To everyone reaching out to me with concern: I’m fine. I stand by my journalism and I will never be ashamed of writing about my struggles with mental illness and drug abuse. To anyone facing similar demons: you are not alone. I am proof that healing is possible. Stick with it. To the people who have spent so much energy trying to bring me down: I am still standing. I am still learning, and growing, and healing from a long history of trauma more each day. I wish them only more peace of mind than they seem to have, in their current state of existence.

So I don’t know how all your Friday nights are going, but my phone, while plugged into our car’s navigation system, just spontaneously pulled up the route from Israel into Lebanon, which stayed on the screen for a few minutes, and then disappeared 😱 (I have never been to Israel...and had not been searching for those terms in Google maps previously)

Whatever I’ve written about #Syria seems so meaningless, in the face of such tragedy. Most of you won’t read this and who can blame you? Impotent grief is hard to feel. But if I had to choose 1 story from 10 years of watching a country burn, it’s this one. foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/29/syr… Many other heartrending moments never made it into print, like the little boy I met in 2012 at a camp in Aley. He couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9. This was just after Obama walked back his red line. This child saw his father and uncle killed in front of him. His sister later.

My IPhone just reminded me of the weirdest thing I've ever seen while reporting. I was staying with a tribe in the KRG. This tribe had been on that land for many centuries, and digging up ancient artifacts the whole time. Their patriarch showed me this, in their makeshift museum. I'm very curious to know more about this artifact, because it's very interesting-looking, but that's not the weird part. This is the weird part. The tribal leader told me the stump had been there for three years. The museum had no windows, so no light. It had been given no water.

This is my great-grandmother, Bahiyeh, who grew up in Damascus. When her husband’s family wanted to marry her 8-year-old daughter, my teta, to a cousin in his 20s, she took her child and escaped to Lebanon, where they lived in hiding for years, so their family wouldn’t kill them. This is Souad, my teta, who grew up poor, in a country notorious for its xenophobia and sectarianism. She was married and divorced twice; the second time to my jido, Adib Bassil. Adib came from a wealthy Maronite Catholic family (yes, the same as Gebran, to our endless shame).

We need a more moral foreign policy, particularly in MENA; not just because it's right, but because exploitation, invasion, turning local populations against us, and selling weapons to dictators who serve our interests while preaching about democracy hasn't worked out so well. I was on a panel in which I argued for this, and several men kind of smirked, like I was naive. One brought up the idea that weapons sales to dictators gives us some measure of control over them. I just thought, somewhere in hell, Saddam Hussein is having a good laugh at that one

My husband just entered the U.S. for the first time, and the U.S. CBP agent who interviewed him was an Arab who joyfully shouted "Salaam aleikum, welcome to America" at the top of his lungs while stamping his passport, so I'd say it's pretty clear the atmosphere has changed. Apparently he repeated it several times, loudly, while looking around to make sure all the other officers heard him. Must have been a rough four years 😂

I love my country so damn much. We made it. Onward and up.

Former @TheAtlantic managing editor @jenzerb writes about the environment of toxic masculinity there under previous EIC James Bennet, who was replaced by @JeffreyGoldberg. This piece validates so many of my problems with the way legacy media treats women. jenzerb.medium.com/i-left-my-care… @TheAtlantic @jenzerb @JeffreyGoldberg Also came across this while reading, from Mr. Goldberg. Yikes. It really hit home because that seems to have been the attitude I've received from so many male editors at magazines: you've been writing for web, you're probably not good enough for a print feature (I wrote a book)

So Republicans can incite a white supremacist insurrection that provided cover for an attempted terrorist attack, actively and willfully spread a deadly virus ravaging our country, and not only face zero consequences, but have the chutzpah to complain that they're being silenced. I'm sorry, was that too biased of me? Perhaps I should have afforded equal weight to the outrageous positions of the people who almost destroyed my country; so as to give them an even more inflated sense of their ability to break the law without repercussion.

Really want to stress that cancelling your @nytimes subscriptions is not the solution. Consuming--and funding--less good journalism is not the answer. Being rigorous consumers of the news who hold sources of it accountable from a place of informed engagement is a better approach. The reason I am telling you not to cancel your Times subscription is because there are places in the world where indescribable things happen to human beings, and the industry is in freefall, so most journalism there is really only being done by NYT and a handful of other outlets.

Literally nothing makes me angrier than institutionalized, unacknowledged sexism. I'm indescribably tired of being implicitly held to different standards because of my gender. I'm tired of watching less talented/qualified men be taken seriously when I have to fight so hard to be. I'm tired of the army of male trolls waiting to leap on my every typo or error/correction, twist it beyond recognition and hold it up to the public as evidence that I'm not good at my job/crazy/not very bright. I'm tired of men in this industry being so quick to believe them.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but traditional media just failed us hugely. Journalists with no real stake in the damage being done insisted on reporting down to the partisan rabble. Their inability to deviate from convention normalized a situation that was entirely insane. The solution is not to do away with standards of objectivity in journalism. Taking a step back and coolly examining a subject from all angles is important. Fighting bias in your reporting is crucial. That doesn't mean you should get fired for expressing an opinion on Twitter.

Absolutely shocking that @nytimes fired Lauren Wolfe for her tweet when Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephenson together have fallen on their faces countless times all over their pages; forget about Twitter. Really shocking gender bias, caving to bad faith criticism and just cruelty. Lauren did not deserve to lose her job because a mob of right-wing trolls and Glenn Greenwald rightly bet that a woman showing vulnerability while witnessing an historic event would be a popular target for partisan scorn and draw disdain from employers. Very sad to see this.

I have never said this in public, because I haven't wanted to burn those bridges. I just dc anymore. If journalism doesn't work out, I will survive.

The way editors (95% men) have treated me has taken a high toll on my self-esteem and mental health.

That's it. That's the tweet. It sucks to work hard and do things you're proud of and still be consistently treated as completely disposable in a profession with no protective industry standards. I know they do it to a lot of other freelancers, also men. I know gender is not the only factor. It just compounds

Yet another thread about white supremacist terrorism--which again, is very clearly what we are dealing with. Not just according to me, but law enforcement. So I am going to do a little explainer about what these people want and where their skinheads are at right now. To start with, I'm not talking about the “armed protesters.” There is overlap but not all goobers with giant guns are like this. The most violent white supremacist terrorists, though, are a lot like AQ or ISIS. Again, some actively nurture that connection.

https://twitter.com/SulomeAnderson/status/1347996723071823872?s=20

Ok fellow journalists. I know some of you dislike me (I’m actually nice) but I hope you will see why this is important. A thread on what to watch for re: domestic terrorism while covering anything like 1/6. This is offered with the best of intentions, and in the public interest. 1. Please familiarize yourself with the most violent white supremacist terrorist groups and their symbols/insignia. Much imagery in the latter is not immediately recognizable as terroristic or Nazi in nature to anyone who isn’t already aware of the connection, so research now.

I don't know how many of you realize this, but QAnon Shaman and his band of weirdos were 100% a distraction from the trained militia terrorists, who were not in costume. Please stop letting this furry neo-Nazi make you take what's happening less seriously. buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanu… Fast forward to 20 seconds of this @NewYorker video. Check out the photographer fixating on Furry Neo-Nazi (I like this name better than QAnon Shaman), while the cosplayers yell out their strategy and take pics of documents. Very effective technique.

https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1350843696930025480?s=20

Anyone who feels like going down a deep, dark rabbit hole on a Saturday night, check out the Order of the Nine Angles, a neo-Nazi occult group that seems to be increasingly influential and is known for...recruiting U.S. military to carry out terrorism. washingtonpost.com/national-secur… In addition to accelerationism and encouraging military and law enforcement personnel to commit terrorism, the O9A also enthusiastically endorses ritual child sex abuse. That should interest the folks in QAnon. bbc.com/news/world-531…

This news makes perfect sense if you look at other reporting on ties between Russia and white supremacist groups. nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/…

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1350583133188608003

For example, the leader of violent neo-Nazi group The Base, which was recorded last fall trying to recruit U.S. military and law enforcement personnel to carry out terrorist operations, is literally running the group from St. Petersburg. bbc.com/news/world-512…

Please stop saying the #Capitol attack was "loosely organized online." The mob used to disguise the core terrorists was loosely organized online. The terrorists were trained ex-military militiamen, and highly organized. They were minutes away from success. apnews.com/article/ex-mil… This is why people who don't understand terrorism should comment on these things less. The most dangerous of these groups have been recruiting and training ex-military and law enforcement for years. They are not a bunch of yahoos. They are very dangerous.

https://twitter.com/SulomeAnderson/status/1347992454499356674?s=20

Anyone who sincerely believes anything about this needs to have their brains checked. What are they scheming up now

https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1349492130578919425

I double dog dare anyone to get up in my mentions with “you call yourself a journalist” or “biased liberal hack” or whatever stupid shit you’re going to project at me. I am a journalist and a PATRIOT. I love my country. I want it to be a better place. I don’t want it to be Russia