Sunday Reading

Enter Jane Hu, stage left:

• Write a short book review for the LARB Tumblr
• Veep and the Glories of Julia Louis-Dreyfus
• The Short Life of Publishing Tradition
• Talk, Talk: When does bar-room debate count as criticism?
• Getting Them Dead
• Where Things Stand
• A Courageous Little Gallery Takes on MoMA
• Philosophy’s Western Bias
• On the Terrors and Pleasures of Robert Frost
• "The book of love is sad and boring, no one can lift the damn thing. . ."

Boring old me:

• How Mainstream Israeli Politicians Sparked the Tel Aviv Race Riot
• Walker’s victory, un-sugar-coated
• The Shock Doctrine Goes to College 
• Europe is a dead political project
• Why Elites Fail
• Oh Sue, If Only I Could Love You More
• Europe's exciting elimination tournament in 2012.
• The Pakistani Radical
• Reflections of a Spoiled Child on the Student Strike
• The Race Card
• Gaza's Zoo, the saddest zoo in the world.
• is this brilliant example of right-wing kitsch actually a copyright infringement? 
• Behind the Shell Hoax
• Employees Right Out of the Box
• You Can Always Teach a Party New Tricks: How the Dems Both Won and Lost Wisconsin
• Charles Olson at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965
• Diassassembling Dynasties
• ‘An Essay on Criticism‘ and Criticism
• Two out of three 2011 law school graduates did not get real legal jobs
• Too High a Price to Pay
• A Bike With Infinite Gears
• Shiny Objects Are People, Too
• In a Romanian Womens Prison, Ioana Cârlig Asks, “What Do You Miss?”
• Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
• On Paul Fussell
• Model Live-Tweets Married Actor Trying To Hook Up With Her On A Plane
• Protest criminalised at the "pepper spray" university
• Ten Very Good Reasons You Aren’t Married Yet
• Did America's Cyber Attack on Iran Make Us More Vulnerable?
• No Boys Allowed: Let the Ladies Have Our Own Book Awards
• Drone-Strike the Jobless
• Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: The Long, Slow Death Spiral of America’s Labor Movement
• Two models for how to apologize with integrity: Jason Alexander and Megan Carpentier

ReclaimUC, defiantly debting as usual, but also enjoying an organic, locally produced burrito:

• "The gold rush is on, and in this case the gold rush is for college-going students."
• Three excellent pieces originally presented at the recent Edu-Factory conference in Toronto, written up and published over at the Reclamations Blog:
  • Debt and the Student Strike: Antagonisms in the Sphere of Social Reproduction, by Amanda Armstrong
  • Our University? by Mark Paschal
  • Circulation and the New University, by Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser
• Last November, literally at the exact same time as hundreds of protesters from Occupy Cal were marching against police violence in general and UCPD in particular, UCPD officers shot and killed UC Berkeley student Christopher Travis in the Haas School of Business. The District Attorney's office has finally released a report on the killing that clears the officers of any criminal wrongdoing. In their statements, the police officers claim that the victim pulled a gun and pointed it at them; however, the video evidence doesn't appear to show anything of the sort (pp. 17-18), and none of the 11 student witnesses corroborate the claim (p. 15).
• Student Loan Debt Collectors:

According to a report from the National Consumer Law Center, “The U.S. Department of Education (the Department) relies on an increasing number of private contractors to collect the approximately $67 billion in defaulted federal student loan debt.” Moreover, not only is the government on the hook for an increasing number of student loan defaults, but it is paying outside collection agencies huge sums of money to collect these debts: “The Department paid contractors almost $1 billion in commissions in 2011.” Thus instead of providing free public higher education, the federal government is lending students huge amounts of money that they can never pay back, and the result is that the feds have to hire expensive private contractors to collect the cash.

• UC Berkeley to collaborate with private developers to build student housing:
  Private developers in the city of Berkeley have numerous options and requirements in order to provide some measure of affordability for a portion of the units in their projects.However, according to city Rent Stabilization Board Commissioner Igor Tregub, it is not mandatory for campus funded projects to align with the city’s affordable housing requirements. For that reason, he has concerns that private development will drive up the rent amounts in campus-provided housing.
• Hours after publishing op-ed critical of UC Davis, UCD professor received an email from a UCD administrator removing him from key positions.
• Police Review Board finally issues its report on police violence at UC Berkeley on November 9. It's pretty much worthless. The only part worth reading is the highly critical Addendum, written by the PRB's grad student representative Eve Weissman. Also see Zunguzungu's excellent piece, "The vigor of these baton thrusts is most distressing and should not be repeated."
• The Shock Doctrine goes to college
• Protest criminalised at "pepper-spray" university: statement of solidarity with the Davis Dozen from the UK.
• "The Secret Shopper," on mystery shopping, precarious labor, and refusal.
• Check out Radio Autonomía's latest show, "Solidarity in an age of global insurrection," featuring interviews on solidarity from Egypt and Mexico as well as from the streets of Oakland.

When Bint Battuta and Frank Pasquale are on vacation, I shamelessly steal from Gerry Canavan:

• Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types. So now I have to spend the whole afternoon trying to figure out if I’m a Bert or an Ernie.
• Pixar’s rules on how to write a story.
• Power Plant Mercury Emissions Poisoning the Great Lakes.
• Federal data released Thursday show the United States has had its warmest spring, its warmest year to date, and warmest 12-month stretch on record.
• The class action lawsuit against student loan agency Sallie Mae.
• Conservatives never liked left-wing, government-run solutions to problems like unaffordable health care and climate change. These days they don’t seem to like right-wing, market solutions, either.
• And Mr. Rogers Remixed. Because there’s still a good and decent kid inside you somewhere, dammit.
•  Earth Is Headed for Disaster, Interdisciplinary Scientific Review Concludes. NB: That’s the actual headline. More climate apocalypticism via MetaFilter.
• Three Ways Climate Change Could Impact The Game Of Baseball. NB: Each of these will tend to increase people’s enjoyment of baseball. Forget I said anything!
• Voter Fraud Extremely Rare In Florida: ‘More Likely To Get Hit By A Bolt Of Lightning.’
• Florida Governor Rick Scott Officially Defies Justice Department, Vows to Continue Voter Purge. Someone should really tell him there’s actually no crisis!
• Michael Hardt on WUNC’s The State of Things.