"If you want to get a letter out of a Burmese prison, do not give it to the guards."

It's sage advice from someone who knows, Danny Fenster, a journalist who spent six months in Insein prison after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar (the one that unfolded behind a woman's fitness instruction video). A decade before that, he was my student.

Danny chronicles his time in prison—the hopelessness and hope, the stress and boredom—in a beautiful, harrowing, evocative biographic comic he wrote in collaboration with illustrator Amy Kurzweil for the tech-and-culture website The Verge. I can not urge you enough to go read it.

Scrolling through the story, you learn what led Danny from the US to Myanmar, you see early moments of budding love with his now-wife Juliana, you witness the coup through their eyes, you watch ants crawl up the walls of prison alongside Danny, and you feel his joy when he first hears Juliana's voice in prison via a smuggled SD card. It's a remarkable piece of reporting and storytelling, one that resonates especially poignantly right now.

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