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Kai Maristed

@kaimaristed.bsky.social
557 followers 434 following 54 posts

Novelist, playwright, translator. Ploughshares, AGNI, Iowa, Five Points. Prize-winning fiction collection, The Age of Migration, coming in July. Anti-poverty and climate activist. I brake for spiders. substack.com/@kaimaristed, www.kaimaristed.com

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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
Theater Review by Kai Maristed: The End Is Nigh—and It’s a Blast: LaB’s Satirical Pageant of Survival and Spectacle artsfuse.org/325751/theat...
artsfuse.org
Theater Review: "The End Is Nigh"—and It’s a Blast: LaB’s Satirical Pageant of Survival and Spectacle - The Arts Fuse
Come for the frolic and high energy professional stagecraft; stay to experience this creative ensemble’s answer to: Who the hell are we, facing the end?
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
open.substack.com/pub/kaimaris...
open.substack.com
This Morning's Anthem: I Hate Men, from the musical Kiss Me Kate.
Frothing at the mouth while drinking coffee and scanning the news, furious over how all this insane destruction (flames now, famine—no fertilizer for the developing world!—to follow) is at the bullyin...
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The Arts Fuse @theartsfuse.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
@kaimaristed.bsky.social writes that "The Moderate" at Central Square Theater is a consistently engaging and engaged, insightful, humorous, scarily moving, polished contemporary drama with a premise to die for. artsfuse.org/324136/theat...
artsfuse.org
Theater Review: "The Moderate' - Ken Urban’s Dazzling, Disquieting Digital Drama - The Arts Fuse
A consistently engaging and engaged, insightful, humorous, scarily moving, polished contemporary drama with a premise to die for.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
A new Point de Vue! post. Go to Paris, have a look... kaimaristed.substack.com/p/fraternite...
kaimaristed.substack.com
Fraternité in Action
According to a certain (immigrant) American billionaire oligarch, empathy is a sloppy weakness, fatal to any country that aspires to world dominance.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
A new post from Kai's Paris letter, Point de Vue. 'Gangsters at the Gates.'
pointdevueparis.com
Gangsters at the Gates
The sun-soaked, Phoenician-founded port of Marseilles has long been famous for its succulent bouillabaise, formidable soccer talents, and, in long-ago decades, blood-thirsty gang vs gang subculture. But while the cocaine trade of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, as dramatized in the iconic film The French Connection, has faded from public awareness, it never went away. What goes underground eventually will surface. This year, from mid-April into May, prisons all over France holding drug kingpins have been battered by a blitzkrieg of attacks—Molotov cocktails, AK-47s, drones, torching of officials’ cars, and death-threats and rape-threats to guards, particularly those in charge of the…
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
My new review of a long-admired writer, for LARB--
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Here a letter I received as a member of Democrats Abroad. The scope of the SAVE Act is horrifying. Anyone can and should write in, from home or abroad, asap.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
If not for the source, nhpr.org, I'd have thought this story a plant. Too outlandish. Anyone else hear the cadence of goose-stepping boots?
nhpr.org
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 14/03/2025
like, they must think their voters are rubes who don’t understand what is happening
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
With thanks to Robert Reich, handy numbers to share liberally: White House: 1-202-456-1414 (switchboard). 1-202-456-1111 (comments). 'Jam it.' Senators and representatives. The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. The operator will connect you directly with the Senate or House office you request.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
My 2 cents on Rattner's Opinion piece: www.nytimes.com/shared/comme...
nytimes.com
Read a Times Reader's Comment on: Donald Trump Is Backed by the Business Elite
Behind closed doors, many top executives voice support for the new administration.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
IMPORTANT EVENT, please pass it on: standupforscience2025.org
standupforscience2025.org
STAND UP FOR SCIENCE
March 7, 2025. Washington DC and nationwide. Because science is for everyone.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
Great resource. Thanks for the research.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 01/03/2025
Today President Macron in a press conference said that if Putin is not stopped he will take Romania and Moldavia next.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
I deplore Schadenfreude. Normally. But this makes me want to do CARTWHEELS!!!
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Right now, quick dives into past writers are as necessary to me as a plunge into ice-water when the sauna gets too hot. My current voice of choice: the eternally contemporary Heinrich Heine. How he would lampoon this American Schlamassel, sparing no one!
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/02/2025
this is what we want to see. tariff the shit out of elon’s companies www.businesstoday.in/world/canada...
businesstoday.in
‘Make them pay’: Canada puts Trump’s ‘first friend’ Elon Musk’s Tesla in the crosshairs of tariff war
Canada’s EV adoption rate is outpacing that of the U.S., with nearly 17% of new cars sold in the third quarter of 2024 being fully electric, compared to just 8% in the US.
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National Book Critics Circle @bookcritics.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
NBCC member @kaimaristed.bsky.social reviewed "Command Performance," written by Jean Echenoz and translated by Mark Polizzotti, for World Literature Today:
buff.ly
Command Performance by Jean Echenoz
Trans. Mark Polizzotti. NRYB Classics. 2025. 162 pages.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
"[Trump] also reiterated claims about the need to engage in the herculean task of raking dry leaves out of forests — claims irrelevant to fires that have destroyed packed residential areas." WaPo. Call up the immigrants, Donald! Nowadays I take my laughs (read, coffee snorts) where I can get'em.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Will I be torched for saying the truth sometimes lies in the middle? Today's civil war re HB-1 visas: numeracy and literacy take years. We should triple public school investment, pay for more qualified teachers, ban phones in schools etc-- AND make big tech fund short courses for specific skills.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 26/12/2024
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-fi...
persuasion.community
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Jamie Raskin is among the hardest working of the new generation of leaders. Not a Headline Grabber. Educating and motivating the next generation of voters for many years now.
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chrislehmann @chrislehmann.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Where's the party? My latest (a review essay) for @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/poli...
thenation.com
What Happened to the Democratic Party?
The squalid state of our present political institutions points to a failure of not just individuals but the system as a whole.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Happy Holidays to you many thousands of govt workers frorced to work without a paycheck for the indefinite future! The Lord will provide!
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Watch: not this year's fictionalized movie but the real Bonhoeffer documentary (on Netflix.) The amazingly researched footage of the docu is a breathtaking study in Everyman courage so needed today.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
In Paris recently I binged on crackling new fiction from 'la rentree', six books, (real books, Kindle doesn't light my fire) - idea was also to write up a mega-review, compare & contrast - but it may be spring before I get to the last 'fin.'
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Plastic. Choking, poisoning the planet. The profit savior promised by Big Oil to stockholders sweating green energy. Today I lost it at Whole Foods over a tiny pkg of chicken thighs 2x more bubble container than meat. No alternative. The manager shrugged in sympathy. 'New product for GenZ!'
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Still up for that DR beach getaway? "Cage-like trucks fitted with iron bars... line up every morning at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ... not loaded with cattle, but with Haitians being deported. They include young men, pregnant women, unaccompanied children..." NYT Dec 9
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 09/12/2024
this is straightforwardly an effort to try to re-segregate the officer corps
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David R. Yale @davidryale.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
“Judge Woodruff ordered it closed. Owners appealed. Judge Ovington refused to hear it. So did Minnesota Supreme Court. All happened in two days. Who says government can’t move fast when it has to? Who says justice has to take six years longer than forever?” davidryale.com/getting-back... #Booksky
davidryale.com
Getting Back Our Stolen Bootstraps - David R. Yale
The Real Paul Makinen - a novel about how a blue-collar community's general strike triumphs over a right-wing conspiracy to suppress wages.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
If your Thanksgiving resolution is USxit (please no; you are needed) here is the 'Internations' list of top locations as rated by ex-pats. Hardly my personal set of rankings, but chacun a son gout. 1 Spain 2 Austria 3 UAE 4 Qatar 5 Luxembourg 6 Japan 7 Portugal 8 Denmark 9 Singapore 10 South Korea
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
It's snowing in Paris today. Rare magic, but hardly a stay against the debacle, the grotesque festival of egos and infinite greed, that was COP 29. Hard to see how the many climate innovations from universities and start-ups can do more than melt like snowflakes, faced with the accelerating heat.
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