Bizarrely an unpublished article I wrote for the now-defunct Newsweek Pakistan in 2011 has been published by The Standard (15 years later)! thestandard.com.pk/the-last-mao...

*mutters* they could've spent that money on faculty, staff, and librarians

Kicking off my summer triathlon training with a 20 mile ride in my hometown’s state park on my mother’s bicycle 🚲.

After ICE deported Wendy Hernandez Reyes, it turned her 3-year-old son Orlin over to her sister’s estranged partner, who tortured Orlin and beat him to death. I can’t say what I think should happen to those responsible without violating this website’s TOS. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

The weaselly letter AHA ExCo sent to its membership lambasting its members exercising the right to stand for election is exactly why so many of us are convinced you are sabotaging democratic governance of the AHA over Palestine-related academic freedom. Appalling. Vote for the HPAD slate 🗃️

New special section of CSSAME on "Methodologies of the 'Everyday' in South Asian Islam" co-edited by Harini Kumar and me is now out! Featuring articles from Mudit Trivedi, Ali Altaf Mian, Elizabeth Lhost & Taushif Kara, Harini and me, with a post-script by Shahzad Bashir. Check it out here!

Very similar to fixing health insurance in this country. Lots of good ideas and examples out there! However: - Billions in advertising/lobbying efforts maintain the status quo. - People don't know a better way is possible. - Changing things = "undeserving others" might get good things.

Car activists need to stop mowing down Chicago cyclists. There, I fixed it.

The talk I recently gave for the Islamic Studies program at Harvard was recorded and is available here! vimeo.com/1188453158

May Day in Chicago ✊

The Trump Administration may be taking a quieter approach, but the terror has not ended.    Trump, Mullin, Miller, and Homan continue to weaponize the government against its people to ensure anyone who gets in their way ends up shot, detained, deported, or dead.

Assigned a blue book midterm 💃. Forgot the part where I’d have to read all the blue book midterms ☠️ .

ICE agents shot another driver -- on Tues. He had just asked to call his wife. They shot him six times. One bullet his jaw. Now he can't speak and has been mostly unconscious. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/u...

Before playing Kamancheh, he says: 'Hello, I'm Mohammad-Reza Afarideh, the director of the ed. institute that has now been destroyed. I wanted the last sound coming from my institute not to be of missiles and war; (I want the) final sound to be of the instrument that I played in it. Thank you'.

Trump is promising to commit genocide. "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." A clear, indisputable statement of intent.

After a hiatus, Arun Kumar and I are back with new articles in our series on artisan and laborer histories for the Wire! This first piece in the new set considers the working lives of stonemasons! (Side note, we don’t write the headlines).

Boy, what a terrible headline. We *need* the wealthy to participate in public services. If only poor people ride the bus, then rich people won't wield their power in support of public transit or, worse, will wield their power *against* it.

I love my neighbors and how hard they fight and teach me to fight. Learning from the incredible local organizers here in Pilsen is the best thing I’ve done in Chicago.

Will be speaking on Pious Labor at Harvard Islamic Studies later this month! Would love to see Boston-area friends there. islamicstudies.harvard.edu/event/semina...

We obtained the Dilley detention center’s 911 call logs. Among them are pleas for help for toddlers having trouble breathing, a pregnant woman who passed out and an elementary-school-aged girl having seizures.

How did the Indian Ocean become a geography of unilateral US dominance? In Ajam's latest, Mahdi Chowdhury explores the history of anti-colonial efforts to build a Zone of Peace and argues for the urgent, existential need to demilitarize the Indian Ocean:

I think often of a New York Times photo of a little Iraqi girl tending to her parakeets in a bombed house, probably from 20 years ago now. I will think of this man and his sweet dog often now too. People just want to love what they love, care for their little beings, and instead we do this to them

Deploying ICE at airports is to normalize their transition from being a special operation targeting immigrants to being an entity that polices all. This is the production of the American Gestapo, one institution at a time.

First day of Spring Quarter today. In discussing my AI policy (a big 'ole NOPE), made a passionate plea for the power of human creativity... but then summed it up with "Don't ask Chat, ask me!"

Fully agree. Even where sources/data are digitized, the default should be to refuse 1) because of the documented errors, harms, and “slop”piness of AI “research”; and 2) because it’s nearly impossible to make a consistent ethical argument for AI reliance almost anywhere, much less in academic work.

So relieved Krishnamoorthi lost. Taking money from an ICE contractor should automatically disqualify anyone from running as a Democrat. Glad it did in IL.

They’re holding people hostage in order to steal precious minerals

Haitian woman, 31, dies alone at Pittsburgh bus stop days after ICE released her to the streets far from home to perish. Rest in power, Daphy Michel: migrantinsider.com/p/the-loneso...

For the new South Asia book forum section, I reviewed and put into conversation three excellent recent books: Rishad Choudhury‘s Hajj Across Empires, @ajab.bsky.social 's The Making of Persianate Modernity & Daniel Majchrowicz’s The World in Words. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We need reparations for ICE victims. Anything short of that is setting the stage for a massive wealth grab from people of color that will re-entrench racial disparities for generations.

Killing people should not be something we do quicker than the speed of thought

Let me be clear: I’m glad Kristi Noem was fired. But we still have to abolish ICE.

Brilliant exhibit on Mexican traqueros who helped build the railways of Chicago & the Midwest, currently on at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Particularly stunned by the stories of people who were deported via the very tracks they built 😡.

“If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.”

I didn't go to journalism school, but this is... incorrect.

Call me a raving radical but I literally do not care whether your imperialist massacre of children is “constitutional” or not.

No words.

Murderers.

Pretty incredible. This candidate went to the West Bank to see the violence of the occupation herself. And Israeli settlers — apparently flanked by a soldier — immediately showed it to her by throwing eggs at her as she walked with an ex-soldier, a priest, and Jewish activists:

“Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward… Giant donations… often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission...”

I am apparently too old for travel now, currently absolutely dying from jet lag on my sofa in Chicago. Still, here’s a few cool pics from the Chaukhandi tombs on the edge of Karachi!

Grateful to the Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences journal and Melissa Baldwin and Dominik Huenniger for including my reflections on the methods & practices that I used to write my first monograph as part of their new special issue, "Historical Practice," on the many ways to be a historian.

Online collections are great and vital in an age of visa/travel restrictions and limited humanities funding. But relying on them means excluding so much history, so many pasts & so many worlds contained in spaces like these (from Islamia College, Peshawar this week).

It's possible to do a non-reactionary critique of the current landscape of humanities research funding: www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Islamia College, Peshawar, and its mosque 😍

Qissa Khwani bazaar, Peshawar. Some days academia is hard, but most days I still can’t believe I get to go cool places and learn cool things as my job.

Concentration camps: “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick."

Former Washington Post journalists have launched a GoFundMe to help repatriate fired staff members who are effectively stranded in foreign countries. One of the richest men in the world fired them from the paper and didn’t even pay to ensure they got home. Abolish the billionaire class:

Israel is still bombing Gaza. They have received all their prisoners of war, but they keep bombing.

Absolutely stunned by Sadequain’s final (unfinished) mural, on the ceiling of the Frere Hall library in Karachi. My poor photography skills can’t do the scale or detail justice.