'The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them.'
mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-mes…

With others, I salute #HelenVendler , her rare mind for poetry, esp. #JohnAshbery , & her good heart. I have story or two, but nothing to match this, from #RitaDove :

So... if you want to make it big... get mentioned by T-Swift?

China Miéville, best-selling author & historian, has rescinded his acceptance of prestigious German residency, DAAD.

'I have watched with horror as the political atmosphere in Germany has grown more and more poisonous, the repression of solidarity with Palestinians more and more

Hell YES!!!! I've gotten to see pieces of this and it's so, so effing good. nick glastonbury and Sandorf Passage are gonna make for an amazing pairing :)

One unnerving element of this massacre is how relentless it is — in the sense that we’ve read of children killed so young that they had no names yet, and then the dead crushed by machines, buried en masse, or left unburied. The cruelty has touched all levels of existence.

MoTaz and Najla Said, daughter of the late Edward Said, have arrived at Columbia’s solidarity encampment in support of the student movement

101° fevers suck, do not recommend even when you have lots of matzah ball soup on hand

Likewise. I don’t get any flak or pushback from most people; I’ve only gotten vitriol or even visible disapproval from a subset of fellow Jews who identify as Zionist.

If you haven’t already, now is a GREAT time to withdraw from the World Voices Festival and let PEN America know that along with its events, complicity as usual is CANCELLED

Holy shit.

'The $75,000 prize accompanying the PEN/Stein award will be donated, this year, to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the direction of the Literary Estate of Jean Stein.'

publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/in…

proud, inspired. thank you to all the authors who withdrew their work, to the PEN staff who supported our action, to the writers who withdrew from the WVF and charted a path forward, to Jean Stein for saying what PEN America refuses to––Gaza will be free lithub.com/the-pen-americ…

I don't want to fully theorize this yet, but it is kind of weird that the biggest story in the US about Israel / Palestine is about college campuses when there are multiple mass graves being uncovered and constant bombardment in Gaza right now ('as we tweet').

New statement from Columbia student protestors:
'We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us…Our members have been misidentified by a politically motivated mob.'

'We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry…'

.Columbia University gets rebuked by the UN's top expert on freedom of expression for calling in police to crack down on protestors at the Gaza solidarity encampment:

Incase you didn't read that last sentence: More than 9,500 Palestinians have been kidnapped from the West Bank since Oct 7.

Toni Morrison describes fascism as the conversion of “all public services to private entrepreneurship…so that the narrow chasm between governance and business disappears.” It “changes citizens into taxpayers..neighbours into consumers” and produces “the perfect capitalist…

The senselessest part, naturally, is stamping Katherine Silver’s name on the cover in… gold foil

The Union theological seminary distancing itself eloquently from shafik and @columbia actions. Bravo.

BREAKING: In solidarity with Columbia, hundreds of Yale students have just constructed an encampment of tents outside a Board of Trustees meeting.

Organizers say they won’t leave until Yale divests from all military weapons manufacturing.

FREE PALESTINE!