Don’t worry! If your Thanksgiving dinner conversation turns from pie to prisons, or from cranberries to crime, we’ve got you covered. 🧵

A lot of people are going to walk away from the Ghislaine Maxwell coverage with the impression that our prison system isn’t punitive enough but I’d say it highlights how most everyone else is treated with *deliberate* cruelty.

In my Chicago neighborhood this weekend: candy drive for kids who can't safely go out to trick or treat because of ICE; big visible letter-writing campaign at an outdoor block party; low-flying Blackhawk helicopter over a children's baseball game; whistle brigades everywhere. #chicagostrong

Regarding the question “Well, what can I do?“ Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Go into something that already exists, and do that work towards the end of helping to tip it away from reinforcing the system towards weakening the system. That’s infiltrating. Or innovate. If something doesn't exist, make it."

NEW ISSUE OUT NOW American Quarterly Volume 77, Number 3, September 2025 tinyurl.com/3cp8rvax CONTRIBUTORS Jason Ruiz Joseph Keith Justine Frerichs Kendall Gordon Artz Joseph D. Martin Jason Ezell Nicholas Fesette Naomi Fair Eunhye Grace Lee Yi-hung Liu Bethany Swann

The Ten Demands for Justice provides the roadmap to abolition — with each action chipping away at an inherently, intentionally unjust system. Read all 10 here, and print this PDF to bring to your city council members. drive.google.com/file/d/1MKG3... web.archive.org/web/20240622...

THREAD. Did you know that at about 1/3 of all stranger homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by police? But there's something hidden here that is important to understand in this authoritarian moment.

an experience I think about a lot: I was visiting a class in DC Jail shortly after Kim Kardashian visited and had brought in her camera team. I relayed critiques of her "performative", "virtue signalling" acts I had heard on the outside. the response was somewhere between a shrug and an eye roll

According the victim's attorney, body camera footage captured the officer saying, “Do something, bitch,” before leaping out of the car and shooting her multiple times. Another officer asked, “Hey, what happened?” The first pointed to his camera, “Hey, don’t speak. You’re good.” trib.al/2RfPYXK

thread: atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara was arrested June 14 while livestreaming a protest. one of the charges? “pedestrian in the roadway” -- he stepped off a curb as police cleared the street. it’s on his livestream. he was wearing a press vest, and identified himself as media.

Since her arrival at a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, Jayme Kilburn has grown its theatre program into a valued local cultural institution. By positioning theatre as a social service, she writes, she has cultivated a community that wants to show up. #theatre howlround.com/reshaping-ru...

The thing everyone can do right now is to find your lane if you don't already have one and work that lane diligently and with commitment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “What of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know.”

I wrote my own Charlie Kirk obituary, and about valuing truth over manners: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

it’s early but it seems like maybe this is relevant again (wrote it last week fml)

🧵

ATLANTA (AP) — Judge says he'll toss the racketeering case against 61 people tied to protests over a training center called “Cop City.”

I just attended a Community Defense and ICE Watch training, & I’d encourage others to take one--bc no matter your expertise, unless you’ve been trained in this work, it’s easy to rely on assumptions. These trainings share proven strategies that actually minimize harm & strengthen community safety.

Check my review essay of recent titles in carceral studies by Orisanmi Burton, @robinmbernstein.bsky.social Holly Karibo @melanienewport.bsky.social and Doran Larson. Just published in American Quarterly. Many thanks to editor @pmckelveyphd.bsky.social

We are all beholden to the cowardice of university general counsels, as well as the trustees and administrators who enable them

If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.

😍😍😍 youtu.be/6MwgC9ew-vU?...

Among the insane things about this headline is considering the opposite. You think if elites were more outspoken about crime that Trump would have LESS opportunity to send in the military? Does that make even the tiniest bit of sense?

I don't even know how to handle this part of the NYT editorial piece on why crime is falling. But I'd like to start with the most obvious thing: WHY IS THE EDITORIAL PAGE WRITING THIS AT ALL? "Why crime fell" is a DIFFICULT EMPIRICAL QUESTION. One that, you know, EXPERTS should be asked to answer.

1. This week, the FBI released its comprehensive crime report for 2024, which revealed that both VIOLENT CRIME and PROPERTY CRIME reached their LOWEST LEVELS SINCE THE 1960s This a massive story. But you might not have heard about it, even if you follow the news closely. Here's why.

"Every major US city has a private foundation supporting police, with more than 250 nationwide. The foundations have been used to pay for surveillance technologies in cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles without being subject to public scrutiny, according to the report."

Extremely useful listen if you have anyone in your life who thinks that pandemic protocols “went too far”

I'm really asking everyone to please stop using Alligator Alcatraz. This is not a descriptor that makes sense. These are concentration camps.

"I can hardly ask the authors of junk-science papers and greedy legal consultants and sleazy official spokespeople to stop what they’re doing. But I can ask the rest of you to stop tolerating it." - statistician Andrew Gelman, also on Team Stop Lying statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/r...

The ICE agents aren’t insurrectionists, extremist militiamen or criminals, they’re the police. This is what the police look like, this is how the police operate.

After living in Texas prisons for 23 years, I think I can tell you what it feels like to be cooked alive.

I wrote about Democrats' obsession with calling Trump's actions a "distraction," and how it reflects their failure to understand the modern media ecosystem.

Ten writers by whom I’ve read more than 5 books Samuel Beckett Bertolt Brecht Anton Chekhov Angela Davis Philip K Dick Michel Foucault Franz Kafka Fred Moten Suzan-Lori Parks Naomi Wallace +Virginia Woolf Also Octavia Butler and Patricia Highsmith but I’m excluding titles that are part of a series

How long has the US had for-profit prisons and unpaid prison labor? @robinmbernstein.bsky.social tells the story of how, **in the 1840s**, William Freeman, a Black man incarcerated in NY, sought back wages for his prison labor. Read about this lost chapter of history: inquest.org/the-prof...

If you want to see where you own city comes out, that table is here:

"Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication." prospect.org/power/2025-0...

Since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, the number of people killed by the police each year has continued to rise — and Black Americans are still killed in disproportionate numbers. Our data reporter explains his findings. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/u...

THREAD. A lot of attention is rightly going to Medicaid cuts and other very bad things in Trump's bill passed by the House, but there's something else that isn't getting enough attention, that is very difficult to find in any news coverage, but that will fundamentally alter life for all of us.

universal drinking game

I did not love Sing Sing…

i'm not crying you're crying

It has occurred to me that y'all might not know who Mayor Ras Baraka is. So I'm going to take a moment out of grading to do my duty as a Jersey girl and teach you a thing. Mayor Baraka is the 40th mayor of the Newark, NJ, the city that will forever be Jersey's heartbeat.

Social media taught me “defund the police” and “modify standard operating procedures” are the same actually