Our timelines are trauma tsunamis. This week, I helped a friend soundboard how to get his wife and kids out of Lebanon (shocker: it was not hard to be more helpful than this State Department). Today, the National Guard parked itself on my street for the second time in six| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Parties who benefit from harmful and abusive systems tend to follow the pattern of practice of selling oppressive systems to the public with liberation language. Easy! Quick! Hands-free! Cashless! Democratizing! It isn’t a total gaslight— if you squint your eyes and tilt your head| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Tax exempt status is not an identity. When I worked in Afghanistan we had a literacy program we could not call a literacy program and a school I was told to not call a school. The school’s student body was primarily made up of widowed grandmothers who brought their| Sabrina Hersi Issa
It is my birthday. “What do you get the woman who has everything?” my friend asked. Back in January at the height of the California wildfires, a close friend texted, “If the place that finally feels like peace to you, where you can finally breathe burns| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Ambiguity, the absence of transparency and clear channels of accountability is a mechanism to burden the lesser powerful. There is a community of analysts who work on complex dense issues that are boring to most normies (but not us!) where we discuss, not war-planning, but how to make research, analysis| Sabrina Hersi Issa
People seek safety in small numbers. I have a friend whose job is to match study abroad students with host families for their academic year. I have another friend whose job is to design and build cohorts for new soldiers entering bootcamp training. I am never surprised by how similarly| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Trust is consistency built over time. Back in 2016-ish, I was on a team of analysts evaluating and assessing a range of infrastructure investments and interventions to counter the white supremacist nationalist movement and build durable power for people of color. I was a later addition to the group so| Sabrina Hersi Issa
In January 2017, I flew to Chicago for the Obama farewell speech. I am someone who deeply dislikes crowds and running into people, so the decision to go was very last minute to the point that I was still considering whether or not to bail riding in my Uber to| Sabrina Hersi Issa
“Hope is a woman who has lost her fear…” the Alice Walker poem goes. Hope rises, She always does, did we fail to notice this in all the stories they’ve tried to suppress? This week we witnessed Rachel Maddow receive important| Sabrina Hersi Issa
An old mentor of mine is one of the world’s leading experts on analyzing extremist and insurgency movements. She is old school in the way that she uses a flip phone and doesn’t do email but savvy to have intentionally invested in training a generation of| Sabrina Hersi Issa
They say love is a verb for a reason. Last January, I was back in Washington, DC and on my way to a big group dinner I was hosting focused on joy, care and community. I got an idea and stopped at a CVS on the way, headed to| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Loss does not depress me. It focuses me. Hello, Sabrina here. I last wrote to this list in January 2022. I was only a few weeks into recovering from an intense car accident. My intention in restarting and resetting this digital space today is to create a container to| Sabrina Hersi Issa
(TW/CW: This email newsletter describes a car accident and bystander failures) About two months ago, while I was in California for work I got into a terrible car accident that nearly killed me. The accident had all the elements of a scene out of a movie: an elderly driver| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Recall: Last week we learned how to hack sunk cost and that I am a massive women’s endurance sports super nerd (and yes, this is yet another whole newsletter on US women’s track and field. You are welcome in advance!) Make it make sense I recently| Sabrina Hersi Issa
Shame is a powerful weapon of control. Crooked, lying, fake. These are the slurs mainstreamed by Donald Trump to describe the work of journalists and truth-tellers. It is projection and deflection in action. The language weaponizes shame to deride and devalue the work of those holding power to account. Journalists| Sabrina Hersi Issa