Assigned a blue book midterm 💃. Forgot the part where I’d have to read all the blue book midterms ☠️ .

Victim in ICE Shooting Suffered at Least Six Wounds, His Lawyer Says

ICE agents shot another driver -- on Tues.

He had just asked to call his wife.

They shot him six times. One bullet his jaw.

Now he can't speak and has been mostly unconscious.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/u...

Before playing Kamancheh, he says: 'Hello, I'm Mohammad-Reza Afarideh, the director of the ed. institute that has now been destroyed. I wanted the last sound coming from my institute not to be of missiles and war; (I want the) final sound to be of the instrument that I played in it. Thank you'.

Trump is promising to commit genocide.

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."

A clear, indisputable statement of intent.

After a hiatus, Arun Kumar and I are back with new articles in our series on artisan and laborer histories for the Wire! This first piece in the new set considers the working lives of stonemasons!
(Side note, we don’t write the headlines).

Should Rich New Yorkers Get Free Stuff, Too? Mamdani Says Yes.

Boy, what a terrible headline.

We *need* the wealthy to participate in public services. If only poor people ride the bus, then rich people won't wield their power in support of public transit or, worse, will wield their power *against* it.

How Chicago is getting ready for more ICE raids YouTube video by Channel 4 News

I love my neighbors and how hard they fight and teach me to fight. Learning from the incredible local organizers here in Pilsen is the best thing I’ve done in Chicago.

APRIL 16 (THU) | 4-5:30pm ET A Book Talk on Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship and Technology in Colonial India Amanda Lanzillo Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago CO-SPONSORS: Department of South Asian Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Mahindra Humanities Center Persian and Persianate Studies Seminar BARKER 133 | RSVP at islamicstudies.harvard.edu/seminar PIOUS LABOR

Will be speaking on Pious Labor at Harvard Islamic Studies later this month! Would love to see Boston-area friends there.

islamicstudies.harvard.edu/event/semina...

The Kids Trump Sent to ICE’s Dilley Detention Center ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of...

We obtained the Dilley detention center’s 911 call logs.

Among them are pleas for help for toddlers having trouble breathing, a pregnant woman who passed out and an elementary-school-aged girl having seizures.

How did the Indian Ocean become a geography of unilateral US dominance?

In Ajam's latest, Mahdi Chowdhury explores the history of anti-colonial efforts to build a Zone of Peace and argues for the urgent, existential need to demilitarize the Indian Ocean:

I think often of a New York Times photo of a little Iraqi girl tending to her parakeets in a bombed house, probably from 20 years ago now. I will think of this man and his sweet dog often now too. People just want to love what they love, care for their little beings, and instead we do this to them

Deploying ICE at airports is to normalize their transition from being a special operation targeting immigrants to being an entity that polices all.

This is the production of the American Gestapo, one institution at a time.

First day of Spring Quarter today. In discussing my AI policy (a big 'ole NOPE), made a passionate plea for the power of human creativity... but then summed it up with "Don't ask Chat, ask me!"

Fear of Flying, 12. I picked it up at the local bookstore because I thought it was travel literature, which I loved. I was… confused 😂.

Fully agree. Even where sources/data are digitized, the default should be to refuse 1) because of the documented errors, harms, and “slop”piness of AI “research”; and 2) because it’s nearly impossible to make a consistent ethical argument for AI reliance almost anywhere, much less in academic work.

So relieved Krishnamoorthi lost. Taking money from an ICE contractor should automatically disqualify anyone from running as a Democrat. Glad it did in IL.

They’re holding people hostage in order to steal precious minerals

The Lonesome Death of Daphy Michel Watch now | Haitian Woman, 31, Dies Alone at Pittsburgh Bus Stop Days After ICE Released Her Far From Home to Die.

Haitian woman, 31, dies alone at Pittsburgh bus stop days after ICE released her to the streets far from home to perish. Rest in power, Daphy Michel: migrantinsider.com/p/the-loneso...

Glad you think so. I fear I wasn't able to do each of the individual books justice, but I hope my admiration at least came through. Really enjoyed reading your work, and have returned to it several times since then!

For the new South Asia book forum section, I reviewed and put into conversation three excellent recent books: Rishad Choudhury‘s Hajj Across Empires, @ajab.bsky.social 's The Making of Persianate Modernity & Daniel Majchrowicz’s The World in Words.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

We need reparations for ICE victims.

Anything short of that is setting the stage for a massive wealth grab from people of color that will re-entrench racial disparities for generations.

Killing people should not be something we do quicker than the speed of thought

Let me be clear: I’m glad Kristi Noem was fired. But we still have to abolish ICE.

Brilliant exhibit on Mexican traqueros who helped build the railways of Chicago & the Midwest, currently on at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Particularly stunned by the stories of people who were deported via the very tracks they built 😡.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi | The dry and the wet burn together ‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination. Once...

“If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.”

I didn't go to journalism school, but this is... incorrect.

Call me a raving radical but I literally do not care whether your imperialist massacre of children is “constitutional” or not.

Number of students killed in Israeli attack on school in southern Iran rises to 24 We have reported earlier that an Israeli strike hit an elementary girl’s school in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, killing five people. Now, Iran’s Fars news agency is reporting that the number of students killed rose to 24.

No words.

Murderers.

Pretty incredible. This candidate went to the West Bank to see the violence of the occupation herself.

And Israeli settlers — apparently flanked by a soldier — immediately showed it to her by throwing eggs at her as she walked with an ex-soldier, a priest, and Jewish activists: