For many environmental advocates, the COP30 climate negotiations ended this weekend in disappointment. The annual United Nations conference, which brought together more than 190 countries in Belém, Brazil, concluded without any firm plans to phase out fossil fuels—a key step scientists say is urgently necessary to address the climate crisis. In part, experts say, that’s […]
Saudi Arabia has been ranked one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and is frequently placed among the “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s survey of political and civil rights. Amnesty International says that despite a massive global “image laundering” campaign, “the human rights situation in the Kingdom has deteriorated exponentially.” It has no national elections, and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) uses imprisonment, torture, and execution to quash even mild dissent against the government. People can be sentenced to death over their tweets, and women who protest being kept as chattel by men can be thrown into prison and tortured. The resulting climate of fear can result in absurdities—the Financial Times recently reported that Saudi engineers and designers have been too afraid to tell MBS that his ludicrous plan for a utopian city is literally physically impossible.
Ayman Soliman speaks to Asawin about his ICE abduction, his time in detention, and how his community rose up to take on a lumbering, fascist behemoth – and won.
This year signifies transformation,
as if we could molt away old skins and transform them
into expensive clutches,
into cold-blooded.
Closed off streets are, to
pedestrians, open streets.
Every inclusion another’s exclusion.
A student, plaintive: “I’m a Black male
who voted for Trump. Is that the colonizer
mentality in me?”
I can't use three letters: D, E, or I.
Will my research be shut down
or embrace Chinese
netizens’ euphemisms—
“youth in Asia” equals euthanasia.
Damn, you crazy, every time
I mean democracy.
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Also gather?
Deer are not evil.
They attack when hurt.
These long winter nights.
Let’s write shorter lines.
This poem was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Celina Su’s academic and creative work focuses on everyday struggles for collective governance. Her last book of poetry was the collection Landia; her latest nonfiction book project centering radical democracy, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, is out now from Princeton University Press.
Epstein and Alan Dershowitz collaborated on smear campaigns against Mearsheimer, Walt, and an underage assault victim making allegations against Epstein—in the same week.