it is my birthday today. as a gift to me, tell someone you know about palestine, but don’t just tell them about our death. tell them about our life, the way we crowd around to flip the maqlooba, the insistence that someone else eats first, the tatreez we’ve woven into the fabric of our history, tell them about the soap from nablus, the oranges from yafa, the olive oil. tell them about our poetry, our art, our folksongs. tell them that we were, and still are, human beings who bore witness to the worst parts of humanity but searched for compassion anyway.

Apple Bottomjeans is a beautiful gname for a gnome

people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm's length continuously for seventeen years

plagiarism is also like the ur-bogeyman of academia but if you spend any time around successful prolific professors you realise that their success is contingent upon them stealing, without credit, the work of their RAs and graduate students for most of their careers. and you can say those guys are bad actors, that they’re doing academia incorrectly, but their paychecks, tenure status, awards, and publishing record would disagree with you on that. the ultimate conclusion isn’t that plagiarism is good, but that it is ubiquitous, that it is the name of the game, that punishment for plagiarism is a discretionary disciplinary mechanism more than it is a system for rooting out unethical behaviour. it is difficult to overstate the daily mundane instances of plagiarism you encounter at university because tenured professors have extraordinary amounts of power and vanishingly few checks against their behaviour