I thought the earlier news from A&M was bad, but this is incredibly bleak. It’s close to the point of not having a functional university.

my takeaway from this letter is that glenn youngkin, rector sheridan and their flunkies on the board are deeply dishonest people who are engaged, with the trump administration, in a mob-style shakedown against the university of virginia

On Tues, Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah attempted to fly to London to attend two conferences. He was stopped by authorities and told he could not travel. It's been almost 2 months since Alaa was pardoned. It's time for him to be allowed to travel too www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

If you have tenure at Texas A&M and aren't maliciously emailing the president a dozen times every day to ask if you can say this or you can say that, then what's the point in having tenure?

I know people have a lot on their plates right now, but the opposition candidate who Erdogan most wants to avoid running against is being threatened with a jail sentence of over 2000 years. apnews.com/article/turk...

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far

Tell me you don’t understand risk pools without telling me you don’t understand risk pools

No paywall archive.fo/2025.11.08-1...

"...one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently." Brilliant reporting from the FT on the unravelling of Saudi Arabia's Neom. menasky

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

Mamdani era off to an excellent start. Couldn't do better than naming the brilliant Lina Khan to his transition team.

This NYT story about how Mamdani dealt with the opposition by the city's elites fails to mention one particular elite institution: The NYT editorial page, which last June railed against him as "uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges... lacks political savvy" www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n... 1/

Republicans are unprepared for Democrats who fight back, much less play the offense, but this is what it looks like.

An absolutely electric victory speech by Mamdani tonight: "We have bowed at the alter of caution and paid a mighty price". Here's hoping the rest of the Democratic party is listening.

This landslide is more shocking to me than even the Virginia legislature. Suggests that many, many more people grasp the true nature of the democratic emergency than a year ago and understand that we have to play hardball to keep the republic.

i want to repeat this: mamdani and spanberger have run similar campaigns tailored to their respective electorates and it is maddening to watch political journalists attempt to create some broad contrast where none exist

remarkable to see someone actually appeal to us (because he is one of us)

genuinely crazy-making how much the national press is indifferent to the verifiable fact that jd vance is buddy buddy with internet nazis, and the degree to which this is almost certainly a form of solidarity among people with a similar institution pedigree

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

On women in the revolution from our spring issue, with @maryahannun.bsky.social and Raga Makkawi. www.merip.org/2025/06/shif...

An estimated 1,500-2,000 killed in El-Fasher in 3 days. “Among those killed, according to the World Health Organization, are more than 460 people systematically slaughtered at el-Fasher’s Saudi Maternity Hospital.” www.commondreams.org/news/sudan-a...

In Sudan, the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces are "killing at a scale and a velocity that I haven't seen since Rwanda,” says human rights investigator Nathaniel Raymond.

Systematic execution of hundreds in a hospital in Darfur, as RSF/Janjaweed take over the city of El Fasher (population ~250k) in Darfur. That adds to an estimated 150,000+ death toll from fighting, plus many more from famine. But Sudan is one of those places the outside world cares little about.

"The fall of the city after an 18-month siege amplified fears that the paramilitary fighters — who also control most of western Sudan’s Darfur region — could embark on a spree of ethnically motivated killings."

“It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.” @pkrugman.bsky.social

The depth of the shame of a country this wealthy and abundant allowing its people to go hungry is impossible to measure. The fact that a handful of people could fix this by paying their fair share of taxes while still remaining obscenely wealthy makes it even worse.

"Businessmen also complain about the government’s opacity and about corruption — their bête noire under Assad — creeping back in. One prominent industrialist said that under Assad, officials would shake down his factories once a month. “Now, it’s once a week and there’s more of them.”

"Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men... Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, increase for women presenters"

Me to my assistant: do I have time for an interview with Isaac Chotiner Assistant: I could pencil it in between the Dahmer dinner and poker with Anton Chigurh

@thenationalnews.com's Kyle Fitzgerald on challenges to Syria's reintegration in global financial networks: www.thenationalnews.com/business/ban... But is the Shara' government prepared to be sufficiently transparent to satisfy regulators?

Testing out the new juicer from Turkey for a massive amount of pomegranates from the tree this year. Strangely cathartic to do this after this week’s news cycle and worth it despite the kitchen looking like a murder scene afterwards.

Some welcome developments: "Three diplomats told the FT that some Arab and Muslim states had voiced concerns over the plans to include Blair on a “board of peace” intended to supervise a postwar transition in the war-shattered strip, because of his backing for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq."

Timothy Mellon of the famous Pittsburgh Mellon family is the one who provided $130 million to pay US military personnel. His views on social safety nets are that Democrats “buy” votes by providing government funds to pay for food for infants.

The Leahy law is being killed off. "The US State Department has removed an online portal for reporting alleged human rights violations by foreign military units supplied with American weapons." www.bbc.com/news/article...

The amount is meaningless — less than one day of salary. But the principle is important: once the armed services are paid by the oligarchs, they become a private militia, and we no longer have a country. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...

A military funded by private actors. What could possibly go wrong?

absolutely shameful that the university has embraced the administration’s demand that it discriminate against its students. this is the board of visitors telling UVA students that if they aren’t white and cisgendered then they don’t belong.

Lots of US companies have done lots of dreadful things to Americans. But the symbolism of paying to destroy the White House is hard to top.

It's the contrast between the gleeful destruction of a public treasure and the failure to engage in any meaningful way with the actual problems people around the country and the world are dealing with, and which include destruction.

Once again, EVERY R1 research university depends on federal funding for ~15-25% of its budget. You simply can't unplug the largest or 2nd-largest source of $$ of every R1 university & expect it not to have devastating consequences for graduate education, which will spill over to undergrad education.

shocked to learn that the president lied about this and also this is a horrible defacing of a building that belongs to the people of the United States, not donald trump

“Gaza, in the wake of Israel’s genocide, demands a reckoning,” Tareq Baconi, told me. “The first imperative is local agency: youth, civil society, unions, and intellectuals must lead planning and implementation. Legitimacy cannot be imported or imposed. It must emerge from within.”

A beautifully written, sobering piece by Mohammed R. Mhawish on Gaza's broken politics in the New Yorker.

Joyful turnout at the #NoKings protest on Jefferson in Newport News, VA with supportive honks from drivers so loud we had to make a quick exit sadly with our freaked out pup.

U.S. aid was about $500 million a year, over the past decade, for a country battling crippling drought and brutal insurgencies. So far the Trump administration has approved $15 million. I saw the impact, in the lives of the women I met, and their very sick children. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/h...

I reported recently from Somalia, as part of our ongoing effort to document the effect of the major cuts to U.S. foreign assistance. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/h...

If I had explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)