J Wortham

Columbia's Mohsen Mahdawi, fresh out of U.S. detention, walks the graduation stage Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, participated in graduation ceremonies Monday for the School of General Studies at Columbia University in Manhattan. He spent more than two weeks in federal detention before a federal judge ordered his release. [ more › ]

Columbia's Mohsen Mahdawi, fresh out of U.S. detention, walks the graduation stage https://gothamist.com/news/columbias-mohsen-mahdawi-fresh-out-of-us-detention-walks-the-graduation-stage

My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse (Gift Article) I wanted to learn how to prepare for disaster. It turned out I needed skills, yes — but the first thing was learning how to breathe.

At the top of the year, I took a ten-day survivalism course to try and wrangle with my feelings about the apocalypse and our end times. It's here, for free, if you have the time www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/m...

Protest outside the NYC ICE office now demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil
#FreeMahmoudKhalil

My hometown of Waterloo, Iowa canceled its African American Read-In after Trump’s anti-diversity directives. So i got together some writer friends and I’m holding it instead.

i get these on tiktok ALL THE TIME and they freak me out

The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0 Two decades after creating Digg, a community-focused social message board, Kevin Rose is reviving the site and teaming up with a founder of Reddit.

i feel like i've read this exact story 350 times in the last decade www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

Image of our photos and a picture of the book cover on a red and pink background. Text says, "Dean Spade in Conversation with J. Wortham Tuesday, February 4th at 6:00 PM Brooklyn Heights Library, Multipurpose Room". Below the picture of the book it says, "Please test, wear an N95 mask, and don't come if you're having any symptoms."

Please come to the Brooklyn Heights branch of the
@bklynlibrary.bsky.social on Tuesday Feb 4 at 6pm for a conversation with @jennydeluxe.bsky.social about Love in a F*cked Up World. Wear a mask!

I’m a part time librarian and I just want to echo what I’ve seen other librarians say recently: there is a HUGE uptick in requests for social justice, climate justice, abolition, history, etc books and I just want to say nobody is giving up the fight. If anything people are fighting harder #library

Happy Black History Month! Here is my favorite story about a Black American you may not know about: Robert Smalls. He commandeered a confederate ship and sailed himself, his family, and the other enslaved crew and their families to freedom. THROUGH waters controlled by the Confederacy.

The Revolution Was Live-Tweeted (Gift Article) In “We Tried to Tell Y’All,” Meredith D. Clark chronicles the heyday of Black Twitter.

Thrilled that @jennydeluxe.bsky.social reviewed @meredithdclark.bsky.social ‘s book on Black Twitter for the NYT- perfect marriage of reviewer and topic (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/b...

Art Spiegelman Won’t Shrink Back From Controversy The artist has illustrated more than one contentious New Yorker cover in his career, chronicled in a new film, and his next project will be no less gutsy.

Maus author Art Spiegelman’s next comic will be about Gaza, in collaboration with Joe Sacco. He thinks he will struggle to find a publisher in the United States.

“I’ll finish this thing or die trying.”

just as an FYI, i don't agree with the term 'enshittification' ! but thank you for reading with an open mind

it almost feels too easy to think they don't get it; much scarier to consider what it means if they do

it really is something to go and look back at some of the 1/6 statements from people who've gone straight back to bending the knee

thank you for letting me know! also, hi!

yes, but i resist the term 'enshittification' and recommend that you consider the same! that word feels imbued with the exact same politics that i'm writing about

to be fair (to myself), i didn't write that headline, nor would i have. and it wasn't the final headline that i saw before it went to print. i think that's shaping a lot of the reactions to be piece - which, makes sense!

As Malcolm Harris lays out in his 2023 book “Palo Alto,” the politics of the products are tethered to the ethos of their environment. The Palo Alto System, as Harris interprets it, is meant to uphold power structures that California has been cultivating since its beginning, starting with pilfering land from Indigenous people for development. Harris urges us to see that as a forewarning. The state that those practices birthed “didn’t simply quell violence,” he writes. “It stoked it, focused it and organized it.” Harris traces that genesis through mining, to the building of the railroad and the establishment of Stanford University, whose founding president, David Starr Jordan, was a eugenicist, through to PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, who helped fund many of the companies we use today — including Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yelp, Spotify and SpaceX. He also helped fuel Trump’s first win in 2016, a campaign that represented the supposed antithesis of Silicon Valley’s professed progressive values. “Competition and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and class hate: These aren’t problems capitalist technology will solve,” Harris notes. “That’s what it’s for.” - J Wortham

Brilliant! @jennydeluxe.bsky.social

#BlueSky

Quite possibly the best piece I’ve read about life after The Bird App and the rise of this app by @jennydeluxe.bsky.social who beckons us with @ruha9.bsky.social’s words to reevaluate our relationships with the Internet.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/m...

Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been a Rebel The eighty-eight-year-old artist and critic, whose profile has risen in the past decade, examines her role in the art world then and now.

"I had to make myself seen." -- may the legendary Lorraine O'Grady rest in power. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Those gofundmes some of you are complaining about are the only thing keeping Palestinians in Gaza alive. There are many governments who could intervene & say "if regular people can get money to Palestinians to buy food, so can we" but nobody has said that. Everything happening in Gaza is intentional

A white square with black text reading, “I remember in a recent interview you spoke about your support of the trans community, because you said: "I see that transgender youngsters are the ones who are helping to take planet Earth into the galaxy because we're going to run into other life forms that our gender does not matter." Can you speak about that a bit? I think the transgender kids are the bravest kids right now that we see; they're as brave as my generation was in breaking down segregation. They're breaking down —I don't have the word for it right now-but it's gender prejudice, and [the idea that] somebody has decided that they can tell you who you are, what your name should be, and how you should look.”

A white square with black text reading, “And those youngsters are saying, "No, I can decide who I am, what my name should be." Everybody's mad at me like, You should be a girl because we've decided you're a girl. And they say, "Well, who the hell are you?" I can decide that I'm a boy. And if it makes me happy, what does it mean to you? And I can decide that my name is John. And if you don't like that my name is Geraldine, why can't you name yourself? And if the people who know you and love you— or have to talk to you, maybe they don't even love you but they have to talk to you-you can tell them, "This is my name, and I would like to be referred to in that way."

A white square with black text reading, “But when we go into the galaxy, a life-form may say, "Who are you?" Well, there's no point in talking to another life-form and [saying] "I'm a boy or a girl," because it may have no meaning. That may mean nothing to them. So what you're going to say is, "I am a life form from the third planet, from the yellow sun," therefore giving yourself an identity. You don't have an identity because you say, "I'm a boy, I'm a girl, I'm a Jew or Gentile, I'm a Catholic or Baptist." That doesn't mean anything once you get beyond the prejudices of Earth. So yeah, I think the transgender students are really brave because they're taking a lot of flack for just wanting to be themselves and to have the right to have their own name. I think that's incredibly brave, and I think that they're absolutely right to want to do that. To want to own themselves.”

Nikki Giovanni staunchly supported trans folks, especially trans youth. Her encouragement is a balm.

“I think the transgender kids are the bravest kids right now that we see; they're as brave as my generation was in breaking down segregation.”

I’m curious how much federal funding he thinks the ACLU receives (it’s none).

Activist Raquel Willis, a Black trans woman, is wearing a white shirt that says “Gender Liberation Movement” in black letters , black leather coat, and black pants. She is being escorted by a police officer in uniform. The scene takes place outdoors, with a red pickup truck and several other police officers visible in the background. She appears composed while being led away.

Let today’s Capitol Hill bathroom sit-in spark an era of radical defiance. Trans folks refuse to bow to hate and bigotry. We demand dignity and respect. We will fight like our ancestors. We are building with our elders and peers. And trans youth will inherit a better world.

📸: Alexa Wilkinson

Early this morning, an autonomous group of New Yorkers reclaimed an F train car, replacing ads with signage reading “A MAN WAS LYNCHED HERE” and Jordan Neely’s name, as a jury deliberates over whether to convict Daniel Penny, Neely’s killer, with his death last May.

my brain is totally glitching on what to post here. even though its technically same same, its also not not, you know what i mean?