Nothing is inevitable. In either direction. Hope and work.

Stephen Colbert's Emmy victory speech: "Sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it. I have never loved my country more desperately. Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor!"

September 14 deadline is approaching 🚨

Today in comic relief, it's my 18th first day of school as a college professor, my course has been prepped for a month, I've set up the website and sent the welcome message, I'm caffeinated and ready to go...and I totally forgot to print out the syllabus.

No words for this one.

Journalists/media inquiries about recent events in Yemen, please contact me at my university email: [email protected]

The airstrikes on Sana'a matter, but perhaps not in the way being most widely reported. Targeted strikes against members of the Houthi cabinet and Houthi PM would matter more if they represented the concentration of power in the Houthis' system of rebel rule. They don't. 1/n

For months, @ichamza.bsky.social's family were told by the IDF - warned, threatened, choose your verb - to abandon their home, even though the "strategic target" had left by May. Pressuring civilians to leave their homes is not a kindness. Doing it for months on end just terrorizes them in advance.

#NIH is hanging by a thread. The #CDC has been decimated. #RFK Jr. and Russell #Vought are psychopaths--I don't say this frivolously--they are cold, calculating, inflicting violence on millions through public policy. It is where we are right now. These men are not normal. 1/

Today is the last day to vote in Apsa Mena officer elections. Please vote if you haven’t already. And if you have, thanks for voting!

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?

It has been almost two years since Hamas led the deadliest attack on Israel in the country’s history. Not a single person has been charged or prosecuted for it, and the entire subject is shrouded in secrecy.

“All…GHF food distribution sites are located in areas the Israeli military has marked for evacuation. To collect food, Palestinians must enter zones of direct danger. There are reports, and video evidence, of the Israeli military firing on Palestinians near or en route to these distribution sites.”

What's up, Chat-GPT 5? Do we have some PhD-level intelligence up in this piece?

Alex DeWaal's 2018 book "Mass Starvation" gives more serious thought to this dark subject than most any of us can bear, so I am grateful for his voice now. His work offers a conceptual vocabulary that improves our capacities to act, even in response to a "calamity that was forseeable and foreseen."

Excited to be co-organizing an APSA MENA Methods Workshop on "Participatory and Engaged Research in the MENA" with @apsamena.bsky.social colleagues @separkinson.bsky.social, @ammars.bsky.social and Lara Khattab at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. ECRs & practitioners, apply by 9/14.

This is the Washington Post (yes, that one): names in Arabic and English, and ages, of all 18,500 children killed in Gaza, plus portraits and stories where available: www.washingtonpost.com/world/intera...

“Stifling media freedom and repressing any dissent in both the north and south has become a hallmark of Yemen's prolonged war—with no end in sight. As Mohammed puts it, ‘The journalist fears seeking information and the sources fear sharing it.’”

Person who skipped the meeting: “We are not legislating, and we should be.” AGREED. “One of the first items that had to be postponed Tuesday was a vote to transfer land once held by…a now-defunct homeless shelter system…for the development of a tiny house community.”

let’s even imagine he’s the one adult in the room at every meeting.* this is still what the room looks like. *he won’t be in the room for the meeting because his job got knocked down from cabinet level to simply ambassadorial—he reports to Rubio.

Basically, Shaheen’s making the kind of “adults in the room” argument that brought us Tillerson, Mad Dog, etc. last time around. And that clearly worked out well.

What is left to say? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I walked to the gym today, which gave me plenty of time to observe the dozens of my neighbors who sped by a senior lady with car trouble by the side of the road in the sun. Had no phone, didn’t speak much English, but it took two minutes to fix an easy issue w/ her car. Could have been your mom.

It appears that we’ve entered our Suzanne Mubarak era.

The "Harvard Educational Review" organized a special issue on "Education & Palestine." It was nearly ready for production... when the publisher suddenly canceled the release. #Palestine is the greatest test of academic freedom of our time. What side are you on? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Read in its entirety.

I think it IS a relevant point, though. And the whole, bleak article is worth reading.

Syria's government misread how Israel would respond to its troops deploying to the country's south this week, encouraged by U.S. messaging that Syria should be governed as a centralized state, eight sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

really don't care if you disagree with me, i think constantly filming everything everywhere is bad, i think the widespread deployment of facial recognition is bad, i think the fact there are cameras everywhere inside of arenas & that increasingly you have to use your face to buy a hot dog is bad

while I'm scolding ppl, this article is currently 20x more popular than our scoop from an hour ago about ICE's new facial recognition app, which is perhaps the most powerful/concern face rec database/tool widely deployed. happy to use current events to start a convo www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

100% this.

🚨 Lancet report to highlight: 49% of 232 US public health datasets were quietly altered this year. Most changes? Swapping “gender” for “sex.” Only 13% logged it. Silent edits undermine data integrity and trust. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

This helped me understand a bit better.

Appreciating a Thursday morning that starts with five 11 year-olds loudly and sincerely shouting their advice at Buttercup through the fight scenes in The Princess Bride (“Help out! What are you waiting for? Grab the sword!”). This is the self-help wholesomeness I needed this morning. With oatmeal.

This showed up on my doorstep unannounced today and I’m not going to turn it away.

When a policy is so odious that lawyers seek to advance it anonymously, what is left to say?

About a month ago, I started a friendly DuoLingo competition with my teen to help her stay engaged over the summer. I’ve been testing out of French levels to catch up to her, and along the way, I’ve had some fun, learned and re-learned some things, and stumbled onto something unsettling. 1/n

A couple of RAs in my department have been working hard to sharpen their data visualization skills this summer and I’m tempted to send this to them as a do-over challenge because these are some pretty terrible charts from our “paper of record” and I think we could use some better ones…

Happy 4th. It's a great day to register for the @apsa.bsky.social pre-conference short-course on "advancing expert witnessing in the asylum process."

Notable to see a number of quite conservative folks interviewed here sounding alarms about the weaponization of accreditation, too.

OK, two of my greatest pleasures in one place, podcasts (yes…) and @merip.bsky.social (absolutely).

It is impossible to overstate the threat this poses, at several scales: to the well-being of international students themselves, to the character of the communities to which they belong, to the knowledge they help to produce, to higher ed as a sector…we can’t let this happen.

I’ve hiked this specific trail with my own children a half-dozen times and they‘ve almost always been the only brown people on the path. I’ve wondered about whether I’d want them to go alone, now that they’re getting to be old enough. Glad to see the hiker is OK enough to be righteously angry.

🚨 Apply now! ISA Research Workshop Grants (up to $2,500) support collaborative, interdisciplinary research in International Studies. $50K total funding available for 2026! In-person & virtual options. #ISA2026 👉 buff.ly/XsaQQIl

The first essay on my Intro to Comparative politics syllabus is a classic by Mamdani. (“What is a Tribe?” in LRB.) This time, I guess I’ll have to lead with “this is an essay by the other Mamdani…”

This is a specific, useful guide that people - pregnant, planning to be pregnant, accompanying those who are pregnant - would be wise to read and keep with them when they visit the hospital. It’s practical and clear & may help people get lifesaving care in a crisis when it’s hard to think straight.

This is for sure one of the ways we’d be describing this when describing it elsewhere. There are available concepts and theories, even.

ICE broke the window of his truck to extract a US citizen and detain him before ultimately releasing him, all while bystanders questioned the legality. Right here in Rochester, NY. If you see something, say something, folks. Be like the Goodes.

Of the (many) strange things my husband says to me in a day, “Before the Soviet Union fell, orcas started wearing salmon hats…” was not a phrase that I anticipated in any way. What’s the Soviet connection? Just how political scientists periodize history on the cusp of war with Iran, I guess. Dunno.

This won’t stop with Latinos, either.