khaled furani, what if anthropology were a spiritual exercise www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... i bailed on this forum but wish i'd made time for it - he is always provocative even when questions remain. the responses are telling though

This piece goes so hard:

Sad to see the Ides of March becoming commercialised like this. I really feel like we're losing track of the true spirit of the holiday. It's not about how many knives you can stick in a tyrant all at once, it's about the whole community coming together to stab the tyrant as many times as possible.

50 years into the 24,000 years needed. Not optimal.

R.I.P. Jürgen Habermas. My intellectual obituary from 2024: criticalmuslim.com/explore/issu...

Roundtable on the War on Iran and International Law with Noura Erakat, Luigi Daniele, Shahd Hammouri, Ata Hindi, Maryam Jamshidi, and Darryl Li www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47234

“It is incumbent upon us not… to get into debates about who is the tail and who the dog, when both are simply different heads of the same ravening beast.” I wrote a letter from Beirut for The Markaz Review themarkaz.org/we-live-in-a...

The third part of our symposium on the American-Israeli war on Iran: @warghetti.bsky.social on bombs over Beirut Aslı Bâli on the arsonists of world order and a dispatch from the first days of war in Tehran, translated by Salar Abdoh www.equator.org/articles/dea...

"It’s a dangerous mistake to include it." Robert Watson argues the most famous line in literature doesn’t mean what "Hamnet" thinks it means: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hamnet-chloe-zhao-paul-mescal-hamlet-shakespeare-misinterpreted/

The enclosure of the human mind fuck man that's a bleak sentiment

Since the start of the US-Israeli offensive against Iran on 28 February, Israeli forces have imposed strict restrictions on worshippers, preventing access to Jerusalem's Old City and its holy sites, under the pretext of “security” measures

I've been thinking for the last few days about Omid Mehrgan's complex essay in @parapraxismag.bsky.social which moves between Tehran, Gaza, resistance – and the task of the translator www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/ren...

I wrote on psychic life and Palestinian resistance – to ensure more people read Abdaljawad Omar @hamayel.bsky.social. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Here I write on the current state of Birzeit

humanityjournal.org/blog/gaza-tr... as always, faisal devji observes something incontrovertible and then reads it in the most infuriating way (always yearning for a proper politics). have some humility, my god

Sarah Aziza - Ojalá: Toward an Illiteracy of Liberation share.google/vcVKrEXMxYEZ... stunning piece

Calling Cormac McCarthy’s authorial style a “mistake” that AI no longer makes is so funny

JB review (1988) of wyschogrod's SPIRIT IN ASHES www.jstor.org/stable/2504962

This is the cloud of oil currently hovering over Tehran, released when the US bombed the city's oil depots. A stew of particulate matter, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, heavy metals & volatile organic compounds is raining down into the city right now. 1/2

“At the root of so many of our moral and political crises today is what Simone Weil, describing life under European fascism, called ‘the adoration of power in its most brutal form’.” Our editors on the Iran war: @equatormag.bsky.social www.equator.org/articles/epi...

“Her reporting depicted the war as a psychodrama of vanity and hubris that indicted the values of the ‘Greatest Generation’ to which she belonged.” Andrew Holter reads Mary McCarthy on Vietnam in a new era of wartime illusions—and new efforts by writers to puncture them:

the university in deconstruction, a conversation with peggy kamuf and samuel weber www.jonathanbasile.com/BasileUniver...

As bombs sink metallic toxins into the earth and destroyed oil refineries send chemicals into the air, coating whole cities, we are thinking of the many harms caused by war's environmental violence as well as its military force. We've been here before: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

"What animates the modern compulsion to historicize is often a compulsion to discover and expand the possibilities for world-shaping intervention." A conversation about concepts, genres, contingency, and other scholarly grammars: www.culanth.org/fieldsights/...

solid zakat calculator for those in canada, made by a friend zakatview.co

Now as ever, to understand Israeli operations, Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim is absolutely crucial, and has been so grimly prescient.

Defeat as Method: Thinking from within the ruins (by Shahram Khosravi). www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/71/kh...

"a homelessness of despair that can live with the ruination of form in a way that rattles our petit bourgeois comforts"

“Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside." Read every word.

They're going to poison a city with 17 million people

Smotrich just said Dahiyeh will soon look like Khan Younis. I wrote about Dahiyeh in 2024 and Israel’s domicide/urbicide www.aljazeera.com/amp/features...

This piece starts with a vignette about an Israeli drone flying around broadcasting the message that “The architect Tarek Mazraani continues his conspiracies. Chase him. Drive him out so security returns and reconstruction begins" and then somehow manages to get MORE dystopian...

Just out: Jeffrey Sacks thinks settler colonial life philosophically, philologically and politically. An essential book that moves between close readings of Arabic poetry and art and broad questions of living in a world of slaughter.

An intriguing book sponsered by a colleague, which may be of interest to some here. Spiro Jabbour was a Syrian Christian deacon writing in the 70s and 80s who sought an encounter between theology and psychoanalysis. Aaron Eldridge translated and edited this book, and Omnia El Shakry blurbed it.

www.theguardian.com/environment/... seas rising, smoke billowing, abandonment, brutality, well

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

good piece. the dry and the wet burn together

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

This is obscene, ghastly, unacceptable.

stunning piece

🔴 New image shows rows of freshly dug graves after US-Israeli school strike on girls’ school in Iran Iran's For. Min. Abbas Araghchi shared an aerial photo showing long rows of freshly dug graves, saying they are for more than 160 girls killed in the US–Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab.

We finally did it, folks. Every facile argument about AI concentrated into a fine powder. Not a critical engagement in sight to blunt the ecstasy of the void.

last night’s acla president’s plenary panel with @hystericalblkns.bsky.social, @biqbal.bsky.social, Timothy Brennan, and Michael Bucknor featured poignant and powerful testimonies to the unbearable violence of these present times #acla

matteo benussi - restless quietists: muslim forms of life in russia's volga region www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501... autonomism now

Today on The Incline → How to challenge the narrative that #HamOnt is "in decline", especially as some candidates prepare to make that their central argument in this fall's municipal election. #YHMvotes2026 theincline.email/p/in-decline

history after the fall of assad (conference at princeton) syrianstudies.history.princeton.edu couldn't join because of ACLA this same week, sadly

made me laugh a few times. absurdities

"But the realism of Kiarostami’s cinema is distinct from the modernist project to reduce art to the bare minimum through the subtraction of extraneous elements. What Kiarostami is after, Copjec insists, is something more plentiful, expansive. More so than a realistic representation..."

This is what a large proportion of the violence in internal conflicts looks like: a state relying on regular people for intelligence, regular people weaponizing the state within their own communities, and security forces not knowing/caring what’s motivating the sources whose information they act on.