Seo-Young J. Chu (she/they)

The fragments are devastating, yes. And the reality they show is ugly beyond comprehension

A page from a spiral notebook is covered with code written in red ink. Decoded, the text opens with “Close your eyes close your eyes close your eyes” and ends with “I closed my eyes and no more.” Stamped diagonally across the page: “CONFIDENTIAL FOR ATTORNEY’s EYES ONLY.”

Once I started reading this diary I couldn’t stop. I felt compelled to bear witness to her pain. CW: Epstein

www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

More and more people are saying…

My group chats are full of Minnesotans reacting to today’s murder by figuring out ways they can help.

We need people outside of the state to do the same thing. Whatever you wish everyone else was doing right now? Do it today.

Let’s make a list of things that could help.

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

-James Baldwin, from Notes on the House of Bondage (The Nation, 1980)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Deporting children with cancer.
Using a 5-year-old as bait.
Shooting moms.

ICE is beyond reform. And today the House is voting to bankroll more terror. Hell no.

ICE detains 5-year-old Minnesota boy; school leader says agents used him as ‘bait’ The Columbia Heights school district says federal agents have detained four children in their district. School officials say agents used 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos as “bait” to try and draw family m...

They detained a five-year-old and used him as "bait" in Minneapolis www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Distraught woman says ICE killed her wife in video after deadly Minneapolis shooting "They killed my wife," the distraught woman says, adding, "They shot her in the head." An ICE agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman who was driving an SUV in Minneapolis on Wednesday. / Screenshot/@Breaking911

"They killed my wife. I don't know what to do," the woman says through sobs in the footage, with a damaged SUV visible in the distance behind her. "We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head," the woman cries. "We have a six-year-old at school," she says, almost unable to breathe, as a chaotic scene in which federal officers prevented at least one doctor who was on the scene from assisting the shot victim unfolds. "We're new here," the distraught woman says in despair.

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today.

This could be you.

Of The Empire By Mary Oliver We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Of The Empire
By Mary Oliver

I’m so sorry that you - we - have had to go through this experience. Healthcare shouldn’t be so labyrinthine

Did Trump’s DOJ really think dropping hundreds of blacked-out pages counted as complying with the law?

I know it’s a bunch of unqualified folks with no backbone over there, but this is next-level.

Last week, ICE arrested and separated a father and son after a routine check-in. Six-year-old Yuanxin had just enrolled in the first grade at an elementary school in Astoria. Now he's in custody, alone. ICE won't say where. This cruelty serves no one. It must end.

Update: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

According to the article, Summers hasn’t stepped back from teaching: “This semester, Summers is teaching five Harvard courses, including two large undergraduate classes.”

Why is Summers still being given access to mentees, many of whom are probably young women?

#MeTooAcademia

🙏🏼

CW: sexual harassment, racist stereotypes, misogyny, rape culture

“This is Alice’s friend Sandy Ho, posting. Per Alice’s wishes, this message is being shared at the time of her passing.” Below, the main message continues in paragraph form: “Hi everyone, it looks like I ran out of time. I have so many dreams that I wanted to fulfill and plans to create new stories for you. There are a few in progress that might come to fruition in a few years if things work out. I did not ever imagine I would live to this age and end up a writer, editor, activist, and more. As a kid riddled with insecurity and internalized ableism, I could not see a path forward. It was thanks to friendships and some great teachers who believed in me that I was able to fight my way out of miserable situations into a place where I finally felt comfortable in my skin. We need more stories about us and our culture. You all, we all, deserve the everything and more in such a hostile, ableist environment. Our wisdom is incisive and unflinching. I'm honored to be your ancestor and believe disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don't let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

Alice Wong ask that this be posted after her passing. Honoring that.

This idea that #metoo was a temporary piece of insanity that happened because America was too woke...

Fuck you. It was a temporary moment in time when people decided, for the first time, that 20 women were finally equal to one man.

Good questions! I don’t know the answers, but “dog that didn’t bark” may be a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story in which the absence of the expected barking of a guard dog becomes a vital clue to solving the mystery.

I dreamt that Denis Villeneuve adapted Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” into a sci-fi thriller starring Angelina Jolie as the gun

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52737/...

To the Anonymous Iguana, I must have been an Anonymous Moose (or Otter or Panda or Frog etc). We were both simply anonymous animals visiting a forest of words gathering information and fleetingly crossing paths at 5AM moments before sunrise.

Lmfao!

What is the proper thing to do when you’re viewing a Google Doc by yourself at 5AM and an Anonymous Iguana suddenly joins you in the document? Do you type “Hi, Iguana”? Do you leave to give the Iguana some privacy? Do you shut down the computer because the social anxiety is overwhelming?

This is a wonderful thread on how to support your community members facing hunger. #MomSky

“A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme” —Zohran Mamdani in his Tuesday 11/4/25 victory speech, quoting Andrew Cuomo’s father

A photo shows a “Queens Votes Early” sticker on a black shirt that I’m wearing

Today I voted early for @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

❤️🔥

In the audience tonight is Charlotte Bennett, one of the 13 women that Andrew Cuomo is credibly alleged to have sexually harassed while they worked in his government.

She can't speak for herself because Cuomo's lawyers have hounded her.

So I confronted him.

I screamed so loudly my neighbor asked if I was ok. No I was not.

The cases were “resolved” by Cuomo hounding Bennet for years, at taxpayer’s expense, including with a retaliatory defamation lawsuit that he filed *after* the attorney general found that he had sexually harassed her.