wrote a special newsletter today for @coyotemedia.org that's chock-full of mutual aid links for work happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul www.coyotemedia.org/coyote-weekl...

Ignore the political pundits. They’ve failed us. The media is failing us. Listen to the historians. This is Conservative historian Robert Kagan on what is happening in Minneapolis & what it means for the US…& the world 3/

1. ICE has STOPPED PAYING for medical treatment for its 73,000 detainees ICE has not paid its bills to 3rd party providers since OCTOBER and the situation will likely persist for MONTHS, a Popular Information investigation reveals Meanwhile, critically ill ICE detainees are not receiving care 🧵

Friends, please join me & the great @prisonculture.bsky.social for a discussion on Feb 3 at the 42nd street NYPL where we dismantle many of the myths about Dr. King's work--and dive deep into his work outside the South and his political partner Coretta Scott King. www.nypl.org/events/progr...

Listen in as Tiffany E. Barber discusses the place of gender studies, art history, and curatorial work in the Black Studies tradition. Great stuff throughout, tune in here or at your fave stream: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

I missed this when it came out--take note! (and thanks @igormsimoes.bsky.social ofc)

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Alright, it's time for the chaser. Making this holiday a national one took huge effort and many state leaders resisted (& still do). PE wrote a song about one of them, & I listen to this one every year bc PE, but also bc it's crucial to remember that part too. Honestly not sure it would pass today.

Happy #MLKDay! Today my mind is set on freedom. For this reason, I’m posting about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom. It only seems right to kick things off with march performer Odetta, "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.” Got My Mind on Freedom song.link/GMMF #MLK #Musicsky 🧵

Eva Jessye, the renowned musical director of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, was invited by Dr. King to lead the official chorus of the 1963 March on Washington. Her group of all-black singers also provided support to other musicians, including the Freedom Singers.  #MLK #MLKDay #musicsky 🧵

Harry Belafonte: “To mobilize the cultural force behind the cause—Dr. King saw that as hugely strategic... My job was to convince the icons in the arts that they needed to have a presence in Washington on that day.” HB at the March: “Artists reveal the society to itself.” #MLK #MLKDay #musicsky 🧵

Bayard Rustin was a civil rights activist & adviser to #MLK. He was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. His role wasn’t as public due to his sexual orientation. He was awarded the Pres. Medal of Freedom in 2013 for his work in both the Civil Rights & gay rights movements. #MLKDay 🧵

If you haven't watched the video (a) get on it (Fat Boys, Full Force, Melle Mel, come on!), and (b) you can tell Whitney wasn't at the taping so someone made the decision to float her separately filmed face in a cloud above/on top of everyone when her gorgeous voice comes in & it's how it should be.

We become the people capable of changing the world by acting as if we already are. Seems like Minnesotans are doing this. From an essay by Amia Srinivasan. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Nearly all of the flimsy tents in displacement camps have been rendered unusable due to the harsh winter conditions.

Robert A. Sengstacke's photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., January 1, 1965:

Listen up:

❤ photo by Benedict Fernandez Countdown to Eternity, Photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Some background:

My little household tradition is that this is the first thing played on this morning & then I play it throughout the day. It’s Kurtis Blow’s way of reminding us how happy & hopeful we were when it became a national holiday. If you follow me, you know what’s next, but let’s linger on this one a bit.

seen in Philadelphia: FUCK ICE FUCK TRUMP + MUSK GO BIRDS

Maud Earl Birds Perched on Winter Branches, 1935 Oil with mixed media on board Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. It is the context and the content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form, we have to organize.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, What Is to Be Done? 2011

Respectfully, I am going to whisper to some of our white comrades a truth that should be more widely known: You definitely have some ancestors to be proud of, ancestors who refused white supremacy, and poured out their lives in many of these struggles over time. Time to claim your true history.

I've been calling them murderbots but that's not totally fair to Murderbot...

I think this is Kalpulli KetzalCoatlicue—a dance group based in South Minneapolis that does indigenous Mexican dance. They are amazing. I’ve seen them dance at the Monarch Festival.

People who were actually enslaved believed that chattel slavery would end one day. I'm sorry but to me that suggests that you [who are not enslaved in 2026] can also imagine an end to the current horrors.

Anywho, the main truth I know is that there's ALWAYS something that can be done. Always. You just have to find the things you can do.

Read “The South African Pavilion is betraying its own history” - on Gayton McKenzie’s decision to withdraw South Africa’s Pavilion selection for the 61st Venice Biennale - by Christina Sharpe and Rinado Walcott here: hyperallergic.com/the-south-af...

I'm no substack fan but we might make a rare exception for our friend and climate defender Tim Martin, now in federal prison for the felony crime of finger paints on a plexiglass vitrine.

Grok is so much worse than you think.

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

Too bad that you can't join us at this event but I hope you can come see the exhibition! It's up until April 12, 2026 and full of amazing insights from the Guerrilla Girls archive. www.getty.edu/exhibitions/...

"These vetoes are an abandonment of the AHA's democratic principles and a dereliction of the AHA's duty ... With these vetoes, the AHA Council has silenced Palestinian scholars and colleagues, placed historians of Palestine at greater professional and personal risk, and fed rising authoritarianism."

re-upping this

Photos: Gaza ceasefire brings no relief as Israeli bombings continue https://aje.news/9tyi6h

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NEW — ICE violence has spread well beyond Minneapolis, with agents landing in small cities like St. Cloud. I spoke with Alice Valentine, a local queer trans woman, who protested ICE on Monday and was pepper sprayed, beaten and jailed as a result, along with her girlfriend. This is Alice's story:

People are surging to our new map of ICE contractors to check their states/cities and quote-post what they find here on Bluesky. Old-internet-style distributed social sharing.

Block block block.

I came here for @socialistdogmom.bsky.social (among others esp @prisonculture.bsky.social)...y'all this podcast epi is all the reasons I follow Molly & have during/since Charlottesville. Why history matters, why love matters, why white people have to give up our safety to heal the wounds we made. 🗃️

💯💯💯💯💯💯

In "When Home Is a Photograph," Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make home in the world through an exploration of the practices of Black American activists and artists. #BlackStudies Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/lMkphrj

ICE has kidnapped so many people from their cars that the city had to put out this statement. Let that sink in.

Big news: Davidson County, #NC you're next up for a new Duke E nat gas plant. Duke owns 1600 acres of timberland on the Yadkin River 8.5 mi west of Lexington. insideclimatenews.org/news/1501202...

Justice Coney Barrett begins to get that anti-trans policies will harm cis women. “Your whole position in this case depends on there being inherent differences. I’d be concerned about what the ramifications of that might be.” I wrote about exactly this in @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/articles/202...