Karen Attiah

BREAKING: After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I'm happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post. They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/b...

Add this to the Angel Reese Finals statement game, Meg Victoria's Secret Walk, Cardi B Tiny Desk. Lots of thriving black women on the TL & I love to see it.

@karenattiah.bsky.social CONGRATULATIONS 🎉

mood:

Winning feels good. Channeled my inner Rihanna for some celebration shenanigans. 💰🍾✊🏾 Run me my coins, @washingtonpost.com!

Yup: Bruce Lee was a champion salsa dancer. See also: UFC fighter Valentina "The Bullet" Shevchenko, who trained as a dancer as a child and competed in dance competition shows.

In my experience, women have good lower-body flexibility/hip mobility-- especially if they have experience with, say, yoga. If they don't, they are willing to work extra on flexibility/ mobility to improve. Plus-- kickboxing is just one of the best workouts you can do to get into shape fast!

There's a reason why striking martial artists would rather just walk away from anyone with a Muay Thai / Dutch kickboxing background. I also wouldn't mess with anyone who has trained kyokushin karate tho.

An explosive, Muay Thai spinning back elbow is one of the most devastating strikes there is

I earned my second degree black belt in taekwondo twenty four years ago at age 45. We were taught elbow strikes were most powerful. In 1998 while in Bangkok I saw a Muay Thai match on TV and watched a man do a spinning back elbow to his opponent's head, dropping him like a rock. Done.

Related to the question of why more women 40+ are getting into Muay Thai and lifting-- I think a lot of us have enough mileage to look back over our lives and are dealing with the rage of being held back by men, misogynistic social conditioning, etc. And we are justifiably PISSED.

This reminds me of the one time I was accused of plagiarism by my white history teacher from Colorado, at my international high school in Tanzania. Half the boys in class had literally copied and pasted from Microsoft Encarta. I pulled my first all-nighter ever writing my essay. I was so proud of it

“This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media /intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “ www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...

This news is both beautiful and brutal.

@marawilson.bsky.social I’ve thought about color privilege, pretty privilege, other types of privilege. But I’ve never thought about funny privilege as a form of social insulation. Really interesting to consider.

Write book without using AI. Run manuscript through Pangram to make sure you can’t be accused of using AI. Pangram identifies some characteristics of AI writing. Change these in manuscript. You now have a book part-written by AI.

I don't think anyone appreciates the extent to which independent journalism in the global south over the last decade or so is simply disappearing from the historical record.

I literally teach classes on the harms of African stereotypes and tropes in western media. I read the Caine prize winning essay and purely on the story and the rhetorical devices? Reads very African to me.

Money to be made

FOR REAL like...at what point do people start saying "hmmm you just uploaded a work to a third party server without my authorization"

Its so unfortunate that this is the first time a lot of people are coming to know about the Caine Prize. And yes people should read articles before commenting! The Caine Prize is for African short stories, judged by other Africans.

Kate Greenberg, Jorge Zamanillo, Karen Attiah, and more–here are people we'd like to hang out with this October.

The limits of discussing the Caine prize AI controversy on BlueSky is that there aren’t enough African people or writers to actually discuss the story. The more robust discussion from African writers is on X. Sigh.

I'm reading the contested Caine Prize essay, "The Blue Fighter," and it is making me misty because I resonate with the story so much. It reminds me of my late father's own obsession with fish and fancy aquariums--- he built one in our house and was fixated on getting fancy tubes, food, etc.

Counterpoint— if you admit to using AI to bolster sloppy, superficial “lit crit” of African writing, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously. It’s astonishing how much intellectual mediocrity is okay as long as AI is involved.

Now we have people cheering for the Caine Prize to be eliminated all together. Because it's not just about attacking African writers individually-- it's about attacking pipelines for Black success. The Caine Prize is specifically not universal. It is for Africans, by Africans.

But they could at least have the decency to check their own coverage of Pangram… here’s the Atlantic back in May. This article also has some problems, but it is at least basically critical of marketing claims and looks at Pangram’s failures and misuse. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

If "AI" were a mere tool and not a political narrative you wouldn't need to headline "X used AI to do Y" all the time. Anything anyone does while "AI" is involved must reify "AI"'s power and relevance. Because it's not "just a tool", it's a project of disenfranchisement some willingly embrace.

One of the main duties of journalism is to weight credibility. One of my main points is that the article is asking us to trust a tech company's supposed accuracy-- While a Zimbabwean writer who has written for years, should not be trusted to write how they want about their own lives!

This is why I say that in the age of AI, it is imperative to be pro-human. Accuracy is not the measure of the value of literature. It is whether your intended audience, other humans, feel seen, recognized, moved by your work. This is what makes work human. This is not something AI can capture.

legit scary how many supposedly A.I.-wary people just trust whatever Pangram tells them