Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla passed away a couple of days ago, and Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai – a wonderful documentary about him – seems to now be available to watch for free on YouTube. It's a powerful portrait of stillness, and well worth a watch. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM6q...

"Like Amazon Prime, but with human beings."

These visits by ghostes koude have been three emayles.

Although this is the first year they'll actively be trying to shoot him down.

For a period of a couple of years during the 2010s I was employed regularly by cattle to shoot the covers for the albums they had recorded. It was always wonderfully inspiring to witness the love, hard work and passion they had put into their music and I think that comes through in the photos.

Did the annual *White Christmas* rewatch, time to reup this take (which I know I've posted before but bsky seems to have eaten): *White Christmas* is an extended riff on *The Waste Land*. A land no longer productive (of snow) can only be restored when a once-great ruler is restored to honor.

From Anne Carson’s groundbreaking translations to Geetanjali Shree’s Booker-winning work, @saudaminideo.bsky.social explores the complex dynamics of translation, cultural appropriation, and the reception of non-Western literature in the Western literary world. wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

The 60 Minutes piece on the Trump Administration’s torture prison that Bari Weiss doesn’t want you to see has leaked.

A rare series of watercolors by Hilma af Klint, The Tree of Knowledge c.1913-15 #WomensArt

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

told my landlord he no longer has to apologize for being white and he lowered my rent by 25%. told the grocer it's now the trump kennedy center and he sold me potatoes for $1. told PG&E it's a christian nation now and electricity is free. try it sometime

The Sound of Music is on TV tonight, so we must point you, yet again, to this all-timer by Melinda Taub from our archives.

Oh hell YES. I've long maintained that based on the result of ink recipes, the word "azraq" couldn't mean "blue" in early Arabic texts but seems instead to be yellowish. Now I have textual proof: "Take red arsenic [realgar] or if you wish, azraq"—no such thing as blue arsenic, this means yellow!

Contemporary Ukranian painter Maria Chepeleva #WomensArt

🎯

"The stories of the genocide in Gaza are unbearably difficult to tell, but I believe they are most truthfully carried in a poem, surrounded by an expanse of white space that mirrors both silence and grief." Ibrahim Fawzy from our Gaza issue, for #10Questions: massreview.org/2025/12/08/7...

the epstein files as rick owens fall/winter 2024

My novel, Alice Sees Ghosts, will be published in the US by Galiot Press in October 2026! 🎄🎄🎄

"In this tug of war between tongue and tail, what got bruised, and what wavered, was the spine..." Read Geetanjali Shree's story (translated by Daisy Rockwell) "And I Saw Myself Running" in the Fall 2025 issue of Ploughshares, free this week! https://bit.ly/3MFC5Xy

By Geetanjali Shree. A brief magnificent story in a translation by Daisy Rockwell. #booksky 💝 granta.com/all-at-once/

My novel, Alice Sees Ghosts, will be published in the US by Galiot Press in October 2026! 🎄🎄🎄

THERE ARE NO JOBS IN ACADEMIA! NO JOBS! DOZENS OF HYPER QUALIFIED APPLICANTS PER JOB!

Usual reminder: decisions like this don't mean that AI can do the job of a human translator; they mean that some C-suite creature who is basically a LinkedIn profile wrapped in ham and an expensive suit has decided it provides an alibi for paying human translators less money for less rewarding work.

And from experience, 'revising' AI translation is more demanding and less rewarding, so there are enormous incentives to doing it quickly and badly beyond being paid less and needing more contracts.

"Autonomous" academy of letters letting fascist govt's minister of culture dictate who and how it awards writers.

🎊🧀🎊

Translating literature is itself a form of art. No algorithm could render into English Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" with anything like the beauty that William Weaver did.

Announcing the National Book Critics Circle 2025 Longlist for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

It’s obscene.

A story I found about Haiti: In 1999, a group of Haitians were tired of political disorder and dreamed of a better life in the United States. So they built a small, 23-foot boat by hand using pine trees, scrap wood, and used nails. They called the boat "Believe in God."

Protesting the U of Arkansas for Removing Middle East Center Director over her Condemnation of the Bombing of Iran

Proud to announce Spring 2026’s What Is Research Now? from Paul Mellon Ctr, co-convened by Sria Chatterjee, Kenny Fries, & myself. DISABLED LEGACIES: BEYOND ACCESS AND INCLUSION www.britishart.ac.uk/about/news/w... 26-28 Feb & 26-28 Mar 2026 @jaivirdi.com @syrusmarcusware.bsky.social many more ✨

I'm not sure if people realize the murder strikes are taking place across a large region. It's quite staggering. www.newsweek.com/map-us-strik...

every page has these abbreviations which seem to relate to the text - if anyone knows anything about deciphering them, whether there are standard reference works to them, etc., I would be very glad to hear it!

I don't know, Aaron. I think we need to take this seriously. In fact, after surveying hundreds of years of history in the past few days, I've written an article assessing the originalist case here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

19. I was in grad school when email got going so I had an .edu address, no AOL.

we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

International Prize for Arabic Fiction Announces 2026’s 16-book Longlist The International Prize for Arabic Fiction today announced 2026's judges and 16-book longlist.

It’s the right time of the year to post a painting of a turtle dove. Painted on cradle gesso panel, with a pure silver leaf sky. These gentle birds, now much endangered well once the background sound to our childhood summers.

This is the way to defend our honor!

Take away a translator's dictionaries, knowledge of grammar, experience overseas, decades of research and deep reading, professional development over the course of a lifetime, coffee, and a deep-seated self-loathing that first brought them to the profession and they have nothing.

Childe Hassam, "Late Afternoon, New York Winter," 1900, from collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/1202

This is basically EVERY university in the Anglophone world.

Chomsky’s language ideologies have directly contributed to a culture of linguistics in America where arrogant Anglophone children scoff at you if you dare ask them if they speak something besides English Where was our great anti-colonial leftist hero? Encouraging it.

Hi folks — I’m back on the job market and open to roles + freelance work in language and localisation. I work across Hindi, Odia, Bhojpuri, Magahi and Angika and over the last few years I’ve taught, translated, interpreted, edited, and generally helped people communicate better across contexts. 🧵