basically every 2024 truism is dead. Trump did not build a lasting multiracial coalition or turn young men into committed Republicans. You don’t need to cave on trans rights to win. The pundits have nothing left to tell you.

schadenfreude is rarely my thing but I will make an exception for the incoming Third Way meltdown

I saw a kindergartener do the 6-7 in Assyrian (“ishta showa”) complete with hand gestures. This is getting out of control

I have an essay on self-help, the "philosophy" industry, and human finitude in our new issue. As Dylan said of "Tangled Up In Blue," it took me ten years to live and two to write. I hope you enjoy. www.thedriftmag.com/how-i-learne...

The word “ceasefire”—the cry of protests two years ago, including ones I was part of—was vacated of all meaning once people who supported the genocide started to claim that they wanted one. And now this

‘Test of ceasefire’ comeon guardian wtaf

The fact that this is how people are learning about the Assyrian Church of the East 💀 if you enjoyed this post you may be interested in my forthcoming article on Assyrians in Middle Eastern studies, stay tuned

“In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to.” defector.com/higher-eds-r...

“An artificial intelligence system apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.”

Translation: After we built an addictive tool based on stolen data, exploited labor and plundering the environment, which pushes kids to commit suicides, we were like, why not cash in on "erotica"? After all, this is what building so-called AGI that "benefits humanity" looks like.

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health. Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble. rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

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Chicago, Illinois, 2025: "They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van." "They was bringing the kids down, had them zip-tied to each other." "I kept asking, 'What is the morality?' One of them laughed. He said, 'Fuck them kids.'" abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were

♥️

well

The Israeli government continues to violate international law — this time, killing 31 journalists in a strike on Yemen in the second deadliest attack on the press ever recorded. The U.S. cannot keep funding and supplying weapons for this destruction. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

CAIRO (AP) — A Sudanese paramilitary group reportedly killed 43 civilians while praying inside a mosque early Friday in the besieged city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, said a local medical group.

In light of this reporting, the story from a couple months ago about American contractors in Gaza celebrating whenever they shoot a starving aid seeker comes into focus

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i... A vital interview that will serve as a testament against our fucked reality.

So how many fake names are there in this clown car? (Dartafiwijhak from Kharatuz is definitely fake, the one right above it looks fake too though I don’t get the joke)

this article quotes one of my UW colleagues as saying that he used ChatGPT to come up with his AI usage policy (it’s allowed in his classes, of course) www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

Such an odd thing to read in the newspaper www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

The Middle East Studies Association of North America has published a very helpful “know your rights” FAQ on how and when to interact, or not interact, with immigration or law enforcement officers on campus mesana.org/advocacy/tas...

they’re so close

I am just … livid that this is what children are doing. From Minnesota to Gaza. Shielding each other. Facing snipers. It is obscene.

Another example. Danyel Reiche is the purported author of ‘Qatar’s World Cup and the Challenge of Sports-Washing’ (Third World Quarterly, 44/2, 2023, 245-64) No such article exists (I checked the library catalog and with Danyel too). But if I google it, I get an AI summary of its probable content!

I'm peer reviewing a manuscript for a reputable publisher and came across fake references which must be AI-generated - including to an article attributed to me which sounds fascinating but which I never wrote.

Four journalists were killed by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital today, including Mariam Dagga, a freelancer with the @apnews.com. She has a 12-year-old son, who was evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war. She was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza. tinyurl.com/3cn5c9vb

A massive attack on several humanities units (Arabic Studies, Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Classics, Religion, German & Scandinavian, Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies) *and* tenure now unfolding at the University of Oregon (a blue state!). Closure of units and faculty layoffs threatened.

It's happened. An AI slop post in Arab American history is making the rounds, blending every immigration stereotype with a cloyingly implausible story about a fake Syrian peddler in Michigan. This is deeply fascinating and also troubling. AI can regurgitate these stereotypes endlessly. What to do?

‘Oxygen is Not for the Dead’: The Life and Legacy of Hiba Abu Nada During a book fair in Qatar, Hiba wrote, "My book has been to several book fairs, and I have not been to even one. How far away we are from the world in Gaza, and how many places are empty of us."

This is so hard to watch now

This hashtag must rock Iraq and the whole region. Enough is enough. Women will not be silenced anymore. We want to know the truth about Dr Ban Ziyad Tariq. #نريد_حق_بان

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.

Today, the fact that the airstrike that killed an Al Jazeera journalist and his crew whom Israel had smeared as a terrorist in advance hit next to a hospital is just the fourth or fifth most horrific detail, and yet the international response will be… what? More nothing.

Less than two years ago, an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in Gaza city merited a multi-day news cycle, with international outrage forcing Israel to issue denials and launch an absurd but ultimately successful attempt to muddy the waters with dubious theories about Gazans bombing themselves.

If you are reading about Anas al-Sharif tonight, please consider making a small donation to one of the many families in Gaza with a fundraiser. Here is one, for a young doctor who has lost her father and is trying to support her family: chuffed.org/project/1249...

The final statement by Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, written months ago in anticipation of his likely death, posted on Twitter/X by a friend. Israel assassinated him tonight along with his reporting team in an airstrike in Gaza.

AHA’s official guidance says you can use generative AI to “produce a historical image.” In case you were wondering if it was possible for AHA to become more embarrassing

A young psychiatrist died today in Basrah Province in Iraq. She was most likely murdered because her body showed clear signs of torture. She finished her boards last year. Her name was Dr Ban Ziyad.

The editors who published this should go straight to The Hague. I mean literally, according to the terms of international law such as it exists.

Exclusive: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication. My latest. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

There's a rhetorical sleight of hand with these guys in which proletarianization—and the immiseration of artisans—is pitched as democratization and called a good thing. The vast majority of people peddling the latter are too dumb to know they're doing that, but the people who came up with it knew.

Just to accurately lay out the course of events, people were yelling at him because his auto-responding robot that was trained on Twitter’s userbase still displayed — against all odds — a modicum of empathy. He then made the robot speak like him and within hours it was calling itself Mechahitler.

Israeli scholars publish a paper featuring at least one apparently AI-generated fake citation of a nonexistent article by a Palestinian scholar

I spoke with people in Gaza who've been accused of being scammers or even AI.