Emma Harper

New Yorkers: please vote!!!! Cuomo went all-in on racism in the final 2 weeks because he's got nothing else. And as we've seen, that's a very effective motivator.

The poop plane and the Nazi tattoo Why Trump vs. Trumpism matters

This will always be the week when I felt compelled by current events to apply my professional expertise to a blog post called The Poop Plane and the Nazi tattoo. open.substack.com/pub/goodpoli...

The U.S. economy has grown by $20 trillion since 2000 … about $7.7 trillion of that (36% of all the growth in GDP) is spending related to recovering from or preparing for climate disasters per Bloomberg Intelligence #EconSky

Beyond Bad Borders: How Nationalism, Imperialism, and Power Politics Shaped the Modern Middle East In 2014, the Islamic State swept across large swaths of Iraq and Syria, soon emerging as the obligatory lede for every article about the Middle East and

Grateful to @centuryintl.bsky.social for the chance to bring together, update, and expand some of my writing on maps and Middle Eastern borders

tcf.org/content/repo...

Enjoyed writing this short but sweet [altho not necessarily in message] piece for @projectsyndicate.bsky.social w @irisvanrooij.bsky.social:
> While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype & stolen intellectual labor

🧵

Old enough to remember when kids being anti-semitic was the basis for a federal government assault on higher education

‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese journalist on the US under Trump The long read: Once a stalwart of Hong Kong’s journalism scene, Wang Jian has found a new audience on YouTube, dissecting global politics and US-China relations since the pandemic. To his fans, he’s p...

In which I commented on the unfortunate convergence between the US and Chinese info environments: high-quality information is increasingly becoming a luxury consumed by the educated and well-resourced, while the rest of us are left to swim in the same trash. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

María Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership in Venezuela’s democratic movement. In 2023, she outlined a peaceful and constitutional path toward freedom and urged international support for the country’s renewal.

bit.ly/4h4MXJV

@aaup.org won its case against the State Department's attempt to terrorize non-citizens and deprive them of their First Amendment rights

I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)

Paying Nature’s price “What does it mean”, asks Thea Riofrancos in Extraction, “to defend people and the planet from extraction – when others frame this same extraction as

A new piece on extractive capitalism for @thetls.bsky.social, reviewing 4 new books, including @triofrancos.bsky.social's much-anticipated EXTRACTION and Partha Dasgupta's widely-
praised ON NATURAL CAPITAL

It is remarkable how few national Dems have been willing to put themselves on the front lines here.

In Turkey, this is called "havuz medyası" ("pool media"). It is achieved via:

1) Vertical dissemination of narratives from the government
2) Political economy ties that incentivize private channels' compliance PLUS
3) Intimidation that combine to produce (often anticipatory) compliance

www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

oh. Oh. OH. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

“awful people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either” is apparently a thought too complex for the pundit mind

Fucking sick, and also, filled with unintelligent people: "The 30th percentile meant most babies measured bigger than Leon. Smith was tall—shouldn’t that make a bigger baby, Bi wondered? She had expected her son to be above average in all things."

Thank you Lisel! I'm still actively looking for new journalism assignments, writing or editing gigs, or other work using my communications skills, ideally to make positive social/cultural/environmental impact. Check out what I do and get in touch about projects that might be a match!

This is what "Pepe's" hands looks like after harvesting tomatos all day. He has the option of wearing gloves, but they slow him down. When you're working piece rate you can't afford to be slowed down. He needs to make every penny he can during the peak season. #WeFeedYou

The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results Trends always have an element of randomness, but our algorithmic feeds have made them unintelligible.

I wrote about the Labubu Dubai chocolate Love Island matcha latte of it all. There really has been a material change in how trends are produced and which ones are capable of catching on with huge audiences. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Israel kills Al Jazeera journalists in targeted Gaza City airstrike - Committee to Protect Journalists New York, August 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is appalled to learn of the killing today of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and M...

An entire news crew working for Al Jazeera was killed by Israel as they sought to bring the world firsthand reporting from #Gaza.

Among them was prominent journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who had been previously smeared and threatened by the IDF.

#NotATarget

Full statement: cpj.org/2025/08/isra...

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

It's incredible to watch Cuomo try to co-opt the communication styles of both Trump and Mamdani, and fail miserably

Urban planning under arrest in Istanbul - my latest for @bloomberg.com on how a city of 16 million is operating with its leadership behind bars.

the right wing media ecosystem is so efficiently set up to take random posts from non public figures and turn them into pseudoevents. to the point where the entire social media system rn really just favors their viral propaganda machine.

Can Turkey Make Multicultural Authoritarianism Work? Erdogan’s negotiations with the PKK seek peace and possibly pluralism without democracy. Will they succeed?

Some thoughts here from me on Ankara's peace talks with Öcalan and the sociopolitical imagination&desires behind it:

foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/30/t...

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

British doctor comes back from Gaza and confirms two things we knew: 1- the Israelis *specifically* confiscate formula feed to starve children 2- there is a clear pattern in gun shot wounds pointing to the fact that IDF soldiers are playing games hunting humans.

www.instagram.com/reel/DMm03Kp...

Israeli military says airdrops of aid into Gaza set to begin tonight amid increased starvation deaths For months, the U.N. and experts have warned that Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of famine, with reports of increasing numbers of people dying from causes related to malnutrition.

"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation," UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X on Saturday. "They are expensive, inefficient & can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction & screensmoke."

www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-...

Gaza is starving. Where are the American Jewish leaders? A fear of being labelled antisemitic still deters American Jews and Jewish institutions from taking a position that is morally correct.

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God.

Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well.
forward.com/opinion/7575...