Nisa Malli

These artists are making concerts safer with COVID-19 precautions - The Sick Times While most of the music industry has moved on, COVID-conscious performers have been working to prevent their shows from being superspreaders.

For @thesicktimes.org, I looked at the state of COVID safety in live music and how artists and event producers can still protect themselves and audiences thesicktimes.org/2026/02/17/t...

Housing inequity makes me uniquely annoyed because we could have nice things if we wanted, we could have 80s level of co-op housing development, rent increase caps, rules that limit the number of investment properties an individual buys but instead we have $2500 1beds with no balconies or real walls

I miss the mid 2010s internet when I could post a complaint thread on how new purposebuilt rent in my city is 25% higher than private landlords renting condos and every building offers 2 months off instead of lowering $$ and housing policy wonks/economists would jump into the thread to explain why.

Don't worry kitten This week I saw a meme of a ceramic kitten with the caption “abolish ICE” and it felt enragingly emblematic of the current iconography of babyfication: the desire to present as unequivocally innocent ...

theimpairingcurse.substack.com/p/dont-worry...

oh @nisamalli.bsky.social HIT with this piece

My Year of Raves In my third year of being trans, I discovered that I like dancing. This was a surprise. Dancing is meditative, therapeutic – healing even. Now I try to go dancing as often as I can. This the story of ...

Last year, the universe sent me a message: it told me to start going to queer raves, and so I did.

It’s been a good time!

I wrote a retrospective on 2024, the year I discovered that I like dancing, plus reflections on parenting, music, fascism, fashion, and trans joy:

okayfail.com/2024/my-year...

Don't worry kitten This week I saw a meme of a ceramic kitten with the caption “abolish ICE” and it felt enragingly emblematic of the current iconography of babyfication: the desire to present as unequivocally innocent ...

New essay out on babygirls, babyfication, adhd babies, trauma babies, adulthood, adulting, t-boys, girlhood, hot girl summers, responsibilization and responsibility, conditional whiteness, and why our present moment is more Watership Down than Beatrix Potter:

open.substack.com/pub/theimpai...

“He spoke in the idiom of today’s New York, with its neighborhoods of more recent arrivals. He went on Subway Takes and passed out sweets for Diwali in Jackson Heights, and showed up at the queer dance party Papi Juice to ask for votes.”

What My Rec League Taught Me About Aging, Ego, and Letting Go On aging, denial, and the injuries that come from believing you’re still invincible.

“Diligent injury prevention doesn’t address the root cause of Rec League Dysmorphia. The ghost of my adolescent self will always be there, beating me to the ball, unencumbered concepts such as paying for health insurance & Microsoft Teams”@outsidemag.bsky.social www.outsideonline.com/culture/love...

How TV podcasts helped me regain my memory after Long COVID When my girlfriend of six years broke up with me by text, followed by a short call, I couldn’t comprehend it. It wasn’t grief, shock, or denial. My brain, damaged from 16 months of Long COVID, couldn’...

"For me, podcasts were patient companions who didn’t mind repeating themselves...They kept me company when I was too sick to leave the house." @nisamalli.bsky.social tells us about the cognitive impacts of Long COVID, and how she used podcasts to recover.

this.org/2023/12/19/h...

Every single page of @arabellesicardi.bsky.social’s House of Beauty so far has contained a horrifying interesting fact I did not know about the beauty industry and also now I can’t stop thinking about how evil the term “beauty” “industry” is.

Guest Post: Niko Stratis on How Twitter Changed Fandom | Friday Things And why moving away from the era of centralized internet might actually help defang stan culture

Anyway I haven’t been on text-based socials since Twitter died and talking into the void felt worse than silence. I was offline for the era of great memorials (eg: @nikostratis.com’s piece: www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts...) but I miss being quippy in a soup of professional aquaintances and nerds

It’s v apt that a video on how Zygmunt Bauman’s book Liquid Modernity predicted the modern situationship that brought me back to text-based social media but here we go. Because where else can I gripe that actually Bauman predicted the modern situationship in his lesser known sequel Liquid Love?

“In illness, I lose capacity to cope with any precarity other than my own malfunctioning body: every alarm, every tripwire, every flashing ‘check-me’ light on my internal dashboard goes off daily like Christmas in the ICU”