2/ I stayed by Monica Moreta-Galarza, who was seeking asylum with her family, until she was discharged from the hospital. “Over [in Ecuador], they beat us there too. I didn’t think I’d come here to the United States and the same thing would happen to me,” she said in Spanish.

today’s walk

Omar Zahzah looks at digital settler colonialism: “Even if blacklisting is a well-worn strategy of Zionist persecution, Canary Mission constitutes an escalation.”

You have not heard this story. Nobody else has this story. @thisamericanlife.org, and how the US Dept of Justice is corrupting immigration courts - which they directly control. Told by the judges who were coerced, intimidated, and fired. www.thisamericanlife.org/868/the-hand...

if you're a weirdo that needs convincing that dr. mitra is an extremely intelligent, prolific, kind, and generous professor and scholar that any institution would be blessed to have, this article will do it!!!! read it and then hire her!!!!!!!! www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

This photo is everything!! (Alaa with his remarkable mother Dr. Laila Soueif, who spent nearly 300 days on hunger strike to secure her son's release)

HUGE HUGE NEWS FROM EGYPT!! Egyptian President Sisi has issued a presidential pardon for activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah.

Lovely notice of *Disrupted City* by a fellow historian of Lahore!

Columbia University, main campus. Once an open thoroughfare, shaded by tall noble trees. Now closed to the public, the big trees torn up and replaced by stunted exemplars of other species, planted deep in the summer vacation, and yellowing, dying. In an novel, the metaphor would seem heavy-handed.

Navina Haidar and Marika Sardar's 2015 MET exhibition catalog "Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy" is now available for free online

“The vigil — a call for nuclear disarmament and an end to global conflict — is maintained by a rotating cast of volunteers who keep the protest going 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It has survived seven U.S. presidents, countless global conflicts, hurricanes and blizzards, heat waves and floods”

Now available! Drawing on Shaykh Musa Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, TEXTUAL LIFE offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. buff.ly/O1jMqC6 #ReadUP #BlackLivesInTheDiaspora

The past two years, there has been some amazing writing about what it's REALLY like to be an Arab in the "West." (Not that we were never writing it before, just wasn't getting published too much.) Here's another essay. The author doesn't name names, but I will: The New Yorker. David Remnick.

It’s launch day for No Is Not A Lonely Utterance! So I shared some of my reasons for writing the book 💜💜

The destruction of the Gaza city mosque is a devastating loss to humanity as a whole. A part of our global medieval heritage destroyed in furtherance to a genocide. I despair.

The President of Barnard College calls for more controversial speakers like the late Kirk (without citing any of his controversial views), a position at odds with what Barnard colleagues describe as a track record of censoring events and speakers on Palestine. (1/4) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/o...

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes—and every student gets a personal chatbot. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

The UN has recognized that Israel is committing & has committed genocide in Palestine. Here’s June Jordan saying I SAID I LOVE YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP in 1996 www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

On June 24, I began my Election Night speech by quoting Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” That's the spirit of this campaign, and our city. This is "Until It’s Done,” a new series about New Yorkers who refused to accept that a worthy goal was impossible.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

Interested in a global antiquity? There is a new, open access vol. _Classical Art and Ancient India_edited by Peter Stewart. 🌏 “This volume explores India's connections with the Med. and Western Asia during Graeco-Roman history, highlighting artistic exchanges” www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress...

Judith Butler: "It is important to refuse the notion that this is just how things are right now, invoking a feckless realpolitik that justifies complicity with a brutal and rising authoritarianism."

today’s walk

“UC Berkeley released the names of individuals and their ‘potential connection’ to reports of alleged antisemitism.” Potential, alleged, reports: these words tell us that any student, at any time, can now make any claim, w/ or w/o evidence, & get a faculty member investigated, fired, &/or arrested

ex-IDF chief confirms Gaza casualties over 200,000 That’s 10% of the entire population of Gaza in 2 years www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

fiftythousandnames.org Fifty Thousand Names was made in commemoration of every single man, woman and child who, as of March 2025, had been killed as a result of Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Historian Joan Scott on maintaining the “stubborn resistance” that is the legacy of her father — in the face of so many craven responses within universities to the imposition of authoritarianism www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

It's publication day for UNIVERSITY KEYWORDS. Across 27 sharp essays, the book offers a critical account of the political economy of US higher education, how it came to be structured this way, and how together we might build a better university together.

When Campus Reform and Turning point came after professors and created the professor watchlist, administrators didn't pay attention..Now they are being fired and attacked. Maybe institutions should have done more to protect academic freedom....

Something my colleagues in India and Pakistan are deeply familiar with in their own university settings.

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

Very proud to be able to share, via @dissentmag.bsky.social, Marshall Berman's essay "Sympathy for the Devil," about the Pentagon exorcism, The Rolling Stones, Faust, and the culture of the 1960s. It's been out of print for forty years, and it's a masterpiece www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Hope the “Third Founding” does the trick for this nation-state.

It is the *greatest* (perhaps only) affirmation when a student publishes their book but holding @esmat.bsky.social brilliant *Parting Gifts of Empire* is a special privilege all its own. Until liberation.

Excited to announce my book that is forthcoming in January. I’m looking forward to sharing more soon. Let me know if your faculty, students, or community would be interested in a talk or class. Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt | Princeton University Press. Description at: bit.ly/PerrySlavery

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Hot dog seller, New York 1963 by Evelyn Hofer. Kodachrome has such a fantastic look to it.

JOB @ Stony Brook University: Assistant Professor - Historian of Modern Continental Europe (scholars with interests in transnational, multiethnic, or borderlands histories and critical imperial studies)🗃️

today’s walk

I am once again asking you to stop sending us money. But we do need your time. ⏰ zohranfornyc.com/events

NEW: An NYPD officer's death brought rare recognition for Bangladeshi Americans. But for younger generations shaped by post-9/11 surveillance & Black Lives Matter, it exposed painful questions about belonging, writes Jennifer Chowdhury for @newlinesmag.bsky.social newlinesmag.com/argument/a-p...

I have a new article out today in Public Humanities, where I try to find some words for how historicide is (and has always been) a project of European colonialism - and I try to find some words for the historians who continue to support it. 🇵🇸✊🏻 Open access: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

shout out to @veenadubal.bsky.social for being the FIERCEST, most tireless advocate for free speech, academic freedom, and the rights and value of all faculty also for her kindness and beautiful soul 💕🌸✊🏽

“We have chosen a life of humanistic study, because we believe it will bind us more closely to you, to those who have preceded us, to those who will follow, and to the lands that we rely on.” www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This is an AMAZING and important book. It will change the way you understand the politicization of science. Insights in this book will help us to understand the current moment. So proud of and grateful to @azizaahmed.bsky.social

very few ppl are as talented and fortunate as bill cunningham. but i often think about how he was able to live an honest life doing what he loved because he lived simply. even at the height of his career, he slept on a cot. as he once said, "if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do."

New at PB: Jenna M. Loyd reviews 4 recent books that show how technologies that claim to "solve" the border crisis have only expanded and legitimized carceral and bordering practices.

I confessed to my class yesterday that I too was artificially intelligent.

Read the introduction to Anjali Nath's "A Thousand Paper Cuts," which offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. buff.ly/liHKmoZ

Muhammad Hanif on American love for Pakistani military men who love America.