Sunday Reading

Frank Pasquale

• Texas drought killed 301 million trees in 2011.
• Dementia epidemic.
• Health care voucherism.
• Romney's Global-Tech globalization: "Overcrowded, filthy dormitories; rotten food; 112-hour, 7-day workweeks"
• Google redacts its redaction requests.
• 70% believe Big Bird gobbled 1% or more of federal budget;  7% think over half of federal funds go to PBS; time for dinner.
• Explaining the debate: Benjamin Kunkel; Charles Pierce; Doug Henwood.
• Defined contribution health care.
• Drones on autopilot.

 

ReclaimUC

• If you read any article this week, make it this one: Andrew Ross on Universities and the urban growth machine
• Two new articles on the "slow death" of public higher education in California: Andy Kroll on The Death of the Golden Dream of Higher Education, which emphasizes the shift from education spending to prison spending; and our very own Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal on Reagan and the death of the Master Plan (still behind a paywall for now)
• Solid reading list on the militarization and financialization of campus
• Just another satellite campus? Behold the Baghdad campus of the School of the Americas
• Digital humanities, digital austerities while academic paywalls mean publish AND perish
• Militant high school students take on riot police in Italy
• The federations, traitors until the end: Against the co-optation of the Quebec student movement
• Documentary: Madrid on the brink: S25-S29
• At UT Austin, students of color are being attacked with bleach balloons
• And finally, some investment advice from Thomas Jefferson: "should have invested in negroes"

Aaron Bady

• Nollywood: Nigeria's Mirror (audio)
• Thoughts on Rape Culture
• Limits on Communication
• Universities and the Urban Growth Machine
• Mining The Future
• The Danger of a Single TED Talk
• We're Proud to Be Scabs
• After Neoliberalism
• Ahdaf Soueif in A Room for London (podcast)
• It’s time to pull the plug on fusion centers!
• Sanctioning society: From Iraq to Iran
• The Forgotten: Example of An African Middle-Class
• The Anti-Revolutionary Science
• Actually There is No Hyperinflation and On How Despite the Currency Crisis Iran’s State Revenues are not Collapsing
• The Metaphysics of the Internet; or Can Lydia Maria Child’s Ghost Read My Comment?
• The Return of the Infield Fly Rule
• Police to people of Makause: 'March and there'll be another Marikana'

Nathan Jurgenson

• "I still want to be a cyborg"
• "we’ll have a crack team of GIF artists cranking out instant animations of the best debate moments"
• "And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud"
• "bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer"
• "I am only as secure as the last time I was retweeted"
• "everyone else seemed so natural in their tweeting. for me it was agony"
• "the friction of the digital divide in academia requires only the slightest irritation to hit a rolling bubbling, um, boil"
• "it's strange to write a serious research proposal & have half of your bibliography be science fiction"
•  "let’s stop shaming teenagers for exploring sexual imagery through the cell phone shutter, instead of our own lens of 1960s nostalgia"
• "Pinterest is now jammed with inspirational quotes, some of which could have been lifted from fortune cookies"
• "the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom"
• "low-tech objects that are the paraphernalia of hipster culture"
• "the public assumes that what is printed or pressed or somehow physically produced is of better quality"
• "the only way to not be used by the Internet is either to not use it, which is ridiculous, or to make something out of it"