Hi there!
Jane Hu here (sometimes contributor to this weekly syndication) to let you know that I'll be updating Sunday Reading for the next little while. Our beloved Aaron will still be around (see his recommendations below!), but probably not as much (there's only one of him y'know). If you start to miss his words, there are literally years and years of them to be found back at the original zunguzungu. Anyway, like I said...
- Not Fade Away: On Living, Dying, and the Digital Afterlife
- Varies of Lewdness, 1795
- Remember the time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica?
- Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties
- Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico
- Confessions of a Dot Com Entrepreneur
- Kissinger and Allende
- Teaching Children to Hate
- 1940's Kodachrome
- Racism in Football
- Guilty as Charged: Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
- Is the Media Ignoring the Uprising in Sudan? (25 minute video)
- The Only Alternative is War
- US Shadow Wars in Africa and Obama's Scramble for Africa
- Rwanda at 50
- Another World
- Between Fact and Fiction
- Coercion and Comic Sans
- Chumbawumba's Long Journey
- When Rape Jokes Are Never Funny
- The Fall of the Oil Empire
- Yo as a Pronoun
- Guide to Future-Present Archetypes Part 1: The Spark
- Occupy Warzones
- How to Make a Rape Joke or Rape Jokes that Work
- The CLASSE Manifesto
- That Oceanic Feeling
- Misreading Feminism & Women’s Rights in Tehran: Beyond Chadors, Ninjabis, & Secular Fantasies
- Interview with Khin Maung Sein, a secondhand bookseller in Rangoon
- Shafik's Airport, Morsi's Egypt
- Street art initiative uses LEGO to rebuild Beirut
- Arab Kitsch: a searchable database of songs containing Arab and Middle Eastern stereotypes
- The Islamic Tartan Concept
- Google Maps mashup of Egypt's retired army generals and where they've landed
- Temple built for Higgs-Boson God particle in Tamil Nadu, devotees throng to get darshan
- The history of Cairo's Sinan Pasha Mosque
- Learning Chinese in Zambia
- South African History Online: Towards a People's History
- The history of Egypt's Greek community
- Japanese-Ottoman relations and Japanese subjects in Istanbul in the late 19th century
- Only connect.
- "The rules of the game in the United States are chosen in ways that do not necessarily lead to a more efficient economy, but which do lead to more inequality."
- Shareholder value myth; the rise of crony capitalism.
- Dream of Eurotrains for US by 2040.
- Banks punish you merely for asking questions.
- “The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat.”"
- On the complete corruption of financial markets; financialization triumphs over real capital formation.
- "Every bonkbuster cliché in existence."
- Stupid computers taking over; will likely power scan-o-rama.
- Wall Street on Parade.
- Mega-rich Mitt; secrecy on the rise.
- Pharma fail: who's running the show in drug trials?
- Classify corporate crime fines by how many orders of magnitude away they are from real deterrence:
1) 4 orders of magnitude off: "$25K fine for Google for impeding investigation."
2) 2 orders of magnitude off: "$22.5 million is about 4 hours of revenue for Google, but it’s the largest fine ever levied on a company by the FTC." Facebook settlement of $10 million.
3) 1 order of magnitude off: "The bank secured a nonprosecution agreement and agreed to pay a penalty of more than $450 million, a comparatively paltry sum for a bank that had more than $50 billion in revenue in 2011."
4) Just right?: $3 billion fine for Glaxo. No: "Last year, GSK had a net profit of $8.2 billion on revenue of $42.6 billion. . . . 'If pharma companies can flout the law and then simply write a check when they get caught, they’re never going to stop.'"
Los Angeles police fired their weapons in 63 incidents last year, a total which marked a roughly 50% increase over the shootings in any of the previous four years, according to the report. Beck has explained the increase by pointing to what the LAPD said was a 22% increase in assaults on officers from 2010 to 2011. Police officials counted 193 such incidents in 2011, which were recorded as assaults with a deadly weapon or attempted murders, according to the report.
- US pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren't there. So where do all those science PhD's end up going? Apparently, into administration. While academia depends on precarious labor and the post-doc "pyramid scheme," university administration is booming.
- Speaking of administration... What Terry Sullivan's reinstatement at UVA really tells us about the future of higher education, by the one and only Zunguzungu.
- Never enough money for education, always enough money for cops:Anger as McGill and Concordia universities spend $500,000 on security during recent student protests against austerity.
- The revolution of living knowledge, by Gigi Roggero
"Officer involved shootings are also up — largely in response to these kind of attacks," Beck told the Police Commission in November. But the inspector general found several reasons why he said this cause-and-effect relationship wasn't accurate. For one, from 2007 to last year, the number of assaults on officers fluctuated dramatically from one year to the next. The number of officer-involved shootings, however, remained relatively flat until last year, when they jumped. If there had been a connection between the two, the year-to-year totals should have climbed and dropped in sync, according to the report. The way the department tracks shootings and assaults on officers also muddied matters, Bustamante found. Attacks on officers are tallied based on the number of officers present when assaults occur. By contrast, the department counts an officer-involved shooting as a single event regardless of how many officers open fire. In an incident in April 2011, for example, in which a suspect shot at police from inside a house, the LAPD counted 16 assaults on officers and one officer-involved shooting, despite the fact that 15 officers fired their weapons. When Bustamante recalculated last year's assault total to count the number of incidents instead of officers, he counted 106 attacks — a 45% drop from the department's total. And, instead of a double-digit increase that Beck had contended, Bustamante said the number of assaults was actually about even from 2010 to 2011.
- Bloated corpses and institutional limits: A [fantastic] interview with Mark Paschal
- "It's like waking up to a snarling wolf every morning." Indentured students rise as loans corrode college ticket. And a theory of the debtor as political subject. http:.
- Indentured Students Rise As Loans Corrode College Ticket
- The UC Regents are proposing a 20% tuition hike ($2,400) if Jerry Brown's tax measure doesn't pass in November. (To put that in a global perspective, while consumer prices have approximately doubled since 1985, tuition has risen by almost 600%.) They'll be discussing it at the Regents' meeting next week. They better watch out for zombies and their undead demands...
- In other UC news, UCSF chancellor pushes for more "autonomy" from the rest of the UC in order to privatize faster and more efficiently. That could be the end of the UC system: "If UCSF gains increased autonomy, Scull predicts, other campuses will want it too."
- Silencing pro-Palestinian speech at the UC
- Notes on faculty "compensation" at a for-profit university.
- Incredible video: Spanish miners battle police over austerity. Meanwhile, the Spanish government announces another 65 billion-euro austerity package, including a 3% increase in sales tax.
- Summer of rage in Mexico?
- New report shows that every 40 hours cops kill a black person in the US. Meanwhile, an internal BART investigation exonerates the cop who shot and killed Charles Hill last summer.
- A lesson in "juking the stats," courtesy of LAPD.
- The first picture ever posted on the internet
- More open letters among writers, please. Matvei Yankelevich writes to Marjorie Perloff regarding her notions on reinventing the lyric
- Tavia Nyong'o on Frank Ocean, whose cruel optimism and lateral cruising comes from a queerness that is generationally specific
- Cynthia Carr's bio of David Wojnarowicz is drawing out incredible reviews
- "Hear Muffs don't look like headphones, they look more like a giant fuzzy doughnut with a bite missing." (img)
- On Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis and the addict narrative
- Not Just Another (Piece on How Brave is [Not] Just Another) Princess Movie
- Phillip Maciak on The Newsroom
- What if we were only allowed to tweet in airports? (David Horvitz at triplecanopy)
- “ColgatePalmoliveYum!
BrandViacomCredit” aaaannd “LandO’LakesGMFordCredit” - More narrative journalism like this please: a close look at one block (44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
- Tessa Hadley's "An Abduction"
- If you haven't read Muriel Spark, this is a wonderful way to begin
Printed on thin Bible paper and in a single-column format, it could compress a large amount of material into a readable and portable volume.
- M. H. Abrams turns 100 this month, is still publishing, and didn't intend to erect the English canon. We also learn why one Norton Anthology page = 4 normal pages anywhere else.
And by this we did not mean anyone had fallen, but rather to say get up, get on up, stay on the scene, come back if you left, please don’t go if you’re going strong, stay if you are just arriving, we see you, the work you are doing, you are amazing, breathe you, we talk, we smile, we touch your hair, you are the one, you are the one who did this to us, you are our own, we are crying hard, there was blood, no one told us, no one knew, mother knows, there is a world love center inside my ribcage, there is a world hate center inside too, to acquire a political meaning you don’t even have to be human, raw materials will do. . .
- Birthright programs and "long-distance nationalism"
- "Urban Target Complex National Monument": declassifying and remediating military spaces
- The digital can be durable too
- Have you heard of an "auroch" before? Have you heard of "mimetic reversal" breeding? Here.
- "Most Offensive Post" prize of the week.
- On Anthony Trollope's fallen woman: can't live with her, can't write without her
- Record yourself eating a hamburger. Andy Warhol did
- A quietly gorgeous piece on Take This Waltz
- From the archives: Hilary Mantel said a lot of things we still need to hear
- A friend send this to some friends