Sunday Reading

ReclaimUC:

• UC Berkeley student government passes divestment bill
• California's terrible MOOC bill has been amended—and it still means privatization
• "In response to a question concerning the questionable educational value of some of his institution’s new online classes, [San Jose State President Mohammad H.] Qayoumi said the following: 'It could not be worse than what we do face to face.'”
• "I fully expect to die with this debt"
• Spring Breakers, finance, and student debt
• Full reportback from the Indiana University strike
• Two more colleges accused of mishandling, downplaying, and suppressing sexual assault
  
• "[O]ne of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel."
• The perils of wonkery
• The Saudi marathon man
• The case for Chechnya

Kitabet:

• The Idol in the Archive: “Past was the most common currency and the most valid emotion that I ever encountered growing up.”
• Julia Hobsbawm, Remembering Dad:  ”as I was buying a small bunch of flowers to lay on the grave, I had an overwhelming sentimental urge to give my father one last thing to read: it seemed impossible that he would never breathe in ideas again.”
• An underwater archaeologist ponders the fate of Hoover Dam
• “I’m looking for quarters because I’m headed to prison, and I’ve been told they will be useful there.”
• Remembering A Baghdad Elsewhere: An Emotional Cartography
• A Black Flag in Raqqa
• The Performance of Modernity: Ataturk Kültür Merkezi, 1946-1977
• “For much of her life Carmen Weinstein fought the pernicious misperception that there were no Jews left in Egypt.”
• Imagine There's No Gender: The Long History of Feminist Utopian Literature
• Eat It Up and Lay Wit It: Hip Hop, Cunnilingus, and Morality in Entertainment
• “Turns out, Korean dramas—or k-dramas—have become extremely popular in Kurdistan.”
• Is the New York Post Edited By a Bigoted Drunk Who Fucks Pigs?
• Tamerlan and Tamerlane: American Journalism Gone Nuts 

Kerim:

• “Half of all New Yorkers spend over a third of their income on rent; a third spend over half.”
• Why White People are Called Caucasian [PDF]
• “By nearly every measure… flies that fed on organic bananas and potatoes fared better”
• “Only about 40 people, most in their 80s, are known to currently use Hawaii Sign Language”
• “Of course, in Iceland, the question is not whether you’re related – it’s how closely.”
• “how the post office enabled a more interventionist state”
• “New York City has a problem with income inequality.”
• The Rejection Slip
• “Mrs Thatcher took positive steps to lower the pitch of her voice” (Iron Lady voice lessons as performed by Meryl Streep)
• “Swedish author Jan Guillou attributes the popularity of ‘hen’ to ‘feminist activists who want to destroy our language.’”
• “I had no way to say ‘that’s not okay.’”
• People from the South aren’t the fattest – they’re just more honest.
• Mahmood Mamdani - Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity
• “60 percent of …Americans who file for personal bankruptcy each year do so because of medical costs”

Jacob Remes:

• 50.7% is decisive; 50.6% is narrow.
• A formal posthumous exoneration for the Scottsboro Boys.
• "He was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in 'a startling show of force.'"
• Refuse to be terrorized.
• "Whenever the word 'terrorist' is mentioned in this country, reason tends to go out the window."
• Sex in the Locked-Down City
• Town/gown
• Two from Mike Konczal: An Anti-Rentier Agenda and the Serious Problems with Reinhart-Rogoff
• Mismanagement and underfunding at the Chemical Safety Board, now investigating the West, Tex., explosion.
• “Ten thousand workers who took on Jim Crow racism and dealt with race, gender and class, and this was during the 1940s.”
• History of capitalism and corporations. (streaming video 1:28:19)
• Remembering Eric Hobsbawn, father and reader
• Surprise! Toms Shoes isn't actually a good development model

Frank Pasquale:

• Time for algorithmic auditors; or is auditing just another form of solutionism?
• Big Brother Watch on access to records.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies about the long-term unemployed.
• Hong Kong high rises.
• Kids as captive audience for colas.
• Sleep as a luxury; study CEOs.
• Magyar Menace.
• How the death rate for skin infections declined; and may rise again.
• Why the CEO-worker pay ratio should not exceed 20:1.
• The hedge fund manager-CEO pay ratio should not exceed 2:1.

OCC foreclosure investigation as fraud: "no matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse."

1. Barmy plan for distributing peanuts.
2. Embarrassing payout amounts set.
3. Failure to supervise.
4. Coverup emerges.
5. The decision not to find harm.
6. Won't correct wrong addresses.
7. 2 year wait for checks for trivial restitution amount; they end up bouncing.

L.E. Long:

• How games like Katamari help us deal with consumerism and the wealth gap
• Why 'financial literacy' is a bunch of hooey – and why the banks promote it
• The Science of Self-Defense for Girls and Women (1929)
• "'Porn for women' is a marketing construct about as legit as the 'Bic Pen for Her' product."
• How The Attention Economy Of Myspace Fostered “Scene Hair”
• A Welcoming Pavilion of Thought: Weird Reading
• Love, Twitter, and Event
• French farmers, anarchists unite in airport fight

Bint Battuta:

• An Ottoman View of Missionary Activity in Hawai'i [pdf]
• "This was a plea to Turks to take up anthropology in self-defense"
• In Search of Jerusalem Airport [pdf]
• Islam for the indentured Indian: a Muslim missionary in colonial South Africa
• Ottoman Orientalism
• Islamic History & Identity in Central Asia: Key Issues & Debates [podcast]
• I don't know Arabic, but I do. And yet don't
• The Ghazipur Opium Factory
• Reviews of libraries and archives around the world
• "They may be devout Shia, but that does not mean they wish to become martyrs"
• Digitized version of 1967 census of West Bank and Gaza Strip
• The Literary Atlas of Cairo: Navigating the City by Book
• K-dramas in the global south
• Language, Nation and the Question of "Indian Literature" [pdf]
• Claes Rålamb's diplomatic mission to Sultan Mehmed IV's court
• Contemporary Iranian Literature
• The Ottomans and the "Dog of Venice"
• Return of the Brothers: Student Activism and Islamic Politics in 1970s Egypt [podcast]
• Shared Hindu-Muslim Shrines in Karnataka: Challenges to Liminality

zunguzungu:

• An Open Letter to Beatrice Ask
• Resisting Resiliance
• Can the Boston Bombings increase our Sympathy for Iraq and Syria, for all such Victims?
• The Perils of Wonkery
• Detainee Task Force Report
• Banned Occupy Nigeria Documentary Goes Viral
• This is the Sound of Uncool: Spandau Ballet & the Biopolitics of Cool
• Racial Maddow vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran
• The Ballad of Puerto Rican Rick
• Privacy: Disclosure
• Dove Ideology
• Shut Down and Shut Up
• Parasites and vultures.
• Cognitive Assemblages, a roundtable.
• This Image Should Not Be Seen by the Entire World
• Fact and Fetish
• Counting with Abraham: Love, Justice, and Boston
• Bassem Youssef is no Jon Stewart