So, apparently a professor delivering a talk at an academic conference got irritated that someone in the audience was live-tweeting the paper and he rebuked the tweeter on twitter: since the material was not yet “published,” he demanded, the audience had no right to broadcast it to the world. Adeline Koh storified the twitter conversation that ensued and the hashtag #twittergate will be your go-to source for where it went from there, as you breathlessly follow its developments. A remarkably large sub-set of the digital humanities people have been talking and blogging about it, and Inside Higher Education even wrote a piece on it yesterday, called “The Academic Twitterazi.” From a handful of tweets, to a storify collecting them, to blog posts, to more official blogposts, and finally to an article in Inside Higher Ed documenting it as "news": it had… Read More...

l.e. long #feministvigilantegangs Black women shaping feminist theory This is how to play chola... They come with harrowing tales of abuse that neither the police, nor their local communities, have done anything to address. - on the Gulabi Gang "You can't do feminism without thinking about imperialism." Anticapitalist Feminist Struggle, and Transnational Solidarity - an interview with Chandra Talpade Mohanty (video) Phoolan Devi Queer Interrupted A brief history of Bash Back! "Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital – there’s no one to ask." Olympic boxer Claressa Shields, fighter-survivor A love poem for single mothers "She didn't take shit. At least never with a smile." - Remembering Shulamith Firestone "No one ever made a movie about my grandmother's story. No new laws were signed into effect… Read More...

Aaron Bady (is back at his Twitter handle): Spin Capitalist time has eliminated geological time The Hollywood Life Of "Walter Mitty" Kenya: Land and Communal Clashes News from Biblioteca Popular, week of september 16 My State-Sponsored Assault, Courtesy of the NYPD S17, chaos, possibility, futures, failures Everyone who attended OWS with a cell phone had their identity logged, says security expert The radical right-wing roots of Occupy Wall Street “Who’s really getting government handouts?” New report blasts working conditions of adjunct faculty In defense of David Graeber's Debt Europe on the Brink Pictureless Art Textbook What it costs to vote in California Among the Alawites Demolishing Palestine The War on Crime as a Conservative (and Progressive) Assault on Liberal Philosophy Jacob Remes Jane Jacobs's main contribution was changing the idea of who knows and how to know about urban life. What to do… Read More...

A lot of people have occupied themselves in defining the line that divides “speech” from “violence.” These people seem to agree that there is a basic and fundamental difference, and that it’s an important one, pretty much the line dividing good from evil. As a result, you cannot question the legitimacy of the former, while it has become virtually idiomatic that the latter is unacceptable, beyond the pale. It has come to be baked into the terms themselves: “positive violence” is practically a contradiction in terms (and the police don't use "violence," they use "force"), while a thing called “freedom of speech” has become a fetish, both an object of sacred reverence and a mode of defining legitimate behavior. In short: free speech is a thing worth defending to the death, while violence is a thing which no one will… Read More...

Aaron Bady Occupy’s ‘bat signal’ tries to keep the movement in spotlight Yale and Eugenics Solitary confinement in schools Can Debt Spark a Revolution? Dead After 11 Years of Despair: A Prisoner Who Proved Gitmo Is Immoral "Was the Arab Spring Really Worth It?": The Fascinating Arrogance of Power Screwing Working People CTU Strike FAQ Gerry's Advice for the Academic Job Market CUNY Declares War on Rebel Faculty Painkiller Post What Happened to Shulamith Firestone Telegraph Avenue http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-democracy-and-oil-ended-it-lessons-from-the-new-book-carbon-democracy.html http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/romney-will-solve-crisis-exact-same-gop-plan-2008-2006-2004 Debt Resistors' Operations Manual The Worst Teacher in Chicago No, I Will Not 'Get Over It." Hoffman’s Barracks and Beyond: Quick, Dead, Zombies Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? The White Man Comment Natives on the Boat Embedded Fisk Michelle Rhee Is Taking Over the Democratic Party The Fascist Mother Obama's Hellfires The problem with Naomi Wolf’s vagina Frank Pasquale Social… Read More...

Jane Hu: First, can we talk about the What Maisie Knew trailer? The individuals behind Anonymous Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Long Suicide of Montgomery Clift. Greg Londe reviews City of Bohane, and contextualizes it within the history of Irish literature Eloquent anger Read “I know why Bret Easton Ellis hates David Foster Wallace,” written by a man who edited them both, before Ellis’s twitter statuses of the past week. Christian Lorentzen’s national conventions coverage read like short stories to me: 9Sept ;6Sept ; 31Aug ; 30Aug ; 29Aug.   New Emily Dickinson photograph   The Awl was on fire this week: Evan Hughes reviews and expands on Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error. Ask a NASA Scientist, Dr. David Morrison, about the apocalypse. Is Brooklyn Better? Has Manhattan Gotten Worse? Revisiting NY Mag’s “I Hate Brooklyn” Article Seven Years Later. ReclaimUC: UC: The UC regents… Read More...

(A guest post from Jungli Pudina, the final part of a three part series. Part one is here, part two is here.) Crazy forms of illogic were being debated in this case against Husna and Jalal to justify why their three young kids were abducted from them and could be permanently removed. They didn’t take their kids to the hospital right away, they preferred home treatment which means that the mother must have intentionally burnt her child, they keep their children cooped up at home, they don’t know how to discipline their children, they don’t even know the kids’ birth-dates, they don’t know English well, they are angry and anxious, the kids are wild and love to climb walls and isn’t that abnormal - utterly ridiculous non-arguments. I wondered if these would ever be discussed if the couple was not… Read More...

(A guest post from Jungli Pudina. Part one was here, and part three will be posted on Friday.) I called my mother and told her the essence of the case against Husna. In most situations of injustice, her standard response is: Tch tch, Dekho to. Aisa to nahin hona chahiyeh na - Oh my, just see. Like this, it shouldn’t be. But her reaction to Husna’s situation was radically different. Ma: Kia? Yeh to sarasar Zulm hai! Aisay kaisay bacchay lay liyey? It was mad. It was incomprehensible. Ma: Dekho to, kaisa Zalim Samaj hai! Even before learning that Paradise lies below the feet of the Mother, I must have learnt that we live in a Zalim Samaj, Cruel Society. It is a most essential term in everyday South Asian life, in our practical wisdom. The Society is Cruel primarily because it is against Love. It denies… Read More...

Jacob Remes: The murder fields of Marikana. The cold murder fields of Marikana.  Halifax tries a novel rape education message: "don't rape" Pat Buchanan's "cultural war" speech was derided as fringe at the 1992 Republican Convention; at this year's convention, it's utterly mainstream. Where HIV+ is the new normal. "I affirm a Judaism that is not associated with state violence." From a striking Quebec student:  Why We're Still Blocking Classes Obama Channels Reagan on Welfare Quebec's left-wing party (projected to win two, maybe three seats in Tuesday's election) Frank Pasquale: From voodoo economics to Honey Boo Boo economics. Predatory privatization. S. Africa: prison sentences 4 whistle-blowers; Apartheid-era rules & violence for labor. Why medicine is so costly in LDCs. The purchase-driven web. She gets $600 a second and she thinks you need to work harder. “Money is rules and governments set… Read More...

(A guest post from Subashini Navaratnam.) I’ve been reading the current flap over nice reviews vs not-nice reviews and wondering what this says about me, that I write not-nice reviews. Maybe I’m a not-nice person. (A revelation?) That’s what happens when much of the debate is framed around issues of niceness, positivity, and likeability—you can go around in a circle wondering if the reviewer is nice or not-nice, positive or curmudgeonly. I’m inclined to think that this whole discussion started off on the wrong foot, with a bizarre Jacob Silverman piece that claimed to be “against enthusiasm”; bizarre because presumably people get into book reviewing as a Thing To Do because they’re really enthusiastic about books? Surely, then, it’s not about enthusiasm and niceness and more about the demands of the market and book industry and the concurrent intensification of… Read More...

Bint Battuta: Spanish anarchists in the Welsh valleys Afro-Brazilian Mosques in West Africa A conversation with filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi about the Palestine Film Unit and "militant cinema" Jewish Aleppo, Lost Forever Karamanli Culture in the Ottoman Empire: Hybridity, Identity and Ethnicity [podcast] Why Hindi and cryptic crosswords do not mix Broken Letters: A Typogeography of Europe Reorienting Heritage: Poetic Exchanges between Suqu?ra and the Gulf No, Iran Didn’t Just Ban Women From Universities On Cairo's water crisis, and the diversion of resources to suburban developments Poetry, Immigration and the FBI: The Transborder Immigrant Tool Signs of Conflict: Political Posters of Lebanon's Civil War Archive of Golha (Flowers of Persian Song and Music) radio programmes   l.e. long:   On the politics of protest in Cape Town Lonmin: Malema fans the flames, but the victims are still out in the cold… Read More...

This guest post from Laurie Penny comes with a trigger warning for rape and sexual assault that should be visible from space. [author's words] *** Rape. From the Latin, "rapere," to take or snatch. Usual meaning: to penetrate another person's body sexually without their consent. From the Sexual Offences Act, 2003: "A is guilty of rape when A intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of B (the complainant) with his penis; B does not consent to the penetration; and A does not reasonably believe that B consents." It's such a small, simple, violent word, and right now, thanks to Julian Assange, George Galloway and Todd Akin, the entire internet and substantial portions of the internot are arguing over what it means.  (more…) Read More...

Frank Pasquale: Wall Street grandees need to have their net worth on the line. Rethinking the corporation after Enron, Goldman, and Milken. Peachtree pooh-bahs. High-speed Internet only for rich people. A whisteblower's tale: bank inner circle "operated like the mob." Police vs. photographers. Wealth-worship as self-concern. Bill Black explains 21st Century Economics. Robert Pollin on full employment. Dementia profit centers. Proposal: start evolution in distant galaxies. Jane Hu: "I'm so tired of this. Aren't you?" is my new internet mantra. * Louis MacNeice is romantic. * Pussy Riot and feminist anger. * On Antigone: "The nick of time is the essence of comedy; in tragedy it does not exist." * A key difference between book & TV criticism. * Man edits The Woman's World, then writes The Picture of Dorian Gray * Don't worry, we're far from the end of men. (Or, y'know, worry.) * A childhood… Read More...