Today is one of my favorite holidays. In Turkey it's 🇹🇷🦅NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY🇹🇷🦅…and 🌼children🛝 Day so goofily incongruous!

I'm already exhausted thinking of how much canvassing I am going to do for her when she runs for president

Cicero on the value of literature: “Haec studia adolescentiam acuunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.”

oh man, this was a good article. The ruling class doesn't even have the decency to have good taste anymore lithub.com/in-praise-of...

“Without transparency, ‘reassessment’ is just another word for evasion,” said Maryam Aldossari, the spokeswoman for a Saudi opposition party in exile. “Who is accountable for the public money wasted, and for the people whose lives were shattered in the process?” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

أشير الى كثرة الشعارات اليمينية المتطرفة المشفرة: علم أسرى الحروب والمفقودين في المعارك ("پاو - ميا")، عصابة الثلاثة في مائة، الأحرف اليونانية ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ أساطيرُ تتناول قصصَ فئةٍ قليلةٍ من الشجعان الذين يحاربون ضد الطغاة، في الواقع ليست إلا أوهام رجال بيض أثرياء، يعتصمون داخل شاحناتهم كأنها حصون.

Vicky Osterweil on the intersection of labor conflict, nationalism, and white supremacy within Disney studios

Little chickens just hatched 🐣 99 % of all chickens are factory fHarmed. Their lives start on conveyor belts. Their lives end on conveyor belts. In the slaughterhouse. Or on their way to the macerator. No welfare only suffering abuse torture and murder in animal farming. #LiveVegan live a good life✌️

There's an important new group launching tomorrow, that will channel money directly into building union power. We're having a big ass launch rally in Manhattan tomorrow with Bernie, Zohran, Sara Nelson, and a bunch of union people and you should come. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/how-to-put...

The obvious answer here is that the student protest movement was broadly smeared as anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists, and a variety of institutions from government, media and the universities acted as if that smear was true, threatening, suspending, expelling and even deporting students.

I agree with this. Gentrification is just aesthetic criticism rather than being an adult and speaking of housing as private property and speculative asset as a central mechanism for capital accumulation and crises

Happy Surrender and Freedom Day! On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac. home.nps.gov/apco/planyou...

مش بيصدق انني حاقدر اتفرج هالفيلم جو سينيما بالولايات المتحدة يوم الجمعة www.youtube.com/shorts/Xdt85...

I don’t think people around the world realize how bad the attack on Lebanon was today. It’s BAD. Like 9/11 BAD. Hospitals are overflowing and do not have enough blood. We still don’t know what the death toll is. This is TERRORISM. Pure and Simple. April 8. Never forget.

cc: @nytimes.com

Israel strikes central Beirut without warning https://aje.news/ygb521

All the little quail hatched out today. The hen had laid a bunch of eggs in a planter and she hunkered down under last season’s dried-out basil. I went out to check on them today and they were just leaving the nest. I counted 11 on the ground and another 5 still bopping around in the planter.

"It’s easy enough to say that the creation of the monumental implies the erasure of the everyday or the ordinary but this is often true. The “ordinary monument” is rare, though it might well exist; the “monument to the ordinary”, like Ulysses, is rare too. " www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

oil may be destroying the environment, but it's important to remember that it's also driving conflicts and propping up some of the worst regimes in human history

oh look they made the Brutalist for people who like history, politics, and good taste www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypAE...

it only seems like the population bomb didn't go off if you aren't a butterfly, a wolf, or an elephant www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

In Journal of Animal Ethics Vol. 16, No. 1, Wasseem Emam (@ethicalseafood.bsky.social) outlines why the ethical lives of aquatic animals matter—and why justice, sustainability, and development frameworks must not bypass them. Read on @projectmuse.bsky.social: muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/artic...

The number of displaced persons in Lebanon is now over a million. 20% of the population, roughly, is unable to sleep their home tonight.

Historian Dana Frank shares the stories of people who survived the Great Depression—and what lessons they offer working people today.

Epic fury and cognitive dissonance @leninology.bsky.social @newleftreview.bsky.social newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

The UAE has taken functionally zero refugees from Middle East conflicts. Contrast that with counties like Jordan or Turkey which, while with more than their own share of problems, host millions of Syrians alone.

"Americans prefer a car-dependent lifestyle." I can't tell you how much I hate this glib sentiment. The only way to determine someone's true, enduring preference is to give them full familiarity with their options. Americans have no familiarity with their options! They've only seen sprawl!

I usually avoid posting things from the other place but I will make an exception because this is so damn cool. @yappelbaum.bsky.social

I really think Hesgeth believed Iran would get knocked out in the first round and there was no need to plan for everything that was obviously going to happen next, Israel knew better but kept that to itself, Trump was incurious and easy to persuade, and nobody in administration dared push back.

I straight up do not like horror movies but we watched the new Frankenstein last night and I thought it was excellent: no clever new conceit or modern allegorical spin, just great film-making and a full-throated telling or the original story www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fran...

Poor Lebanon, so far from God, so close to Israel

*Finally* someone pushing back with the right reasons for why declining birthrates are actually a good thing www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/o...

Une civilisation qui s'avère incapable de résoudre les problèmes que suscite son fonctionnement est une civilisation décadente. Une civilisation qui choisit de fermer les yeux à ses problèmes les plus cruciaux est une civilisation atteinte.

This map of Paris compares the extent of the area of forced displacement of the residents of Beirut's southern suburbs, in order to provide a clearer spatial perspective on the scale of the disaster and the urban footprint it represents. H/t Quentin M

jewishcurrents.org/education-ca...

"The absence of justification is not incidental. It is a morbid symptom of an international system in crisis." I just sped ran @eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social series on Iran on the @thedigradio.bsky.social and so incredible to have his thoughts on the current moment www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

it was palpable in every interaction when I was there recently www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/iran...

There has never been an official, comprehensive record of Black-owned bookstores across the United States — until now

this is all I can think about whenever I'm outside

so weird to see the obvious and widespread ideas held by those in the region that “Israel and the U.S. continue to be the main cause of instability in the region” being quoted extensively and without interruption in a NYT article of all places www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/w...

I just wrote a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social letter: Email your representative: No War with Iran! Write one here: actionnetwork.org/letters/emai...

yep, totally feels like I imagined a war dictated by the whims of frontal lobe dementia would feel

from time to time I consider that basically everything with a spine likes being pet, and due to the vagaries of hand evolution Team Human has the best petters in the game

The Voyageurs Wolf Project of Northern Minnesota tags & documents grey wolf ecology & behavior: www.voyageurswolfproject.org The video you see here is confirmatory proof: Wolves. Love. Blueberries. As much as 83% of a wolf's calories in summer months comes from eating berries.

"These attacks are causing much suffering for Iranian people, and it’s destroying the space in which Iranians were struggling for social justice and civil liberties” - Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, once imprisoned on death row in Iran. www.democracynow.org/2026/3/2/ira...

This is precisely it, and it mirrors their strategy in Lebanon and Syria. Where they cannot procure a compliant authoritarian, they settle for weakness, divided societies, and the ability to sustain that division through violence with impunity. Definitional rogue state.

البربرية و البلاهة