Ben Mauk

Recommended if like me you are a cult fan of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, or if you like Perec, Pynchon, Tawada, or Shusaku Endo (whose book THE SEA AND POISON Beilin brilliantly remixes).

Sea, Poison Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia—this city of hospitals—who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start...

My friend and colleague Caren Beilin's new novel SEA, POISON is out with New Directions. I may be biased but it's the best new novel I've read in a long time. A paranoid comic body horror thriller by way of Oulipo, it's enormously fun, smart, and disturbing.

www.ndbooks.com/book/sea-poi...

Last November, the New York Times had a searing exposé on the treatment of Uyghurs trapped in Thailand during a migration crackdown. Worth your time if you want to learn more about what was happening here. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/m...

House Arab I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it s...

bidoun.org/articles/hou...

Irish protester Kitty O’Brien accuses Berlin police of widespread violence Investigation under way into assault on O’Brien who claims police brutality expected in pro-Palestine demonstrations

"I don’t even know a single person in the movement who hasn’t been physically assaulted in some way by the cops. Punched, choked, shoved, slapped, kicked – I am at a loss for words to describe how bad the police abuse situation here is.”

www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

The biggest problem in America is a right-wing disinformation machine that has waged a decades-long war on public attention, conquered the media landscape, and entirely reshaped civic society.

Every other problem, including higher ed, is downstream.

benmauk.substack.com/p/the-crisis...

Demanding Pleasures, by Lydia Davis On the art of observation

"I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose. I don’t write stories to persuade a reader of something I believe, though I have many, many beliefs."

Lydia Davis in Harper's

harpers.org/archive/2025...

Opinion | America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment.

Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.

Jenny Turner · Something Is Surviving: Olga Tokarczuk’s Mycophilia Mushrooms,​ trees, turf, twigs, bushes, moss-covered stones: nature is a force in Olga Tokarczuk’s Empusium,...

Phenomenal piece of criticism

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Washington, DC under military occupation in last August 2025, with banners proclaiming the absolute power of the primus inter pares

This is a real photograph of Washington, DC this week, where the United States president has ordered military occupation in peacetime, and ordered the display of colossal portraits of himself.

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

I just got it to replicate the error, although inconsistently. It seems more likely to happen if it is an initial query rather than part of a longer thread.

bsky.app/profile/benm...

J Street head says he’s now convinced Israel committing genocide in Gaza Jeremy Ben-Ami explains he has been 'persuaded rationally' by legal and scholarly arguments, stresses that though he won't use term himself, he won't argue against it either

"Days after rejecting the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Zionist advocacy and lobby group J Street, has said he has been “persuaded” that he was wrong."

admitting you were wrong is good

www.timesofisrael.com/j-street-hea...

Border Patrol at a Home Depot in Los Angeles days after the 9th circuit affirmed a court order that purports to block this exact behavior. They don't even know who they're chasing! This is insane. Send them all to jail.

Bodies by Joe | Alma Guillermoprieto With his strange machines and an uncanny, intuitive understanding of muscles, Joseph Pilates created a new technique for improving strength and movement.

“Joseph Pilates was by most accounts neither socially graceful nor articulate. He was possessed, though, of a lifelong boundless faith in himself and in [his] machines.” —Alma Guillermoprieto

Just to reiterate: What this administration is doing right now is orders of magnitude more dangerous for academic freedom and free speech than anything the right has spent the last 30 years complaining about.

Lawyers question legality of Alligator Alcatraz, ask federal judge to intervene “This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,” pl...

“‘This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,’ they argued.”

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Flieger gestartet: Merz-Regierung schiebt trotz Taliban-Herrschaft nach Afghanistan ab Trotz der verheerenden Menschenrechtssituation in Afghanistan schiebt die Bundesregierung Dutzende Personen dorthin ab. Asyl-Organisationen schlagen Alarm.

Flieger gestartet: Merz-Regierung schiebt trotz Taliban-Herrschaft nach Afghanistan ab
Trotz der verheerenden Menschenrechtssituation in Afghanistan schiebt die Bundesregierung Dutzende Personen dorthin ab. Asyl-Organisationen schlagen Alarm.
www.fr.de/politik/merz...

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ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court ICE attorneys fighting to deport immigrants are able to obscure their identities — no masks required.

In @theintercept.com, Debbie Nathan reports on ICE lawyers refusing to give their names in court - and immigration judges going along with it.

theintercept.com/2025/07/15/i...

Law is fake, power is real.

Israeli airstrike kills at least 10, including six children, at Gaza water station, say health officials Nine killed in separate bombing of a home on Sunday and 31 others shot dead near aid distribution site on Saturday

An Israeli airstrike just killed 10 people—six of them kids—as they stood in line for water. Yesterday 31 more Palestinians were shot dead while trying to reach an aid distribution site.

This is what our tax dollars continue to fund. And most of the country couldn't care less.

Another ICE "assault" case unravels. Border Patrol and ICE are arresting US citizens and then after they find out that they are US citizens, they are charging them with "assault" to justify their actions. This is clearly DHS policy at this point. We've seen it repeatedly now.

Trucks Entering Alligator Alcatraz Are Hiding Their Logos, DOT Numbers The contractors are illegally covering up the USDOT numbers on their trucks.

NEW: The contractors working at Alligator Alcatraz are illegally covering up the USDOT numbers on their trucks.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha says he’s been suspended from Substack, a platform where white supremacists publish without issue. I can’t recall this happening to any prominent writers in the past.

Boston Consulting Group is consulting on how to ethnically cleanse hundreds of millions of Palestinians.

Genocide is done through consulting firms now.

Raubkunsteklat um Tänzerinnen-Brunnen im Berliner Kolbe Museum Die Uneinsichtigkeit des Museums: Georg Kolbes berühmter Tänzerinnen-Brunnen, für den in Theresienstadt getöteten Heinrich Stahl geschaffen, bleibt um seine dunkle Geschichte betrogen. Der Begriff „NS...

Das unlängst vom Antisemitismus-Fonds des Berliner Senats geförderte Georg-Kolbe-Museum zeigt eine Skulptur, die die Nazis einst dem jüdischen Ehepaar Heinrich und Jenny Stahl geraubt haben – nur eben ohne Hinweis auf NS-Raubkunst. Keine Pointe.
www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

Updates: Hamas sends ‘positive’ response on ceasefire, Israel kills 50 These were the updates from Israel’s war on Gaza for Friday, July 4, 2025.

“Whomever got a bag of flour, got shot in the head. The bags of flour were all over the ground. Covered in blood,” said a #MSF worker, who survived latest Israeli massacre at aid site in Khan Younis aje.io/xoi4su?updat...