A couple weeks ago, I backed out of the PEN World Voices conference in NYC because of PEN America’s lack of a consistent and vocal support of Palestinian writers and journalists commensurate to its vital support of persecuted writers and journalists in other war-torn regions. 🧵

Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines to prevent long COVID: data from Norway

More evidence that immunity significantly reduces the risk of #LongCovid , thromboembolic and cardiovascular complications.

thelancet.com/journals/lanre…
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UPDATE: it has since come to my attention that PEN America is a Zionist-sympathetic organization that has consistently failed to meet the moment on the genocide in Gaza, and now I do NOT want to be affiliated with them, so I'm withdrawing from the awards. Free Palestine

Zero COVID weirdos: COVID isn't the FLU because COVID does repeat infections!!!

The flu: *laughs manically*

I'm so moved by the writers withdrawing from PEN prize lists in solidarity with Palestine. As a debut author myself, I know winning such an award can be life-changing, and I deeply respect seeing this kind of solidarity in practice. Let's all order their books and support them.

A few months after I started my first academic lab, I told my postdoc PI Wallace Marshall about how great it was he never did this kind of territorial nonsense. He said simply: “I’m not worried I’ll run out of ideas”

And that, my friends, is the dictionary definition of a mic drop

wsws.org/en/articles/20… 🔥 🔥

Investing in (almost certainly) automated and outsourced chat “help” instead of investing in salaries and infrastructure to make trains actually run: peak Mayor Eric Adams bullshit.

while i personally have not been nominated for any prizes from any problematic institutions recently, i feel like we need to come up with some kind of new framework of mutual aid for these divest & refuse actions

“Terrorist” vs “military assault”

Long thread here on mpox in 2022 and how, if activists had been listened to in the US and globally in May, we could have prevented almost all mpox cases.

This new work from Trevor Bedford is a masterpiece in using viral phylogenetics to make essential inferences about epidemiology.

I had to withdraw from the PEN World Voices Festival. The last straw from me was the tweet below, which implies that anyone who chooses to be a part of PEN is tacitly agreeing that PEN aligns with their values and advocacy. This comes after many private messages from PEN.(Thread)

Following Camonghne Felix the cascade of withdrawals from the PEN awards is not in vain. What is an award worth when a good number of the best identified books are no longer in the running? It speaks loud when many of the writers together have made this choice.