Censorship and Surveillance at US Universities The night before the start of the Fall 2025 semester, facilities workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill quietly boarded up a pro-Palestine mural. The mural, created by art students...

Hot off the press, the first published article from the new issue of Middle East Report.
www.merip.org/2026/04/cens...

On the US-Israeli Coalition’s Continued Acts of Scholasticide in the Middle East With the killing of 175 school girls, educators, and parents in Minab, Iran, the latest chapter of the US-Israeli war in the Middle East began with a cruel act of scholasticide—a term many of us we…

Steven Thrasher: scholasticide reveals “an intent to destroy"...by rendering them unable to educate their young people (or even to keep them alive), create scholarship, perform research, or engage in the fundamental human necessity to teach and to learn from one another.
lithub.com/on-the-us-is...

THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS BOOK TALK Steven Thrasher APRIL 28 TUES 5:00 PM The United States' Global Assault on HIV/ AIDS and LGBTQ Labor Wallis Annenberg Conference Room (SSMS 4315) THE HUMAN TOLL WHEN INEQUALITY AND DISEASE COLLIDE STEVEN W. THRASHER Foreword by Jonathan M. Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness In January 2025, the second Trump administration enacted sweeping cuts to LGBTQ health and HIV/AIDS within the United States and globally. Drawing upon lessons he learned while writing his 2022 book, The Viral Underclass, and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and a Pulitzer Center Global Reporting Fellowship, public health scholar Steven W. Thrasher began tracking the impact of these cuts in the United States, Greece, Palestine, Uganda and South Africa. He found that they have not just been driving an increase in HIV transmission around the world, which will be felt for many years; the US cuts created an immediate crisis of LGBTQ employment stretching from the Mississippi River Delta to the Nile. Dr. Thrasher will present his research-in-progress, featuring interviews with public health navigators, people living with HIV, and sex workers on three continents. UC SANTA BARBARA Steven W. Thrasher holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Overseer Class (forthcoming) and the award-winning The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. Dr. Thrasher has received grants from the Pulitzer Center, Ford Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His writing has been widely published in The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times, Village Voice, Literary Hub, and The Nation and has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Polish and Spanish. A California native, he was inducted into the Oxnard High School Alumni Hall of Fame in 2024. orfaleacenter-contact@ucsb.ed

2/2 and on Tuesday, April 28, I’ll be talking about my travels in Europe, Africa and North America in “The United States’ Global Assault on HIV/ AIDS and LGBTQ Labor.”

Thanks to @lisahajjar.bsky.social for organizing.

The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies HEALTH JUSTICE AND COMMUNITY INITIATIVE FEMINIST FUTURES Center for Middle East Studies UC SANTA BARBARA UC SANTA BARBARA Feminist Studies THE OVERSEER CLASS BOOK TALK Steven Thrasher APRIL 27 MON Theorizing an Overseer Class A MANIFESTO 5:00 PM McCune Room (HSSB 6020) STEVEN W. THRASHER As a reporter in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, journalist Steven W. Thrasher noticed an explosion of Black police officers featured in news and entertainment. This inspired his forthcoming book, The Overseer Class (Amistad/HarperCollins, May 2026), which addresses how select members of minoritized communities advance into positions of power not to help members of their same groups, but as overseers who are tasked with cracking the skulls of their own (sometimes literally). Drawing upon literary theory, film criticism, sociology, the history of slavery, journalism, management studies and queer theory, The Overseer Class is meant to help readers think about Black cops, Latinos immigration officers, imperial feminists, pink washers, and other folks who illustrate that representation can sometimes lead to multiracial fascism. Steven W. Thrasher holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Overseer Class (forthcoming) and the award-winning The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. Dr. Thrasher has received grants from the Pulitzer Center, Ford Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His writing has been widely published in The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times, Village Voice, Literary Hub, and The Nation and has beentranslated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Polish and Spanish. A California native, he was inducted into the Oxnard High School Alumni Hall of Fame in 2024. UC SANTA BARBARA orfaleacenter-contact@ucsb.ed

1/2 At 5 PM on April 27 and 28, I will be giving a pair of talks at the University of California, Santa Barbara, both free and open to the public.

On Monday, April 27, I’ll be giving a preview of my forthcoming book in “Theorizing an Overseer Class.”

Palestinian Children in Israeli Prisons - Visualizing Palestine [April 2025]. A record number of Palestinian children were held in Israeli military detention at the end of 2025, and a record proportion of these children were held without charge. This visual summar...

visualizingpalestine.org/visual/free-...

America, War, and Imperial Decline in the Gulf The US–Israeli war on Iran is the latest phase of the United States’ long-war in the Persian Gulf, a fifty-year project to secure imperial power in a region defined as a “vital interest” since the 197...

Toby Craig Jones: "The convergence of oil, militarism, and Gulf capital also accelerated the making of a new geography of war-making inside the United States. Weapons circulated and created their own political-economies and networks of violence."

www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47300

Fragmented Skies Egypt Security Sector Report

New issue of the weekly Egypt Security Sector Report is out!

Are White Men Missing Out?: Differences in Friendship Closeness by Gender and Ethnoracial Identity - Sex Roles Sex Roles - Research has consistently found that boys’ and men’s friendships are less close, intimate, supportive, and satisfying than girls’ and women’s...

New research challenges what we thought we knew about men's friendships. A new study by @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social Sociology grad student, Emily Fox (@emilycfox.bsky.social), asks: is the "gender friendship gap" really about gender? Spoiler: not exactly. 🧵 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A disgusting end to a saga detailed by @lisahajjar.bsky.social and Basil Farraj a year ago in MERIP.

www.merip.org/2024/10/isra...

Roundtable on the War on Iran and International Law The United States and Israel claim their latest attack was a form of preventive self-defense, widely understood as illegal in international law as it neither meets the threshold of the Charter definit...

Roundtable of experts Noura Erakat, Luigi Daniele, Shahd Hammouri, Ata Hindi, Maryam Jamshidi, and Darryl Li.
www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47234

Hegseth Says Defense Department Will Cut Ties With Harvard

The irony: no DoD $$$ because Harvard is too liberal.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/u...

Announcing "Israel’s End Game": A Limited Podcast Series "Israel’s End Game" is a podcast series probing whether Israel can indefinitely sustain policies of expansion, dispossession, military occupation, and apartheid, and how shifting geopolitical balances...

"Israel’s End Game" is a podcast series probing whether Israel can indefinitely sustain policies of expansion, dispossession, military occupation, and apartheid, and how shifting geopolitical balances might enable or constrain those policies.
www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47165

De-Healthification: Israel’s Engineered Collapse of Palestinian Life | Al-Shabaka By tracing the historical evolution of de-healthification, this brief argues that naming the process is essential for accountability.

De-healthification restructures health into a domain of domination, where illness and vulnerability are deliberately produced and administered by manufacturing illness, dependency, and the degradation of the conditions of Palestinian life.

al-shabaka.org/briefs/de-he...

Josh Brolin plays Adrian Vermuele in the new Knives Out.

Dirty Work—The Hidden Machinery and Human Toll of Europe’s Broken Recycling Trade As Europe sends increasing amounts of illegal waste to Turkey, activists and investigators are revealing how the country’s state-backed recycling boom depends on fraud, off-the-books subcontracting an...

Europe sends increasing amounts of illegal waste to Turkey. Activists and investigators are revealing how the country’s state-backed recycling boom depends on fraud, off-the-books subcontracting and a rising death toll of migrant laborers.
www.merip.org/2025/12/dirt...

Trump Gutted AIDS Health Care at the Worst Possible Time By the first World AIDS Day of his second term, Trump gutted LGBTQ+ employment globally and put humanity at greater risk of AIDS.

Steven Thrasher and Afeef Nessouli's research on the global impact of Trump’s anti-LGBTQ policies and the gutting of foreign aid confirms that the result is tragedy, intensified suffering, and avoidable deaths. #mustread

theintercept.com/2025/12/01/w...

Cheney should have died in a maximum security prison because torture is a gross crime. He spawned the US torture program that spawned the extrajudicial execution program. He was spared the fate he deserved because Obama decided to "look forward, not backward." Trump is what looking forward enabled.

We live in the dystopian world Dick Cheney made. Alligator Alcatraz, masked ICE agents disappearing brown people, blowing up random boats of people declared "enemy combatants" in a "war" with no borders, unfettered presidential power. Cheney created the lawless executive power Trump now exploits.

Over 3 million life-years lost in Gaza On July 31, 2025, the Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMH) in Gaza released a list of named people directly killed in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023.1 The list had 60 199 decedents with their reported age, se...

Over 3 million life-years lost in Gaza - The Lancet www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Sammy Zahran and Ghassan Abu-Sittah found that 60,199 recorded deaths translated to an average of 51 years of life lost each—most of them civilians, including over 1 million years among children under 15.

The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law

Gift link

The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law

The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/u...

The resistance reaches into Trump country As organizers for No Kings 2 seek historic turnout on Oct. 18, the broader pro-democracy movement has already broken new ground.

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Hammam, & Chris Shay) has a new piece, whose title speaks for itself. A 🧵 with some key descriptive takeaways:

Hamas Responds to Trump The Palestinian movement appears to have, for the moment, successfully thrown the ball back into the US-Israeli court.

Exceptionally good analysis by Mouin Rabbani.

open.substack.com/pub/mouinrab...

“By cloaking naked power in the trappings of the law, the Trump administration, like the Bush administration before it, channels objections to its behavior into sterile disputes about who has the best lawyers—a dispute that no one really expects to resolve.”

Got a project in mind for our special issue on ethnic studies+student activism? Apply to our workshop, Oct 11, to get feedback on your ideas and connect with others on the dreams and struggles embedded in this work. Space is limited; apply soon!

Do you ever write titles of articles or books in American English? For the love of grammar, "is" is a verb and ALL verbs are capitalized in titles. DO NOT LOWER CASE "IS" IN TITLES!!!!!!

The Self-Sabotage Doctrine Trump’s America torches its farmers, raids its firefighters, abandons its allies, and still finds time for a Navy boat parade.

Farmers bankrupt, firefighters raided, allies betrayed, the #CDC emptied and #Trump still finds time to order himself a Navy boat parade. #ukraine #Gaza #uspolitics
open.substack.com/pub/marygedd...

What is it called when government owns the means of production again?

No Other Land (2024) (Palestinian-Israeli) (Guests: Omer Bartov & Lisa Hajjar) - Law on Film No Other Land (2024) is the Oscar-winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. Recorded between 2019 to 2023, the film tells the story of...

Omar Bartov and I discuss the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land with Jonathan Hafetz on his podcast Law on Film. It speaks volumes about anti-Palestinian racism that it is impossible to stream or buy the film in the United States.
www.buzzsprout.com/2073468/epis...

Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy The conference sheds light on militarization and its rapid expansion and global impact, particularly in light of the brutal genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people, which has ext...

Engineering Destruction conference July 29 - 31. Here is the program schedule and Zoom link. All panels will be streamed with simultaneous translation in Arabic, English, and Spanish.
Please share!
www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46811