Aysha Prather

"The men implicated in the Epstein files reinforces that I spend half my life explaining to men that their simplified, optimistic view of other men doesn’t line up with the experience of women and girls trying to dodge sexual harassment, assault and abuse attempts." - Leslie Morgan Steiner

The Misuses of the University - Public Books Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?

“Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward, and not just at Hopkins.”

I highly recommend reading this piece.

www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

More trans polling. Competent framing matters.

Focus on real problems, not dividing people over trans: 86/10
(Change Research, Nov ‘24)

Elected official that speaks up on trans issues vs ignoring them:
+61 with Dems, +9 with Independents
(Jacobin/@dataforprogress.org, Sept ‘25)

a fucking pedophile sexually abused nearly every prospective and actual Olympian gymnast for over two decades, and the political discourse is hyper-fixated on the hypothetical unfairness of trans girls competing with cis girls

‘We are America’: Norman High School students protest ICE in walkout Norman High School students held a walkout Tuesday in protest of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Norman High School students held a walkout Tuesday afternoon protesting against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Protesters and a counterprotester spoke with OU Daily about student activism and what the walkout means to them.

other cars. No one-and particularly not Teresa-made any attempt to seek help. Even had she wanted to, whom would she call? If Argentines had learned anything in the two and a half years since the military had seized power, it was that little good came from paying attention, and even less came from attracting it. The armed men who now roved the city as agents of the dictatorship were at once secretive-driving cars without license plates and obscuring their faces with women's stock-ings-and brazen, abducting people off the street in broad daylight. It was almost as if they were daring bystanders: acknowledge you've noticed us, see what happens. No. Better to forget what she'd witnessed. Teresa waited for her husband to pick her up, locked up the store, and left. Her employers had always treated her well, but a thought lingered — one that many others in Argentina had come to believe over the years: "Si se los llevan así, es por algo." If they were taken, there must be a reason.

Argentina, 1978:

“The armed men who roved the city were at once secretive — driving cars without license plates and obscuring their faces with women's stockings — and brazen, abducting people off the street in broad daylight… daring bystanders:
Acknowledge you've noticed us, see what happens.”

1/

(guy whose entire modus operandi is tricking people into paying for shit) so I've been looking at this technology, and I've realized it has INCREDIBLE potential as a "trick people into paying for fake bullshit" machine

Open borders create more safety than closed ones, and most of the benefits of safety are downriver from being the sort of people who keep their borders open, thereby avoiding the terrible dangers inherent to being the sort of people who would keep their borders closed.

Live your life so that you're the person people call when they find parasites on their pets

Letters behind a fence on a high overpass spell out FREE IMMIGRANTS CAGE PEDOS. American flags are attached to the fence on either side of the letters.

Norman, OK today.

Photos of a futuristic-looking, brightly-lit, colourful bike parking facility and public passage beneath Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. The red and purple curvilinear space is lined with a variety of vertical and horizontal racks, each separated by a metal grill structure which incorporates LED lighting.

Photos of a futuristic-looking, brightly-lit, colourful bike parking facility and public passage beneath Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. The red and purple curvilinear space is lined with a variety of vertical and horizontal racks, each separated by a metal grill structure which incorporates LED lighting.

Photos of a futuristic-looking, brightly-lit, colourful bike parking facility and public passage beneath Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. The red and purple curvilinear space is lined with a variety of vertical and horizontal racks, each separated by a metal grill structure which incorporates LED lighting.

Photos of a futuristic-looking, brightly-lit, colourful bike parking facility and public passage beneath Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. The red and purple curvilinear space is lined with a variety of vertical and horizontal racks, each separated by a metal grill structure which incorporates LED lighting.

Beneath Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, an overlooked retail strip has been reborn as a bicycle parking facility and public passage connecting users to the S-Bahn station. Modest in scale but rich in possibilities, it integrates seamlessly into the revitalised entertainment, commercial and office centre.🧵

ICE raid at apartment complex causes elementary students to run from their bus stop in NJ Thursday Students were seen running away from their bus stop on Thursday morning as ICE agents conducted an operation at an apartment in Lindenwold, NJ.

Most people probably focus on the damage ICE has caused in Minnesota

But their violent, fascist tactics affect people all over the country

Here they are-terrorizing 4th and 5th graders at a bus stop in New Jersey

May Trump and Stephen Miller rot in hell

www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/f...

Catholic rituals blend with Neapolitan folklore in pilgrimage for queer community MERCOGLIANO, Italy (RNS) — The pews of the Church of the Annunziata in Mercogliano, a town just outside of Naples, were filled with guests wearing lacquered nails, towering wigs and heavy eyelashes.

Updating the tracker and I came across this fascinating story of trans and/or non-binary trans life woven into the Catholic practices of Naples, Italy.

For the photo alone I felt like I had to share it - but it's fascinating throughout. From @apnews.com

apnews.com/article/ital...

I am by no means a class first — let alone class only — leftist, but the older I get the more I think that the way you disrupt a lot of sexual violence and exploitation, including Epstein type shit, is by raising the floor with a massive social safety net and lowering the ceiling with taxes.

Here in rural Oklahoma, i've seen various groups--some definitely wearing shiny metal hats-- yelling about biosolids on farm fields. I haven't been able to work out if it was a real or imaginary hazard, but i'm tending toward real after reading this story.

*are trying

Sure, i get that. We're all doing some defiance these days, now that the people who didn't like all the rest of us in "their" space is trying so hard to shift the boundaries and the rules.

Maybe "assertion" is the correct noun. We have decades of discussion of how being assertive gets read as aggressive by whoever thinks whatever kind of person shouldn't be or shouldn't speak/act in a space, right?

Feb. 8, 1968 | State Troopers Kill Three Black Students in Orangeburg, South Carolina Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

On this day in 1968, white state troopers fired into a mostly African American crowd on the campus of South Carolina State College, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, and killed three young Black men.

When conspiracy theories dictate global vaccine policy The Trump administration has told the global vaccine group Gavi to phase out shots containing thimerosal as a condition of funding. The preservative is at the center of conspiracy theories, but any li...

My interview with @healthbeat.org

www.healthbeat.org/2026/02/05/g...

I had a new baby that 2nd Toronto winter, and i figured out pretty quick my shiny new stroller wasn't going to be useful until the snow melted. Not a great place to need a wheelchair or walker.

I lived in St. Paul, MN, for 6 winters and Toronto for 2. Huge contrast in what got cleared in each city. Sidewalks got taken care of pretty quick in both places, but there were huge snowbanks blocking curb cuts in Toronto (that wasn't the only difference i noticed that i attribute to the US ADA).

thread

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has weaponized administrative subpoenas to attack free speech, according to privacy and civil rights groups.

Administrative subpoenas have predictably become a scourge. Why go through a judge or grand jury when some mid-level DHS douche can basically file their own?

wapo.st/4rtfCw8

I read this, and I almost regret it. What do you even do with the knowledge that Epstein wanted and was trying to engineer societal breakdown via far right populism bc he thought it would benefit his sex trafficking business?

Norman residents protest ICE, Trump administration on Rock Creek bridge About 50 people joined organizer Conni Eckstein above I-35 on the West Rock Creek Road bridge Sunday to protest the Trump Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and operations that led

www.oudaily.com/news/protest...

their awareness that they won't get targeted for DOJ while the DOJ describes standing outside and blowing whistles as domestic terrorism is surely something

Don't Buy a Gun Confrontational but nonviolent protest is more effective than the solipsistic comfort of an assault rifle.

Don't just read the headline. This essay is my lengthy ode to the hard-fought, hard-won successes of the communitarian movement in the Twin Cities, which has been the scourge of fascists and put the most cracks in Trump's fascist front.

Nonviolence has achieved much, and will do more still.

Students brought those multipens to Marian Diamond's human anatomy lectures. Every time she picked up a different color of chalk, you'd hear a hundred pens go click. Other students went the path of carrying lots of different colored pens, which weighed you down but let you use better pens.