Sunday Reading

[exsert something there]

L.E. Long:

• The Avant-garde of White Supremacy
• Possessed or dispossessed? Mental health & class struggle
• "I fear that even if I go to the pharmacy I’ll get arrested."
• Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture
• Liberalism without Humanism
• Game of Thrones: The Queer Season
• Thatcher, Misogyny & the Neoliberal Order
• "Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards."
• 10 WEIRD tips to SUCCESS that a single punk rocker in Pittsburgh could teach a CEO (This dude was responsible for my first forays into anti-capitalism)
• Spring Breakers and Anti-human Communism

ReclaimUC:

• The UC cost wars
• UC Berkeley: The University of Private Enterprise
• Why does City College of San Francisco have to be shut down? Because it constitutes such a threat to dominant administrative models
• "All told, over the last five fiscal years, the [DOE] has generated $101.8 billion in profit from student borrowers, thanks to low borrowing costs for the government and fixed interest rates for students."
• Interest rates on student loans set to double as students fall deeper into debt
• "The [university] now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team."
• "Increasingly large classes"
• When there is no one, what will take care of you?
• Academia's indentured servants
• E-textbooks and surveillance
• More cops in schools, more kids in court
• Newark students defy threats to protest attacks on public education
• Indiana University on strike! Good writeups here, here, here, and here
• "In the American system . . . the things that are broken about our schools are the same things that are broken about our society. Nevertheless, American education policy has always been an effort at base-superstructure inversion."
• "a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them"
• 150,000 Chilean students take the streets demanding free education
• "Indeed, higher education was where, as prime minister, Thatcher made an early push toward privatization."
• Thatcher is dead, long live Thatcher: Misogyny and the neoliberal order
• Two pieces from Sussex: Communiqué for an absent NUS and Our first prison revolt
• Pop and circumstance

nathan jurgenson:

• "the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars"
• "Pa was a simple man, a techno-anarchist by trade, and long after the Bitcoin bust, he stayed on with the mining. “Don’t know nothin’ else, Ma said”
• "Irene Serra chose the name -isq for her band deliberately to make it hard to find online"
• "the public quickly accepts all the miracles that science provides (1948)"
• "From paywalls to jargon to a tacit moratorium on social media, academics build careers through public disengagement"
• "watching videos on the Internet & maybe writing a few very short essays that the professor never sees isn’t college"
• "it is often difficult to distinguish between organized trolling and media linkbait"
• "[Stanford] now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team"
• "the latest billboard for advertising is your own cellphone’s home screen"
• "almost nobody genuinely desired a Facebook Phone"
• "They don’t call it ruin porn in Rome"
• "we live “in media”, not “with media”"
• "Digital evidence led to convictions in Steubenville. Why cant it play the same role in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons?"

Jacob Remes:

• Sock puppetry before the internet.
• Jon Lee Anderson's lies about Venezuela.
• Whose streets? Our streets! (radio 24:21)
• Astra Taylor interviews Rebecca Solnit about disaster.
• Susan Faludi's brutal telling of Shulamith Firestone's life and death.
• Taking on the judicial amendments of the NLRA.
• Extinct but proud.

Kerim Friedman:

• “Mendeley’s sale to Elsevier struck many as a betrayal”
• Chinese man steals iPhone from bicyclist using chopsticks.
• “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”
• Adjuncts from more than 20 Boston-area colleges announce plans to unionize.
• “In short, ‘chained CPI’ is just a fancy way to say ‘cut benefits for seniors, the permanently disabled, and orphans.’”
• “At least they didn’t use image of Susan Boyle as Thatcher”
• “Thatcher rarely met a dictator she didn’t instantly like and wish to aid in some way…”
• “Paisley is far from the worst offender with such songs.”
• hair extensions
• “an increase of 1% of firearms elevates the homicide rate by 2%”
• “The Americans had a different agenda from the Tibetans.”
• “Blank was known for pairing an artist’s eye with an ethnologist’s discipline”
• “Within some of the poorest states of India…sits a treasure trove of minerals worth trillions of dollars.”
• “as anyone familiar with North Korea knows…”

Frank Pasquale:

• No income, no health insurance--but you get to talk to Ashton Kutcher.
• Britain no longer "makes much of anything."
• A pro-life initiative.
• Mega financial wikileaks.
• SEC to bankers: please, speculate more.
• Toxic contract clauses.
• On the Media investigates DDG as a substitute for Google and Grindr as a complement to networking.
• Why eliminate the estate tax?  To pay "to have her dogs flown to a second home in the Caribbean by private plane."

Bint Battuta:

• Contemplating the Indian intellectual self
• On "Recipes from Baghdad", published in 1946 (featuring an Abu Nuwas Cocktail)
• An Ottoman view of Mecca’s water infrastructure
• Andrei Tarkovsky was given a Polaroid camera by Michelangelo Antonioni - and took these
• A visit to the Iraqi National Library and Archive
• From Cyberspace to The World: The Impact of Google Earth and Second Life on Dubai [pdf]
• The Double World: One Man’s Search for Meaning in the Seattle Public Library
• Royal French Women in the Ottoman Sultans’ Harem: The Political Uses of Fabricated Accounts [pdf]
• The story of an abandoned Boeing 707 at Berlin's Tegel airport (involving Leila Khaled)
• On Damascus barber Ibn Budayr's 18th-century chronicle
• "The State shall remain nameless. For the purpose of this narrative, let us call it not-Dubai"
• A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt
• Photos of James Baldwin in Turkey
• Interview with Lauren Berlant
• The sense of entitlement amongst India’s elites
• The Tentmakers of Chareh El Khiamiah