Sunday Reading

Zack Fair:

• Kill the Player: "Oppressive politics such as white supremacy and heterocissexism enter creation through the ghost of the player-construct while enculturation to a capitalist and imperialistic culture is etched into products that define the player-construct’s existence."
• Videogames Without Players
• A review of Kitty Horrorshow's Dust City
• On Furniture Design in Videogames
• The Death and Life of Simulated Cities
• "It’s challenging to accept that there are situations where you can’t do anything useful, but once you have accepted that fact, you’re off the hook ... there’s another kind of player agency ... the situation where you have limited but not zero power."
• Thoughts on Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic, following on the previous
• More on the PRACTICE conference
• Education is for Everyone Unless You Are Special
•  "For the better part of two years, two of the biggest video game publishers in the world have done their damnedest to make it as difficult as possible for Kotaku to cover their games."

Kerim Friedman:

• Anthropology Association Moves Forward on Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
• Donald Trump and the “F-Word”
• Magical Thinking about Isis
• Safe Space
• To Understand Climbing Death Rates Among Whites, Look To Women Of Childbearing Age
• Nabokov’s Silent Partner
• Video: This Is How NYC's Manhole Covers Are Made
• The inside story of the campaign that killed Keystone XL
• Millions Died Because Kissinger Prolonged the Vietnam War for Years After Betraying Peace Treaty

Reclaim UC:

• The $10 billion sports tab
• "The student demands to know who made you the master and her the dependent."
• "Isn’t the War on Terror nothing but an attempt to maintain the safe spaces of the cosmopolitan elite?"
• "Free speech"
• #WeDemandUNC
• Leading anthropologist association overwhelmingly passes BDS resolution
• Brazil students take over schools and fight off police
• The radical, Bay Area roots of Black Lives Matter

ActuallyAisha:

• The countries that don't exist
• Novel Renditions
• Why I Set My Novel in an Unnamed Country
• On Missy / WTF
• Failures of Our Global Imagination
• Origins of the Police
• In the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism
• Whale Fall
• Ghost in the Shell: The Major's Body
• The Paris attacks and the abuse of history
• Ratology
• Why Cannibals Were on Every 16thC Map of the New World
• Feeling into Action
• The Seduction of Safety, On Campus and Beyond
• "Architecture's eccentrics and outsiders can be retrospectively recast as prophets"

Jacob Remes:

• Ernest R. Forbes (1940-2015)
• "Jewish history is a history of displacement. There are 36 mentions in the Torah about the need to love the stranger as yourself."
• "Is it ever legitimate for the state to use force?"
• The army in your kitchen[radio 20:28]
• The kids are all right.
• What it's like to be Black at Yale
• Thomas Midgley and the curse of modernity[radio 20:18]

Kitabet:

• There Will Be Thinkpieces
• The Stade de France: A History in Fragments
• “Depending on how you look at it, the killing of Reeva Steenkamp was either a sex crime or a race crime.”
• The Great Salmon Compromise
• Burj al-Barajneh and the Notion of “Hezbollah Bastion”
• “the last twenty years have seen the relatively rapid growth of a new kind of financial instrument: the catastrophe bond.”
• The Immigration Iliad
• Suspension Bridges of Disbelief
• “Cartoons came to Syria at the end of the 1800s along with cheap print and a global consciousness.”
• Five Comments on Hamilton
• Being Syrian