One of the great experts on Lebanon and Hezbollah, Amal Saad on Lebanon's future: "the current arrangement will likely give way to a new social and political contract that will redefine what the Lebanese state actually is."
x.com/amalsaad_lb/...
You mean Jack Nicholson's character in A FEW GOOD MEN *isn't* based on George Orwell?
I'm baffled at how little attention the 2024 Israeli invasion-bombing-assassination campaign in Lebanon is getting as people analyze how we got into this war. What factor (more significant than US reticence, imo) kept Israel from fighting a regime-change war in Iran before now? Hezbollah.
Bring back the Havelange-Blatter regime tbh
“In a sense, we have witnessed the ‘Syrianization of Iran,’ not in terms of civil conflict (though it remains a risk) but in the brutality of governance.”
Just online, @alexshams.bsky.social talks with sociologist Asef Bayat about the U.S.-Israeli war, recent protests, and Iran’s uncertain future:
Many such cases, no?
it’s twin peaks day ☕
Disha Karnad Jani interviews Esmat Elhalaby about his book, "Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization." Their conversation charts the relationship between Arab and Indian intellectuals during the era of decolonization.
@esmat.bsky.social @ucpress.bsky.social
Jack O'Dell and Jesse Jackson in South Africa, probably late 1970s
A remarkable photo from the archives and a reminder of Jesse Jackson's social justice internationalism: Jack O'Dell and Jesse Jackson in South Africa, probably late 1970s.
Some very powerful people want us to believe human labor is obsolete & way too many people are buying it.
Don’t let them make you think that you are disposable.
Time to revive the idea of a job guarantee. They just created a bunch of fascist ICE jobs overnight. Imagine that for work that matters.
what a time to be teaching nietzsche
"What would the intellectual history of American foreign relations look like if we took the persistence of civilizational thinking as our guide?"
s-usih.org/2026/02/sam-...
How and why police actually support the federal invasions—I have been working on this article for ~6 months, trying to make sense of Trump’s nationwide surge of DHS officers, how it has evolved, what brought us here, and what will remain after it ends.
Du Bois told us all we need to know about this type of guy 106 years ago
This is very good
My latest review for @bookforum.bsky.social is also out now. In it, I think alongside Namwali Serpell’s resplendently rigorous new book on Toni Morrison about the last greatest living writer’s legacy and how we’re meant to read her.
“I don’t understand why so many people have conceded that the university is a left space. Can someone show me a Marxist university president?”
My comment on Tom Arnold-Forster's excellent new intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann is up today on the @susih.bsky.social blog, focusing on its implications for the history of American international thought.
s-usih.org/2026/02/sam-...
"Forms of labor that conserve, fix, make and care for others once had a place in the mythos of America, not to mention on the mantle of the Old Left."
Extraordinary essay about what the last year has been like in DC by Noelle Bodick in @thepointmag.bsky.social
thepointmag.com/politics/rig...
Tucker Carlson: "Saudi Arabia [...] is kind of a weirdly free place.”
Hillary Clinton: "The example that the kingdom is setting for the right kind of development [...] that is a very strong model for other parts of the world"
Quotes from a real estate conference in Riyadh
This incredibly annoying article mentions in passing that the history of emotions is actually not a new field at all, then brushes past that fact to ignore all previous scholarship and set up its protagonist as a Silicon Valley-style "disruptor" of our understanding of what it means to be human
When the AI slop summer reading list dropped last year I knew I had to write about making book lists. Thanks to @thebaffler.com for letting me go long with bewildered nostalgia & regret on 20 years of Internet book culture & how we made the slop book list inevitable. thebaffler.com/after-the-fa...
And special thanks to everyone who engaged with the book in a workshop, book talk, review, or interview over the past year. It means more than you know!
Book cover for The Internal Colony by Sam Klug
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the publication of my book, The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization. Many thanks to anyone who has read or taught it 🙏
Am I crazy or is “woman murdered by state secret police served on school board, which was looking for ways to protect children from state secret police” not convincing as an antifa super soldier backstory meant to incriminate the dead
what stage of capitalism is this
This is genuinely the funniest thing I've read in quite some time and it's also fascinating
