Natalie Salzman Dickter

Today, as I entered the campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to speak at a conference, I noticed again a simple but powerful reality: most of the students walking through the gates at that moment were young women — many of them Palestinian students from East Jerusalem, my own city. For me, this was a living example of something many people have forgotten: Israelis and Palestinians are still capable of coexistence, partnership, and building a shared future together. Those who believe that October 7 and the terrible war that followed permanently destroyed every possibility of trust and human connection are wrong. Something was broken. Deeply broken. But not beyond repair. Every day, in hospitals, universities, businesses, and ordinary human encounters, Israelis and Palestinians continue to prove that another reality is still possible. The picture below is living evidence.

@GreggBraden The hands say everything. 💗

Mother’s Day can bring many different emotions for people. For some, it is a day of celebration and gratitude. For others, it may carry memories, longing, healing, or reflection. Wherever this day finds you, please know you are held in love today. A beautiful memory with my mom.

@paulwilsonimage 6:30 a.m. here in Maryland, USA, and these photos have already made my day! Lovely. Thank you. 😍

went out to shoot the moonrise but bumped into some models instead- normal in new zealand

@NASA @Space_Station I was just looking for them at 5:03 a.m. over the Washington, DC, metropolitan area.

Missing updates from the Artemis II crew? We have other humans in space you can follow! Meet the NASA astronauts currently aboard the @Space_Station in the thread below 👇

@Microinteracti1 I worry about residual radiation effect on their health & genes. But this reminds me of the first year of covid. Animals emerged in cities, suburbs. They must have been thrilled with the lack of cars and people. And I was so happy for them. Mother Nature always bats last. 💚🐺

The Best Conservation Plan The most effective rewilding project in Europe was not planned. It was a reactor fire. 40 years after the 1986 disaster, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is larger than Luxembourg. Wolves, brown bears, lynx, bison. Przewalski’s horses introduced between 1998 and 2004 now move in stable herds. Scientists credit one variable: total absence of human activity. No management. No funding rounds. No stakeholder workshops. Just removal. Conservation biology has spent decades debating optimal intervention strategies. Chernobyl ran the control group by accident. The result is one of Europe’s largest nature reserves. The uncomfortable finding is not that radiation is good. It’s that we are, consistently, the limiting factor. April 26 marks 40 years. The zone is thriving. Draw your own conclusions. If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on X: @Microinteracti1

we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through underground networks. where octopuses dream. where elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand over them in silence. where bees communicate through dance, showing each other where to fly. where flowers bloom...where crows remember human faces -especially those who were cruel to them - and pass that memory on to their young. where ants build entire cities. where cats purr at a frequency that can help heal bones. where forests, after fires, grow flowers first.

@vipuldaave/post/DWqwMboj0vE?xmt=AQF0-g7lfU8QOiL8LG098ErtXpkG-M2U1utDhxGHU7037mpM4GAvzAAphJ9zO2pzB2z2ko0I&slof=1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">threads.com/@vipuldaave/po…

This is appalling. Indigenous people are the original inhabitants of this continent and, here in New Mexico, we live that truth every day. The fact that the Solicitor General of the United States would hesitate on our citizenship is outrageous and horrific. He doesn’t understand basic American history or the law, and he has no business holding this position.

@JocAPhotography Lucky you! 😍

Earlier this week I posted a photo of a Sandhill Crane possibly contemplating a nesting site. Looks like the spot was chosen! Hopefully we will have colts (baby Cranes) in about a month.

@redhotnerd @RadioFreeTom And then he'll cut off the ends of the mustache and dye it black.

@RadioFreeTom It’s a Nazi haircut. I wish I was kidding.

I don't understand the signaling here. I have many ways of showing where I stand, but telling my barber "Before you cut my hair, put on a blindfold, take a slug of Everclear, and then think about the girl who rejected you in high school" is not one of them.

@jamie_raskin All hands are on deck in Silver Spring, @jamie_raskin! #NoKings #NoFascists #RememberRenee #RememberAlex

Hola Miami! Thanks for the warm welcome and I'll see you in a few minutes for the No Kings Rally. And sending love to everyone back home packing the streets of The Free State.

@silverpebble I didn't know that. Thanks!

@NDickter I LOVE the sound of your project! It’s thought that birds do begin singing triggered by light (obviously) but also air temperature as their calls carry furthest in cold air…when the air warms up as the day progresses it affects the distance their communication tweets travel🪶

My depression’s severe & dark just now but talking to folk here gives me a sense of belonging which I really need to try to hold on to. Making this photo helped my brain & looking for the tiny silver owl hidden in it will help yours-the botanical fractals will dial ⬇️ stress & your brain will release dopamine if you find🦉:

@silverpebble Pre-dawn greetings from Maryland, USA. Started my own citizen science project after noticing Northern Mockingbird begin to speak each morning at same time. I'll compare to sunrise times & see if there's a correlation. Delightful to hear that first 'chip'. 💚 I wish you well. 💟

I’ve been away for 6 weeks trying to get well so the Al Gore Rhythm is likely to show that tweet to approx 2 people & maybe their pets, but if you see it & your brain maybe likes it I’d love you to say hi. I’ll say hi back-honestly small good human connections are one of the things keeping me going just now 🌿

@GreggBraden Harriet Tubman, Anne LaBastille, Frances Perkins.

If you could invite any three people, past or present, to your dinner table, who would they be? Scientists, teachers, artists, philosophers... the possibilities are endless. Who makes your list?

Let’s be honest about the résumé here. The United States has not won a war since 1945. Korea: stalemate. Vietnam: fled. Iraq: created ISIS. Afghanistan: handed the keys back to the Taliban after twenty years and a few trillion dollars. That is not a winning streak. That is a participation trophy collection of weaknesses. Oh, and 1945? They needed a formal invitation. Germany declared war on America. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The US did not ride in on principle – it got dragged in because refusing would have looked embarrassing. Three years of sitting it out while Britain bled, Canada crossed oceans, and the rest of the Allies held the line. By the time American boots hit Normandy, the back of the Wehrmacht had already been broken on the Eastern Front by the Soviets at a cost of twenty million lives. The US arrived at a table that others had set, ate well, then spent the next eighty years telling everyone they won the dinner. So yes. Keep the lectures about European dependency coming. Just maybe check the scorecard first.

@Microinteracti1 This is what happens when tens of millions of Americans elect a sociopath. Twice. Those of us who did not will never stop protesting, resisting, suing, and taking care of our neighbors who live in constant fear of ICE. P.S. I loved your post about Robert Mueller. Thank you.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being the most powerful man on earth. At some point, you stop being powerful. And then, rather inconveniently, everything you did while you were powerful becomes somebody else’s problem to sort out. Donald Trump is currently in year two of his second term. He has renamed a cultural institution after himself, closed it, unleashed what can generously be described as a paramilitary immigration force on his own cities, and apparently authorised military strikes where survivors were finished off in the water. He did all of this with the serene confidence of a man who has never once faced a consequence. And here’s the thing. Domestically, he may be right. His own Supreme Court essentially invented a new legal principle specifically for him, which is a level of judicial favouritism that would make even a dodgy FIFA referee blush. But the International Criminal Court did not get that memo. Neither did Germany. Neither did the Netherlands. And critically, neither did Scotland, where Trump owns a golf course he may never visit again without a very awkward phone call from The Hague. Rodrigo Duterte thought he was untouchable too. He is currently attending his war crimes trial via video link from a detention cell in the Netherlands. Which is, one has to admit, not how most people picture retirement. His cabinet will spend the next several decades buried in lawsuits, disbarment proceedings and foreign legal complications. There will be no quiet farm. No memoirs tour in London. No honorary degrees. Just paperwork. Eternal, relentless, internationally sourced paperwork.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers. ~Sarah Durham Wilson

@Milbank A fellow naturalist covering local news. Pinch me; I'm dreaming! Congratulations! The 🐦, 🐝 ,🦋, 🐢,🐍, 🐸 are delighted.

I am leaving the Washington Post to join a new journalistic venture backed by Politico founder Robert Allbritton that will be both the hometown publication the D.C. region sorely needs and a scrappy and fearless national news organization. I hope you'll join us.