New article up at @lithub! Fwiw, I finished another @rabihalameddine book on my most recent flight--not listed here: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)--also just amazing. Happy Pride Month, 7abaybi 🌈🫶🏻💕 share.google/4HA7IjYhx6X56wo…

𝑴𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒔𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓 𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒃𝒍𝒆. “Translation is not an invisible act. The book does not translate itself,” writes Maggie Zebracka. Behind every translated page are decisions, doubts, discoveries—and someone who has weighed every word. tinyurl.com/asymptotejrnl

The American President just signed an Executive Order enabling ranchers to shoot and poison the very last wolves in America. Wolves in America number around 0.5% of their original population, and they are of course vital to the health of landscapes.

★ “Romantic and suffused with longing,” Hooda Shawa and illustrator Nada Esmaeel’s YA debut THE NECKLACE OF SEVEN SOULS is “a luminous exploration of displacement, memory, and the Palestinian diaspora” buff.ly/CBN7pdP

Senegalese writer Ken Bugul’s Felix Faure Street is our Book Club pick for the month of August! Bugul brings the city to life in her musical, potent prose and investigates how spectacle reveals and conceals the power relations, both worldly and spiritual: tinyurl.com/43p9jzcj

Bookshop.org, the online bookstore, is generating some $70 million in revenue per year and has surpassed the $50 million milestone in distributions to independent bookstores since its launch in 2020. buff.ly/Q0v2WkQ

Yosemite made headlines yesterday. A few things got left out. Yosemite belongs to every American. It is not Trump's to give away. Jeff Pori, the CEO of the company set to gain from this deal, had zero political donations on record — ever — before October 2024. That's before Trump even won the election. Starting that month, he began giving monthly to Trump's campaign and the RNC, more than $4,000 total. He kept paying through the transition. And the moment Trump's people were in power, by spring 2025, a request that had been dead for over 20 years suddenly came roaring back to life. They'd tried this before. In the late 1990s, a different owner of this same land sued for this same access. He lost — first in district court, then again on appeal in 2012. Dead. Over. Then in 2024, Kingsbarn Realty Capital — run by Pori — bought that same land for $4 million and asked for the same road. Told no again. Until Trump took office. Around that same time, Kingsbarn also closed a deal with two companies tied straight to Trump's inner circle — one run by a man who personally underwrote Trump's $175 million bond in his own civil fraud case. Political appointees pushed Park Service staff to make this deal happen. The pressure traced back to Burgum's own office. Two former officials, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, confirmed it. There's even a plan to use the Land and Water Conservation Fund — money meant to protect public land — to help pay for it. When two senators, one from each party, sent Interior their own list of projects worth funding this way, Yosemite wasn't on it. It was never even in consideration. Former Yosemite superintendent Cicely Muldoon put it plainly: if this can happen at Yosemite, "it can really happen anywhere in the national park system." The National Park Service oversees 433 sites across the country, spanning more than 85 million acres of public land — all of it belonging to the American people. The Sierra Club is speaking out too. Executive Director Loren Blackford says this plan is "betraying that legacy by trying to hand parts of Yosemite to a private developer." Senator Alex Padilla didn't hold back: "This is the most corrupt administration in history." This isn't about one road, or one developer, or one park. It's about whether anything protected in this country is actually protected — or just waiting for the right administration to give it away. 🦋HumanityUnited #DemsUnited

This review has set my expectations SO high.

Reading through Goodreads reviews on a book I was lukewarm about--so annoying to see the comments blaming the translator for things ppl disliked. Or worse ~ 'Loved it, can only imagine how much better it was in the original!' Like--why? What if the translation is "better"? #xl8

"Ultimately, LLMs plunder the past, but they also plunder the future." Alessandro Camon discusses the true cost of unpaid creativity in the age of IP and AI: lareviewofbooks.org/article/…

Spotted in Hammamet Tunisia. Follow @ ferjeniii on IG

Bold of you to be doomscrolling when you have a stack of 10+ unread books collecting dust on your desk.

True story, 😂🤣😂, 😺😺😺😺

How I found the kittens downstairs this morning (stuffed leopard a gift from another resident's granddaughter ❤️) #whereswaldo #TNR

Through the leaves on Highbury Fields, pinhole style projections of the eclipse

Our recommendations for #women_in_translation month 📚🌻 You can read the first chapter of all our books through our website dararab.co.uk/en/english-boo… Stay tuned for the official release of “The Garden We Carry” by Bushra Khalfan, translated by Luke Leafgren.

Huge news! 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘫𝘦𝘦𝘣 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺, translated by David Boyk and I, wins the 2026 Humanities in Translation Prize . "A surprising, funny, and fascinating collection," "Wry, disorienting, and utterly original." Can't wait to see this in print!  nupress.northwestern.edu/blo…

Just a friendly little stamp.

Did you know that every spring in April, the desert city of Taif in Saudi Arabia transforms into a sea of fragrant pink roses? These blooms are carefully handpicked by farmers and distilled into precious rose water and oil, some of which is used to cleanse the sacred Kaaba in Makkah. With nearly a thousand rose farms, Taif has become a centre for this centuries-old tradition, where thousands of petals are harvested daily and processed in copper distilleries. Deeply rooted in Islamic culture, the rose is often seen as a symbol of the soul, its scent carrying a sense of beauty, purity, and spirituality that has endured for generations.

Time to reclaim my veranda now, I guess 💔🤍 #TNR

Took the 3 kittens back downstairs this morning, and Mama Cat, who hasn't seen them in a couple of weeks, acted seriously annoyed. Came downstairs just now to see all 3 "nursing." All the warm fuzzies.