Sunday Reading

ReclaimUC:

• "Thanks to Berkeley…": Managing multiculturalism in an age of austerity
• "Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history."
• Fitch gives UC bonds AA+ rating, and the university still takes its marching orders from the bond raters
• Florida Atlantic University joins the prison-industrial complex
• As growth shifts into overdrive, NYU faces a rebellion from within
• Historicizing the Yale torture center and the administrative response
• Immigration activists to Yale: "We're not lab rats"
• Michelle Rhee donates significantly—to the tune of $250k—to L.A. school board races
• The student body, for sale
• The PhD bust in 7 charts
• Antebellism: The neoliberal compromise of the political
• Disaster capitalism in the Chicago public schools
• Michelle Alexander on the school-to-prison pipeline
• "At the end of December, about 400 students occupied the Russian State University of Trade and Economics in Moscow for over a week to protest controversial education reforms that would absorb their institution into another university."
• Just war theory is just intellectuals justifying war
• Christopher Dorner and the LAPD: America's native sons
• Organizing as if social relations matter

T.F. Charlton:

• After the Feminine Mystique: "Talking only about The Feminine Mystique severely limits our understanding of feminist philosophy, its potential to transform how the market is structured, how labor is valued, and what forms of justice can really be achieved."
• Roopika Risam on Emory President James Wagner and who is afforded the luxury of "misspeaking."
• Adoption, identity, and family secrets
• Kye Allums on being a transgender athlete
• Queer feminist pornographers on what it means for porn to be ethical and feminist.
• The White Savior Industrial Complex in American evangelical anti-trafficking movements
• "[Secular] Women seem to want groups that do more than criticize religion."

Magdalene Laundries:

• Enda Kenny apologized to Magdalene victims, but something is missing (full text of Kenny's apology).
• Samantha Long remembers her mother, who lived in Magdalene Laundries from childhood until her death at 51.
• Magdalene Survivors on Taoiseach apology (video).

Reeva Steenkamp's murder:

• Oscar Pistorius: Salvaging the Super Crip Narrative
• The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp's boyfriend
• Oscar Pistorius and the media

Kitabet:

• Microscopic World: "The implications were theological as much as they were scientific."
  "Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. During the 17th century, when the microscope was invented, the discovery of such objects posed a profound problem: if we humans were God’s ultimate purpose, why would he create anything that we couldn’t see?"
• On the Anatolian pastime of treasure-hunting for lost Armenian gold
  "Anyone who has traveled in rural Turkey as a foreigner has undoubtedly had the experience of being taken for a spy."
• "While she was missing we sensed her palpability, physical and digital. When she died it was quickly forgotten, in favor of arguments about Turkey, about the Turks, about women, about violence."
• The Pink Series: the street art of Ankara's Avareler (Vagabonds) collective.
• The Gentlemen of Gentrification: Engin Gerçek's photographs of Turkish living rooms
• A City Built on Dredge
  "It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the Army Corps of Engineers are the most prolific landscape architects in the world."
• Protecting White Kids From History
• Anthropology, Inc.
• "Sometimes, as a graduate student, I felt like a kind of ghost."  
  on six years of ghostwriting Sweet Valley High books on the side while pursuing a PhD

Kerim Friedman:

• "This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars"
• “Feeding the duckrabbits is forbidden by local ordinance.”
• On a “receiving line."
• "To invoke a narrative of gaffe by way of “clumsiness” is to claim ultimate deniability and to abdicate responsibility for one’s words."
• "only 30 percent of the fathers who wanted to share child care equally with their wives actually did so"
• "The journey from volksgeist to race captured a significant shift in perceptions of human beings."
• Problem with “the social construction of race is how it was never joined to a concrete political program.”
• "Farmers in parts of India are breaking growing records, using less seed, less water, and compost as fertiliser."
• "pork-blobs are being danced through the street, filled with metal, and are about to be killed for the New Year."
• "Hello everyone, I am Marx. I just started on Weibo."
• "Funding eo ipso does not, in fact, act like NetHack's Speed Boots once awarded."

Frank Pasquale:

• Livin' la vida think tank: models and bottles.
• 200,000 without homes post-drones; perma-war on horizon.
• Government makes $34 billion profit on student loans.
• 500,000 correctional officers in US.
• 8.6 million US households have net worth over $1 million.
• Lie-bor, now and forever.

Bint Battuta:

• Is Europe Western?
• Reflections of a Qur'an Translator
• The British in early 20th-century Basra, and "inarticulate cosmopolitanism"
• On hunting for Armenian gold in southeastern Turkey, and the politics of historical memory
• Karachi's Malayali community
• The Balustrades of Beirut
• Footage of Sharjah in 1958
• Ethnic Identity and Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman Architecture
• Edward Said's Untidiness
• From Syndication to Society: Abdullah Tuqay and Central Asian Literature
• On the loss of public space in Beirut
• Egypt's Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha
• Ghassan Kanafani on the 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine
• The Afghan Photography Network
• Mapping intellectuals in Ottoman Anatolia
• The women of India's Baghdadi Jewish communities

Jacob Remes:

• Security for journalists begins with solidarity among them.
• Using a European trade deal to improve US labor laws.
• scott crow on politics outside the government.
• The practicalities of picking a pope.
• Epcot Warsaw (radio 20:35)
• Hungary returns to the 1930s.
• Japan's most right-wing prime minister in years comes to Washington.
• “The Tohoku region is devastated, the damage was enormous. But even without a tsunami the region was heading towards a catastrophe. It was suffering from a very bad economic situation, especially caused by an aging society and the emigration of all young people to Tokyo. If we now are to rebuild the region, we must grab this chance to rebuild it in a way that it won’t happen again, and do everything we can to create a new style of living.”
  Moving to Tohoku to build a model society.
• Immigration status and disaster relief.
• Immigration, heterosexuality, and class.
• On being different at Yale.
• The prehistory of Yale's new interrogation training center.  (See also here.)
• "If you have the university and it's just the administration and the trustees, nobody's going to come to school here, right?"
• "This is what we should expect when a university president is essentially a CEO."

L.E. Long:

• Bhanu Kapil enters urbandictionary
• "It must be hard to deny charges of arson when the name of your settlement is literally 'holy fire.'"
• "Organizing, good organizing, is to my mind the slow, steady, one-on-one building of relations and interconnections that are at odds with how people are treated under capitalism. "
• Riots! the video game
• Trouble in Mind: Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness
• What is filth?

Topical:

• Oscar is a job creator.
• Beasts of the Southern Wild - The Romance of Precarity I
• Beasts of the Southern Wild - The Romance of Precarity II
• Me Tarzan, You Jane. Me Django, You Chains
• Lincoln against the radicals
  (disclaimer, this is by your Sunday Reading overlord, Aaron Brady)

nathan jurgenson

• "Catfish is Jerry Springer for the social media age"
• “Let’s face it: panic about ‘people’ not pairing off is really panic about women not pairing off"
• "the idea that technology comes from us, people, is something we are reluctant to accept"
• "Stop Calling It 'Digital Humanities'"
• "temporary photography is doing something very interesting with time"
• "I don’t oppose the MOOC any more than I oppose online classes, or three-hundred-person-lectures, or Wikipedia"
• "the way that the Harlem Shake meme seems perfectly designed for the workplace"
• "Everybody in the industry wants to see Spotify succeed"
• "Who hates free speech? The powerful and the powerless"
• "With almost 20 different speakers over two hours, not a single woman took the stage"
• "Cup holders aren't just for our constant hydration, they're the source of our psychological well-being on the road"
• "Google is doing other things to recruit the fashion-savvy, particularly women"
• “There is no difference between the “real” and the “virtual” : a brief phenomenology of digital revolution”
• "Writing, like drones and smartphones, is a technology"
• "linguistic innovations that start with young women spread rapidly throughout the population"
• "we can disturb the archive & begin to draw new connections between the personal & the technical"
• “Even if an accusation is unfounded, being branded as a troll can be damaging to an online reputation”
• "social engineering disguised as product engineering"
• "the Internet once felt like a secret. And, like most secrets, it was mostly about sex"
• "the “urban renaissance” isn’t benefiting everyone"
• "No art show, even at a state-supported museum, is complete without the merch table"
• "the supposed line between the natural and the social is of crucial importance for theories of justice"
• "The 85th Academy Awards will elevate films that are openly ideological, weaponized tools of the state"
• "Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male"
• "a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology”"
• "We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit”"

Millicentsomer:

• Gollum, Dreaming
• Pride, Prejudice
• Orwell, Orwellier 
• Anne Carson, Glass
• Misericords
• Trolls and Rose
• Spanish Handwriting Lessons
• Ten Little Suffergets
• Comedy Library
• Saunders, Catholic
• Love? Dead.

And a very special guest, Gerry Canavan, brings us the week in MOOCs:

• Obama wants to decouple Pell grants from traditional accreditation, opening the door for full-throated neoliberal profiteering. Commentary at MetaFilter.
• MOOCs are not primarily or even secondarily about bringing open, no-cost education to the masses. Instead, these efforts created by private elite institutions and for-profit businesses squarely aim to outsource traditional governmental functions in education, and divert taxpayer dollars from the building of public assets and institutions to create long-term revenue streams and profit for corporations.
• MOOCs, Progress, and Player Piano: David Noble’s “Digital Diploma Mills” (1998), via iterating toward openness.
• MOOC as right-wing plot.
• The Trouble with Online College.
• February 14, 2013: McGill reels as budget cuts begin. February 21, 2013: McGill gets on MOOC bandwagon.
• “So far, most MOOCs have had dropout rates exceeding 90 percent.”
• FrankenMOOCs and zombie profs.
• Research Questions about MOOCs.
• The more I think about the xMOOCs in terms of power relations, the more I note that they preserve and consolidate those of traditional academia. They take the sedimented prestige and name-brands of elite institutions and open up new markets for them, even while undermining many of the structures that those institutions have operated on for generations. The xMOOCs convert the capital carried by academic reputation into new value, at a new scale, in new forms.
• Beyond the Buzz, Where Are MOOCs Really Going?
• Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching. Twitter user @cjprender has a slightly different take.
• MOOCs: What if the cure is worse than the disease?
• And my own thing I wrote.