Sunday Reading

Kitabet:

• “a big idea floating around talk of Haiti’s reconstruction was that the disaster was a chance for the country to be a tabula rasa, on which could be imposed something entirely new.”
•  Excerpt: Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb
•  Peace Comes to Turkey? On Newroz in Kurdistan
•  One of Us: “These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness.”
•  “The distinctive thing about Irish censorship is that it had such a contrary effect.”
•  Photographs from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, & the garment workers’ strikes that preceded it
•  Walking the City: an interview with Nabil Shawkat on the pleasures of exploring Cairo on foot
•  A tribute to Perween Rahman
•  Making Art Out of Earthquakes: on Bloom, an “internet-based earthwork” visualizing activity on the Hayward Fault
•  Bollywood Easter: images of Christ in '70s poster art from India
•  “Practice resurrection.”

ReclaimUC:

• Will UC Berkeley occupiers get justice?
• The impact of budget cuts on California's community colleges
• A flurry of online legislation moves through California legislature: "SB 1306 is the absurdity degree zero of online panacea hallucination: It creates a 'New University of California' that must offer credentials but that may not offer instruction."
• Chicago is ground zero for "free market" education reform . . . but it's not only Chicago
• "Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period."
• The growing burden of college fees
• Half the professoriate will kill the other half for free
• The gender politics of MOOCs
• Why would MOOCs lower tuition? "Previous means of [lowering production costs] haven't resulted in reduced tuition. Instead the increased 'profit' from cost savings has been kept in-house."
• "Ah, student government: that perennial stepping stone for proto-politicians and safety valve against student activism"
• Atlanta cheating scandal is an indictment of education "reform," standardized testing, and authoritarian administration
• Whiteness supreme: Towson University and liberal ironists
• Photos from national demo in support of Sussex University occupation
• In Chile, students are back in the streets
• Interview with John Holloway: The meaning of revolution and autonomous struggle today
• "We were handcuffing [black and hispanic] kids for no reason": Stop-and-frisk on trial
• Pamphlet on the Flatbush rebellion; Kimani Gray and two weeks of struggle in Flatbush
• Toys for the state of exception

Kerim:

• “the Supreme Court decided life for shoplifting wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment”
• “The myth of the “Harlem Shake” is that its viral spread was spontaneous, not directed by financial interests…”
• Agamben Toys: Apposite Baubles For The State Of Exception
• “Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Dutt has lived life with his face turned towards the past.”
• “Even in the brief history of this country, then, marriage has not been consistently defined and has been constantly evolving…”
• “You’ve simply made it more complicated and laden with meaning by adding ideas of your own.”
• “As the dancer’s positively-charged wing get closer to a neighbour’s positively-charged antenna, it produces a force that physically repels the antenna.”
• “If the administrators cannot compete and be effective online, then it’s time to get out of the way for the people who can.”
• “The script… sees the bald Indian pacifist confronting the British Imperial authorities with nothing but indomitable will, gentle wisdom and a Gatling gun he drags around in a coffin.”
• “Does Anyone Care About Newspaper Ombudsmen?”
• How to Apply to Art School in China

L.E. Long:

• The Fast-Food Feminism of the Topless Femen
• Rihanna's Melancholic Damage
• Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized: interview with The Knife
• "I really do want to understand how to work with political incoherence" - interview with Lauren Berlant
• "Disability is entirely economic and has been so since the move to  industrial models of labor."
• Kids, crimes & incarceration
• Behind every so-called misfit is a male manager/disciplinarian waiting to make a profit. Sometimes it’s money; sometimes it’s an investment in souls.
• Tough with badges, punks without them
• The Flatbush rebellion
• Action dries your tears: Can mental health struggles become offensive again? (Disclosure: this is part of a project that I work on)
• How to deal with being called out
• The story of every drone strike in Pakistan
• Stratfor on the Cyprus bailout
• Best fashion blog: What Ali Wore
• Against Equality
• "...all these straight people defining the parameters of discourse around same-gender marriage (whether pro-, or anti-from-a-radical-perspective) are still reproducing this same thing where queer people don’t get to define the terms of their own politics, engagements with those politics, and so on."
• Beyond the Access Narrative: Marriage Politics, Austerity, Surveillance
• Mexican town finds more security and peace by throwing out the police
• R U XTREEM?
• PREPARE TO HAVE YOUR FACE ROCKED
• howling dogs
• Melba Roy Mouton
• "as a person who put this negative thing out, I have to put something positive out... You have to be accountable for what you do."

Bint Battuta:

• Imagining Hafez: Rabindranath Tagore in Iran, 1932 [podcast]
• Poetas castellanos del Sáhara
• 19th-century Circassophilia
• Ottoman Palestine: The History of a Name [podcast]
• Mumbai’s Irani cafés
• The Ethiopian-Armenian community
• On Qur'anic healing in Egypt
• Soviet cinema and African filmmaking
• Fantasies of Reason: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural in Iran [pdf]
• The history of Hamra Street in Beirut
• On the pleasures of exploring Cairo on foot
• A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II
• Earthquakes and the apocalypse
• Lama Abu-Odeh on Joseph Massad’s Empire of Sexuality
• An Indonesian Community in Cairo: Continuity and Change in a Cosmopolitan Islamic Milieu

Jacob Remes:

• An Atlas of Misreading
• Anthony Lewis (1927-2013)
• How law firms rip off the companies that rip off the rest of us.
• "The Charter [of rights and freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest."
• The Westminster System and neoliberal crises.
• Republicans, the NLRB, and the attack on the administrative state.
• The problem with OSHA. (Series)
• US counties in 12 demographic categories.
• "Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future."
• Brogramming and anti-brogramming.

nathan jurgenson:

• "Twitter seems to be making aspects of academic practice more visible"
• "as long as people want to be seen reading, things to read will be printed"
• "photos are disposable records of moments, to be taken in bulk and largely forgotten and unshared"
• "“It made it more real to folks,” he said. “There’s nothing like a hundred YouTube videos to do that""
• "This makes the drone the greatest champion of neoliberal practices"
• "The False Distinction Between “Online” And “The Real”
• "The great sin of Facebook is that it made “like” far too important and too obvious"
• "he is siphoning off my very lifeblood in the service of charging his Apple-issued heart replacement"
• "Cyborg writing is the first instant of picking up the tools"
• "Shaw thought the videos looked “pre-viral” and saw an opportunity to exploit them"
• "“Boston Punk Zombie,” reads the crudely-scrawled avatar of a green-mohawked punk with the address [email protected]"
• "Sandberg assumes that the feminist question is simply, how can I be a more successful worker?"
• "this isn’t Where the Boys Are; it’s where the boys aren’t shit"
• "it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy"