“Someday, / someone will stand before you, and you’ll / realize / time is just a trick by which the sun renews / its vow to the flowers.” —Selma Asotić @archipelagobooks.bsky.social

Now I’m getting ads for Snapple on Instagram. I’ll never buy Snapple. I’ve never bought Snapple. Doesn’t the algorithm know that I’m not susceptible to Snapple? Why bother trying to recruit me to become a Snapple devotee? Observe how degraded and coarse the strategies of capital have become.

“Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture.” —Theodor W. Adorno

“It is sometimes possible to put the fallen petal back / on the flower.” —Alice Notley

New order — Farbiarz orders Khalil’s release for 6:30 pm CT. He must surrender his passport, and the gov has to give him a copy of it and his green card.

Why won't the media report, as glaringly obvious fact, that our president is an unhinged imbecile? bluevirginia.us/2025/05/sund...

Announcing issue 1 of fallow, a new literary journal, featuring new work by @evagriff.bsky.social @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social @greggerkesocrates.bsky.social Oisin Fagan, Ellen Dillon, Gabriel Josipivici, Helen Charman, Chris Beausang, Pascale Sardin @rhiansasseen.bsky.social & Patrick Nathan

trying to get a good night’s sleep during a dictatorship: “sleep no more, _____ hath murdered sleep”

“It’s an escalation of a kind that is unheard of,” said Joan Scott, a historian & member of the academic freedom committee of the AAUP. “Even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” apnews.com/article/colu...

when the mainstream media attacked and mocked deconstruction and cultural studies and all the other progressive intellectual advances of those times, that denigration was a rehearsal for what is now happening at Columbia

Marianne Hirsch for context and insight.

Among the projects Musk and Trump have killed via Johns Hopkins: Mosquito nets to prevent malaria in Mozambique, and chlorine tablets to prevent diarrhea deaths in Bangladesh. www.wsj.com/health/healt...

Imagine a world in which the words “Gulf of Mexico” are forbidden.

Free Mahmoud Khalil.

They have nothing. Nothing. They kidnapped a legal resident, shipped him across the country, denied access to his attorney, and are now trying to deport him. And their only justification for it is either protected speech or vague descriptions of alleged crimes committed by other people.

ADD YOUR NAME: American Jews demand that Mahmoud be released from custody and returned to his family immediately with his green card intact. For Mahmoud’s safety and all of our safety. www.bendthearc.us/release_khalil

A President who detains a protestor and revokes their legal status can only be called one thing: A dictator. Silencing dissent is unlawful, unjust, and authoritarian through and through.

The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan bsky.app/profile/pbum...

Tomorrow in NYC will be sunny & pleasant. This will be important.

Setting aside the incredibly dangerous and fascist aspect of this, is there actual evidence that Khalil was a “Hamas supporter”? Or is the standard for a green-card holder being sent to a secret location and possibly deported just “critical of Israel”?

re the previous repost: if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens

25 hours after Mahmoud Khalil was detained in a Columbia-owned apartment building — Khalil’s whereabouts are still unknown & Columbia has still not commented

Bernie Sanders is holding MASSIVE rallies in packed venues, bigger crowds than Trump was getting, and legacy media is practically silent. Bernie is talking to workers rather than hanging out with socialites with mediocre plastic surgery at Mar-a-Lago, and it's just not interesting to corporate media

The choice of Columbia in particular shows that there's *no* amount of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech a university can engage in that will insulate and protect it; so might as well try to do the right thing, which Columbia has determinedly avoided since October 7. www.gsa.gov/about-us/new...

Ice arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia protests, lawyer says

Breaking: DHS detains Palestinian student from Columbia.

It's finally here! Of all my over 50 translations, this is the one I'm proudest of-- and most grateful for. I owe so much to Proust, I'm so glad I could repay my debt a little by translating him. ❤️

decided unequivocally that Giordano’s forgotten “Siberia” (1903) is my new favorite opera

[email protected] reading from Antonio Di Benedetto's The Suicides in Baltimore tonight as part of the Hidden Palace reading series. Starts 7pm at Fadensonnen (3 W 23rd St.) Other great speakers, including @waynekoestenbaum.bsky.social @josephgrantham.bsky.social @greedyreads.bsky.social

Today is the publication day for Essex Hemphill's *Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems," out from @NewDirections, which Robert Reid-Pharr & I coedited! Essex Hemphill's work speaks both to its time & compellingly to our current moment. Please order a copy! www.ndbooks.com/author/essex...

Some figures on the potential death toll from Musk's pointless destruction of USAID, from a memo written by a fired official. He will be remembered as one of the great monsters of history. 1/x

Musk’s status as a “special government employee” limits him to 130 days in the executive branch. However, despite working daily—documented by his own X posts—they claim he only works one day a week, effectively stretching his limit to 130 weeks. This needs to be brought to Congress—please share.

“… a dream of escape, a dream of intervention, a dream of invisibility …” @wakefieldpress.bsky.social

the orange beast has boundary issues

regarding the Oval Office outburst: clarifying, almost cerulean, to see and hear that there is an absolute difference between a hero and a villain

Trump’s disgusting behavior in our Oval Office in the company of a genuine hero and defender of democracy like Volodymyr Zelensky may be the most disgraceful public behavior by any president in our history.

Dusting off my old Oxford English Dictionary and consulting carefully, I could not find "attack friends and submit to enemies" as a definition of the word "strength."

Isabelle Huppert’s message: while you’re alive, be alive, act alive, don’t prematurely imitate death: seize your own animation: mobilize your nerves and your memories: pay strict attention to the pulse of the present moment: never fake it

remembering that we have agency

None of us can be sure what will “work.” You try multiple things and find your way in. Read some histories of the Civil Rights Movement by those who participated. They were never “sure” of what would work. Some campaigns fizzled out. But persistence, creativity, determination, and focus were key.

saw Isabelle Huppert perform tonight onstage and remembered that it is possible to resist, to work hard, to be theoretically a queen, to memorize, to obey measure, to refuse false potentates, to side with accurate language and deft, conscious, crafted movement, and to remember the lessons of history

Donald Trump is treating the destruction of a democracy as a political show — throwing Ukraine to the wolves and doing a favor for Putin. It's shameful and dangerous. I've been to Ukraine, as have many Senate Republicans. I hope they speak up. Millions of lives are at stake.

“everlasting shame”

5 former Secretaries of Defense call on Congress to exercise oversight responsibility on Trump-Hegseth firing of senior military leaders: The "dismissals raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the President’s power."

America held hostage

By accepting Trump’s anti-Black premise and regurgitating the narrative that equates anything Black as DEI, the NY Times has become part of the propaganda machine

The Bureau of Prisons — agent of deliberate cruelty — cruelty, when it is deliberate, is the definition of evil

My new novel, “My Lover, the Rabbi,” will be published by FSG in 2026. (And I’m signed up there for an essay collection, too.) Thank you to editor Jackson Howard and agent PJ Mark. @fsgbooks.bsky.social

thinking again tonight of Ethel Rosenberg