What’s worse, not feeling safe or having a 2000 lb bomb dropped on you

Stand for children, stand for refugees, stand for the people being bombed vs the bombers, and you’ll be on the right side of history

He really hates brown people (and anybody who is not the whitest of white) www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"American propaganda has always been about the spectacle of the city upon a hill on whom the world’s eyes are turned...Now the spectacle is about the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, zeteo.com/p/250-americ...

I hate it when I can't boycott an organization I've already boycotted

Ding dong!

Never again for us or never again for everyone is one of the most basic moral and political questions of our time. Too bad a lot of people are failing at answering it.

ICE claims that Araujo drove into one of their SUVs with his van and then tried to run over an agent. There were no marks on the van and KHOU11's Jeremy Rogalski found surveillance footage showing ICE chasing Araujo and cutting him off. Renee Good all over again.

Humanity is participating in its own destruction, or at least planned obsolescence; the movie has film and TV people working with AI people www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Re-listened to Huey Lewis and the News 1983 album SPORTs for the first time in 40 years and it holds up well--maybe better even than it sounded in the 1980s.

Saying Netanyahu is the problem and not Israel is like saying Trump is the problem and not the United States

Well, when you put it that way…

Brings new meaning to the word “necropolitics.”

The United States betrayed this man, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Even MAGA should be ashamed for killing someone who fought with and believed in this country.

A slow motion torture and killing…carried out brazenly by Israel because it knows no state will stop it

After I lost four pounds on my seven day European trip, I went on an eight day all American road trip and gained 3.2 pounds. I’m relieved. I thought I would gain five or six.

Like vinyl records, the humanities will make a comeback

4th of July in one image from @orr_photo for @reuters…the modern KKK in Washington DC and a lone Black Woman saying it all with one look.

Our history is complicated, and only an acknowledgment of the cruelty, past and present, can make the US better. Rather than celebrating American power and violence, in a vain effort to prop up a declining empire, Americans need to turn towards humility and repentance. zeteo.com/p/250-americ...

Ultra conservative, anti-immigrant, pro-fascist Catholics make no sense to me. What New Testament part of the Bible did they read?

This is quite an assortment of US American writers that The Observer asked to reflect on the best and worst moments of American history on the 250th anniversary. Marilynne Robinson, Jennifer Egan, Rumaan Alam, and many more, including yours truly. observer.co.uk/style/featur...

I am in the “cut fruit to show my children love” phase of my life.

THE NATION has a collection of articles reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. From my contribution: It is a fantasy to believe that we can separate the dream from the nightmare, destiny from orgy, liberation from conquest... www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Hi NAME, I’m sorry, I won’t be able to do this. I’ve resigned from academia. — One of the most satisfying sentences to write, which I’ve written a couple of times now. I had a hard time saying no as an academic, which was one of the reasons I had to quit.

I wrote about Delaney Hall, the ICE concentration camp where imprisoned immigrants are staging a work and hunger strike. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A snapshot of the feelings the Vietnamese community has for me. Thanks, Mai Nguyen! Meanwhile, Hoàng Nha previously called me an "uneducated scoundrel," but I like "naturally rude and uncultivated" as well.

This Wednesday in San Luis Obispo.

Anybody here in Georgia? I'll be there from June 8-10 at the ZEG Storytelling Festival. I am excited about my visit--followed by a few days in Yerevan, Armenia, another place I am very much looking forward to, after having become friends with many Armenian Americans. www.zegfest.com

I got to edit Best American Short Stories 2026. Much thanks to series editor @nicole.a.lamy, who read thousands of stories before giving me one hundred and twenty of them. From those, I chose this list of twenty exceptional stories. Available now from @marinerbooks.

My latest for @zeteo.com on Trump's imperial war on Iran, and how it's connected to the American war in Viet Nam, Israel's war on Lebanon, and the shared American and Israeli belief in air power, bombing, and asymmetrical warfare, as deployed against those seen as less than human.

Bread and circuses, appropriate for a clown.

Here's my easily shareable commencement speech to the UC Berkeley English department, published thanks to the Pittsburgh Review of Books and its editor Ed Simon, with some highlights below. pghrev.com/address-to-t...

The walls of this hotel are very thin.

Trump strong-armed his own government and basically the country to give him a $1.7 billion fund to aid anyone he wants, and to declare him off-limits from audits. The corruption is off the charts. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Amin Abdullah gave his life to protect children and his community. A hero. Unlike the professional police officers who didn’t dare save the children of Uvalde or Parkland.

I want a world that respects justice so I’m supporting @PublicCounsel’s auction celebrating AAPI history month with the chance to Zoom visit with me OR a signed copy of my book Simone to help fund their vital civil rights & social justice work. Bid by 5/21 www.Charitybuzz.com/publiccounsel

I'm giving the UC Berkeley English Department commencement speech this week to the class of 2026. I'm class of 1992. A 34 year gap. The math is that if someone my age had given the commencement speech in 1992, they would have been class of 1958. I would have considered that person ancient.

It’s definitely settler colonization in the West Bank. Anybody who still thinks there’s a two state solution is deluded. Gaza is a wasteland and the West Bank is under occupation, apartheid, and slow motion ethnic cleansing.

As a teacher, I've seen the highs and lows for my students. Nothing in my graduate education prepared me for how to deal with the lows--mental illness, homelessness, sexual assault being the most extreme.

The US is basically waging war against Cuba with a blockade…for no good reason except enmity.

This is one of the reasons why I thought Park Chan-wook was perfect as co-showrunner for THE SYMPATHIZER (especially if you remember Wim Wenders' less than inspiring comments at the Berlinale about art and politics as needing to be separate, after he was asked about his opinion about Gaza).

Two very funny young comedians, Will Pepper (he's really Vietnamese--you'll have to tune in to find out how he got his name) and Danny Plom join Philip Nguyen and me to wrap up season 6 of ÁCCENTED! www.eventbrite.com/e/accented-c...

Israel flattened an entire building because it suspected one Hamas spotter was on the roof (no evidence offered). The consequences: massacring more than 132 members of Abu Naser family. Some 8000 bodies may still be under the apocalyptic wreckage of Gaza.

Listening to @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social on NPR’s Throughlines on memory and war. It’s a brilliant episode. The point made about time and distance needed to process really resonates. In Palestine and Lebanon, we haven’t had the opportunity afforded by time to process. It’s ongoing & ever present

I'm glad I refused to learn how to use Canvas. I ignored it in my big lecture class and none of my students cared. www.latimes.com/california/s...

If I had an Israeli character in one of my novels celebrate his birthday with a cake with a noose, I’d be called antisemitic.

Looting Was Part of Every Israeli War. What's New Is the Total Indifference - Headline says it all. The most moral army in the world loots and pillages.

See you in Riverside, California, next Friday May 3 at 3PM for UC Riverside's Writers Week. Did you know I did my freshman year at UC Riverside? writersweek.ucr.edu writersweek.ucr.edu/schedule2026

The German chancellor said this today. I said this on March 8, but with a little more judgment. The Germans can’t call the Americans (or the Israelis) terrorists, because they’re all still on the same side. The German chancellor is just sad the Americans are so dumb about their war.

An administration and a person who casually destroys lives - ordering the ethnic cleansing of the country; ordering extrajudicial murder via Venezuelan boat strikes; wiping out USAID and eliminating aid programs that lead to thousands of deaths;