Sunday Reading

Egypt:

Jane Hu:

• J. Hoberman's 2005 Village Voice tribute to mentor Andrew Sarris, who passed away this week.
• An interview with an auteur. 
• Mary McCarthy would be 100 this year. The same goes for Alan Turing.
• The internet that loves Chris Kraus also loves Sheila Heti. Kraus's review of How Should A Person Be? in the LARB.
• Elizabeth Willis writes about Adrienne Rich. 
  "Her work asks us to consider questions of “difficulty” that surpass conventional literary concerns. Where does the difficult work of aesthetics meet the struggle for social justice?"
• In sports, science as an defining measure for gender. (Sort of maybe not really kind of valid?)
• Watch parts of Jennifer Doyle's lecture on International Women's Soccer at Duke earlier this year.
• Bad Influences Week at the Awl. Anne Helen Peterson's "Bad News Brenda" might sound familiar to you too.
• Bruno Latour is seeking co-investigators.
• Film Quarterly dialogues about Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce (2011).
• A body/horror/monster reading list.
• Susan Gubar's on writing her way through ovarian cancer. 
  "During the chemo and after it and during other chemos and after them, I realized that I had no idea at all about what it might mean to accept impending death. Not a clue. So I kept on going."
• Andrew Goldstein guest lectures on Lolita.
• Evan Hughes--author of Literary Brooklyn--writes about baseball in Oakland (the place, not the book).
• Rob Horning on Eric Ambler (spying) and social media (sharing!).
• R WOMYN FUNNY IN 2012?!! (They certainly were in 2001. SURPRISE!!!)

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Bint Battuta:

• The Afro-Iranian Community: Beyond Haji Firuz Blackface, the Slave Trade, & Bandari Music
• Tihama, the other Yemen [photos]
• Freud on Translation [podcast]
• Coffee colonialism in Laos
• In Extremis: Literature and Revolution in Contemporary Cairo (An Oriental Essay in Seven Parts)
  Here is a suitably exotic Sufi folk tale from the Nile Delta...
• On the movie Hitlar, about Hitler’s Pakistani gangster son
• Old wine, twisted cliches
• On Cairo's Agriculture Museum, a "weird and wild hall of wonders"
• Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem
• Jack Cheng on the Slow Web Movement
• On the system of self-demolition built into the Swiss national infrastructure
• Scheherazadenfreude

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Me:

• Google Search Tips
• Can Apple Refuse to Sell a Laptop to an Iranian Citizen? Maybe.
• I was sexually assaulted three times before I was 20. Here’s why I never told my family or the police.
• 10 Worst Book Covers in the History of Literature
• How to Survive a Plague
• The Left’s Big Sellout: How The ACLU & Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights
• Interview with Eyal Weizman
• Twist of the Mother Tongue
• Child mugshots of the 1800s.
• Meet the Man Who Kept the Rainbow Flag Free
• Elaine Castillo and Subashini on Prometheus.
• Keller to Nuns: Get Out! 
  Former New York Times editor Bill Keller thinks it sounds shocking that he agrees with the Catholic conservative Bill Donohue, but he need not be disturbed. Some of us have long thought he was closer to Donahue than he pretended. Keller ran the paper of record when it cheered on the Iraq War. Now he is a columnist for the same paper, where he promotes disasters like Donohue. 
• Mali: 90 Days of Disaster
• North Carolina rejects funds for sterilisation victims
  "While many states had sterilisation plans targeted at "feeble-minded" people, North Carolina stands out for widening its programme after World War II."
• Prometheus - Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning
• David Graeber on State Repression

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Frank Pasquale:

• First draft of the history of the Obama presidency.
• Daisy chain of regulators who hire (then lobby) their replacements leads to daisy chain of CDOs.  Capital reproduces revolving door culture reproduces capital, etc.
• Worst provisions of Multilateral Agreement on Investment "shamble zombie-like through the sweaty dreams of neoliberals."
• Political agenda of richest woman in the world: reduce her taxes, pay less to her miners, challenge climate science.  For every Bill Gates, there are how many Gina Rineharts?
• The politics of "grab it all now."
• Bell & deShalit conclude London has no spirit; perhaps a "pirate's palace?"   oligarchhaven?  Feudal remembrancer?
• Hey seniors, watch your doctor for fraud and abuse!  But don't you dare tell on billionaire tax evaders.
• US in "much worse shape than when we paid higher taxes, higher interest rates and made more of the manufactured goods we use."
• The Cloud Corporation: "I fear them/ and their love of money, everything I do without / thinking to help them make it."
• No antitrust, no Google.
• Global tide of disease-mongering.
• Pizzaganda: under Obamacare restaurants have to give customers 30 million calorie disclosures, in triplicate, just if they want to change their address.

*

ReclaimUC:

• How not to be a union
• The police think we're animals
• Death by degrees
• Damning report on OPD 
  "the Frazier Report gives a detailed and somewhat devastating list of criticisms focusing on OPD's system for investigating officer misconduct and crime. Not only does the department not learn from past mistakes, the reports states, but Oakland police officers even acknowledge that the lack of consequences for violating policy or engaging in criminal misconduct has fostered a culture of impunity. Thus, the report raises serious questions whether the recommended reforms can so easily be completed."
• Why are so many children, especially girls, placed in solitary confinement?
• UC Regents abandon lawsuit against Gill Tract farmers
• Following the privatization of UCLA business school, other UCs look into following suit
• Oakland school closures, by the numbers
• "The good order of a school" and "The People's School for Public Education"
• On the insidiousness of corporate attitudes in academia
• The structural logic of administration: On the ouster of UVA president Teresa Sullivan
• The invisibility of corporatization: On Sullivan and the Board of Visitors
• I don't want Teresa Sullivan Back: A short conversation with UVA
• Teresa Sullivan and the living wage campaign at UVA 
   "We cannot agree with her characterization of the progress U.Va. has made. In fact, her email to the University today contains information which we deem intentionally misleading. Below, we respond to President Sullivan’s claims directly."
• As UVA president, Teresa Sullivan raised in-state tuition by 18% in not even two years, making eight consecutive years of tuition hikes of "somewhere below 10 percent."
• Neoliberalism comes to Mr. Jefferson’s university
• More on "responsibility-centered management" (RCM), the "Wal-Mart model" pushed by UVA Presidenty Teresa Sullivan:

[A]dministrators at the provost and presidential levels have unintentionally exacerbated the rubber-stamp culture by instituting budget models based on so-called responsibility-centered management. Promoted by the corporate world, RCM essentially operates on one concept: Reward revenue-generating activities, such as student credit hours. That is touted as "transparency," a welcome change from obtuse budget formulas by central administration.

The old budget formulas, typically based on the number of majors in a program, had one thing going for them: They didn't reward curricular expansion. RCM does.

To understand RCM, picture the university as a Wal-Mart superstore and students selecting all manner of courses off the pedagogical shelves. Each semester at the register they pay for "student credit hours" by the course, and the academic unit that created the course gets a chunk of the student's tuition. So departments keep proposing courses that appeal to the shoppers. The longer students stay in the pedagogical store, the more revenue they generate (and the more student debt).

The Wal-Mart model keeps students in the aisles for five, six, or more years when they should be walking down the aisle at commencement in four years or fewer. Worse, many students do not even realize the amount of debt they have amassed. A new study out of Iowa State University found that 13 percent of students who took out loans didn't realize they had borrowed money, and 37 percent underestimated the amount they owed.

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And Jacob Remes!

• Is Bilingualism Still Relevant in Canada?
• How to build (or not build) a bilingual Canada: Youth Bilingualism in Canada 
• Greying Farmers Force Japan to Rethink Food System
• In Japan, defending the right to take vacations
• In the wake of the triple Tohoku disaster, Japan's sake revival
• How Israel has lost its Jewish heart, in two articles: Israel Is Not a Jewish State: On the Destruction of Susya and the Expulsion of South Sudanese  and A Jewish heart vs. a Jewish state: Choose the first - or we will lose both 
• And relatedly, on the political importance of maintaining secular Yiddish, also in two articles: Rokhl Kafrissen and Jenna Brager.
  "The State of Israel, we were told, was the home of the Jewish people and Europe was a continent sized graveyard. . . . What we did learn didn’t quite track with the lived Jewishness all of us, teachers and students, brought into the classroom."
  "The desire to keep Yiddishkeit alive signals less nostalgia than a political urgency grounded in a cultural history of resistance–a need to discover a relevant, lived Jewishness not over-invested in the propaganda of a dubious and oppressive 'homeland.'"
• The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
• Twenty years after his murder, Why Vincent Chin Matters
• The odd coalition between the evangelical Christian right and so-called feminists Hey Ho! Backpage Protesters Hit Village Voice on the Hottest Day of the Year
• At Duke, we called that "effortless perfection":  “Oh, great, so I have to be smart and still meet all the demands of conventional femininity, too?”
• How American nuns learned they didn't need to ask permission.
• The Declaration of Independence, Charlottesville, June 19th, 2012
• The original robber barons knew what they didn't know. Our robber barons don't.
• A prize in memory of the lawyer who brought the first interracial marriage case to the Supreme Court goes the man who helped win marriage equality in New Hampshire.  American Constitution Society Honors GLAD’s Janson Wu