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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 · 29/05/2025
Love rats. We had two when my kids were little. They (rats not kids) were box-trained and had the run of the house along with dog, cats, conure, a five-foot iguana and temporary rescue cases. Bliss.
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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 · 23/04/2025
Try raisins. My cat will sit, stay and 'up' (because cats don't beg) for raisins.
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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
Agree. Thanks for stating this so clearly for so many. Gives me more courage. We all need every drop of courage we can get.
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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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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Time for a radical Spring Cleaning. Corporations, not 'bad' per se, aren't people. And the very rich? A few might squeak through the needle's eye. But let's get them the hell out of the electoral process. We need strict contribution limits, as in other first world countries.
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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 · 14/03/2025
As sent this morning: Mr. Schumer, America needs a Watch Dog, not a Dead Dog. Your decision was a chance for the Democrats to finally draw a desperately overdue line. You blew it. This life-long Democrat and millions of others won't be contributing one cent to the party of Roll Over and Play Dead.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
As sent to Schumer: America needs a Watch Dog, not a Dead Dog. Thursday's decision was a chance for the Democrats to finally draw a desperately overdue line. You blew it. This life-long Democrat and millions of others won't be contributing one cent to the party of Roll Over and Play Dead.
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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 · 09/03/2025
Musk also suffers from psychotropic abuse disorder.
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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
To be clear, Canada has held a special immigration door open for high net worth applicants. So I doubt strict illegality. Morally this pales compared to stripping off the protected status of Haitians and Venezuelans, sending them to torture, death, or condemning kids to disease, or--fill in here.
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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 · 26/02/2025
Be still my heart. And LISTEN.
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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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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Not to mention a waste of time and money. Where is the E in DOGE?
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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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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Great work. The mess around how to teach reading is a literal scandal. (Tip: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.) But to cut funding for and generally dumbing down public education has been the Republican program since Reagan. Sowing increasing crops of deplorables, and now the GOP harvests the reward.
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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 · 17/01/2025
Hear, hear.
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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 · 06/01/2025
On the other hand... Darwin award.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Excellent point. Living partially in France for over twenty years, I have yet to bother with the red tape and possible rejection of submitting medical expenditures to my US BCBS, since the out-of-pocket costs are so reasonable. (A calamity might be a different story.)
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
And Making America Dumb-- so it votes dumb.
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
You're so very welcome!
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
So funny: 'Totalizing.' Does that have something to do with betting machines? But seriously, Orwell got pretty close to what we seem to be getting close to with his geopolitical blocs. Unthinkable then, unthinkable in 1984, but hey...
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
Pls see my relevant post if you have a moment. Vehemently agreeing, Kai
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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 · 29/12/2024
Loving all this stuff.
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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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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
You are correct. I assume they only warned about a suspected terrorist. 'Right-wing' is today's revelation. To clarify terms--the guy was a supporter of Germany's ultra right AfD party. Not a jihadi. (On current information.)
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Your intro citing Harris's fainting spells re Gaza (is she 'Eyeless in Gaza?') crypto, and anti-trust sums up much of the Dem's Absence Without Leave. Add blindness to immediate problems of the less-than-80%, e.g. the healthcare schlammassle, Big Ag, other DC 'investors'... well, there you go.
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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 · 21/12/2024
Plus, we learn today that the Saudis warned the German govt acutely 2-3 times about this terrorist-to-be. 'Clowns to the left of me, clowns to the right...'
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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 · 20/12/2024
What the hell does he know about Germany?
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
G K Chesterton!
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Kai Maristed @kaimaristed.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Hurry up and get that passport, before the usa shuts down. Fingers crossed re Pshares. Great journal, great people.
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