Sunday Reading

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Today only, with extra Sunday.
nathan jurgenson: “A simple piece of software got us through the dark ages of computing” "The Decelerator Helmet is an experimental approach for dealing with our fast moving society...a perception of the world in slow motion" "War existed before social media, but not like this. This is a new thing" "he's the one who was violated. But he knows that won't stop anyone from clicking "play" over and over again" "A book is basically thousands of tweets printed out and stapled together between pieces of cardboard" "ideally, real human users will leave social networking altogether" “Do we buy iPads b/c they change & improve our lives? Or because we need something we can believe improves our lives?” "We've got enough stuff going on inside a race car. We don't need to have cell phones in there, distracting us" "biological storage… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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“Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  Frank Pasquale The Age of Greed and the Sabotage of Regulation. 401(k) fee-for-all. 2-tier 1st Amendment; your cell phones died for Verizon's freedom. Disability history. Banks won't tell you their fees; AT&T won't tell you data usage measure. WalMart won't tell workers next week's hours; prevalent precarity. Algorithmic serfdom; algo-driven speech; algo trading ban; mega-trades. Keep on trucking: 14 hours on, 10 hours off; the Bush fils legacy, updated forfracking. The average million-dollar-plus household receives almost $800,000 in investment income. 52 Shades of Greed. l.e. long Five ways cis feminists can help build trans inclusivity and intersectionality Porn stars of color face racial inequality and wage gap, too. Hardcore desire: Black women laboring in porn--is it just another job? Sex work and serial killing Dear PETA, Shut the fuck up (NSFW pics) EFF, ACLU challenge California Prop 35's online surveillance requirement Oakland police… Read More...

American Democracy's Bad Infinity

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Nothing left of the word once we have declared politics to be also personal; if politics is anything, it’s everything minus the personal, so adding the personal back in—as we must—forces the essential meaninglessness of the word “political” to the surface.
I put it to you that “politics” is not only not a useful word, it’s an actively harmful one. Everything is political, so the “political” can be nothing in particular. And this means the particular can't be anything. Think of it this way: when we say things like “the personal is political,” for example—or attach an adjective like “sexual” or “identity” to politics—what we really mean is that the sense of the political sphere which excludes mere personal concerns (like sex, or sexual identity) is bogus and wrong. We are right to say this, excluding the personal from the political is bogus and wrong. Dignity is as much a part of the struggle for labor rights as are things like salaries and benefits, and the dignity of marriage no less so; any one who thinks a civil union is the… Read More...

more tired, more frustrated, more rotten

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At times like this, the same thing always happens: the Israeli military kills and injures large numbers of Palestinians with guided missiles while Palestinians fire a few rockets at Israel and kill and injure a much smaller number. These numbers and the mismatch seem important, as does the question of who broke the truce first. Who was justified in killing innocent people in response to the killing of innocent people? Who is blameworthy, for having killed more innocent people than necessary? If you watch this video, for instance--which is framed with the requisite “balance,” in that there is one Israeli and one Palestinian--you can’t really escape noticing that only one of them is in a place where his building is being shaken by nearby missile strikes. The other shows us images of his kids, and asks us to sympathize with… Read More...

The Young Mr. Lincoln

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Since he wants so desperately to be nothing more than a humble man of the people, the movie functions as one long demonstration that no such thing as “the people” exists.
Young Mr. Lincoln is one of the three movies John Ford made in 1939, and even though it begins and ends during Honest Abe’s time as young Springfield lawyer, the anachronistic term “prequel” is appropriate since the Civil War and Ford’s Theater retrospectively structure everything about the film’s narrative. Precisely because we know what will eventually happen, the film’s plot is never in doubt as such; we know that Abe will become a lawyer, we know that he will win his court case, we know that he will eventually best Stephen Douglas in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, that Douglas will hold his hat while he is inaugurated, that he will fight the civil war, free the slaves, and be shot and die. There is therefore no narrative suspense, nor does the movie ever cheat and try to create any. Instead, there is… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Sunday In The Park With Great Reading
Aaron Bady Are you there, Foucault? It’s me, the tourist. Mapping the geography of our resistance Electoral Maps, Antebellum Maps: Or, How Liberal Self-Satisfaction Dissolves History into a Racist Mess Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election The Unelectable in Literature: A Rogue’s Gallery Despite Not Being Charged with Any Crime, US Muslim Put On No-Fly List, Effectively Exiled from His Country Another City is Possible!: An Interview with David Harvey On Mob Justice in Nigeria It Doesn't Mean We Were Wasting Our Time Take it from a Soldier “Remember to Save Often” Glaciers For Obama and Plankton For Obama The British Have Invaded Nine Out of Ten Countries It's all going to get so much worse. "It is difficult to believe that the Post's terminology was its best effort at informing readers" “I’m not having my daughter growing up… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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"Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task / Does not divide the Sunday from the week." -- Marcellus in Shakespeare's Hamlet
bint battuta Islam, Vodou, and the Making of the Afro-Atlantic Wenzhou’s Italian Uncles Moroccan Tape Stash Structural Violence as Political Experience in Palestine: An Archaeology of the Past in the Present Inventing Ethnicity; Imagining Agriculture: The "Tribes" of Ham and the "Primitive" Crops of Africa Turkish Knockoff Toothpaste, Legal Imperialism, and Racist Product Marketing in 1920s America Iraqi Maqam: Classical and Traditional Music of Iraq City, Space, Power: Lahore’s Architecture of In/Security The Book of Collateral Damage On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections Looking for Revolution in Kuwait Fear and Forgetting: The 1962 internment of Indian-Chinese No Zombies in Gaza: Horror in Arabic Cinema Your multicultural nation is not necessarily mine Ani Mi Levanon: Smiling Through Hebrew Class nathan jurgenson “What thrill does one imagination hold, after all, when we can program a bot to… Read More...

“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

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If we think of censorship in purely negative terms, none of this will be all that interesting.
A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune made the comparison above, and though it feels right, I find that I don't really know what the difference between “recording” and “implying” signifies to him. Faulkner is a great American writer, a High Modernist, and though a novel like Sanctuary comes close to producing “the South” as the lurid object of the reader’s voyeuristic gaze, it isn't that version of William Faulkner that the reviewer is referencing. He's talking about the Faulkner who implies a great deal with the sight of Caddy's "soiled britches" but never quite says what that is, who makes the reader "feel more than they know," as Hemingway once put it, precisely by not being too specific. If modernism is many different things, the "high" in High Modernism is the way what's on the surface hints at the iceberg below. Caldwell, by… Read More...

America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama

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...that tear in the discourse shows us the limit point of dads as master ideology; the one thing it can’t actually justify is murdering your own kid, and a 16 year old American kid is President’s Obama’s child.
Louis CK knows one thing, and it is that being a good dad makes him bulletproof. He knows other things, but this is the main one, the important one, the one that has made him even more successful than he can always admit being comfortable about being. It’s the thing that saves his character, and reliably saves his show; witness the finale of the first season, when, after walking in the dark for thirteen episodes, he returns home to be redeemed by his children, by the way they make him necessary. Dads are not, however, necessary. Be careful in reading that line, though; I mean something very specific by it, and perhaps less (and more) than you might think. First and foremost, we don’t need any the things we say we need. All “needs” are socially constructed, the end result of… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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"We returned to our college on a Sunday afternoon: the peasants were dancing, and every one we met appeared gay and happy. My own spirits were high, and I bounded along with feelings of unbridled joy and hilarity" -- closing paragraph of Ch. 5, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
ReclaimUC Support plunges for Proposition 30, which would prevent a devastating round of "trigger cuts" to public higher ed in California. You would think UC president Mark Yudof would make a strong case for supporting Prop 30. You would be wrong. In the 1990s, City College of San Francisco "rewrote the way the college was going to be governed": administrators were fired and faculty were put in positions of power. Now, supposedly to cut costs, the system of faculty leadership has been dismantled while a new "special trustee" with veto power as been hired for $1,000 a day plus a free car. Is student debt the choke point of finance capitalism? Pay gap makes student debt burden worse for women and elderly Americans burdened by student debt too University of Chicago as an engine of gentrification (cf. Andrew Ross on… Read More...

"Want some food?"

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"I'd cook some for you, but my kitchen is fucked up."
At the considerable risk of indulging in nostalgia, I can't help but revisit what happened a year ago. It feels like a lot longer than a year ago, but it's still an itch I can't help but scratch. Below is what I posted the morning after the Oakland Police Department raided the Occupy Oakland camp. It was heartbreaking and surreal to be at the "crime scene" that was, until recently, Occupy Oakland. I don't really have words. When I first went down there, the police had the whole area blocked off and you couldn't get close. There were pockets of occupiers gathered on street corners talking about what they had seen, what had happened, and you could hear a lot of anger and amazement at the number of police that had been deployed. People were naming off the different police departments… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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"I walked down alone Sunday after church / To the place where John has been cutting trees." -- Robert Frost, "Pea Brush"
Aaron Bady How Things Fell Apart In Reagan's Nation Sex House The Kiriakou Conundrum: To Plea Or Not To Plea Oakland is for Burning? Beyond a Critique of Gentrification ‘We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth’ Why It is Essential That Criminal Bankers are Prosecuted Ethnic Cleansing: Colorblind Casting in Cloud Atlas Our Men in Honduras America's Pussy Riot Achebe and the Myth of Nigerian Exceptionalism “Binders full of women”: Mitt Romney’s theology of the book Were TSA Scanners Dangerous? Ionizing X-Ray Machines Removed from Airports Socialism, Secularism and the Shifting Goalposts of Indian Democracy mo melanin mo problems: tightening & whitening The paradoxes of demographic doom the moral secret of capitalism, its existential fundament, is not that we are free to choose but that we are forced to choose. nathan jurgenson Ready (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010 from… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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To Veluet-Guards, and Sunday-Citizens.
Jacob Remes A year after AWDU's victory, a report on left-wing public sector and education unionism How to Separate Jewishness from Zionism "Some Girls Rape Easy" 10 Amazing Lady Explorers Who Aren't Columbus Devaluing Care Work -- And Women Haiti's Constitutional Horror Show Nathan Jurgenson “There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War” “In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927) “Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued” “the apocalypse of the coming Reputation Market, in which all humans will be searchable, sortable and assigned a value by a judge, jury and executioner of their peers across the Internet” “The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm” “social media encourages thinking of authenticity as moment of external confirmation; others decide if you have been true to yourself” “The… Read More...

Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of "Free Speech"

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How the mere act of occupying a body that can be photographed becomes the consent required to do so
If “Violentacrez” was seen as a criminal, unmasking him would be universally understood to be a praiseworthy thing to do. Sheltering a criminal is not something anyone defends; what they do, instead, is argue that the criminal in question is not really a criminal, or that the law is unjust. But if you accept the legitimacy of the law, and if you accept that the criminal in question broke it, then there is no virtue to be had in sheltering him. To the extent that you accept that an act is legitimately criminal, in other words, free speech protections do not apply to it. This is a subtle point, but it’s also not that controversial: as the famous “fire in a crowded theater” example demonstrates, “Free Speech” is not and cannot be a blanket protection of all speech, as such,… Read More...

There Will Be a Memoir: Chinua Achebe and Biafra

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Since I haven’t read it, I can’t be talking about Achebe’s book, can I?
Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country, will be published tomorrow, and I will buy it and read it. That’s just a given. Achebe is a very sparing writer, as careful a craftsman as you’ll find and he’s never prone to writing just for the sake of doing so. If there was ever a writer whose every word, sentence, paragraph, and book deserved to be written, I’m tempted to say it’s him. And so, a new piece of creative work from him is a celestial event, or at least as rare. I can’t review his book, of course, because I don’t have it yet. For that, try Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Ike Anya or Chika Unigwe or Noo Saro-Wiwa or Uzodinma Iweala or until I’ve had a chance to write a proper review. In the meantime, let me comment on… Read More...

Sunday Reading

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Sunday Reading--October 7, 2012
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… Read More...