This is the year. Go vote. www.chicago.gov/city/en/dept...

I’m embarrassed for these people. I was at a writing retreat this summer that suggested we use genai for ideation. They told academics to use a plagiarism machine for ideas. If you are doing this, do us all a favor and leave the field. If you have no more ideas, you shouldn’t be an academic.

I am glad to see opportunities like this exist, but the people who have faced the most sustained and egregious limits on their academic freedom in USA are those who loudly speak out against the Palestinian genocide. Will they really find more academic freedom in... Germany? (Asking genuinely.)

In light of news of more area studies cuts, resharing my "why area studies matters" article. As our universities dismantle the humanities, they also put forth an exclusionary vision of what will remain: a regressive, white, western & anglophone vision of our history, knowledge & culture.

UNC following the inglorious footsteps of Indiana University, currently making big headlines in…football… while gutting world famous area studies and other programs.

Stay safe, Chicago, the Nazi scum are back 💔.

Got my dog boots (because Chicago 🥶) and she promptly forgot how to walk.

Really interesting ethnographic work with a community whose histories I've always been curious about...

It's hard to find the right words for this level of absurdity, but this is how intense anti-Palestinian (and anti-Arab) racism is in the United States, all under the guise of philosemitism but often at the expense of Jewish students. via Palestine Legal instagram: www.instagram.com/p/DSFzYLWCcZ...

DHS used a wide variety of weapons against people in Elgin yesterday, not only tear gas. Some wild photos in this writeup from @domguan.bsky.social:

Kind of obsessed with this effort to maintain the cross-border movement of Urdu texts and knowledge in the wake of Partition. From Aug. 1950 issue of the periodical "Rozgaar" (Delhi), info for Pakistanis on how to pay for texts now that D/P & money order services are closed b/w the two countries.

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

The article I’m writing is about the rise of a commercial lithographic print culture in Pashto, but I also got to check out the oldest Pashto movable type printed book, a copy of the Bible produced by the the Serampore Missionaries in Bengal in 1818. UChicago holds one of the few extant copies.

The diplomatic "achievement" of the ceasefire was to recalibrate the tempo of the genocide sufficiently to get it off the front pages and the news bulletins, thus alleviating the political pressure on Israel's western accomplices. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Brb, just gotta rewrite the AI policy in my syllabi.

All through Chicago, I’ve seen kids and young people marching through the streets, getting attacked with chemical weapons, and putting their bodies on the line to fight ICE and protect our neighbors. But apparently not enough of them go to No Kings Protest, so they don’t exist 🙄.

Using this week to get back to some work on Pashto lithographic print culture! Here's an 1887 manual (with mixed Persian and Pashto contents) on "Mīzak-i jangī" (Military Music) printed by the state press in Kabul 👀. (Full text here available from the LOC: www.loc.gov/item/00313390/)

We don’t need to reform ICE. We don’t need alternatives to ICE. We don’t need to engage in dishonest debates wondering what the U.S. would do without ICE. ICE isn’t even 23 years old. Most adults know a world without ICE. And the billions used to fund ICE can be used to meet people’s basic needs.

What I've been noticing lately in convos with students is that they *despise* the AI-slopification of everything as much or even more than I do. And yet our universities & their admin seem to believe that students for some reason want it integrated into everything. THEY DON'T.

Several Chicago newsrooms have been quietly collaborating to bring big ICE stories to the forefront. In this story today, we found that feds used chemical weapons on Chicagoans at least 49 times during immigration raids — even after a judge said to stop.

Excited to see my latest article out, exploring cultures of production in highly localized trades in north India. Part of a forthcoming special section of “South Asia” on artisan lives and forms of production that I co-edited with Arun Kumar and Adhitya Dhanapal. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VYR6S...

The opposition to so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” is not the first time Chicagoans have stood up against our neighbors being snatched off the street by outsiders. Jeff Nichols takes a look back at how Chicago residents resisted abductions of Black Chicagoans after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

i, for one, embrace the moral clarity of not raping children, embracing fascism, and using state violence to terrorize both citizens and non-citizens

“As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Threats to the humanities as institutions like my own tend to get a lot of attention, but the decimation of our disciplines is happening rapidly at regional public schools across the US, which serve far more students. Students at every university & college deserves access to humanities education.

The dog in the first snow of the year.

CBP & ICE terrorized Little Village this weekend, used chemical weapons against families and children and kidnapped ordinary people from its streets. Absolutely vile to shout its name during a photo op.

Did actual f*cking Jeff Bezos write this absolute trash?! (The irony is that this article is just the WaPo dropping the mask of not being the mouthpiece of billionaires and fascists).

The views of the average pro-Palestinian student broadly match what the academic literature says, what international courts say, what the relavant UN officials & orgs say and what the relevant NGOs say. It is views of Clinton and her peers in Western capitals which are largely divorced from reality.

put a stake in it www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Today in absolutely and always Fuck ICE.

“And for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.”

Looking forward to traveling *all the way up to Evanston❗* next Wednesday to speak on my book, Pious Labor, at the new Languages of Islam workshop through the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Details here!

Apparently the gap btw “centrist liberal” and “full blown klan” is closed by the radical demand that Palestinians be seen as people and buses should be free

Yup. And riding a bicycle teaches you to vibe with the city, but also that the car people are 100% very actively trying to kill you.

"What I need you to know is we are organized. What I need you to know is that you need to get organized. What I need you to know is they are coming. What I need you to know is you can stop them... This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family"

Highly recommend bringing your dog to your academic conference.

“No public criminal charges have been filed against anyone in connection with the raid … The Tribune has been able to confirm the identity of only one immigrant taken into custody by federal agents that night: a 41-year-old pizza delivery man… who has no apparent criminal history.”

Wtf is a TEST of a ceasefire?!?!??!?

ICE continues their terror campaign today as people protest in mass. Border Patrol was seen in Blue Island, and at the O'Hare rideshare lot again. Sightings in southeast side. A truck with a smashed window in Villa Park. Right now, they're hunting people on the southwest side.

Delighted that Pious Labor (@ucpress.bsky.social and Three Essays Collective) has been awarded the South Asian Muslim Studies Association biennial book prize! faculty.thecollege.asu.edu/samsa/announ...

“On the question of intent, much fudged and fettered by those legal minds who wish to keep the high standards for genocide untainted by Palestinian blood…” 💯. The only way to deny genocide in Palestine is to believe that Palestinians aren’t equally human.

h/t @fiona-webster22.bsky.social

This really makes it sound like a Border Patrol agent tried to kill an anti-ICE activist in Chicago and DHS lied to cover for him

I have a full day today, but I woke up early to put this edition of my newsletter together because I need you all to have this rundown of what we've been up against this week in Chicago as the federal assault on our city continues. To ignore these developments would be a damning mistake for us all.

This is who @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social is. Brilliant. Fearless. I fucking hate typing this shit out: Free Eman. Amplify amplify amplify please.

ICE out of Chicago NOW.

Excellent (but depressing) analysis by @gsoh31.bsky.social on the fragile state of higher education in the UK. This passage particularly struck me. politicalquarterly.org.uk/blog/where-n...

“A masked ICE agent inside the fencing shot a pepper ball from about 50 feet away, hitting Rezai’s truck, which had its driver’s side window down, ‘causing the chemical agents to engulf the inside.’”