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Ben Mauk
@benmauk
Ben Mauk’s posts
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Cluster munitions are civilian-killing machines. It is guaranteed that any cluster bombs used in Ukraine will continue to kill children and other civilians for the next three decades, no matter the outcome of the war.
Excited to join the New America fellows program for 2024 alongside many brilliant writers and filmmakers.
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Replying to @NAFellows @OliviaGoldhill and 7 others
#2024NAFellow @benmauk is a Berlin-based writer and filmmaker whose work has been featured in @nytimes, @NewYorker, & more. The director of the award-winning film Reeducated, Mauk is now writing a book on communities outside the administrative state. newamerica.org/our-people/ben
Germany remains a dangerously anti-Semitic country in ways large and small, from militant neo-Nazi cells to the criminalization of support for Palestine to the policing of Jewish identity among the liberal mainstream. Differences of degree, not kind.
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German investigators carried out raids across the country on Wednesday as Berlin banned a far-right group it described as a "cult-like, deeply racist and anti-Semitic association" that sought to indoctrinate children with Nazi ideology. dlvr.it/SwfgwH
REEDUCATED has won a Peabody Award!
Thank you to Erbaqyt, Amanzhan, and Orynbek for sharing your stories with the world.
Congratulations to co-creators Sam Wolson, Matt Huynh, and Nicholas Rubin. Congrats to on its first-ever Peabody.
peabodyawards.com/award-profile/
“Berlin-based entrepreneur,” “henhouse-based fox” twitter.com/pr0blematim/st
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Returning from hiatus for exactly one second to celebrate the launch of The Dial! Issue 1: Egg is now live with dispatches from Turkey and Poland, an interview with Annie Ernaux, and poems in translation from Shin Hae-Uk and Spencer Lee Lenfield.
Every branch of the U.S. military has planted mines in Iraq. Around 117,000 were planted in Iraq and Kuwait during the first Gulf War, most of them delivered with GATOR cluster bomb systems. Cluster bombs are banned in over 100 countries. 99% of stockpiles have been destroyed.
The Dial’s Issue 2: Energy is online now. Read on the German curiosity of the Literaturhaus and dispatches from the Netherlands and Ukraine, with more stories from the issue dropping in the weeks to come:
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The clusters look like balls and children pick them up thinking they are toys. Around 13,400 mine explosion victims have been recorded in Iraqi Kurdistan since the 1990s,. They are a menace to Kurdistan even today, as I wrote about last year.
Curious whether editors realize how pathetic this looksbut I suspect not.
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ZEIT Cover jetzt mit midjourney erstellt, weil die eine:n Grafiker:in bezahlen ist so 2022
I have a story in the current issue of American Short Fiction, available wherever fine fiction is sold.
americanshortfiction.org/current-issue/
Industry leading word rate, world’s largest circulation (22 million), non-insane publisher, hell yeah I’ll write for aarp
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Replying to @afrofatalism
bro go write for the aarp magazine or something
There’s only one cool bootleg literary hat out there and it’s my camo New Yorker boonie hat with high-vis hunter orange lettering from
You should check out our Rivers issue. We just published the final piece, a report from the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq by , alongside dispatches from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Norway, Italy, Ukraine, China, France…
It’s been wonderful to work with this dream team for the past year+ and imagine our ideal magazine — we’re so excited we can finally share it with the world.
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.@thedialmag is here, and it’s incredible (though not edible). 
Honored to work on this project with an extraordinary team including @mmschwartz, @lindakinstler, @benmauk, @MattZeitlin + @jcljules.
Sign up for updates: Thedial.world
Honored to work on this project with an extraordinary team including @mmschwartz, @lindakinstler, @benmauk, @MattZeitlin + @jcljules.
Sign up for updates: Thedial.world
Honored to be a 2023-24 NEH Public Scholar!
The New Yorker newsroom on our Peabody win:
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Today The New Yorker received its first Peabody Award, for “Reeducated,” a combined virtual-reality documentary and interactive feature that exposed the inside of a secret detention camp in Xinjiang, China. nyer.cm/coBbeZm
Science fiction undersold the extent to which AI would reveal the captive mind’s profound desire for an unassailable authority to tell them what to do.
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Replying to @PopSci
Administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”
If ChatGPT said yes, the book was removed from the library.
popsci.com/technology/iow
REEDUCATED is nominated for a Peabody Award
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2022 certainly delivered many diverse, interdisciplinary forms of meaningful storytelling. For the FIRST TIME in #PeabodyAwards history, here are the nominees for Interactive Media! 
bit.ly/PeabodyNominees
#Peabody83 #StoriesThatMatter #InteractiveStorytelling
Hard to shock me when it comes to German journalism, but I’m truly revolted by Berlin’s largest daily newspaper whitewashing China’s atrocities in Xinjiang. Starts by defending state junket, no mention of camps, prisons, or violence against Uyghurs.
A powerful book, highly recommended.
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#Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil watched as his friends disappeared into China's camps. He knew his turn would come soon.
Then he escaped. Now, in this searing, powerful, beautifully written memoir, Tahir shares his story with the world.
My translation out Aug 1 fr @penguinpress.
Steve Jobs fixed boredom
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the next zuckerberg is up all night, coding up an AI girlfriend/boyfriend.
Steve Jobs fixed boredom (phone)
Zuck fixed people watching (FB/IG)
Speigel fixed flirting (Snap)
The next one will fix loneliness.
people will mock it, use it, then be addicted to it.
Have it on good authority that I am one of the few people on EARTH with the knowledge to tell you that this book is brilliant, the writer an essayist with no peers, and you must order it
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My new book, NO JUDGMENT, is out in March. Eight new essays, nothing previously published, on: gossip, Goodreads, Berlin, autofiction, vulnerability, anxiety, spoilers, and revenge 
Here's the US cover and preorder link: harpercollins.com/products/no-ju
Here's the US cover and preorder link: harpercollins.com/products/no-ju
This is literature
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I dreamt I was in beautiful Stockholm in my Issey Miyake gift jacket from a dear friend
Holy marmot! “Shadows, Tokens, Spring: A Plague Journey” will appear in this year’s Best American Science & Nature Writing, edited by and . Thanks and congratulations to my @vqronline editors @reyes_edits and
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Thrilled to be joining @WriteBerlin with an eight-week in-person Nonfiction Writing I course starting October 16. We’ll read Grace Paley, Truman Capote, Jamaica Kinkaid, Gary Indiana, Hilton Als and more as we learn to think about how writing works. berlinwritersworkshop.com/nonfiction-wri
An incredible update from to the case of Rahima Senbai, one of the former detainees from Xinjiang who features in my oral history of mass internment. A report issued upon her release acknowledges she posed “no actual threat” despite months of detention.
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Replying to @shahitbiz
(It is important to note that it is very rare for the high "information" officials to lie outright - usually they twist and rely on word games. Even here, the denial of long-term detention can technically be attributed to Rahima's family, though Elijan still presents it.) (8/9)
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This story on “the largest financial scandal in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany” contains even more German institutional stupidity, and cocaine, than I would have guessed.
It’s because celebrities have to appear in public spaces like the rest of us to enjoy what the agora has to offer, making Berlin, on the contrary, the realest city
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You can tell that Berlin isn't a real city by the way everyone gets so excited when international celebrities visit. People in actual big cities expect famous people to be there and wouldn't let a guy eating fast food or getting rejected from a club dominate social media for 24hr twitter.com/dondatimes/sta…
This book is excellent and important.
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From today's @nytimes. Thanks again to @nytmay for this outstanding profile of leading #Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil. It's been a privilege translating @TahirIzgil's poetry & memoir, and it's so good to see how his work is raising awareness of the crisis in the Uyghur homeland.
We just had to get out, you know? There's a lot of good stock left around Accord, and it's so adorable up there. Claire has a painting studio in the barn. It was hard to pull the kids out of school, of course, but they're adjusting.
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This photo of the Astor Place cube getting transported upstate to get rejuvenated … it heals me
Critically important that we never standardize this across cultures. It will endanger the meet cute reserves, the slapstick ecosystem, the hijinks supply chain… twitter.com/MattBruenig/st
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It really is as simple as there being too many journalists in New York
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Part of a staff-reduction/automation strategy. Ultimate goal is each CVS has a single employee with severe hypertension
Reminds me I got into a shootout with a mime at the rave this weekend
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Any other academics ever feel that maybe under it all you’re just a highbrow clown paid to do a little song and dance with some jokes thrown in to make the children laugh and the grownups smile for a few forgettable moments at the county fair we call the university? No, just me?
This was such a wonderful event! Thank you to everyone who came and engaged with the work, asked questions, etc. I’m blown away and fühle mich sehr sehr geehrt.
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Replying to @CarlSchurzHaus
...des UWC über seine Reportagereisen. In den letzten Jahren verhaftete die Staatsmacht in Xinjiang eine Million Uigur*innen sowie andere muslimische Minderheiten und ließ sie in streng geheimen "Umerziehungslagern" einsperren. Kostenlose Anmeldung: programm@carl-schurz-haus.de!
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You broke the first rule which is don’t talk to Germans about your Jewishness
Interestingly, in some German supermarkets you must weight your own bananas. In others you must absolutely not!
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Under socialism, there will be no bananas, but there will be free, compulsory German language instruction.
From China to Palestine, if “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” does not extend by analogy to other atrocities it is a moral failure.
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With this op-ed 
sinologists #Heberer and Schmidt-Glintzer only make matters worse. They fail to offer satisfactory explanations about the 'exploratory academic trip' to XUAR and their scandalous @NZZ article on the situation of the #Uyghurs in 
/1 table.media/china/en/opini
sinologists #Heberer and Schmidt-Glintzer only make matters worse. They fail to offer satisfactory explanations about the 'exploratory academic trip' to XUAR and their scandalous @NZZ article on the situation of the #Uyghurs in /1 table.media/china/en/opini
Our third (very very good) issue at is about reparations in the 21st century. It’s online now with dispatches from Egypt, Germany, South Africa, Ukraine, and more to come —
I have long wanted to colonize Germany
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Who said Germans didn't have a sense of humour? This journalist is annoyed that foreigners don't learn German in Berlin, calling them "arrogant" and...
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"also a form of colonialism" 
berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/expat
To have loved and lost is better than never to have loved; to get drunk, bum three cigarettes, and regret it the next morning better than never to have smoked at all
Incredible to think that there are almost certainly more indigenous people imprisoned in deracinating boarding schools now than at any time in human history.
The Dial's 8th issue, DRUGS, is live. Dispatches from Syria, Bogota, the Philippines, London, and elsewhere, on Ozempic, captagon, laughing gas, and good old marijuana, among other mind- and body-altering substances.
An actual dream come true for this onetime science writer
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But if you send it by fax they are legally required to come up with one
Incredible stuff. In the Freud Archives with much dumber charlatans
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Replying to @MaxBlumenthal
After Ben violated the terms of our mediation agreement, I decided to break my silence about his deceptions and financial crimes. But I waited for an opportunity to hold him personally accountable.
When I and Anya Parampil confronted Ben about his crimes during a visit to…
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