People gather at Bergen Diyanet Mosque to perform Eid al-Fitr prayer in Cliffside Park in New Jersey on May 13, 2021.(Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
We’re still thinking about the 20th anniversary of 9/11. After the attacks that day, Muslim Americans endured years of racism and discrimination, often at the hands of the state itself. The fight against government surveillance of Muslim Americans continues today, as the Supreme Court takes up a challenge to government efforts to conceal FBI abuse of power—in a case dating from 2006, when the FBI in Los Angeles hired an informer to infiltrate several mosques in Orange County, Calif. Ahilan Arulanantham explains—he will be arguing the case at the Supreme Court. He’s a professor at UCLA Law School and codirector of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy there.
Also: There’s a new comedy on TV about college teachers and campus politics—The Chair, on Netflix, starring Sandra Oh as the first Asian American woman chair of an English department. Amy Wilentz comments—she’s a professor in the English Department at UC Irvine, which has some surprising connections to the show.
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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.
Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.