Frederick Deknatel
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freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Frederick Deknatel
@freddydeknatel.bsky.social
2.4K followers 3.1K following 2.2K posts
Journalist, fellow at Century International, editor of Hidden Cities: https://hiddencities.substack.com/

Previously: Founding executive editor, Democracy in Exile @dawnmenaorg.bsky.social; managing editor @wpr.bsky.social; staff editor @foreignaffairs.com
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freddydeknatel.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 2:27 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 2:19 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 1:27 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“We Are Still Here,” a new poem in Hidden Cities by Vaheed Ramazani.
hiddencities.substack.com/p/we-are-sti...
"We Are Still Here" Is your home still a home when your house has been demolished? Is your neighborhood still a neighborhood when your neighbors are dead or gone? When there is no food, electricity, water no schools, hospitals, markets? Sabah Abu Ghanem and her family return from a tent encampment in southern Gaza to find in Gaza City the skeleton of their home. "This rubble I can call mine" says Sabah.
November 8, 2025 at 3:43 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Is your home still a home
when your house has been demolished?

Is your neighborhood still a neighborhood
when your neighbors are dead or gone?

“We Are Still Here,” a new poem in Hidden Cities by Vaheed Ramazani

hiddencities.substack.com/p/we-are-sti...
November 7, 2025 at 3:16 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 3:30 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
The incoming mayor should do the reasonable and “conciliatory” thing and jet off to Bermuda every weekend unannounced, or spend his nights in a fancy private club where he can solicit bribes and kickbacks.
Given the demands of the job, mayors often seek an outlet to escape the pressure. Michael R. Bloomberg took frequent trips to Bermuda. Bill de Blasio spent leisurely mornings at his favorite gym in Park Slope. The outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, was fond of visiting exclusive nightclubs like Zero Bond. Asked if there was anything he would keep from his life before becoming mayor, even if it might get him into trouble, Mr. Mamdani laughed and mentioned his favorite caffeinated beverage. "I will continue to drink Adeni chai," he said. "I'm just not sure where I'll be doing it."
November 6, 2025 at 12:39 AM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
It was, in fact, just about a sandwich. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...
On rebuttal, a federal prosecutor told jurors that the case wasn't about dissent or opposition to government actions, saying that the defendant was asking for a "free pass" on his behavior. The prosecutor said that Dunn tossed the footlong like a "baseball pitch, even if it’s a sandwich," and that they had proven that Dunn was guilty. "We’re not just talking about a sandwich," Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael C. DiLorenzo said. "This isn’t about a sandwich."
November 5, 2025 at 10:16 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
I wonder now long the Times will keep banging the Andrew Cuomo drum.
3 minutes ago Andy Newman In absolute numbers, Andrew Cuomo got a lot of support. Final totals are not in, but he has racked up over 850,000 votes. That would have been enough to win any of the last seven mayoral elections, when turnout was much lower. In this contest he fell short by more than 150,000 votes. for by Cuomo for NY
November 5, 2025 at 1:06 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
There's a long way to go and American government itself is under threat, but between this, letting SNAP run out, threatening to ground planes because of the shutdown, etc, I can't help but think Trump is ultimately headed for George W Bush-level approvals.

Just wait until he invades Venezuela!
November 3, 2025 at 6:38 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
"One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign."
Entire departments of postcolonial studies will churn out papers interrogating the obliviousness that led us all to that very dark place, as though no one had seen from the beginning exactly what that place was, as though no one had screamed warnings at the top of their lungs back when there was time to do something. One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn.
October 31, 2025 at 7:46 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
The Economist, perhaps not surprisingly, is also here to tell you that the specter of a higher minimum wage or free bus travel in New York under a Mayor Mamdani "would be a disaster for the city." view.e.economist.com?qs=0cf7700ac...
Mr Mamdani has built his campaign around the idea that life in New York has become too expensive. He is right, but his solutions—which include rent control, a higher minimum wage, free bus travel and so on—would be a disaster for the city. Meanwhile, a New Yorker 45 years his senior is itching to “straighten out” the city of his birth. Working from Washington, Donald Trump could use the flow of federal money and an immigration clampdown to whip up trouble.
October 30, 2025 at 9:03 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
"Can you really say a colonnade designed and built (albeit later restored) by Jefferson can be sacrificed? Or a building commissioned by Roosevelt and designed by McKim, Mead and White, architects of the shamefully demolished Penn Station? Or a bunker built by FDR during the second world war?"
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/8564e199-23b7-4c9a-980c-f0abde58215e It’s a familiar refrain; the building has been messed about with, it’s not original. Frequently, with historic buildings, that works, and in the US often only the exterior is landmarked. But this is the White House. Can you really say that a colonnade designed and built (albeit later restored) by Thomas Jefferson can be sacrificed? Or a building commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt and designed by McKim, Mead and White, architects of the shamefully demolished Penn Station? Or a bunker built by FDR during the second world war? Or the rose garden laid out by Jacqueline Kennedy (which Trump paved over)?
October 28, 2025 at 6:45 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
A painful reminder that Karine Jean-Pierre somehow had the most powerful, consequential public communications job in the world.
I mean, it was nasty articles that were coming out daily. You should go back and see for yourself. You’re writing the articles, right? You should go back and see for yourself. It was a campaign. It was even reported that it was a campaign. So you think asking him to step aside was O.K., but there shouldn’t have been nasty articles? Look, what I am saying is it shouldn’t have happened that way. But it should have happened, or shouldn’t have happened? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don’t think it should have happened. I believe that we should have done everything that we could, regardless of who was at the top of the ticket, and fought extremely hard. He was the one at the top of the ticket, and so, therefore, I believe we should have fought to make sure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. That’s what I believed.
October 28, 2025 at 6:29 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Paging the Peacemaker Abroad:
October 28, 2025 at 5:48 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
What the fall of Baghdad, the occupation, sectarianism, and callous American adventurism could not erase: a sense of humor, of food, of hospitality and humanity. hiddencities.substack.com/p/playing-ch...
October 25, 2025 at 8:34 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Douthat: “in the end Trump's architectural legacy will probably be a useful building, built expeditiously, that looks, if not dazzling, at least appropriate, pleasing, fine.”
tasteful. I would like to live in a world where American architecture somehow picked up where Art Nouveau and Art Deco left off, and the Trump administration's preference for neoClassical styles feels cautious and derivative even before you get to Trump's own impulse to put the gilt in Gilded Age. But gilt can always be stripped off. The general design of the Trump ballroom - if you look at the actual sketches, not the social-media caricatures - is perfectly in keeping with the character of the White House complex, and if there's any place where a cautious classicalism is approprinte, it's at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So in the end Trump's architectural legacy will probably be a useful building, built expeditiously, that looks, if not dazzling, at least appropriate, pleasing, fine. Albert Speer’s model of Germania.
October 25, 2025 at 7:30 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Do you think Douthat the architecture critic is as upset about every other presidential library designed by a modernist architect, or his disgust for some reason only applies Obama 🤔?
By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist The controversial public building is ugly and intimidating, architectural vainglory battening on presidential ego, inappropriate to its setting, unmoored from memory and tradition. I'm talking, naturally, about Barack Obama's unfinished presidential center, currently looming like a Star Wars barracks over the residents of Chicago's South Side. Admittedly it's not the most important architectural controversy involving an American president at the moment. But how you think about Donald Trump's demolition of the White House's East Wing to make way for a large neoClassical ballroom should be connected to how you feel about the Obama megalith and the larger urban-progressive approach to public building.
October 25, 2025 at 7:17 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Anyone at TIME regretting this cover?
October 25, 2025 at 6:24 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Every Democrat in Congress should be issuing a statement like this. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...
Senator Angus King, the Maine independent, became one of the first senators to criticize the construction project at the White House, whose scale is only now becoming clear. "President Trump's desecration of the White House is an insult to the American people and betrayal of the obligation to safeguard our history and heritage," King said in a statement, adding: "The White House does not belong to President Trump; it belongs to the American people."
October 22, 2025 at 8:20 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
“potential ethical conflicts” you say?
Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that cypically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts.
October 21, 2025 at 6:49 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN BEHOLD YOUR NEW GOD!
October 20, 2025 at 2:31 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
Trump the peacemaker, give him the Nobel. on.ft.com/3WMSQSu
Donald Trump urged Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept Russia's terms for ending its war in a volatile White House meeting on Friday, warning that Vladimir Putin had said he would "destroy" Ukraine if it did not agree. The meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents descended many times into a "shouting match", with Trump "cursing all the time", people familiar with the matter said. They added that the US president tossed aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine, insisted Zelenskyy surrender the entire Donbas region to Putin, and repeatedly echoed talking points the Russian leader had made in their call a day earlier.
October 19, 2025 at 4:52 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
lol what are the chances this “college football fan” is actually MBS? www.nytimes.com/athletic/672...
Earlier Thursday, a UNC football official, speaking on condition of anonymity, provided The Athletic with a statement confirming Lombardi's visit, which said he "went to Saudi Arabia to meet with high-ranking government officials to discuss potential partnership opportunities." "The Saudis love UNC because of Coach Belichick and Michael Jordan," the statement added. Executive associate athletic director Steve Newmark declined to provide The Athletic details bout the person Lombardi met with. Later Thursday, UNC characterized the individual as a "college football fan" interested in "supporting Coach Belichick" in a statement to The News & Observer, which a reporter shared on X.
October 17, 2025 at 1:09 PM
freddydeknatel.bsky.social
For some reason, Sassoon has nothing to say about a different "cycle of censorship" coming from the federal government, demanding universities give up academic freedom and pledge loyalty to Donald Trump's political agenda in exchange for federal funding.
To break the cycle of censorship, students should be warned: If you disrupt this event in a manner that censors speech, we will identify you and impose severe consequences. If a student organization engineers such a disturbance, the group’s leadership will face the same fate. When robust security is paired with meaningful consequences for those who violate campus policies, threats of disruption and violence will lose their force as a weapon to monopolize campus speech. In the long run, that is the right investment to ensure that Mr. Kirk’s killer and those who use less lethal forms of intimidation do not have the last word.
October 13, 2025 at 6:33 PM