Bint Battuta: The Afghan Box Camera Project Iran's Armenian monasteries The histories missing from the Gulf's museums The Toughest Man in Cairo vs The Zionist Vegetable Freedom of Expression and Censorship in Medieval Arabic Literature [pdf] How "Turandot" became China’s national opera Photos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s Pulp science fiction under totalitarianism The Mark(s) of a Good Editor Pasta’s Winding Way West Writing the Kenyan Diaspora Trüth, Beaüty and Volapük An Ottoman map of Beijing Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle Jacob Remes: For every dollar Quebec spends on $7-a-day subsidized childcare, it makes $1.05. So-called Americans "Uncanny justice": paranoia, mystery, and confusion at Guantanamo Israel's $22-million black market for illegal abortions. Pro-Israel zealots try to Goldstone a report that shows that neither Israeli nor Palestinian textbooks are as bad as previously thought. The chair… Read More...

L.E. Long: Political Concepts: Lexicon Vol. 1 Habits of French colonialism (Vijay Prashad on colonialism in Mali) Black Women in the Labor Movement: Interviews with Clara Day & Johnnie Jackson The Irony of MLK Day 2013: A Renewed Invitation into White Supremacy Carceral feminism and the war on sex workers Columnism, complicity and crisis 5 Things I Learned About Abortion by Checking My Assumptions at the Door I watched the marathon, 9+ hour Oakland City Council meeting last night David Harvey, anarchism, and tightly-coupled systems Videos from Tuesday's Oakland City Council meeting A plan for a safer Oakland: Critical Resistance Depression and Money, Some Real Talk 16-year-old Temitayo Fagbenle reports on sexual bullying online (audio) Facial weaponization: Fag Face Communique Nicole Cook retires from cycling, her statement on sexism & drugging in the sport "in the NFL the writing on the wall… Read More...

T. F. Charlton: We have always resisted: centering the historical activism of trans women of color in the narrative of the reproductive justice movement What we aren't talking about when we talk about gun control Race, Gun Control, and Unintended Consequences Wrestling with details of Noah Pozner's killing What Girls and Shameless teach us about the difference between being broke and being poor Having children shouldn't be a privilege for women graduate students How to write about trans issues without doing a Julie Burchill Did Jodie Foster just come out? Jodie Foster and the queer line between public and private Tragically hip: privilege and the emerging church     Kitabet: "I was told by one human rights worker the story of Hasan Avras, who received a DNA match for his relative’s bones only to discover that they had been lost in the post." (On mass… Read More...

Bint Battuta: I am Hazara Zanzibar: Imperial Visions and Ottoman Connections [podcast] Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization Joginder Singh, Kenya’s "Flying Sikh" On vibrant port cities and anomalous nation states Saudi Arabia Stakes a Claim on the Nile Ten Cairo Music Videos African Americans and the Soviet Union [YouTube] The Turkish Kiosk Project The New World Through Arab Eyes On war and the body, cartography and corpography Out of the Hadhramaut The mixed opinions in Goa regarding 451 years of Portuguese colonial rule 1937 British documentary about Sharjah airport [YouTube] Spray Paint on the Border Wall: Challenging the Waning Sovereignty of the Nation-State [pdf] Jacob Remes: Understanding the Native subsidy of settler Canada Haiti's continued disaster of internal displacement Repurposing flying robot killing machines, because roads are too difficult Forced Entry The 22-year-old American… Read More...

Let’s start with the title, a phrase that probably meant nothing to you before you associated it with this movie. Apparently “Zero Dark Thirty” means 12:30 a.m. in military parlance, but that’s not what it means to you, Hollywood’s consumer. To you, it means “the name of the movie about the CIA finding and killing Osama bin Laden.” It’s a cipher, a code, a set of words stripped of any context but the meaning which the movie gives them, and in its very absence of meaning, it comes to stand for the movie’s own howling absence of meaning. Imagine if the movie was titled “Geronimo,” by contrast. Think about how the name would pass judgment on the events it describes, would frame how they were to be received. “Geronimo” was the code name used to identify Osama bin Laden, but… Read More...

Kitabet: "Unbeknownst to them, people in Eugene, Oregon, in 1965, were helping to test the aerodynamic flexibility of two buildings that had not yet been announced and that would soon come to dominate the skyline of New York City...." "Ngai claims that the zany, the cute, and the interesting are the categories that speak best to the constitution of “a historically specific kind of aesthetic subject: ‘us.’” "Welcome to the Sanaa Sheraton! It’s now officially part of an expanded US Embassy estate that some are calling Yemen’s “Green Zone" "if I were an Iraqi, that would be my street—that’s where my bookstore would be, this would be my cultural community." "They began arriving in the 1870’s from what was then the Ottoman province of Syria, most leaving behind home villages set in mountains much higher than Manhattan’s not-so-hilly terrain." "In Martin’s “non-Anglo” cultures, and in Orientalist literature more generally, the… Read More...

What would a better system of higher education look like? Our political vocabulary has never been geared towards this kinds of discussion; in the long, excruciating age of Reagan, anything not directly conducive to the accumulation of profits will slowly or quickly be changed into a version of itself that  more effectively serves the interest of finance capital. It’s hard not to become a certain kind of conservative, then, to defend what is or what was because what threatens to be in the future seems likely to be much worse. This is how Occupy would find itself demanding an end to the state, for example, and also for a return of the new deal: against those who say that There is No Alternative, we might be right to retort that another world is possible, but in practice, the “other world”… Read More...

I'm not saying this year happened in the passive voice, but I'm not completely sure it didn't. So let me purge my memory by voiding my activities of their subject. Some films were reviewed: At Jacobin, Lincoln Against the Radicals (preceded by The Young Mr. Lincoln) Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman The Albatross Around Johnny Depp’s Brain   Some books were written about: Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memory Damning With Faint Prize: Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” What It Takes to Build Your Credit: Billy Kahora’s “Urban Zoning” Everything Fantastic is Credible: Babatunde Rotimi’s “Bombay’s Republic” David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words   Some television was watched: The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction The… Read More...

Kerim Friedman: Res Obscura: Early Modern Drugs and Medicinal Cannibalism Indian police: A law unto themselves Prerevolutionary Russian income inequality: Russia in 1904 was less unequal than America today. #IdleNoMore in Historical Context Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility 55555, or, How to Laugh Online in Other Languages We are All Treaty People The price of inequality in higher education The Unequal State of America: The Decline of the Great Equalizer "Doraemon at Thailand’s Wat Sampa Siw Wab Kinew: Idle No More Is Not Just an "Indian Thing" Native American Netroots:: Reservation Poverty The Secret History of Guns TEHELKA INVESTIGATION: The rapes will go on The Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012 In Most Rich Countries, Women Work More Than Men UC Berkeley's New Chancellor Endorses the Falsehood: Criticizing Israel is Anti-Semitic The Modernity of Jazz… Read More...

Jacob Remes: The strange case of Christmas KFC Tokyo prepares to lose its last street-level view of Mt. Fuji On Not Believing in Canada Thinking Haiti, Thinking Jean Casimir L. E. Long: Old school Berlant: Against the Sex Scandal Dean Spade, The Most Imprisoning Nation in the World (video) Rania Kalek on what's Missing from the Gun Control Debate When the burning moment breaks: Gun control and rage massacres “Did you hear? It’s the sound of their world collapsing” The Shape of My Impact: on Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years Thousands protest rape in India Oki Sogumi on living anymore Anne Boyer's crushindex Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Coioniai Discourses (pdf) Matt & Kteeo are spending the holidays in prison and soon Maddy will be joining them China Mieville's Christmas(TM) story: 'Tis the Season To get you through family times, my current favorite porn tumblr (NSFW) Kitabet: The… Read More...

http://youtu.be/DArWFdtW-Mk (Eternal present/in memoriam, by Jeremy Osner) Me: I am Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza, which became a problem [On] Zoë Heller on Rushdie The Impossible is Deplorable Another Skyfall review Knaan on censoring himself Mo Yan, censoring himself World Revolution Z Kristof: "The Poor Cannot Feel Love" Bartholomew Williams There is no joke here unless you think black women’s bodies are jokes Ghosts on the Waterfront Thinking the Unthinkable Who is Going to Win the Kenyan Election? How abusers get away with targeting Indian women Graceishuman: "being what i am, there is no other Troy for me to burn" - erica, inchoate on Riki Wilchins and the dangers of idealizing one experience as the "standard 'trans woman narrative.'" Chivalry, Class, and Race - Bix on the problems of viewing chivalry through the "blinders of Victorian sentimentality." Risk and Ethics in Public Scholarship - Tressie McMillan… Read More...

I’m pretty okay with any kind of gun control that our political process can produce. Sure, let’s do it. Let’s try doing something instead of doing nothing. Unrestricted gun ownership is, like the second amendment, a wildly anachronistic relic of a very different period in this country’s history, and I’d be down with scrapping it. And if you think you need a gun to protect your farm from coyotes or shoot deer, calm down. Those guns are safe. There is no possible scenario in which it will ever become difficult for you to purchase the kind of firepower you will need to kill deer and coyotes in Montana. If you think jack-booted thugs are going to come for your shotgun, you are wrong. They don’t want your shotgun. A handgun, on the other hand, is a gun which is designed… Read More...

The logo itself is not nearly as big a deal as what it represents. That’s true in a very literal sense: the logo itself only matters because of the thing which it is meant to represent, the University of California. It’s not objectively ugly, in other words, if indeed there is such a thing as aesthetic objectivity. The logo is subjectively ugly. It’s because of its context, because of its history, and because of our subjective experience of the logo that it strikes so very many people as “ugly.” For many, this is the last straw, a last indignity.  I say this not only for myself, but after reading a lot of comments on the petition being circulated, and doing periodic searches for “UC” and “logo” on twitter. It’s impossible to be comprehensive, of course—over 45,000 people have signed the… Read More...

Kitabet:  A Lost Map on the Tramway in Istanbul: "It is not easy to define who is a secret Armenian." Access to Counsel and the Political Geography of Immigration Detention: "For these individuals, geography often becomes destiny." How the Coastline Became a Place to Put the Poor: "In retrospect, after the storm, it looked like a perverse stroke of urban planning." Lahore's Architecture of In/Security: "One of the greatest unacknowledged casualties of the United States’ “war on terror” has been the cities—and citizenry—of Pakistan." Elizabeth Bishop's Misunderstood 'Brazil': “It is awful,” Bishop wrote after her return to the United States, “to think I’ll probably be regarded as some sort of authority on Brazil the rest of my life.” Vispo: "If poetry ought to be performative, as James Fenton recommends, then it makes sense that in visual form poetry would elicit a kind of motion, an unfolding over the space of… Read More...

"Its vagueness is its strength--anything more detailed would get in the way of the pastel and neon textures that animate the identity." The new logo that the University of California unveiled yesterday can’t be taken seriously, but we laugh so we don’t vomit. That quote, above? That’s an actual quote, by someone who apparently did not think they were saying something so humiliatingly vacuous that the only possible reaction would be to take a vow of silence and change professions. That thing is ugly. But it’s not only ugly because it looks like a Swedish flag being flushed down the toilet; it’s ugly because it so perfectly crystallizes everything that’s been going wrong with the University of California for years, the same mindset that’s been dragging the UC down in its nose-dive with destiny. Watch this video, for example, in… Read More...

Bint Battuta: Hip Hop from ’48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent The Boring Russians of Dubai Bengali Harlem "In one of the darkest moments in Palestinian lived history, a 'dream-world' has somehow emerged in the West Bank" Persian Underground: Garage Rock, Beat and Psychedelic Sounds from the Iranian 60s & 70s Scene Why I left Berlin for Karachi The Coldscape, "this vast, distributed artificial winter that has reshaped our entire food system" Bil?d al-Welsh (Land of the Welsh): Muslims in Cardiff, South Wales Uncertified Copies: On Samizdat Why Israel Desires to be Hated by Palestinians Sultan Mahmud II's love of European music Oops, Your Jahiliyya Is Showing: Exposing the Convert Party Girl The Iconography of A Camel Fight Taking a Trip Through Ethnic Lane - Cultural and Racial Voyeurism and The White Gaze Kitabet: Trap Streets The Tunnels of… Read More...