Just realized something about Leon Botstein, in whose employ I was from 1998-2005 as an assistant professor of German at Bard College. Three years ago, he wanted to meet with me for some reason [cont'd] www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Please join us on 2/26 at 6 PM for the English-language book launch of "Sanderling" ("Ahnen: Ein Zeitreisetagebuch") and a conversation with the author, Anne Weber, the translator @neilblackadder.bsky.social, and moderated by @tesslewis.bsky.social. Details & RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/sanderling...

Y’all, I am so excited to bring you my new translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain soon. After years of work (beginning in 2019!), I have finally completed the translation, written my preface, and even finished translating the French dialogues for the appendix. 1/2

BREAKING: Liron Mor declines @modernlanguage.bsky.social's 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in protest of the MLA Exec Council's supporting genocide by suppressing a delegate assembly vote. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...

Liron Mor declines the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies due to the MLA leadership’s refusal, in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to pass to the Delegate Assembly for debate a resolution in support of the 2005 Palestinian call for BDS: utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...

Looking forward to continuing the conversation with the brilliant translationista Susan Bernofsky about The Magic Mountain, which has been going on for not quite seven years yet... www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/ve...

In which I recommend @mortenhoijensen.bsky.social's THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS to lovers and new readers of Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Apropos of The New York Times's concern trolling today about Mamdani's "thin" resume, I'd like to remind everyone that Mamdani is currently serving his THIRD term in the NY State Assembly. NYT sweetheart Mike Bloomberg, by contrast, held NO office before becoming mayor.

Did your rabbi sign that wretched letter (docs.google.com/document/d/1...) wrongly accusing Mamdani of "Delegitimiz[ing] the Jewish community and encourag[ing] and exacerbat[ing] hostility toward Judaism and Jews"?!? This letter claims that ...

The @nytimes has fallen to a new low by printing these propagandistic lies by a co-author of Trump's "compact." I'll give just one example of his newspeak: Compare this false claim (below) with the actual text of the compact (further below). nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o... 1/7

Spoke with cnn while sitting on the floor of my hotel room hallway bc my family were asleep in the other room.

This week, our colleague Dr. Mark Bray came under attack by Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter for his public scholarship. Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union condemn this campaign and stand in solidarity with our colleagues. Read our full statement here: https://loom.ly/BDXasRY

“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’

🧵This week, New Directions will publish a collection of essays by Jenny Erpenbeck, Things That Disappear, translated by Kurt Beals, a translator for whom I have the highest respect. Since this is a book I translated chunks of 15 years ago for magazines, and since I know some of you enjoy getting

Civility Is a Fantasy www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

Grateful to my colleagues next door at Barnard, Professors Castelli and Callahan of the Barnard @aaup.org, and brilliant writer Jhumpa Lahiri for these clear and principled words. We all know what it means to support real freedom of speech on and off campus. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/o...

Can you help the Ali Forney Center provide meals for unhoused LGBTQ+ kids in NYC? Just $5 buys a meal for two young people. Please pitch in if you can! serve.aliforneycenter.org/twilight-twi...

I'm looking forward to this event tonight with the great Katrine Øgaard Jensen and some exciting emerging writers you'll be hearing more about soon www.scandinaviahouse.org/sh/lectures-literary/writing-the-world-from-copenhagen-to-nyc/

I was so delighted to be asked to review Han Kang's new novel We Do Not Part, translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, for Korean Literature Now. It's a stunning book, beautifully translated. klwave.or.kr/klw/magazine...

As the new semester starts, I want to keep the focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza (and US complicity in it). Honored to have the chance to co-write this with another parent whose child was suspended from Barnard/Columbia for protest activity. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

Excited to host the inimitable Jennifer Croft at Columbia next month. To attend, you MUST send in your RSVP as specified in the event description 48 hours in advance, otherwise you won't be allowed to access campus under current restrictions. In-person only. arts.columbia.edu/events/being...

So looking forward to this!

Announcing the Center for the Art of Translation's DAY OF TRANSLATION 2025! Join us on 9/18 at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. Registration open now for our 12-5 pm panels & tickets available for Jhumpa Lahiri and Katie Kitamura's 6 pm keynote. Full announcement ➡️ mailchi.mp/catranslatio...

Defections matter: “All authoritarian regimes rely on support from key institutions in society … When members of these pillars stop cooperating with the regime […] it becomes difficult or impossible for autocrats to stay in power.” @mariajstephan.bsky.social

Defections matter: “All authoritarian regimes rely on support from key institutions in society … When members of these pillars stop cooperating with the regime […] it becomes difficult or impossible for autocrats to stay in power.” @mariajstephan.bsky.social www.justsecurity.org/113995/colle...

The Swiss newspaper Der Bund that printed Robert Walser's first poems in 1898 just reviewed the German translation of my Walser biography 🔄 www.derbund.ch/robert-walse...

Everything was fine until Trump decided to unleash violent raids w/o grounds in elementary schools, shopping areas, & peaceful public spaces. ICE then illegally blocked Members of Congress entry into the facilities they are disappearing people into, escalating the situation. Let’s start there.

It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence. They are in charge.

I will be damned if I allow a bunch of Confederate-waving January 6th apologists give the American people a lecture on flag waving. There is ZERO reason to enter an argument about patriotism with people who still worship traitors to America 150+ years later. They. Are. Breaking. The. Law.

Good to know one of the U.S. President's main influencers on national security policy is calling for actual genocide (65 mil is the total Latino population of the U.S.)

US contractors say their colleagues are firing live ammunition as Palestinians seek food in #Gaza. The AP has obtained videos of a food-distribution site in Gaza and interviewed two American contractors working there. apnews.com/article/pale...

So that’s a Sikh activist in Canada, a Sikh activist in Pakistan and a Sikh activist in the UK, all murdered. A fourth, a Sikh activist in the US, survived an assassination attempt. We gonna pretend Modi isn’t ordering hits on dissidents outside of India?

TFW your biography of a great German-language author gets translated into German, and you're waiting nervously to see what German-language readers will make of it, and the first article finally comes out, and it's a rave review! www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/rober...

Wanderungen mit Robert Walser!!!!! My Walser biography, CLAIRVOYANT OF THE SMALL, is now out in German, from @suhrkamp.de, in a beautiful translation by Michael Adrian: HELLSEHER IM KLEINEN: DAS LEBEN ROBERT WALSERS

So weird that Dems who said Trump won because Dems weren’t focusing enough on young voters and kitchen table issues are actively opposing a candidate who won the NYC mayoral primary doing just that. Almost as if that’s not really the concern…

A few years ago, I warned that we were entering a Second Nadir. Just a few months into Trump's second term, we are in it. I spent the last few months reporting on the in a once-a-century battle for civil rights being waged by the Trump Administration. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/m...

I've covered race for two decades. I knew the 2nd Trump Admin would be dangerous for civil rights. Yet the collapse of the federal civil rights architecture and national will to address racial inequality and work on integration is stunning. Here's my latest. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/m...

Today is Pride Day in Chicago.

Thrilled to have gotten to co-translate this beautiful short story by Sharon Dodua Otoo. It starts off innocently enough, and then things quickly spiral into ever more reality-bending complexity. (Also check out her novel ADA'S ROOM, trans. @jpolizei.bsky.social.) thebaffler.com/fiction/tim-otoo

Launch event for EXOPHONY by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. July 1 at Books are Magic in Brooklyn. Who's in? RSVP below. mailchi.mp/ndbooks/exop...

"These people do not care about Jews. They are deeply antisemitic." @lilygreenbergcall.bsky.social on how dangerous it is for the Trump administration to use Jews as justification for the abduction of Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil.

Vaccination schedules on the CDC website have already started changing under RFK Jr. So we published a guide to the evidence-based vaccine recommendations in place *before* all 17 members of the advisory panel were abruptly dismissed by the new admin. www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-... 🧪

Did you see this awesome video Mamdani made when he was a kid, Karen? It stars Madhur Jaffrey, my cookbook hero, cursing a blue streak.

just wanna put these two images next to each other for posterity's sake

Am I right in saying these numbers have Cuomo spending about $100 per vote

There’s a pretty consistent pattern to what the admin does with the law. 1. Find the biggest grant of power to the exec in sight 2. Go waayyy beyond its outer bounds 3. Say they’re staying within those bounds 4. Dare others to stop them, by which time they hope it’ll be too late

After spending January and February sprinting to research claims by the Admin, I learned one lesson: do not comply with their legal demands. Treat them like AI hallucinations. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, the function of the law in the Trump Admin is to distract from some horrible political goal.

When he says "huge swaths" of Santa Monica look like "failed third world nations" what he means specifically is that there are brown people out in public