Sunday Reading

Shashwati:

• A detailed background on Narendra Modi and his rise to power before he became the presumptive PM.?
• Post election summing up of what led to the massive victory of Modi and the BJP.?
• The role of violence in Indian politics and the violence of 1984 and 2002 which are cited by those you support Modi and those who oppose him.
• Speculative alternative history of what would happen if Modi won. The reality is turning out to be worse.
• The transformation of Narendra Modi to front runner?.?
• Why are otherwise bright people flocking to Modi?
• Modi's Brahmanical creds. A good insight into how caste has played into the equation
• The able lieutenants who bring in the votes one communal conflagration at a time.
• Saffron terrorist Swami Aseemanand
• Intellectuals capitulation to Modi
• What happens if you oppose Modi
• The rise of Hindutva politics has largely been funded by NRIs especially post Babri masjid.
• How the failure of the Congress is tied to the Nehru Gandhi family.?
• Modinomics: do Narendra Modi's economic claims add up?

Some other things that people on my timeline suggested for reading about the Indian Election:

• The Modi Generation
• Rushdie Explains India
• India and Israel look to deepen ties following victory of the Hindu right
• The promise, and peril, of Modi’s mandate
• So Who Has Won the Election?
• An Anti-Congress Wave in India Propels the Hindu Right to Power

Reclaim UC:

Jacqui Shine:

The Chipotle Cup Desk:

• Chipotle Cup Draft
• George Saunders on Chipotle Cups

 

The Vivian Maier desk:

• Vivian Maier and the problem of difficult women
• Vivian Maier, Cottage Industry

 

The celebrity profile desk:

• Alex Trebek: Last King of the American Middlebrow
• & let's revisit Jada Yuan's brilliant profile of Stevie Nicks, just 'cause we can!

 

The Internet Age desk:

• Message board childhoods
• The commencement season desk

 

Bint Battuta:

• The Zionist Expedition to East Africa, 1905
• Poles In Persia (1943)
• South Asian migration to Britain in the 1950s
• Hijras and the British imperial state in India
• The Crypto-Christians of Trabzon
• The politics of archaeology in Lebanon
• Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
• The Panopticon: A peek into Lebanese prisons
• "Uninhabitable" African and Asian cities
• British World War II propaganda in Persian
• The dissemination of legal knowledge in British India
• Sanskrit, Culture & Power in Premodern India
• The last of Delhi's calligraphers
• Lakmé/Lakme, from the opera to the cosmetics
• The history of the suitcase
• The history of Nutella

Nathan Deuel:

• "It is understood the unusual nesting place was picked by the queen bee, who landed there first and was quickly followed by her devoted colony." 
• "When you look down from an airplane,” Chuck D said in Beirut, “you don’t see any letters down there.”
• "The family eats one meal a day, and they try to do it together...Chicken and meat are extremely rare."
• "Me: Was it that bad? Me: Fuck you."
• "We would be terrible. We would lose every time. But we’d really figure out some important shit about suffering." 
• "Like I want my face on FBI's top 12 most wanted. Because that means I'm doing something right."
• Is Lebanon Winning Against Al-Qaeda? "April 2014 was the first month to witness no explosion since October 2013." 
• "That’s my corporate plan. Sexting is the future."
• “I’m not the Man — I’m just a man. I’m just a cowboy. I’m just one dude that’s doing something special."
• "I haven't been down the mountain in six months..It's all about the digging the work, the search."
• "Ninety seconds later, it was over. And now, Westbrook knew, his career was too."

Kitabet:

• Turkey Coalmine Disaster: Accident or Murder?
• "Coal is Turkey’s most exploited indigenous source of energy."
• Arabs in Yiwu, Confucius in East Beirut
• Japanese Namazu-e (earthquake-causing-catfish) Prints
• “The men in my life noticed my body was changing before I did.”
• Queer Questions
• Vijay Iyer on “Complicity With Excess”
• "But as Naji discovered, the US government can do more than land you in prison overseas."
• Kabir Tambar on “The Reckoning of Pluralism”
• The End of Rain as We Know It
• We Kill People Based on Metadata
• “This film is Maier’s punishment for the crime of violating a social media ethos that had yet to become dominant.”
• Editing While Female
• Artists of the Palestinian Revolution
• Punishment in the Afterlife: An Eastern Turki Manuscript
• On Nicholas Wade: “an important feature of a plausibility argument is plausibility.”
• Flatulanthropology
• An Earthquake Live at the Symphony

Frank Pasquale:

• We've gone beyond an economy of exclusion to an economy of expulsion.
• The robots aren't going to save us, and may be making the laws.
• Nanotechnology and Military Attacks on Photosynthesis.
• Please forgive us, plants.
• Memez in the trap.
• The right to the city.
• Billionaires with drone movies.
• Digital Taylorism in the WorkPlaceOpticon.
• Permatemp.
• Google, you're a data processor, not a li'l ole newspaper.
• The left on Piketty: Callinicos, Harvey.
• Let them eat fat; GDP rises, calories fall in India.
• Oculus Rift for chickens, and to reduce human costs.
• Maker Faire as a politics of fantasy.