2012

I'm not saying this year happened in the passive voice, but I'm not completely sure it didn't. So let me purge my memory by voiding my activities of their subject.

Some films were reviewed:

• At Jacobin, Lincoln Against the Radicals (preceded by The Young Mr. Lincoln)
• Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman
• The Albatross Around Johnny Depp’s Brain

 

Some books were written about:

• Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memory
• Damning With Faint Prize: Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial”
• What It Takes to Build Your Credit: Billy Kahora’s “Urban Zoning”
• Everything Fantastic is Credible: Babatunde Rotimi’s “Bombay’s Republic”
• David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words

 

Some television was watched:

• The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
• The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction
• The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness

 

And of course, a lot of writing on higher education was done:

• With Mike Konczal, From Master Plan to No Plan was written on the slow decline of California public higher ed, and with Gina Patnaik, a piece On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses
• On the late, great UC logo debacle: first, Let Us Eat Cake and then A Different Baton.
• Some stuff on other campuses; Quebec: Il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants: Québec’s Law 78; UVa: What Terry Sullivan's Reinstatement at UVa tells us; and UC Davis: Reading Katehi: The Pepper Spray Chancellor
• Most recently, an Inside Higher Education piece Questioning Clay Shirky (on MOOC’s and the techno-utopianism thereof).
• And some thoughts on academic social media: My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish

 

In an election year, some America stuff happened:

• American Democracy’s Bad Infinity and America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama

 

As Occupy was ended, the violence of the state was considered:

• Eikonoklastes: Violence and Speech
• Dumb Computers, Smart Cops
• Political Language on Police States and Political Language
• Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
• We Cannot Afford to Protect the Anuses of the Condemned

 

And the intersections of speech and forbidden speech:

• Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of “Free Speech”
• Obscenity: I Know It When I See It
• The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke
• “What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

 

Finally, A Breather was taken.