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

I’m sorry I was wrong about the device that impacted my leg. It wasn’t one of these hard foam projectiles. I believe it was actually way worse. And explosive device. That detonated about 3 feet away from me. More to come.

Rebecca Solnit has just been banned from Facebook. If you google her name and "meditations," you'll find the article they banned her for.

The devastating, shortsighted attack on literature continues. List from Magic City Books. Who'd they miss? Note: the small publishers selected here for financial attack include (among other very worthy and important presses) @transitbooks.bsky.social, publisher of 2023 Nobel laureate Jon Fosse.

Natasha Wimmer on the canny, wily, funny, biting, steely essays and crónicas of the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart

Dean Chemerinsky and other #lawschool deans "speak as legal educators, responsible for training the next generation of lawyers, in condemning any government efforts to punish lawyers or their firms based on the identity of their clients or for their zealous lawful and ethical advocacy."

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."

Amid all this grief and madness, excited to host the incredible Yoko Tawada tomorrow. It'll be on W. 129th St., not the main campus. Free tickets are "sold out," but in my experience there will be an excellent chance of getting in via the standby line. www.lenfest.arts.columbia.edu/spring-2025-...

Grateful to my historian colleagues. Yes, we should be learning from history here.

"We call on scholars, students, administrators, and staff here at Columbia to reject such efforts to dominate universities." Letter from History faculty at Columbia to President Armstrong (with complete list of signatories) www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025...

Show up.

Brilliant (very sad and unfuriating) new piece by Adam Shatz www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ma...

This is what Columbia Univ should have said in immediate response to the extortion note from the Trump admin. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-ti...

Here’s three questions I have about matters at Columbia this morning. 1) *Why MESAAS?* 1a) The Feds gave no reason for their attack on that department and we gave none in our concessions on it. It’s a world-class department with afaik no findings or investigations. So why is it targeted? 1b) Our…1/

Almost a year ago, we were writing this letter. It gives me no pleasure to observe how accurately we assessed the situation and predicted the outcome if no one changed course. www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024...