This is not going to be a very good blog post. It is late, but that’s just a start. As with Scott and Ben, this is a story that left me with little to say; as with Keguro, it’s a story that left me expecting more, and feeling a little bad about it. Like Veronica, I never knew what to expect next in this story, as the text weaved together “one unexpected aspect of the ‘story’ to the next.” Like Beverly, it seemed to me that there was something distinctly timeless, placeless, and un-voiced about the narrative voice, and the story’s final line—a deadeningly duckbilled platitude of a freshly minted cliché—left me flat. I have lots of reactions, but nothing to say. And I did not have the charity to read it a second time; I will take Kola’s word for it… Read More...

This is week one of the "Blogging the Caine," in which I and a group of other writers write about the shortlist for this year's Caine Prize. Feel free to join the conversation, here, on twitter (#caineprize), or anywhere else. Send me an email (aaron AT thenewinquiry DOT com) if you'd like to mix it up with us, and see links to other participants in the right margin of this post. The first story, in alphabetical order, is Tope Folarin's "Miracle," which you can read in its entirety here. That “miracles” are not real is, I think, a secular assumption that many of Tope Folarin’s readers will share. Some of us might say that we believe in miracles, and we might enjoy indulging in the fantasy of divine intervention, or biblical stories that describe Jesus’ ability to turn water into… Read More...

ReclaimUC: In-state undergraduates at UC pay in tuition "nearly twice what it cost the University to provide their education" Monsanto University Oberlin cancellation of classes was demanded by students of color / Oberlin microagressions The university as a site of struggle: On occupying in a Midwest college town Virginia's evangelical mega-university Education in the streets Anatomy of a failed campus: NYU in Asia How Washington could make college tuition free without spending a penny more on education Abolish the SAT The professor, the bikini model, and the suitcase full of trouble Student protesters Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty!!! How cops became soldiers The racist history of the entrapment defense The austerity question: Work, welfare, and post-family life nathan jurgenson "The commodity markets of capitalism have made being truly different as difficult as space travel, and being merely different as… Read More...

L.E. Long: What is yours / How to get it Dear Sheryl Sandberg: "Leaning In" Doesn't Fix What's Actually Broken for Working Women Crisis and domestic work (On self-reduction, shoplifting, and other forms of gender war) "In fact, while for the male worker, his reproduction and reintegration is always assured, the woman is the only worker for whom these moments [of reproduction and reintegration] are not assured: she must, in practice, self-reproduce as labor-power throughout her entire life, whether within the house or outside it." "...clear instances of violent acts for private ends, the very embodiment of piracy." “Have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time?” I Didn't Do Anything - The Fight for Alan Blueford (video) Against Hired Guns: A six-part series on policing and violence in Oakland "In our attempts to curb police violence solely through… Read More...

ReclaimUC: "Thanks to Berkeley…": Managing multiculturalism in an age of austerity "Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history." Fitch gives UC bonds AA+ rating, and the university still takes its marching orders from the bond raters Florida Atlantic University joins the prison-industrial complex As growth shifts into overdrive, NYU faces a rebellion from within Historicizing the Yale torture center and the administrative response Immigration activists to Yale: "We're not lab rats" Michelle Rhee donates significantly—to the tune of $250k—to L.A. school board races The student body, for sale The PhD bust in 7 charts Antebellism: The neoliberal compromise of the political Disaster capitalism in the Chicago public schools Michelle Alexander on the school-to-prison pipeline "At the end of December, about… Read More...

It’s interesting that we are upset when the president of Emory University talks about the 3/5ths compromise—one of the marks of this country’s white supremacist origins, the place where racial slavery is literally written into the constitution—as a model for exemplary political behavior. When he uses that historical example to argue for the necessity of continuing cuts to the liberal arts, we are upset, unsettled, enraged, astonished. Should we be? Of course, it is a very stupid thing for James Wagner to write, full stop, and not simply because of the deep and profound level of historical ignorance it demonstrates. After all, the reference doesn’t even work on its own terms: the 3/5ths compromise, like the compromise of 1850, utterly failed at solving the conflict over slavery, whose bloody resolution it only delayed, intensified, and made all the more inevitable.… Read More...

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… Read More...

Clay Shirky observed at the Awl last week that he and I disagree over whether the trend toward MOOCs in higher education is reversible—he says no, and he says that I say yes—and I suppose he’s right, so far as that goes. But I don’t think that goes very far. So I want to shift the debate a bit. Shirky thinks in terms of “disruption” and what can come of it, in theory. I think in terms of what the “disruption” of the University of California system looks like in practice, as a complex of politicians, financiers, and career administrators move in lock-step to transform it into a self-sufficient corporate entity, and to enrich private industry in the bargain. I see a group of decision-makers who quite manifestly do not know what they are talking about and who barely try to disguise it, for… Read More...