sisyphe

سنكون يوماً ما نريد

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

Your song playing in the coffeeshop the minute I walk in, as if my nostalgic personality needed any more impetus to yearn

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

HAHAAAHAHAHAHAH HER FACE

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

The German FM puts forward two key policy reasons as to why Germany - for the first time - lost a bid for an elected seat on the UN Security Council.

Germany's support for Ukraine and its support for Israel.

Let's be clear: Germany's support for Ukraine had nothing to do with it. Portugal and Austria - who beat Germany - are no less supportive of Ukraine.

It has EVERYTHING to do with Germany's support for Israel's genocide and the manner in which the German government has been willing to undermine international law and the UN Charter on behalf of Israel.

Germany's blind support for Israeli crimes cost Germany its seat on the UNSC. As it should.

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

Can we start over?

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

"Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny."

Tremendous read from the tremendous Hermann Hesse https://t.co/MWDfIb9fI7

[Søren Kierkegaard Club @Kierkegaarddd]

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see”

[✰ @slowwlifee]

fyodor dostoevsky once wrote “i want to talk about everything with at least one person the way I talk about things with myself”

[جلال الدين الرومي @RumiArab]

الحياةُ الحقيقيةُ هي لأولئك الذين حافظوا على طفولةِ قلوبهم، ولم يرضخوا يومًا لمنطقِ الكبار.

— جلال الدين الرومي

[Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine]

Wife: You don’t tweet about me anymore, and while I don’t always like it, when you don’t do it I feel like you don’t love me.

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

C’est joli ça

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

"Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions."

Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on friendship https://t.co/U0EGuJ1qwi

[Lina Abu Akleh @LinaAbuAkleh]

Today marks four years since my aunt, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper in Jenin.
An iconic journalist, and one of the most empathetic and sweetest people. This is who they killed. She loved life, but they stole hers from her.

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

Only by listening to the voice of the soul -a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should-do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it.

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

The courage to be yourself – Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul https://t.co/q6EA818Aha

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

Take your time my baby, cause I’m waiting right here for you

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

Sharing beds like little kids

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

The radical act of letting things hurt – how (not) to help a friend in sorrow https://t.co/fUkbvUKr60

[Siddharth @svaradarajan]

"There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?”

So begins @yanisvaroufakis's powerful and much-needed tribute to @FranceskAlbs, who has not been deterred by American sanctions and Israeli slander from highlighting the genocide in Gaza and the plight of the Palestinians

https://t.co/hLe6px0Eyv

[sisyphe @jigsawfalling__]

wehmüde auf der Couch

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

[Jonathan Fine @jonathanbfine]

Everyone wants to be an intellectual historian, but nobody wants to read primary texts.