Am curious about where they got the design knowledge other than Ajanta paintings. Anyone know?

The dynamic is a much older one. Nasser and every populist authoritarian starting in the 1950s used it. I do wish Europeanists would read more widely.

Egypt before, during, and after Jan 25. www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/t...

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

My fave song coming out of Egypt right before - and then again after the 2011 uprising. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TeZ...

Today, January 25, marks fifteen years since Egyptians took to the streets to demand "bread, freedom, and dignity." For 18 days, protesters challenged decades of repression, injustice, and corruption despite violence by security forces that injured thousands and killed at least 846.

May everyone continue to be inspired by the bravery that Egyptians showed then, and to not give up.

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes...Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared."-Anne Frank, 1943

YouGov is out with a new poll after ICE killed another person in Minnesota today. Abolishing ICE is now +5 among all adults, and **+12 among independents** substack.com/@gelliottmor...

The Indian channels were more focused on immigration policy, but I can tell you that I've never seen so much Indian media attention paid to US domestic politics before.

What are we doing here Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless economist.com/united-state... from The Economist

If you're interested in seeing how framing contests are taking shape after the ICE killing of another person in Minneapolis, here's a window into the conversation on X this morning. Link to interactive graph: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot... * I put this together quickly. Sorry for any errors

Great question. First example is rise of MORENA in Mexico. A paper that shows how party organizational method can shift the needle on representation and ultimately electoral success:

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minneapolis protester fatally shot by a federal officer was ICU nurse Alex Pretti, his parents say.

Our initial analysis is up. The video footage appears to show that the gun was taken away from the man before he was shot. He was UNARMED before any of the shots were fired.

So I watched the shooting video frame by frame and it looks like: 1) They were beating a struggling man with batons 2) His jacket opened revealing a gun in his waistband or lower back 3) The agent in gray grabbed the gun and was walking away 4) THEN the other agents shot the man in the back

I am watching what is happening in Minneapolis on Ali Velshi and one of the ICE officers (off camera) literally says, “It’s like Call of Duty. Pretty cool huh?” as they shoot whatever it is they are shooting. Agents walking around, guns unholstered for no reason. This is insanity

The StarTribune live blog is paywall free: - The man shot by federal agents this morning has died - Several witnesses have already been transported to the Whipple building. - ICE attempted to order local police from the scene, but O’Hara refused, sources said. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

Yall outside of MN need to know that observers are STILL out protecting their neighbors. Right now. They know the news and they’re still out there.

I'm glad.

Americans have seen multiple Khalid Said-equivalent videos in the past few years. In Egypt, I remember a reporter of my acquaintance saying that this was the moment when people thought, keeping your head down and being middle-class and respectable was no longer going to protect you.

It was right in front of a store and on a block that I was staying near in August. Horrible. This reminds me of images of tanks rolling over people near my former Kasr el-Nil flat in Cairo.

ICE detained a 2-year-old girl in Minneapolis and put the child on a flight to a detention center in Texas, despite a court ordering her release: www.startribune.com/agents-detai...

I feel like everyone who followed this story carefully knew that this was the role Canary Mission was playing but didn't have definitive proof yet. It's a weird feeling to just finally have something to point to.

MSP airport. Clergy risking risking arrest and a huge gathering of protesters. The song is, “Down to the River to Pray.”

just to make that clear for the rest of the world, that's -9 degrees *fahrenheit.* -23 degrees *celsius*.

CRM repertoires of contention being repurposed powerfully here.

🚨 BREAKING: Over 100 clergy at Target HQ in Downtown Minneapolis demanding justice #ICEOutOfMN #ICEOutForGood #ReneeGood 🎶 “We can stay here all day, we shall not be moved. We are shopping elsewhere, we shall not be moved.” 🔗 Watch live: www.facebook.com/share/v/1ALf...

I am not a religious person, but this is incredibly moving.

I reviewed MORE AND MORE AND MORE which argues that there’s no historical precedent for an “energy transition”; instead, we see symbiotic linkages between wood, coal, oil, and now renewables. I’m convinced. But the book’s analysis of capitalism falls short @thebaffler.com Link ⬇️

Aww, old school Teletubbies!

When I first started studying media Arabic in Cairo circa 2005, we would read news reports in Al-Masry al-Youm about political detainees who had knocked their heads against prison walls and killed themselves.

Commit to what we could be rather than what we are. My favorite expression of this is Langston Hughes’s poem “Freedom’s Plow”.

Defining armed people as necessarily in the right, entitled to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals, because "you are either with us or with the baddies," was always likely to end up this way.

If you are a US citizen and think your children are safe because they don’t “look like” this child… … stop to consider that in our country, now, your children’s safety depends on what they “look like”.

A five-year-old boy seized on his way home in Minnesota and now locked up in Texas. His family didn't know where he was for 24 hours.

One of the reasons it's more work to be juggling multiple responsibilities than to have longer stretches handling one responsibility. (Those who teach & research & keep track of multiple needs, time-sensitive tasks, advance planning for multiple people, know this well)

the old connectors are dying, and usb-c struggles to be born. now is the time of dongles.

I mean if you take the 101 to the 10 to the 60 at like noon, & dodge rush hour commuter traffic, you might be able to make it in under 2 hours, but that's pushing it. The container trucks near the 57 will slow you down any time of day. (Riverside is 40 mins from the eastern edge of LA Country)

So an 'adult content' warning was placed on this, from Egypt over a decade ago - when on social media IN EGYPT, where I lived at the time, this image was not censored. People were horrified by it. Revolutionary graffiti replicated it. It galvanized protests. I suppose puritans would rather not know

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

I haven't found a cookbook as perfect for my current life stage and interests as Good Things by Samin Nosrat, in a loooong time. And I'm really curious about the vin d'orange, which seems perfect for the oranges that grow on campus trees!

A depressing instruction at a peer-reviewed journal's portal for submitting manuscripts: "Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors."

I can't retweet this enough.

Social media would be more engaging & productive if we - I'm referring mainly to academics & reporters - posted less whinging about how such & such other writer/analyst is a jerk/wrong/moron/has undue influence. I get the impetus, and share it - it just makes for a feed full of back & forth beefs.

An amazing set of essays and resources about primarily US protest movements.

I have an article forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science called, "Participatory Democracy & Its Limits." It focuses on limited citizen attention & how participation can backfire, w/ land use as an example. Abstract below; here's a preprint: kevinjelliott.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Few things deter people from writing letters of recommendation for excellent students quite like fussy reference portals that require you to get your letters down to x number of characters and spend 4 hours tailoring them to the whims of the specific grad program's web interface.