Adonis Diaries

Archive for February 25th, 2016

Military checkpoint recreated at Cambridge University for ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’

An Israeli military checkpoint was recreated at the University of Cambridge on Monday, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week 2016.

Adonis Bouhatab shared a link.

The Cambridge University Palestine Society, along with various students, artists and activists, established the mock checkpoint in the centre of the university’s Sidgwick lecture site.

According to a statement by the Palestine Society, the aim was “to show a glimpse of what it is really like to live under an apartheid regime.” The statement continued:

Read: 68% of Palestinian deaths resulting from recent violence occurred at checkpoints

PalSoc stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle, and in doing so, we answer the call of Palestinian civil society to engage in a non-violent campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions until Israel complies with its obligations under international law.

At the end of 2015, according to the UN, there were 543 obstacles to Palestinian freedom of movement in the Occupied West Bank.

Israel’s Separation Wall, (or wall of Shame) illegal as per the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, is a further tool of colonisation and fragmentation.

Also read: 20% increase in Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks across the West Bank

Israeli Apartheid Week is a series of global events seeking to raise awareness of Israel’s ongoing human rights violations and apartheid policies against the Palestinian people.

Photo credit- University of Cambridge Palestine Society.


40 Words For Emotions You’ve Felt, But Couldn’t Explain

Brianna Wiest. February 16, 2016

Exulansis: when there’s not an actual word for what you’re trying to explain.
We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating.
People work through emotions by being able to identify them and use them as signals. A lot of the time, we’re left in the dark.
Enter the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, the brainchild of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you were having. Here are 40 of them:


n. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience.


Mal de Coucou




Hanker Sore










Nodus Tollens














Dead Reckoning








Rigor Samsa











n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.

Catoptric Tristesse

n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.


n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.


n. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”


n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.


n. a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic ‘I know the feeling’—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some foreign country.




n. an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what you’re doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far away and don’t call much anymore.

Fata Organa



n. the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…



The Tilt Shift

n. a phenomenon in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you put it down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths—peaceable, generic and out of focus.



Ecstatic Shock

n. the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.






Lee Fang. Feb. 22 2016












“Not a bad Christmas present,” he added.








How often you felt the conversation was worth recording?





00:31 You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady“: Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects are not safe either.





Now, part of that is due to technology.










So I have 10 basic rules.







Number three: Use open-ended questions. In this case, take a cue from journalists. Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. If you put in a complicated question, you’re going to get a simple answer out.




We’re sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. And we stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need to let them come and let them go.



Conversations are not a promotional opportunity.




Why do we not listen to each other?











Celeste Headlee. Writer and radio host
Years of interview experience gives her a unique perspective on what makes for a good conversation. Full bio


Renewed Efforts to Stop Subway Sex Crimes

“She’s more free to tell me everything that she felt happen to her,” Lt. Angela Morris, center, said of the importance of having female officers to handle sex crimes

  Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times

Fanning out along the platform at the City Hall subway station in Manhattan, the plainclothes police officers blended in with the morning commuters. As they prepared to board a northbound train, they watched closely, their eyes darting from rider to rider.

The team of seven officers was searching for men who use the subway’s crowded confines to get too close to women. Some furtively touch female passengers, while others rub up against the women they have targeted.

At Union Square, Detective Marquis Cross saw a man he recognized from a previous sex-offense arrest standing suspiciously close to a female passenger. As the woman left the train, Detective Cross jogged after her to ask if she had felt anything unusual. She said that she had not, but that the man did seem too close

The officers, all from the New York Police Department’s Transit Bureau, were working the Lexington Avenue line, one of the most overcrowded in an increasingly crowded system. The ever-tightening crush of passengers provides easy cover for men who prey on women, the police say.

Offenders will often step off a car and get back on just before the doors close so they have to squeeze next to other riders, Detective Cross said. “They’re looking for a particular crowd or person that they want to get behind,” he said.

Opportunistic sex crimes aboard subways are Not new, nor are they news to many women. Some have been grabbed or leered at by a man who is masturbating. Many others have heard a story from a friend who felt an uncomfortable touch but was unsure if she should say something.

But cellphone cameras and social media have given women tools to fight back and provided the police a way to identify some offenders.

Last year, in an effort to encourage more victims to come forward, the police began training more female officers to work the cases.

The police now send out a stream of alerts about such crimes using photos from victims’ phones to try to identify suspects.

One recent Twitter post shared a photo of a man suspected of grabbing a 27-year-old woman’s buttocks on a No. 7 train in Queens this month. Two days earlier, the police posted a photo of a man they say exposed himself to women on two trains at Grand Central Station.


Many of those crimes were forcible touching and public lewdness, the offenses most commonly charged in connection with the sort of sexual misconduct that Detective Cross and his colleagues were on the lookout for that morning on the Lexington Avenue line.

Joseph Fox, the chief of the Transit Bureau, said he believed the increase in reported sex crimes was a result of more women coming forward. He expects the number of reports will keep rising as the police continue to talk about the problem.

“Many men don’t know this issue exists; far too many women do,” Chief Fox said in an interview. “It’s a crime that goes largely unreported.”

Subway announcements have long warned riders about sexual misconduct, and social media and pop culture have amplified attention to it. The phenomenon was a plotline on the Netflix series “Master of None” when Aziz Ansari’s character confronts an offender on the subway

The police made about 400 arrests last year for sex offenses on the subways, nearly three-fourths of which took place when officers witnessed an episode or a victim sought out a nearby officer who located the suspect. Victims are often embarrassed, confused or rushing to work, so they may not stop to tell a transit worker or go to a police station, Chief Fox said.

One of two female officers on the recent patrol, Lt. Angela Morris has become well versed on sex crimes in the two and a half years she has worked on such cases.

Victims are frequently crying and express shock and humiliation, and they often appear more comfortable speaking to her rather than to her male colleagues, she said.

“She’s more free to tell me everything that she felt happen to her,” Lieutenant Morris said, adding that she had taken women whose clothing was damaged to buy a new outfit.

The most common reports in 2015 were for forcible touching (340 cases) and public lewdness (223 cases), both misdemeanors.

There were 130 episodes of sexual abuse, which can be a misdemeanor or a felony. Rapes, which are felonies, are rare on the subway, Chief Fox said. One was reported last year, and five were reported the previous year.

In 2014, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority created a website for sexual misconduct complaints, where riders can attach a photo or make an anonymous report. The agency has received more than 500 complaints so far, and it forwards them to the police, officials said.

In September, Tiffany D. Jackson, a 33-year-old fiction writer who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said that a man followed her onto a No. 3 train in Brooklyn, exposed himself and masturbated while staring at her.

She told the train operator and filed a report at a police station, though it was only after she posted an explicit photo of the man on Instagram and it circulated online that he was arrested.

At the Brooklyn station where Ms. Jackson first reported the encounter, the train operator directed her upstairs to a station booth for assistance. But she did not find that booth, and then, Ms. Jackson saw the offender standing next to her.

She said she hopped the turnstile, raced down to the platform and jumped on the next train toward Manhattan. At Times Square, she went to a police station, where she said officers wrote down her information and a description from the photo on her phone.

But Ms. Jackson said it felt as though they did not take her seriously. After she posted the photo on Instagram and her story spread, Chief Fox emailed her to say that he was sorry she had been victimized on the subway and that he took such cases seriously

“What’s so disturbing is that if I hadn’t posted the picture, one: He wouldn’t have been caught,” Ms. Jackson said. “And two: Nothing would have happened.”

As part of training for transit officers assigned to sex crimes, an anti-harassment group called Hollaback is providing guidance. The group’s deputy director, Debjani Roy, said officers must not dismiss victims’ concerns.

“It’s important to build that empathy and understanding that it is a very traumatic experience,” she said.

Note: In Egypt, this is a common happening to women on trains and buses




February 2016

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