Please join us for this reading full of people I admire deeply. More importantly, RSVP as soon as you can so that the Gaza Poets receive support as soon as possible.

Sameer Project x Ramadan Campaign Salam Alikom,

Anyway. The Sameer Project's Ramadan campaign (there are less than two weeks left until Eid, when the month ends) is one place where material support is needed. chuffed.org/project/1239...

Not that this should matter, but you can see the material impact of their efforts on their IG account. Just because you are seeing less from the ground on social media––due to censorship, the targeting of journalists, & illusory "ceasefire" narratives––does not mean it's not there.

As Israel carries out an accelerated starvation campaign in Gaza, please support Palestinian-led efforts, such as The Sameer Project, which has several ongoing campaigns for water, food, shelter, and medical aid. Including their Ramadan campaign, which is ~60% to its goal.

linktr.ee/thesameerpro...

"The U.S. investment company BlackRock is part of a group buying a 90% stake in the Panama Ports Company, which operates the ports of Balboa and Cristobal on the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the canal. The stake is being purchased from a Hong Kong-based firm, CK Hutchinson, for $22.8 billion."

"The officials cautioned that a U.S. invasion of Panama is unlikely and would only come under serious consideration if a larger American military presence in Panama does not achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of reclaiming the waterway" 🙃🙃🙃

Helyeh Doutaghi: "Rather than investigate the source of these allegations first, the nation's 'top law school' accepted them at face value, and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, treating me, prima facie, as guilty until proven otherwise."

“thanks to Elon’s growth-at-any-cost plans, we’ll soon see a 800-kilogram satellite entering the atmosphere, every hour, with possibly 10% to 40% of that junk coming all the way down, into airliner airspace, and then possibly into your backyard.”
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

Anyway, if people value an insurgent humanities that can counter these many scales of violence then we have to get better at creating/preserving structures of doing it in multiple places at once, beyond where we imagine the last semblances of stability to be (for those of us lucky to have it).

Text of DEAR REPUBLIC by William Archila I want to tell you every argument against disappearing should be turned over & exposed. What matters most is the invention of our unbearable presence. I want to live there in the middle of its own well, a gleaming light devoted to clarity. There must be something inside, something like oxygen settling over the gravesites & stones, enough to climate the weather fit for a ghost, my boy's umbilical cord. There's nothing here to change but the mind of a block. There must be something else outside.

This is half you, half my invisibility formed. Half my struggle to construct my ark, my family with petals curling on the dark day of my birth. Only I can do it mediocrely, fail miserably, with fingers wide, limbered pull out the cartography of earth. Is it my body? Is my river a ruined narrative? Sometimes I feel haunted by the very margins of my story. You can see the trace & pause in my walking. Who are they, in their elegant decay, the marble souls of their children bothered by my presence, in their perfect pitch & breed, still hungry?

“Dear Republic,” by William Archila. From the book S IS FOR (Black Lawrence Press, 2025).

“Who are they, in their elegant decay, the marble souls of their children / bothered by my presence, in their perfect pitch & breed, still hungry?”

What are we doing, my friends? www.instagram.com/p/DGPN3H8u1kq/

They need to include everyone. Those who have always created knowledge outside institutions, those who keep a foot where the resources are, those who couldn't keep trying to sustain themselves in unis... We need to preserve channels of knowledge production toward something outside of...all this.

I am just gonna keep putting this in the ether from my antidisciplinary humanist POV: with the way things are going, we are going to need more autonomous research networks that create spaces of possibility that are no longer possible––if they were ever even possible––in traditional institutions.

El muerto universal ¿Y quien soy yo? ¿Que busco por la orilla del hombre? ¿Dónde fue que cai? ¿Con qué enseña arropado? ¿Y ese inmenso horizonte de sepulcros que marchan? ¡Todos los muertos quieren una ruta en mi paso! Hombre vivo, detente de tu orgia de metrallas; por un instante mirate en mi rostro de espanto; soy el más gigantesco de los muertos, que nunca te cerrará los ojos hasta verte salvado.

The original: "El muerto universal," Julia de Burgos.

"Hombre vivo, detente de tu orgia de metrallas;
por un instante mirate en mi rostro de espanto;
soy el más gigantesco de los muertos, que nunca
te cerrará los ojos hasta verte salvado."

Text screenshot from a book of Julia de Burgos's translated poem "The Universal Dead": And who am I? What do I look for at the edge of man? Where did I fall? Wrapped in what ensign? And that immense horizon of marching sepulchres? All the dead want a passage in my steps!

Today, on the birthday of Julia de Burgos––Puerto Rican civil rights activist and namesake of the cultural center where I work––a poem translated by Jack Agüeros: for "The Universal Dead."

I can make peace with living a life outside of the "good path" that I was told to follow. What I don't want to give up is the space to turn thinking into a shareable language that could help shift something..

We (US-based researchers, writers, scholars who care about a liveable future) are really going to have to get better at building research collectives/other structures that are sustainable outside of the traditional academy and nonprofit models, and how to protect them under duress.

"Before," by Amada Libertad, tr. Yvette Siegert.