Janine Holc

you know who isn't apologizing for the commencement speech? Derek Peterson 👏🏾

The most radical thing that Alabama’s famous Freedom Quilting Bee did was not the quilts they sold, but what they did with the money: in 1968, they bought 23 acres of land in Alberta, Alabama, and formed a Black land cooperative. scalawagmagazine.org/2026/04/stitch…

Solidarity with workers at the University of Chicago Press, who have formed the first union at one of the oldest and most distinguished academic publishers in the U.S.

Great credit is due to the Bard College community of undergraduate anti-rape activists—Take Back Bard—who insisted on Botstein's resignation even in the face of widespread indifference from the faculty and sneering mockery of their efforts in the New York Times. I admire them.

There’s a medication that can reverse opioid overdose if administered in. We are setting up these newspapers kiosks so people can get them for free. We’d love to have them in more of NJ. Can you help?

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

It’s so weird that every time SCOTUS declares racism to be no more than the Ghost of Voter Suppression Past, a bunch of states leap at the chance to do more racist voter suppression.

She co-founded a publishing house in Abuja in 2006 with no business training and no publishing background. Twenty years later Cassava Republic Press has offices in London, authors on international prize lists and a backlist that has shaped a generation of African readers. This interview is a masterclass in what conviction looks like over time. rpublc.com/story/2026/03/…

Kinetic Sculpture Race!

we're only just learning what a post-literate capitalist society looks like and it looks bad! the simple act of never reading or encountering difficult thoughts is remaking the nature of subjectivity in ways Deleuzeans could only dream of

Estamos vivendo um período em que a pessoa inteligente precisa permanecer em silêncio para não ofender os ignorantes.

The IMF and World bank are not Africa's partners. They are Africa's obstacles. And it's about time African nations treated them as such.

man discovers socialised healthcare that many countries around the world already have

Not the point of this particular tussle, but police in Baltimore and elsewhere are still killing Black people. They are rewarded with funding.

$25 billion falls far short of covering ammunition costs alone. The actual expenditures are clearly being understated and concealed. A more realistic estimate for the total costs, including damages, places the figure between $120 billion and $140 billion.

Fun fact: the “correct” way to pronounce someone’s name is however the fuck they told you to pronounce it.

Choosing to use the word “foreign” when the specific demographic is EU students with settled status is a choice. Because “foreign” invokes browner imaginaries.

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace.com/s/The-psycholo…

In case anyone isn’t aware, Trump is demanding Zambia to hand over its mineral rights by end of day tomorrow or the U.S. gov’t will cut off the country’s access to the AIDS medications that are literally keeping its citizens alive. Just thought y’all should know.

Helen Keller was a Communist