So, I was asked to write down my thoughts on the coup for a major newspaper earlier this week.

I told them no, and let me tell you why.

In 2016, after the election I wrote an op-ed on white nationalism and the alt-right for a major newspaper and appeared on MSNBC.

I was hyped to have the opportunity to share my expertise with a wider audience.

I wasn't prepared for what came next.

The op-ed was shared pretty widely. It is probably as close as I've come to a viral piece.

I wrote for a prestigious pub, and people were reading about my scholarly research.

Cool, right?

Not quite.

The day the op-ed was published I was at an amusement park with my partner, two kids, nephew and niece, one of my sisters and her partner.

While waiting on the kids to get off a ride, I started getting messages from folks asking if I was okay.

I was confused. Why wouldn't I be okay?

Well, then, folks were like, "Uh, there are some pretty nasty threats being lobbed at you on Twitter."

THREAD, PT DEUX -- it was a lovely long weekend, I’m feeling rested and energized, and lucky for you I’ve got some more great criminal justice policy ideas to share. Real exciting stuff, I promise. Let’s flesh these out: 1/9

Ok, so to reduce unnecessary contacts between police and people/communities of color, here’s what we’re going to do: end the war on drugs. 2/9

Right now we needlessly make felons out of 10,000+ Virginians per year for narcotics possession, so for that we’re going to end the war on drugs. 3/9

Reduce court fines and fees, prevent disenfranchisement, demilitarize police departments, eliminate mandatory minimums? I’ve got a great idea for those, as well: end the war on drugs 4/9

Oh, and police and prison budgets are bloated, driving state and municipal governments into debt, with no societal benefit to show for it. So in order to save a crap ton of cash we’re also going to end the war on drugs 5/9

Now that we lost our power, it's time for healing.

Of course, if we were in your position, we would crush you. That's what would make your capitulation so healing.

Yes, we are acting in bad faith. But if you acted in good faith, that would help us a lot, I mean, help the country heal.

We definitely haven't learned our lesson, but if you give us a break, maybe we will.

Admittedly, we have acted very badly. But do you want to sink down to our level? You are better than that, America.

A couple of years ago I promised myself that one day I'll be strong enough to be able to talk about my mental health openly. I've made this my goal. I think this is the day, so here's how I ended up diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37 - a thread...

In 2017 I reached my rock-bottom. I got back home from Philippines, where I failed to deliver my conference talk due to being a mental train-wreck (for which I'm terribly sorry!). I started having suicidal idealizations and I realized it's time to get help.

It's not that I wanted to end myself, but I would see myself dying in all sorts of ways every-single-day. These are called intrusive thoughts and the ones I had were probably one of the worst ones you can experience.

I started therapy in May 2017 and it was surprisingly easy for me to...just start talking. It was a relief that I could just talk to somebody because I pretty much isolated myself from everybody.

Unfortunately, my therapist didn't want to be specific about my problems and everything was just...too generalized? I don't know how to describe this. I wanted to hear concrete facts eventually, like "you're dealing with X and you should do Y to improve".

“Those schools who try to do everything they would do in a face to face context in a remote context are going to come unstuck” Darren Northcott .....

“Worst workload is in schools that are reinventing the wheel rather than using resources like @OakNational “ ....

“Teachers are still being required to do triple and double marking, hand in daily and weekly lesson plans, and some schools are hanging onto flight paths and half term data drops AND now add remote learning to it”

“There is no evidence that one form of remote learning is better than another”

“There are schools with really effective remote learning that don’t use live streaming at all”

In my annual, ritual meditation on King, I keep thinking about those misused,spontaneous references to his “four little children” in “I Have a Dream.” As many have noted, this passage has been pressed into the work of domesticating King’s radical project, into inserting him 1/

into a reactionary, progressivist narrative emphasizing just how far “we’ve” come & overcome. Thinking too about the fact that King’s most enduring rhetorical tropes—the touchstones of American memory of the Civil Rights struggle—the dream, the mountaintop, the Promised Land, 2/

are all chosen from the end of the addresses in which they appeared. The beginnings of these speeches are seldom emphasized, although they are rich with suggestions for thinking about time and tense, ending and beginning, past and present. In his last sermon, 3/

“I See the Mountaintop,” widely considered his most apocalyptic, King took as his point of departure, the matter of time. “If I were standing at the beginning of time, “ he began, “with the possibility of a general, panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and 4/

The Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” King then takes the reader on an imaginary journey through the ages, pausing at historic sites and momentous occurrences, ending with Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Then /5

Deciding what to and when to go all in on an idea is super challenging and there’s a lot of bad advice out there

Here’s how it went for me and SwagUp

Here we go 👇

1/ the first important thing is that SwagUp wasn’t the first product/business idea I had worked on

By the time @swaguphq was started I had launched at least 15+ different ideas of varying levels of success growing up

2/ The chances your 1st, 2nd, or even 5th idea/product is going to take off are pretty low

And that’s largely because building startups are less about the product and ideas, and more about markets, timing, and execution

3/ So I think the first key lesson is that the number of swings you take early on is as important as the product you choose to work on

This is where you see many “over night successes” that were really the culmination of years of at bats, even for me at 25, I started at 6 :)

4/ Now back to the founding of SwagUp...

Leading up to it, I had known a bit about the industry, needing swag while launching and app in school, eventually selling flags and custom shirts to fraternities on campus in college

Pete Buttigieg testifies today on his nomination to run the Dept. of Transportation.

I spent almost a year covering Buttigieg. He refused to speak with me, so I’m going to thread some of the things senators could ask him about today.

In 2011, Jiha’d Vasquez, 16, was found dead, hanged, on a utility tower.

In 2012, Buttigieg became mayor and Jiha’d’s mother asked him for help with the case. Common Council records show Buttigieg was at the meetings where she spoke about her son.

Jones and a local NAACP official wanted help because her son’s death had been ruled a suicide…with no autopsy and no investigation.

Items were missing from his backpack.

Jones told reporter @jharrell6468 that she asked Buttigieg to help get the case re-opened. She says he gave her his card and told her to call.

But when she did, she never got through to him, and no one ever returned her

When we looked into it in 2019, the county coroner told me it would be “prudent” to reopen the case. And also told us the file on the case was missing.

Buttigieg never responded to Jones or to our questions about the case. It remains closed

I posted this elsewhere on social media today. Sharing here because I think there are many ppl who relate, and bc having gotten pushback again today, I have found further reason for hope in some of the support I’ve gotten (thread): 1/11

In all of the pushback I’ve gotten over the past yr in statements I’ve made about politics & the white evangelical church, notably a lot has been not about the substance of my message but a continual refrain of “why do you have to say ‘white’ Christians?” 2/11

I’ll share a little to explain why this stands out to me. I’m Indian-American, loosely defined. My dad is from India and my mom is white. I have enjoyed all the privilege of living as a white American, to be clear (lots to unpack there, but have to save that for another day) 3/11

My entire life I’ve been asked to explain myself. “Where are you from?” “Ohio.” “But where are you *really* from?” Or worse, “what *are* you?” I grew up in the 80s and 90s and this is my lived experience. I now know it’s a common one for others like me. 4/11

Again, much more to unpack here, but the point is: I was always “other” because I wasn’t white.

White is just assumed as this default that we have lived with in America, and everyone else has then of course had to be named as something else: black, Hispanic, brown, etc 5/11