Al Lee

working on this. Chicago-based writer

[East German Visuals @GDRvisuals]

East Berlin, 1979.

[East German Visuals @GDRvisuals]

GDR era sunflower mosaic on the side of a residential building in Rostock-Lichtenhagen.

[Sohrab Ahmari @SohrabAhmari]

“I worked all day and can’t feed my family.”

@ZohranKMamdani is right. Those are scarier nine words.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

I joined NY’s Cutest on the Bergen Bike Bus that they ride to school every Wednesday, rain or shine.

We’re adding bike boulevards and more pedestrian space on Bergen and Dean Street, from Court Street to East New York Ave.

It was a wonderful kind of day.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

I LOVE WORKING FOR FREE FOR BIG CORPS WITH A TWEET AS CREDIT IT'S AWESOME NO RAGETS

[David Pfau @pfau]

Dude wrote two books that changed my life. Most don't even write one.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

As wealth concentrates, so does power — the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate.

That’s why we’ve been told for far too long that tax reform is politically infeasible, too complex, and too radical.

Taxing billionaires is not radical.

What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship — and where billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible.

https://t.co/0YCVZJk7ib

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Yesterday, the government passed a law effectively banning repeat protests.

The government is fed up with people protesting about genocide. Well, we are disgusted by its complicity in the greatest crime of our time.

The government wants to silence us. It will never succeed.

[Adam Tooze @adam_tooze]

“The president has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that?”

[Tianyu Fang @tianyuf]

I don’t typically agree with the Russian government but let this be an exception

[Benjamin Kunkel @kunktation]

The absence of huge antiwar protests from the US probably deserves to be placed in this context

[Acyn @Acyn]

Reporter: What do you think of Sid Rosenberg using the term cockroach?

Mamdani: So Muslims in this city, for almost as long as we have been in this city, have had to deal with those with power and platform dehumanizing us — to be called animals, insects, to be called a jihadist mayor….

This language is both painfully familiar to me as a Muslim New Yorker, but also as someone who was born in East Africa, and it is difficult to hear. There’s also a reminder that the silence that often greets this kind of bigotry, this kind of Islamophobia, is what allows it to fester — the temptation to treat it as politics as usual.

And I want to be very clear that I have far more urgent work in front of me than indulging the provocations of a man who trades in outrage and, frankly, fears the city that we are looking to build — one where every single New Yorker who lives here can call it their home.

I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of my faith. I am not ashamed of being the first Muslim mayor in the history of our city. And there’s no amount of racism that will change the way in which I lead or the commitment that I hold to each and every New Yorker in this city.

[Kevin Lozano @kevlloydlozano]

“He was on the one hand analytically restless, forever in search of new ideas adequate to new realities, and on the other hand immovable in his devotion to the principle that everyone should be, in the most fundamental sense, free.”

https://t.co/vkblpuif3J

[Peter Godfrey-Smith @pgodfreysmith]

A new podcast series through the London Review of Books (@lrb) - "Nature in Crisis." Close readings of books about nature, conservation, climate, and energy. Once a month, with myself and @meehancrist.
Links in reply.
Episode 1, out now, is about "Silent Spring."

[John Attridge @John_Attridge]

Pretty sure I have detected a *major* hallucination in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". So disappointing

[eskay @EskayOW]

im surprised he didnt put 3 bullets in the ground

[Peter Godfrey-Smith @pgodfreysmith]

Free speech thread: In the aftermath of the Bondi murders, the state govt here is moving, unfortunately, in the direction of suppressing protest and proscribing specific phrases.
I gave talks in 2025 about tolerance & free speech. I wrote up the main one (link below). 🧵1/

[NYTPitchbot @DougJBalloon]

The left says that oligarchs have bought our democracy. They're wrong—oligarchs have bought our republic.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

You work so hard for your money and they are just lighting your taxpayer dollars on fire.

[Av 🇵🇸🇾🇪 @AvalynWu]

RIP Asad Haider. I always appreciated this piece he wrote on the Cultural Revolution:

https://t.co/zIA5xnZFHS