My friend and colleague Caren Beilin's new novel SEA, POISON is out with New Directions. I may be biased but it's the best new novel I've read in a long time. A paranoid comic body horror thriller by way of Oulipo, it's enormously fun, smart, and disturbing. www.ndbooks.com/book/sea-poi...

Sea, Poison

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start...

ndbooks.com

Last November, the New York Times had a searing exposé on the treatment of Uyghurs trapped in Thailand during a migration crackdown. Worth your time if you want to learn more about what was happening here. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/m...

He Made a Daring Escape From China. Then His Real Troubles Began.

He fled brutal repression — only to discover, as so many Uyghur refugees have, that China’s power stretches far beyond its borders.

nytimes.com

Sense Hofstede@sensehofstede.nl · last yr.

Exclusive: Canada and US offered Uyghurs in Thailand asylum before deportation to China, sources say – Reuters: ‘but Bangkok took no action for fear of upsetting China, where they were covertly deported last week.’

bidoun.org/articles/hou...

House Arab

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it s...

bidoun.org

"I don’t even know a single person in the movement who hasn’t been physically assaulted in some way by the cops. Punched, choked, shoved, slapped, kicked – I am at a loss for words to describe how bad the police abuse situation here is.” www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

Irish protester Kitty O’Brien accuses Berlin police of widespread violence

Investigation under way into assault on O’Brien who claims police brutality expected in pro-Palestine demonstrations

irishtimes.com

The biggest problem in America is a right-wing disinformation machine that has waged a decades-long war on public attention, conquered the media landscape, and entirely reshaped civic society. Every other problem, including higher ed, is downstream. benmauk.substack.com/p/the-crisis...

The Crisis in Higher Education: A Debate with Michael Clune

When the vice president says "the universities are the enemy," let’s believe him.

benmauk.substack.com

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Students being progressive is not a bigger problem than a sustained assault by an authoritarian president, please get a grip www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose. I don’t write stories to persuade a reader of something I believe, though I have many, many beliefs." Lydia Davis in Harper's harpers.org/archive/2025...

Demanding Pleasures, by Lydia Davis

On the art of observation

harpers.org

A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment. Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.

Opinion | America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

nytimes.com

Phenomenal piece of criticism www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Jenny Turner · Something Is Surviving: Olga Tokarczuk’s Mycophilia

Mushrooms,​ trees, turf, twigs, bushes, moss-covered stones: nature is a force in Olga Tokarczuk’s Empusium,...

lrb.co.uk

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

"Days after rejecting the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group J Street, has said he has been “persuaded” that he was wrong." admitting you were wrong is good www.timesofisrael.com/j-street-hea...

J Street head says he’s now convinced Israel committing genocide in Gaza

Jeremy Ben-Ami explains he has been 'persuaded rationally' by legal and scholarly arguments, stresses that though he won't use term himself, he won't argue against it either

timesofisrael.com

Border Patrol at a Home Depot in Los Angeles days after the 9th circuit affirmed a court order that purports to block this exact behavior. They don't even know who they're chasing! This is insane. Send them all to jail.

“Joseph Pilates was by most accounts neither socially graceful nor articulate. He was possessed, though, of a lifelong boundless faith in himself and in [his] machines.” —Alma Guillermoprieto

Bodies by Joe | Alma Guillermoprieto

With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

buff.ly

Just to reiterate: What this administration is doing right now is orders of magnitude more dangerous for academic freedom and free speech than anything the right has spent the last 30 years complaining about.

Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · last yr.

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ. The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

“‘This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,’ they argued.” www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Lawyers question legality of Alligator Alcatraz, ask federal judge to intervene

“This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,” pl...

miamiherald.com

Flieger gestartet: Merz-Regierung schiebt trotz Taliban-Herrschaft nach Afghanistan ab Trotz der verheerenden Menschenrechtssituation in Afghanistan schiebt die Bundesregierung Dutzende Personen dorthin ab. Asyl-Organisationen schlagen Alarm. www.fr.de/politik/merz...

Flieger gestartet: Merz-Regierung schiebt trotz Taliban-Herrschaft nach Afghanistan ab

Trotz der verheerenden Menschenrechtssituation in Afghanistan schiebt die Bundesregierung Dutzende Personen dorthin ab. Asyl-Organisationen schlagen Alarm.

fr.de

In @theintercept.com, Debbie Nathan reports on ICE lawyers refusing to give their names in court - and immigration judges going along with it. theintercept.com/2025/07/15/i...

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court

ICE attorneys fighting to deport immigrants are able to obscure their identities — no masks required.

theintercept.com

Law is fake, power is real.

Steve Vladeck@stevevladeck.bsky.social · last yr.

Since April 4, #SCOTUS has issued 15 rulings on 17 emergency applications filed by Trump (three birthright citizenship apps were consolidated). It has granted relief to Trump ... in all 15 rulings. It has written majority opinions in only 3. Today's order is the 7th with no explanation *at all.*

An Israeli airstrike just killed 10 people—six of them kids—as they stood in line for water. Yesterday 31 more Palestinians were shot dead while trying to reach an aid distribution site. This is what our tax dollars continue to fund. And most of the country couldn't care less.

Israeli airstrike kills at least 10, including six children, at Gaza water station, say health officials

Nine killed in separate bombing of a home on Sunday and 31 others shot dead near aid distribution site on Saturday

theguardian.com

Another ICE "assault" case unravels. Border Patrol and ICE are arresting US citizens and then after they find out that they are US citizens, they are charging them with "assault" to justify their actions. This is clearly DHS policy at this point. We've seen it repeatedly now.

NEW: The contractors working at Alligator Alcatraz are illegally covering up the USDOT numbers on their trucks.

Trucks Entering Alligator Alcatraz Are Hiding Their Logos, DOT Numbers

The contractors are illegally covering up the USDOT numbers on their trucks.

miaminewtimes.com

Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha says he’s been suspended from Substack, a platform where white supremacists publish without issue. I can’t recall this happening to any prominent writers in the past.

Boston Consulting Group is consulting on how to ethnically cleanse hundreds of millions of Palestinians. Genocide is done through consulting firms now.

Mike Gow 高英智@mikeygow.bsky.social · last yr.

on.ft.com/4nEiYvk BCG modelled plan to ‘relocate’ Palestinians from Gaza

Das unlängst vom Antisemitismus-Fonds des Berliner Senats geförderte Georg-Kolbe-Museum zeigt eine Skulptur, die die Nazis einst dem jüdischen Ehepaar Heinrich und Jenny Stahl geraubt haben – nur eben ohne Hinweis auf NS-Raubkunst. Keine Pointe. www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

Raubkunsteklat um Tänzerinnen-Brunnen im Berliner Kolbe Museum

Die Uneinsichtigkeit des Museums: Georg Kolbes berühmter Tänzerinnen-Brunnen, für den in Theresienstadt getöteten Heinrich Stahl geschaffen, bleibt um seine dunkle Geschichte betrogen. Der Begriff „NS...

faz.net

“Whomever got a bag of flour, got shot in the head. The bags of flour were all over the ground. Covered in blood,” said a #MSF worker, who survived latest Israeli massacre at aid site in Khan Younis aje.io/xoi4su?updat...

Updates: Hamas sends ‘positive’ response on ceasefire, Israel kills 50

These were the updates from Israel’s war on Gaza for Friday, July 4, 2025.

aje.io

"I still hear the gunshots in my head. I still see Ahmad's face before he fell." "But hunger doesn't care — it comes back every morning." "I was caught between two impossible choices: slow death from hunger, or gambling my life for the chance of survival." #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #USA #Genocide

Every time I go to a U.S.-run ‘aid’ center in Gaza, I know I might not come back

I have risked my life to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centers in Gaza, where Israel opens fire on aid seekers from every direction. I have an impossible choice: slow death from…

mondoweiss.net

"This is the worst stage of the genocide in Gaza." "We have run out of energy, food, and basic necessities." "The massacres are relentless and nonstop. Emotionally and materially, we are unable to go on." #Gaza #Palestine #Israel #Genocide

This Is the Worst Phase of the Gaza Genocide

With aid deliveries being limited severely since March, Palestinians are facing extreme levels of starvation, isolation and murder by Israel.

inthesetimes.com

rare W for COINTELPRO from a legendary conversation between Bhakti Shringarpure and Mahmood Mamdani (h/t Silke-Marie Weineck)