Sunday Reading

nathan jurgenson:

• “Facebook has certainly taken notice of the desire for impermanence”
• “It’s interesting that we now create things specifically to forget”
• “networks can be far more tyrannical, opaque, and anti-democratic than hierarchies”
• “Snapchat subverts the affordances of networked publics…the technology now—not the recipient—is the trusted object”
• “using the magic word “MOOC,” the privatization disappears in a puff of euphemism. We are instead “expanding access””
• “Just as CafePress can sell you a customized T-Shirt, why shouldn’t OKCupid aspire to sell you a customized partner?”
• “use online connectivity not to try to define ourselves perfectly but to undo ourselves over and over”
• “social media seem to intersect interpersonal sociality and corporate monetization”
• “they all took snapshots and movies of each other out of fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence”
• "And that song was just the apology for being misogynist throughout my life"
• "Using videos of heavy metal concerts, write the authors, allows them to study crowd behavior"
• "the continued cause for concern is a slightly embarrassing absence of blood"
• google street scene

Kitabet:

• A Reader's War: "I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere."
• Captured on Film: "It’s true that Syrian films tend to be critical of the regime, but the nature of the protest is often indirect, like the projection system of the Damascus Cinema Club."
• "There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA, curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography and aircraft."
• "in 1963, USGS and NASA scientists transformed the northern Arizona landscape into a re-creation of the Moon."
• Corpus: Mining The Border (war & mining at Sierra Leone's borders, for Cultural Anthropology's new photo essay section)
• Arizona: naming the dead from the desert
• excavating a galaxy far, far away (an archaeology of Star Wars)
• "Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things—the mail and the post office."
• "Every night for a month, he and fifteen colleagues met to pack texts into small metal boxes, the size of a treasure chest, that they bought at the local market. When Timbuktu ran out of boxes, Haidara ordered more from Mopti, two days away by boat on the Niger River."
• "drones are being treated as the Maxim gun of 21st Century hegemony"
• an architectural defense against drone warfare
• "During the Civil War, volcanoes were widely invoked as harbingers of societal upheavals."
• Lolcats of the Middle Ages: "The relationship between mice and cats, and the prospect of an organized mouse insurrection against the oppressor, was actively explored as a metaphor for human society."
• A Map of the Empire of Language as a Place of Struggle
• Third Eye: photographs of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray and his movies

Kerim Friedman:

• Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All
• Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013)
• Anthropomics: Diamonds and clubs
• ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT’S ‘RACE PROBLEM’
• Yes, Virginia, the Rich Continue to Get Richer: the Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009
• Is compulsory coupledom really the best way to live?
• No, Marco Rubio, government did not cause the housing crisis
• Royal Bodies
• Why do dogs bark? (And what are they saying when they do?)

Frank Pasquale:

• Targeted killing, and questions for Brennan.
• OCC as bank lobbyist; swap regulation as enormous joke.
• "Financial crises ... growing in scale and global impact."
• The lazy slob as "screen upon which much of the resentment against the adverse effects of the civilization of productivity
• and private affluence is projected."
• Liquid modernity & flexible hospitals.
• Watson as doctor's big helper.
• Sugar baron avoids paying "millions of pounds of tax in an African state blighted by malnutrition."
• 1 powerful media exec for every 850,000 subscribers; whom are they close to?
• Dark money at Donors Trust.
• Google's algorithm is not a thing--perhaps not even a digital thing.
• Top 1 percent of households by income captured 121 percent of all income gains between 2009 and 2011.

Bint Battuta:

• Not Talking About Pakistan
• Shahnameh-themed wartime propaganda postcards
• Afro-Emarati: a Unique Historical Experience [pdf]
• Cairo's ballet academy
• When Italy bombed Bahrain
• A History of Espresso in Italy and the World
• Warspace: Geographies of conflict in Beirut
• Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan
• "Time-Sense": Railways and Temporality in Colonial India
• An Ottoman map of North America
• "He loves drinking old wine from the jug": Some Remarks on Alcoholic Beverages in Syriac Literature Based on Secular and Religious Texts
• South Asian stories from Californian streets
• Our own Orientalism: Why Medievalists are Complicit when Manuscripts Burn and Ruins Crumble 
• Tea in Morocco: Nationalism, Tradition and the Consumption of Hot Beverages [podcast]
• From Dazzle to the Desert: A Cultural-Historical Geography of Camouflage [pdf]
• Mocking "Foreign Accents" and the Privilege of "Sounding White"
• On "Bandari" music and the marginalization of southern Iranian culture

Jacob Remes:

• New Jersey's dangerously broken police complaint system (radio 8:37)
• How an archival source can help us understand a treaty. (radio 54:00)
• Who works at minimum wage?
• Obama, union stooge, once, twice, thrice.
• Jack Layton's strategy of building a broad NDP coalition and the next election.
• “The raw energy behind this is young native people who are educated.”
• Can we even call it "carnival" when the government forbids political mockery?

L.E. Long:

• Indigenous sovereigntists speak
• When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative
• Rappers against the segregation of Romani children in the Czech schools
• PBS has a "futuristic" show about importing the poors back into San Francisco
• How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity
• On the eve of our repression: communiqué on the squatting struggle in Oakland
• Tegan Eanelli on the legacy of Bash Back (video)
• “So now my dear friends, it’s your turn to decide where you belong, and what you are made of.”
• Critical analysis of rape in anarchist studies
• Carnal Knowledge: an interview with Melissa Febos
• Our reformers have suddenly made a great discovery – the white slave traffic. Emma Goldman on trafficking (1910)
• Hidden Costs: The narrative of class and race in Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate
• Don't call yourself a revolutionary
• State of the Union: Flammable
• "Had Christopher Dorner been a different kind of camera-ready body, he might have been invited to tell his story by Jon Stewart..."
• Exterminating Angels
• Because being anti-racist ain’t got nothing to do with the color of your skin.
• "President Barack Obama can order, without trial, the death of a citizen residing in another country who threatens us, but we can't follow through with the same sentence in this country after a trial for one who has actually killed a U.S. citizen?"
• Teaching and transitioning
• The phenomenology of solitary confinement
• Pad Thai

Millicentsomer:

• Hilary Mantel on royal bodies and the spectacle thereof
• Speaking of spectacles, why doesn't it occur to women to want to be directors?
• Star Wars and women
• Audi commercials and how to educate a rapist
• The 'Bitch' Was Onto Something: A Re-Reading of "The Feminine Mystique"
• Bing Bleu's stuff
• Subashini Navaratnam on Les Mis, Red Lights, and white Oscars culture bait
• A tribute to last week's episode of Girls

ReclaimUC:

• Management's backup plans (update on the state of the anti-privatization struggle at the UC)
• Some real UC budget facts: "tuition increases have actually outpaced state reductions"
• Janus-faced Leviathan: California’s prisons and the universities as two faces of state power [pdf]
• Tree sitting
• What is the business model for online education?
• The pre-history of MOOCs: college courses by radio
• Everything you've ever wanted to know about Michelle Rhee
• The other side of paradise: Glimpsing slavery in the university's utopian landscapes
• Exterminating angels
• The State of the Union amidst the ashes of extrajudicial death
• Prison sentences given to black men are 20% longer than those given to white men for the same crimes