now

As the Armenian proverb puts it, The world is wide, but what use is it if my heart is narrow? How can we resist the urge to turn our faces away from the grim and ongoing spectacle of wholesale and retail slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon, massacres and land theft which are being perpetrated with our tax dollars and with the full-throated support of our government? The raging dumpster fires on every corner both domestically and internationally are designed to make us shrug and turn our backs. Most days when the big picture is overwhelming, I try to do even one small thing to make the world a little less cruel. And in coming together with other people—whether that be with my teammates at the Gaza Scholarship Initiative (GSI) or with my neighbors in our Morningside Rapid Response group—we find and create hope. There is hope in the work we do together, there is hope in Zohran Mamdani, the dynamic young mayor of New York City, and there is hope in supporting one person at a time as part of a broader movement for systemic change.

James and I are helping to raise funds for a talented young artist and writer in Gaza. She has been accepted with a fee waiver to a master’s program at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, but in order to qualify for a student visa she needs money for her evacuation, resettlement, and living expenses. You can read more about her and donate here.

One of my GSI mentees, Asem Aljerjawi, has written an eloquent and moving piece about his life in Dublin after surviving genocide in Gaza and while his family is still suffering there.

Anti- and non-Zionist Jewish Columbia faculty, including James and a number of our friends who are quoted in this Guardian piece, have filed claims with Trump’s “antisemitism fund.”

On his podcast Why Is This Happening? Chris Hayes spoke with Timnit Gebru about the ethics of AI. I found the discussion illuminating. “Timnit Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute after her high-profile exit from Google’s Ethical AI team.” After you listen to the episode, check out the AI Resist List.

M. Gessen wrote a sobering analysis of the batshit crazy ALIENS webpage the White House launched about ten days ago. When I saw it I assumed it had sprung directly from the brain of Stephen Miller.

Now repeat after me:

The only recognizable feature of hope is action. (Grace Paley)

Choose your lane, find your people. (Mariame Kaba)

Freedom is a constant struggle. (Angela Davis)

The voice of the people is louder than the roar of the cannon. (Armenian proverb)

Let’s go!

xo

Nancy

This past Sunday, I was among those offering blessings at the baptism of a friend’s baby. In preparation, I paged through several anthologies and lists of Armenian proverbs that I have collected over the years and made and arranged the selection below.

Let’s sit crooked and talk straight.

The sun will rise whether the rooster crows or not.

Spring comes on the wings of the nightingale.

Birds fly with their wings, people with their kin.

Measure ten times, cut once.

Say it once, listen a thousand times.

Education is a golden bracelet.

You are as many people as the languages you know.

It is better to carry stones with a wise man than to eat pilaf with a fool.

A good tree is better than a bad person.

A lone walnut cannot make noise in a sack.

From heart to heart there is a path.

Tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are.

Be neither sweet and swallowed, nor sour and spurned.

Let it be one and fine.

A mother’s blessing will lift the curse of seven priests.

Nancy Kricorian

Birds fly with their wings, people with their kin. ~ Armenian proverb

The other day as I was driving along a country road to my volunteer job at the used bookstore that raises funds for our local public library upstate, I listened to the news on NPR. By the time I arrived at my destination, after hearing story after story about violence, cruelty, and corruption, my nerves were jangling. In the shop, the manager, who was sorting through donations, handed me a ten-year-old non-fiction book about characters in American history who had been devoted to the ideas of democracy and decency. She said, “Do you think anyone will buy this or should we get rid of it?” I answered, “It’s about people trying not to do bad things, which could be instructive at this moment.”

Another thing that I find helpful in this troubling time is being out in the natural world among wildflowers, mushrooms, red newts, frogs, butterflies, and birds. And during spring migration, the birds are especially diverting.

On May 8^th I joined staff members of the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program (FEP) for a bird walk on their 900-acre farm in Columbia County, New York. The highlight of the walk was an open field where we saw six male Bobolinks in their spectacular black, white, and yellow breeding plumage. Bobolinks, who spend the winter in South America, have a 6,000-mile journey to return to their spring breeding grounds in North America. They make their nests on the ground in open fields and grasslands, and modern hay mowing practices have contributed to their annual 2% decline since 1966 in the U.S. Hawthorne Valley delays mowing in one large field to give the Bobolinks an opportunity to successfully breed.

Last week, at the height of spring migration, I went on three bird walks in Central Park: one with my friend and bird guide Gabriel Willow starting at the 81^st Street and Central Park West entrance, one with New York City Bird Alliance’s Tod Winston in the North Woods, and the third with The Linnaean Society of New York, also in the North Woods. Central Park is one of New York City’s top birding locations, particularly during spring migration when over 25 million birds fly over the city on their routes north. Many of them pause for a day or two in our area. As Tod told the Upper West Side Rag, “During migration, birds kind of funnel into New York City parks in this really high concentration, which is what makes New York City a world-renowned birding spot…” On Thursday with Tod, we saw 62 species of birds, including 5 Scarlet Tanagers, and an array of warblers, among them Blackburnian, Chestnut-Sided, Blackpoll, Magnolia, Hooded, Canada, Nashville, Tennessee, and Cape May.

How’s that for diversion?

Yours in struggle,

Nancy Kricorian

READ and LISTEN

I have been mentoring a young writer from Gaza named Sahar Rabah, who is currently enrolled in the creative writing master’s program at Trinity Dublin (she is one of 50+ students the Gaza Scholarship Initiative assisted with university applications that resulted in their evacuations to Ireland in August/September 2025). Earlier this month it was announced that Sahar had won the Calibre Essay Prize from the Australian Book Review. Her elegant, powerful, and devastating essay entitled “Between Reality and Dreams” is behind a paywall and if you would like me to send you a PDF, please let me know.

My novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD was featured in this list of works celebrating Armenian mothers and grandmothers.

On this episode of his podcast WHY IS THIS HAPPENING? Chris Hayes interviews cognitive scientist and UC Berkeley professor Alison Gopnik about intelligence, AI, and learning. Gopnik argues that a typical two-year-old routinely outsmarts the most advanced AI models.

I just finished reading and highly recommend Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. It is a fascinating combination of family and social history about Dohrn’s parents Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, members of the radical revolutionary group The Weather Underground, and their lives and times. It expands on themes and materials that he used in his riveting 2022 podcast series MOTHER COUNTRY RADICALS.

Little by little the cotton is spun. ~ Armenian proverb

Every year on the 24^th of April, Armenians around the world commemorate the start of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. For me this date is firmly anchored in my memories of my Armenian grandmother and the congregation of the United Armenian Brethren Church that my grandfather helped to found. My survivor grandmother and the other survivors of her generation in our church, many of them having been orphaned as children, were carriers of a traumatic history that was rarely articulated, but which suffused our community. Their experiences of unspeakable mass violence, dispossession, and exile were passed to the next generations as both a burden and a legacy.

I have always felt that my commitment to fairness as a child and to justice and accountability as an adult are the fruits of having grown up in the Armenian community. In this violent and frightening time, each day I try to find one kind thing I can do or one cruel thing I can help undo. Sometimes I do this alone, but most times I am part of a group. And these small acts and the relationships we make as we do them are the best antidotes to despair.

Recommended viewing, reading, listening

In honor of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day here is a short video about the history of the Armenian village of Anjar in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. It features my friend Antranik Dakessian.

As reported by LitHub, a collective of autonomous writers, artists, and musicians has launched the 92NO campaign to call on their colleagues to withhold their labor from the Arts and Culture Program of 92NY because of the institution’s support for war and genocide. You can follow 92NO on Instagram and X/Twitter.

My WANN mentee Taqwa Ahmed Alwawi wrote a searing piece for LitHub about scholasticide in Gaza.

This is must-read interview with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah about health sovereignty in Palestine.

This fascinating episode of the Psychic Militancy podcast features a discussion with Avgi Saktepoulou and Iris Hefets about the Palestine Global Mental Health Network’s call for all psychoanalysts of conscience to resign from the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Palantir posted a 22-point “Western” tech supremacist manifesto on X/Twitter the other day that was described as sounding like “the ramblings of a supervillain.”  Eliot Higgins of Belling the Cat had a good BlueSky thread in response, and Yanis Varoufakis offered a point by point translation. If you’re interested in taking action against this company that poses a threat to humanity, sign up for the Purge Palantir campaign. More information is available from the American Friends Service Committee.

I was impressed by Wikipedia’s guide to spotting AI generated writing, and if you want a short primer, you can watch this reel by Will Francis.

Nancy Kricorian

When the first crocuses appeared this year, I thought to myself, “We made it!” as though winter were a battle that we had survived. Now it’s April. The daffodils are blooming in Morningside Park, and the ornamental cherries are flaring their pink skirts along Central Park’s reservoir. I have never been a fan of practical jokes, hoaxes, or pranks, so April Fool’s Day is not a custom that I observe. April 1^st was, however, my Armenian grandmother’s chosen birthday. As an orphaned genocide survivor whose birthdate was inscribed in a lost family Bible, she knew neither the day nor the year of her birth. April brings spring showers, spring flowers, and in Armenian the word abril (ապրիլ) is both this month and the verb to live.

How do we live in this dystopian moment when mere minutes of reading the headlines is like sprinting through a raging fire? While walking down the avenue, I am struck by how normal and peaceful everything appears even as I am carrying with me the knowledge of the mass murder of schoolgirls in Iran, the targeting of journalists, medics, and other civilians in Lebanon, and the ongoing genocide against the people of Palestine. And then there are the domestic horrors. So, after I register all of this, I must find something doable and I must do it. I know you have heard this from me before, but I literally repeat these phrases in my head each day, sometimes more than once: The only recognizable feature of hope is action (Grace Paley); Choose your lane, find your people (Mariame Kaba); Freedom is a constant struggle (Angela Davis).

My WANN mentee Nadera wrote a beautiful, sad piece about celebrating Ramadan before and after the genocide. I’ve been going to weekly meetings of our neighborhood deportation defense rapid response (DDRR) group. I have also been working with the DSA-NYC Immigrant Justice Working Group and its efforts with the Purge Palantir coalition. I did some preliminary campaign research on Palantir—truly the stuff of nightmares. (If you want to see my draft research document, let me know and I’ll send it to you, but in the meantime, check out Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s latest shenanigans.) There was some good news this week as the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation announced they would not be renewing their contact with Palantir when it comes to an end in October. On another front, I’m collaborating with an autonomous group of fierce and clever writers on a campaign to hold a major cultural institution to account. We are finding moments of satisfaction, and, dare I say, joy in our work together.

Gathering in the real world with friends and family is another way of fostering light in dark times. James and I recently hosted a launch party for our friend Tim Mitchell’s brilliant new book The Alibi of Capital. In February, we restarted our old tradition of a monthly Sunday brunch. At our second gathering in March, as I looked around the table at our friends, I remembered lines from The Elder Edda (as translated from the Icelandic by Paul B. Taylor and W.H. Auden):

If you know a friend you can truly trust,

And wish for his good will,

Exchange thoughts, exchange gifts,

Go often to his house.

Finding these moments of connection make the work possible.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy

READ, LISTEN, LOOK

On March 13, The Burning Heart of the World was knocked out in the first round the Tournament of Books, but the judge’s reasoning and the conversation below were interesting. On March 27, I lost in the Zombie round, but there was some laudatory commentary.

In the good news department, a federal court has found that Columbia University may have acted as a government instrument to suppress Palestinian advocacy in violation of the First Amendment. This finding means the suit will go to discovery and all those emails between the craven trustees and their sketchy congressional partners will become public.

Via Mondoweiss Psychoanalysts are Resigning from the International Psychoanalytical Association over Its Anti-Palestinian Double Standard. Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, a New York analyst and theorist, named something rarely spoken publicly: that the IPA’s silence has ‘created a permissive professional atmosphere in which Zionist analysts feel entitled to eruptions — saying racist and discriminatory things to their patients and supervisees — both in the consulting room and on our email lists.’

Arundhati Roy on the war against Iran: Any regimes that need changing, including the US, Israel, and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.

We Live in a Time of Monsters—a message from Beirut by Lina Mounzer: But we have learned from Gaza that there is no rule of law, and there are no repercussions for the crimes of the powerful.

Listen to the brilliant Aslı Ü. Bâli via Jewish Currents’ On the Nose Podcast.

Via Instagram. Enjoy these Heated Rivalry themed posters from 28 March No Kings Day. And take the Heated Rivalry Quiz (should I be proud or embarrassed to say that I knew all the answers?).

Nancy Kricorian