Mahmud Rahman

Image of the ruins of a village building and a page from the journal essay.

A visit to my father's village in Bangladesh gave me the chance to confront my father's legacy and reflect on what home has come to mean to me. I wrote an essay about this that was just published in the Washington Square Review.

www.washingtonsquarereview.com/mahmud-rahman

Turk Wars: How AI Threatens the Workers Who Fuel It (SSIR) The much-hyped AI tools of the future are being built by a globally dispersed army of data workers.

I did not realize that there's an actual marketplace for this sort of work called Amazon Mechanical Turk. ssir.org/articles/ent...

It's mechanical Turks all the way down

What goes on beneath the shine of AI, an army of raters and super raters working in isolation, without job security, facing the worst ills of the industrial economy: speedup, lack of quality control, and no doubt, in the future, replacement by new AI.

Is the third boom really over? Just as South Asian translations, long underrepresented here, were beginning to show up in a slight uptick? Did we miss the bus? Is the new isolationist U.S. culture in the making responsible for the downturn?

"The more fundamental problem, though, is that both diplomats and development workers refused to engage with South Sudan as it actually existed, rather than the place they wished it to be."

"On the surface, there is the drama and emotion of Leman’s story. Underneath, there is literal subtext concerning philosophy, literature, history and more. It is to Ypi’s credit that none of this is really signposted; the reader is free to dig as deep as they like, or not."

Translator names do not seem to be listed but the work in the database, under the author's name, was my translation. The copyright is mine. I registered including the ISBN and hopefully it will be counted.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

If you're an author and haven't yet signed up for the Anthropic settlement, do yourself a favor (and strike a blow against AI) by checking to see if any of your books were involved.

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

I've been reading memoirs from South Africa and I believe it's going to take a long time to turn this around. The National Party took power in 1948, institutionalized apartheid. The system was dismantled 1990-94, taking decades of struggle.

The University of Chicago has been invaded by Daleks! Read all about it 👇

Twenty years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. At approximately 5:00 AM, the levees broke, flooding 80% of our city. As a result, an estimated 1400 people lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. Over half of the victims were Black.

An excerpt from my new novel, Alice Sees Ghosts in @scroll.in.web.brid.gy ! scroll.in/article/1085...

Here is an overview of the mentorship genres we have on offer for 2026. For the upcoming year, we will be introducing an exciting new genre, Oral History. Stay tuned for more!

🚨Applications for 2026 open on September 1, 2025 and the deadline is September 30, 2025.

Website link in bio. 🔗

Here is a little about our application process, including some key dates. Mark your calendars and polish your applications and writing samples—we're looking forward to hearing from you.

🚨Applications open on September 1, 2025.
Website link in bio.🔗

#SouthAsiaSpeaks

"In a tour de force that combines history, memoir, and literary rumination, he explores how Lahore has been made and remade through violence, migration, politics, its diverse communities, and the ebbs and flows of time."

I don't know Lahore but this definitely sounds like a book I would love to read. I too am a walker of cities, just returned from Dhaka after an eleven-year absence.

The making of Shabdakalpa, a pioneering historical dictionary of Bengali IT WAS A MUGGY Kolkata afternoon in 2017 when the first lines of code for Shabdakalpa were carefully entered into a lab computer at Jadavpur University in West

The ambitious Shabdakalpa project, launching in 2028, aims to map the history of every Bengali word in digital form, preserving cultural memory and inspiring future Southasian language initiatives.
Ankush Pal writes:

When you tell your grandchildren (or your friends’ grandchildren if you choose not to have a kid) the story of how we overcame this regime, tell them when the fascists came they didn’t come for the guns…they came for the arts.

Cover of Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day and a screenshot of the page where the author thanks the NEA for the support that made this book possible.

I am re-reading Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, feeling grateful that she got an NEA Creative Writing fellowship to create this excellent novel. Now comes the news that the agency will no longer support such grants. Our culture is diminished when grants like this end. More $ to go for the iron fist.

The making of Shabdakalpa, a pioneering historical dictionary of Bengali IT WAS A MUGGY Kolkata afternoon in 2017 when the first lines of code for Shabdakalpa were carefully entered into a lab computer at Jadavpur University in West

"BY BRINGING CENTURIES of writing together in one place, Shabdakalpa will offer unprecedented access to the cultural memory of the Bengali language." www.himalmag.com/culture/shab...

Happy anniversary! Love to both of you.

Perfect for gifts!

Suraiya - Words Without Borders Two young people in a Turkish class find their love language in this short story by Shibabrata Barman.

New story translation from Shabnam Nadiya who's impressive in discovering writers from Bangladesh who she wants to translate into English. Check it out, this is a lovely, contemporary story. wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

I've always been intrigued by Marseilles from Jean-Claude Izzo's Marseilles trilogy. If I ever visit France I'd love to make it there.

C. M. Naim and the Many Lives of Urdu He stood, ultimately, for what might be called the aesthetics of ethical clarity. His writing was never merely beautiful, it was responsible.

Narendra Pachkhédé on C.M. Naim who "refused both the nostalgia of the diaspora and the sentimentality of cultural nationalism. His was a critical love – tender, exacting, and utterly unsentimental."

I can't wait for the first gift from the new gods.

Tweet by Nassim Taleb showing a fictitious NYT headline: critics allege Mamdani used wrong crayon in third grade self portrait

Any coverage yet of his elementary school Spelling Bee successes? And if he didn't take part, how can he claim Indian as one of his identity markers?