Sunday Reading

Shailja Patel:

• “Idku used to be Egypt’s food basket” – now local community fights BP and other oil companies
• Obama's 'Power Africa' a Sweet Deal for GE, Not Sub-Saharan Africa
• These ones had not wanted to be ancestors yet
• Sudan cracks down on female activists
• Writer Of Color
• Fugitivity
• "Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies"

Long Reads

•  On The Appearance Of Things - Queerness, Family And Respectability
• No young person with any self-regard wants to be a teacher
• Of Papal Balls
• Can a woman who weighs less than 40 kg lift 1200 kg of mud a day?
• Why I am sending my daughter to P.S. 163 - or how to game the US public school system
• On putting the thinking back into activism
• BDS Campaign Sweeps UC Campuses
• Bodies That Matter

nathan jurgenson

• "There simply isn’t much of a market for tech-savvy haute couture"
• "In this paper, we investigate if widely used influence scores are vulnerable and easy to manipulate"
• "The TSA's Instagram feed shows the artistic side of confiscated material"
• ""cyber" has, in a way, returned to its dark science-fiction roots"
• "What the NSA needs to do, clearly, is start giving away Jay-Z albums"
• "Power moves through drones; so we can write and talk and think through drones. So we have to"
• "The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves"
• "the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others"
• "In America we’re seeing not the expectation of future growth, but the pessimism of imminent collapse
• "nobody believes in reincarnation anymore, because YOLO"
• "[New York] is a largely liquid city, a stunningly obvious fact that for decades was almost forgotten"

Bint Battuta:

• Reading Hannah Arendt in the Middle East
• Documenting the Modern Oil City: Cinematic Urbanism in Anglo-Iranian’s Persian Story
• On the South Arabian languages spoken in Dhofar, Oman
• White Turks, Black Turks, and Negroes: The Politics of Polarization
• "Names Can Wait": The Misnaming of the South Asian Diaspora in Theory and Practice
• Rachel Sassoon Beer, the Baghdadi Jewish woman who edited the Sunday Times and Observer between 1894 and 1902
• A Turkish hotel that hosts all Syria's pains and memories
• "White Todas": The Politics of Race and Class amongst European Settlers on the Nilgiri Hills
• Dealing with street dogs in Chennai
• The UAE's "porta-mosques"
• Calcutta’s Pen Hospital
• An interview with @NeinQuarterly
• Edward Said's review of Ahdaf Soueif's "Aisha" in 1983
• Mapping Arabic typography and calligraphy
• The emigration of nurses from Kerala
• Interview with Lauren Elkin about the Oulipo literary movement
• The last day of Café Prague in Tehran

Kerim Friedman:

• “10 percent human, and 90 percent microbe”
• “very few in Gujarat are willing to use their real name when asked about Modi”
• “I saw Lone Ranger so you don’t have to”
• In China, a replica of Manhattan loses its luster.
• The perfect example of everything that’s wrong with America.
• Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s
• The tiny island where men have their own language
• “think the I–95 of West Africa”
• “I met my boyfriend through the toilet bowl."
• “Grown children in China must visit their parents or potentially face fines or jail”
• “Preemption bills” in the US prevent states from passing laws mandating paid sick leave.
• Ladybusiness Anthropologist Throws Up Hands, Concedes Men Are the Reason for Everything Interesting in Human Evolution
• When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash

Frank Pasquale:

• Funding global health.
• Starve the squid.
• Scroungers vs. Strivers.
• Pet death is a booming market for Hallmark.
• Billionaire aims for literal immortality.
• Send Slate your ideas on what real progressives should care about.
• 20+ tales of bank scandal and crime.
• A Swiftian kind of privacy.
• Decoding the NSA.
• Brandeis on bankers: as true in 2013 as in 1913.
• The next 100 years.
• Finance's great deal: "$800 billion/year for about $170 billion/year of real economic value"
• Metastasizing finance.
• Theory of the taker class; the real takers; ants & locusts.

Jacob Remes:

• How to talk about the Honduran coup
• Can forgetting how to write be good for your writing?
• Take (and fail) a Jim Crow literacy test.
• Baby Girl for Indian Law beginners
• Is murder now easier than denaturalization?
• Creating a Canadian heraldry