Sunday Reading

Aaron Bady (is back at his Twitter handle):

• Spin
  The White House's initial statements about what happened, false though they turned out to be, forever shaped perceptions of that event. Many people are unwilling to change their minds even in the wake of new evidence, while many others hear only of the initial claims made when news coverage is at its peak and never become aware of subsequent corrections. Combine that with the generalized "Look Forward, Not Backward" mentality popularized by President Obama – as embodied by John Kerry's "shut up and move on" decree to those asking questions about what really happened in the Bin Laden raid – and those initial White House falsehoods did the trick.
• Capitalist time has eliminated geological time
• The Hollywood Life Of "Walter Mitty"
• Kenya: Land and Communal Clashes
• News from Biblioteca Popular, week of september 16
• My State-Sponsored Assault, Courtesy of the NYPD
• S17, chaos, possibility, futures, failures
• Everyone who attended OWS with a cell phone had their identity logged, says security expert
• The radical right-wing roots of Occupy Wall Street
• “Who’s really getting government handouts?”
• New report blasts working conditions of adjunct faculty
• In defense of David Graeber's Debt
• Europe on the Brink
• Pictureless Art Textbook
• What it costs to vote in California
• Among the Alawites
• Demolishing Palestine
• The War on Crime as a Conservative (and Progressive) Assault on Liberal Philosophy

Jacob Remes

• Jane Jacobs's main contribution was changing the idea of who knows and how to know about urban life.
• What to do when your favorite car is a symbol of fascist torture and death squads
• After a year, Occupy is a network and school, not a site--and that's a good thing
• Daniel Sieradski's Occupy Rosh Hashanah sermon
• To end poverty, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year. But are you willing to trust the poor? 
• Accusations of organized vote fraud in Brooklyn [pdf]
• As China and Japan have a macho nationalist fight, Chinese sex-workers in Japan face drastically less business, violence, and unsafe working-conditions.
• The future of local newspapers, as playing out in New Haven.

Frank Pasquale

• Privatizing the internet.
• Extractive industries profiting from US decline, telecom edition: 1) Susan Crawford; 2) Rob Frieden; 3) David Cay Johnston
• DOJ grandee's "once and future client base"
• New Koch plan: slow down minority voting with baseless challenges; is a1983 action possible?
• 300 million Chinese have about 1/3 of income to spend on nonessentials; 200 million urban migrants scraping by.
• Law enforcement and the First Amendment.
• Rome Reloaded: bacchanalia fit for a billionaire.
• Connaughton's blob, and Arendt's.
• Spirited Away, 10 years later.

ReclaimUC

• UC/CSU: No criminal charges for the UC Davis pepper-spray cop, but the UC regents approved a settlement with the students who were pepper-sprayed last fall. They also talked a lot about a new revenue-generating scheme called "parking securitization."Yielding to right-wing pressure, UCLA cancels program for undocumented students; yielding to Occupy the Farm, Whole Foods backs out of the UC Gill Tract development. Meanwhile,Cal State approves a 5 percent tuition hike that will take effect if Gov. Brown's tax proposal fails in November, and SF State starts a private fund-raising campaign to help students pay these increasing tuition rates (donors include Bechtel and Genentech).
• Administrative overreach at CUNY, a play in three acts: I. CUNY administration declares war on rebel English department; II. The story behind the administration's threats; III. aaaand CUNY administrator backs down and apologizes.
• Occupy Anniversary (S17): Debt Resistors' Operations Manual,Chaos, possibility, failures, futures, and Violence gone by. Also, two pieces published on S17 in the New Inquiry: Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy, and The Other Occupy Movement.
• Surprise, strikes work. So do student strikes.
• A fun fact about privatization: "privatization of government functions and state-owned industries was literally invented by the Nazis." The TEDification of higher education and the segregation of public education.

Gerry Canavan's Sunday Morning Links

• What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop? I love everything Randall has been doing on What If?, but I’m especially fond of What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now – only rotated by an angle of 90 degrees?
• Say “digital humanities” one more goddamn time. 
  To be blunt, I want to give grad students permission to intelligently bullshit their way through questions about DH just as they would any other question.
• Salman Rushdie vs. science fiction.
• Research demonstrates the word “illegals” is dehumanizing.

The term “illegal immigrants” was used in the study specifically to “test the extent to which respondents would use or avoid the phrase.” Study participants were exposed to negative and positive media frames and messages in the news on TV, radio and print as well as in entertainment media. According to the study, non-Latinos no matter what the media format, think that Latinos and “illegal immigrants” are one and the same. There was a higher percentage of people who agreed that Latinos are “illegal immigrants” when exposed to negative frames, but even when exposed to good messages, people still held on to that view. Additionally “over 30 percent of respondents believed a majority of Latinos (50 percent or greater) were undocumented. And in terms of how language matters, “while 49 percent of respondents offer ‘cold’ rating of undocumented, 58 percent rate “illegal aliens” coldly.

• Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain.
• Life as the wife of a Ponzi schemer.
• Why The Jetsons Still Matters.
• Do You Have a Poor Sense of Smell? Congrats, You Are a Psychopath.
• And I did my part: Long Term Grade Inflation by Institution.