Busboys and Poets

I think it's pronounced Anis.

Anis Amri Shalal, owner of the far-left hangout Busboys and Poets.

Former DAWN executive director Sarah Lee Whitson, who bizarrely griped during the COVID pandemic that Israelis were not sufficiently suffering, saying the nation was missing a tablespoon of blood.

And before that crowd, Van Hollen cemented his anti-Israel bona fides by delivering a keynote address, though no video has been publicly posted, and the senator's office did not respond to the Washington Free Beacon inquiry about the content of his remarks.

One other thing.

I am going to do a reading at the Busboys and Poets Cafe and Bookstore at 450 K Street Northwest in Washington, just a block outside of Chinatown, on October 19th, starting at 6:00 PM.

Free to get in.

I'm going to be selling and signing copies of Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison.

I want to thank Andy and Marjan Shalal, the owners and proprietors of the whole string of Busboys and Poets, my favorite bookstore in the world.

The food is fantastic there.

Get the catfish.

Write it on your menu.

We just saw, uh, uh, Andy Shalala, owner, uh, of the Busboys and Poets come out-

Yeah

... and literally say, "You can have a free, free Palestine drink if you just post about free Palestine."

And then at, uh, either six or seven check, uh, I think six, but a case, I think it's six at, uh, bus boys and poets in Washington, DC.

Um, so I think there are a couple of bus boys and poets location, but it's the locations, but it's the four 50 K street Northwest one, uh, Mike and I are going to be doing a book event, Busboys and Poets, with our friend Daniel Tutt.

And then the following Tuesday, so October 6th at 4 p.m., we're going to be doing an event at UMass Amherst.

Definitely open to the public, I checked, right? But it is going to be on campus tomorrow.

for a lot of niches, right? You're doing the vegan bookstore.

You're doing the, like, your politics, your Busboys and Poets with your civil rights library next to your coffee shop, right? This is a coffee chain, for those who don't know, in D.C.

It does very well, multiple locations, and people really like it.

And it's, like, a left-wing bookstore and a pretty good restaurant and coffee shop.

We've recently passed both the 25th anniversaries of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the opening of the Guantanamo Bay facility that has housed those captured and imprisoned in the course of the war on terror.

This event, which took place in Washington, D.C. at Busboys and Poets on September 13th, focused on the continued injustice of the indefinite detention of prisoners at the U.S. military compound, the obstacles to accountability faced by observers like Lisa Hudger and John Ryan that were put in place by the U.S. Department of Defense, and the present and future prospects of the facility and those who remained detained there.

Lisa Hajar is a longtime Merip contributor and editor, as well as a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of The War in Court, Inside the Long Fight Against Torture, which chronicles her observations of trials at Guantanamo and was published in 2022 by the University of California Press.

John Ryan, no relation, is a co-founder of Law Dragon Inc. and has won numerous accolades as a legal affairs journalist over the past 25 years.

What is going on? Does it really mean something to you? To me, I don't know, but I agree.

I think that I'm assuming that some of it you can think about it.

That was Lisa Hajar and John Ryan in conversation with Alka Pradhan, live at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. on September 13th, 2026.

Many thanks to the team at Busboys and Poets for hosting them and letting us co-sponsor.

That's a great restaurant.

If you want something that's a little hipster, go to Busboys and Poets, which is a D.C. area chain.

That's really fun, very casual.

If you want Mediterranean, I would suggest this place called Mayden.

I chickened out.

Later, I had dinner at Busboys and Poets to celebrate finishing east of the river.

Sixty-six walks, hundreds of conversations that went well, and the old plot still had a hand on the wheel.

That's what dead reckoning does.