Novelist · Poet · Essayist · Scientist · Mother · Activist
Organizer of “Palestine Writes” · the only North American literature festival celebrating Palestinian Writers & Artists
Founder of the Children’s Organization Playgrounds for Palestine

Palestinians have been facing erasure for decades. There's the physical erasure of our villages, the names of our villages, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map, erasure of our identities. And now there's this kind of colonization of our narratives, of our stories, and our history. And Palestine Writes is part of a counterforce against this new form of colonization. The Zionist colonial narrative has always shifted with shifting wind, depending on what's in vogue at the time. Initially, it was a sort of romantic ending to Europe's genocide of its own Jewish population. And there was this epic myth of "a land without people for a people without land". And of course that was unsustainable.

Journalist · Activist · Public Intellectual
Author of We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation ·
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

This conversation focuses on the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action and presenting a ”true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism.”

Author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

They weren't able to employ scientists to not find a fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change. They weren't able to pull that off, and when they're not able to do that, what they do instead is create an arsenal of expertise who just create the illusion of disagreement, and they were so successful at doing that with climate change that it's remarkable because there actually was scientific consensus. There wasn't this giant rift in the scientific community, and for decades, they created an illusion of disagreement that we all bought. And they're able to do that using Stanford University, Rockefeller University, these names of institutions as well as individuals, but they're not actually publishing science. And so I think it deserves a kind of special carve out of all of the tactics because it really says: actually these systems are working pretty well. You're just not getting the right information. And they do that again through the media and PR firms and controlling the dialogues and press releases and journals, and especially their relationship with the media, is very, very privileged.