Alessandra Ram

Sabotage is one of @ApplePodcasts’ Best So Far of 2025! See the full list : apple.co/bestsofar 🌍 And stream all 9 episodes of Season 1 now! tinyurl.com/y2uxz9cw

Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during Israel's war in Gaza. “A whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years,” UNICEF’s executive director said. Here are some of their stories: wapo.st/46zv2I4

Don’t miss this real-life love story. Episode 6 of Sabotage is out now: tinyurl.com/484f8pc3 Produced with @weareyellowdot!

Episode 6 of Sabotage brings you a real-life love story. Meet Holly and Marcus. #EarthDay

“I had talked to her a few hours before to tell her that the film was in Cannes and to invite her... She said, ‘I’ll come, but I have to go back to Gaza. I don’t want to leave Gaza... Now the whole family is dead."

SCOOP: Internal Palantir Slack messages obtained by @josephfcox show the company did a recent sprint to build a tool that helps ICE find the physical locations of people who have been marked for deportation. 404media.co/leaked-palanti…

Ep 5 of Sabotage is tense, chaotic and emotional. It also might be my favorite of the season. But listen and decide for yourself. Produced with @weareyellowdot.

Throwing soup. Scaling bridges. Blocking highways. Journalists @Alessandra_Ram & @SamOltman go inside a secretive group to uncover why its members are willing to risk their futures to do these shocking stunts. SABOTAGE is produced with @weareyellowdot. tinyurl.com/ybxuvmc8

While many knew Hossam as a fearless journalist, there was so much more to him. He was a young man with dreams, with a sense of humor, and a heart full of life. He loved dressing well, even in the middle of chaos, once joking: “What if I run into a cute girl while reporting? I want to look good!” Hossam had crushes. He wanted to fall in love, to build a family, to be a husband and a father. He talked about the future like he believed in it — like it was something real and reachable. He wanted more than headlines and frontlines. He wanted soft mornings, quiet dinners, laughter with loved ones. He dreamed of leaving Gaza someday, saying, “When this is all over, I’m taking a long break — I want to visit a beautiful country.” He longed for peace — not just for his people, but for his own soul. A chance to breathe freely, to explore, to just be. He grew up by the sea and loved seafood deeply. The ocean was part of him — he’d smile and say, “I love everything seafood — I grew up with it.” There was something about the water that calmed him, something that reminded him of home, even as the world around him was in pieces. At night, you’d find him with his headphones on, listening to music — especially Palestinian songs. He’d spend time during the day downloading them so he could escape into melodies once the city quieted down. It was his small form of peace — rhythm in the middle of ruin. He was pure. He was innocent. There was a gentleness in him that never hardened, even in war. A softness that stayed untouched by the noise around him. He believed in beauty, in love, in something better. And that is how he should be remembered — not just as a journalist, but as a young man who wanted to live.

“What is worth more? Art or life?” Sabotage, our 9-part podcast executive produced with Adam McKay & @weareyellowdot, is out NOW. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. tinyurl.com/ybxuvmc8

Today I was granted access to speak with incarcerated firefighters. They told me: - they hadn’t showered in 5 days - they were not provided regularly meals - they were working 24 hours in a row - they feel under appreciated and underpaid

.@LATimes live fire coverage is non-paywalled. Support local journalism latimes.com/california/liv…

Remember when people got upset that a tiny number of climate activists were doing minor, easily repairable, damage to a handful of paintings. Will those people now acknowledge that climate change is itself a far bigger threat to the cultural inheritance of humanity?

CNN analyst says Democrats should have listened to Bernie Sanders when he said the focus should be “on bread and butter issues.” “A lot of people attacked him for that, saying, well, are you saying cultural politics don’t matter? He wasn’t saying that.”

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point. Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this. But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned. Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future. Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development. The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital. And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative. So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

What Musk conveniently fails to omit is that the British empire was, before abolishing slavery in the 19th century, the driving force behind the transatlantic slave trade, which involved 12 million people being transported as slaves to the Americas with 1.5 million dying on board the ships... It is true that slavery pretty much always existed BUT the transatlantic slave trade was unique in its scale: there are no other examples in history of millions of people being transported like cattle as slaves across vast distances, dying in such immense numbers. Also, unlike many earlier forms of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade was incomparably more dehumanizing and racist. No other system ranked people with such rigid racial hierarchy and deliberately separated people from their families, languages, and cultural heritage. If you compare this to say, slaves in ancient Greece, ancient Egypt or the Roman empire, you'll see that slaves often had more defined roles in society, could sometimes own property, could be freed and rise up to prominent roles in society and weren't necessarily seen as inherently inferior based solely on their race. Just a few examples: Aesop, the famous Greek storyteller was a slave who was eventually freed due to his wit and wisdom. Or Epictetus, the famous philosopher during the Roman empire: he was born into slavery but managed to rise up to become one of the most famous thinkers of his time. Or in ancient Egypt Tiresias was a slave who became Chief Minister to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. So saying that the British empire was a "force for good" because it abolished slavery is like saying it was a "force for good" because it "ended colonialism", when it was the very worst colonial power to ever walk the earth... Hard to give arsonists brownie points for extinguishing their fire... And, by the way, in this instance they only extinguished it because of tremendous pressure and revolt, not out of some moral awakening... And speaking of colonialism, that was THE big atrocity of the British empire on an even far larger scale than slavery: according to research by economic historian Robert Allen, in India alone British colonialism killed north of 100 million people (blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/20…) That's just India: the British had around 120 colonies at its peak, including much of North America, where it drove the genocide of the native population, probably the very worst genocide in history... And this - colonialism - was truly unique in human history: never before had ideas of racial superiority been used so extensively to justify the domination and exploitation of entire peoples. With the consequences of it still the cause of so much human suffering to this day, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (ultimately a direct consequence of British colonialism) to what's currently happening in Sudan (the artificial borders drawn by the British in Sudan completely ignored ethnic and cultural differences). So no, very much no, the British Empire was NOT "a force for good".

This exchange should be studied for a long time. The interviewer read the book, not to gain new insight, but to get angry that it wasn't written from the perspective he preferred. He expected Coates to crumble under his onslaught. But Coates didn't. That's what makes it powerful.

The @NYTimes "Announcing the 2024 Climate Forward Speaker Lineup". Nope, your eyes aren't deceiving you. That's Kevin Roberts, head of #Project2025 nytco.com/press/2024-cli…

Upward of 20 American doctors are trapped at the European Hospital in Gaza, facing extreme dehydration, at least one is on an IV drip. This is a developing situation… Story with @Hind_Gaza theintercept.com/2024/05/13/raf…

THREAD: Nope, sorry. Major awards committees often look past or don't take seriously work produced by institutions that aren't the last big name, high-end ones standing. /1