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This is the June 2, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.

JOE’S NOTE

Yesterday, I told you about my favorite summer novel and how reading Stephen King’s “The Stand” made a miserable high school trip more enjoyable.

Here are some books I’m reading this summer:

Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is the Way” has been required reading since the runaway bestseller launched the modern-day Stoic’s career by selling over 2 million copies.

Ryan has also helped launch one of “Morning Joe’s” Friday Book Club.

In his book, Ryan explains the idea that lies at the heart of Stoicism: hidden advantages can be found in every situation.

Those who can take seemingly impossible situations and find ways to triumph over them will win in boardrooms, on battlefields, and, most importantly, in their own personal lives.

Published in 2014, “The Obstacle Is the Way” explains how the toughest moments in life can be endured by selflessness, kindness, courage, and decency.

He also explains that in the face of abundance, Stoicism demands humility, discipline, decency, generosity, and unfailing values.

Written a year before Trump’s ride down his golden escalator, “The Obstacle Is the Way” is an antidote to the moral chaos and savage cruelty that has infected the American right over the past decade.

Holiday’s focus remains far afield from American politics, and is instead trained on Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose diary is the founding document of Stoicism.

These words from his diary inspired Ryan’s book and lay at the heart of Stoicism:

The impediment to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.

That ancient insight seems to relate to the main characters in historian Alan Mikhail’s new book that details the lives of New York’s bawdy founders. “Newcomers” is a fascinating story about two of New York’s most influential, and forgotten, founders.

Mikhail explores how Anthony Jansen and Grietje Reyniers were the antithesis of those Puritans who founded the first colonies of Massachusetts. The young Dutch couple at the center of “Newcomers” immigrated to New Amsterdam in the early 1600s and were welcomed with accusations of piracy and prostitution.

Eventually expelled to the wilderness of what is now Brooklyn, the immigrants spent their lives building a fortune while fighting local authorities, encroaching Englishmen, and Native Americans.

By the time Anthony returned to Manhattan years later, he had become one of the richest men in 17th century New York. In a truly American tale, the author tells the story of how this rowdy couple’s descendants would become Vanderbilts and American presidents.

While Marcus Aurelius would have disapproved of the couple’s character, the obstacle of being banished to Brooklyn became their path to fortune.

“What stands in the way becomes the way.”

I’m also reading an advance copy of Kurt Andersen’s upcoming novel, “The Breakup.”

Set in 2045, Andersen’s story describes an unraveling marriage that dissolves soon after civil war tears the United States apart.

Readers follow an estranged couple as they drive their daughter across country on a college tour. The trip helps readers better understand the forces that drove their marriage and the country apart — and provides a glimmer of hope that the great “disunion” may one day end.