Sunday Reading

kitabet:

• “The lesson of the minaret: every tyrant will fall and the city remains.” 
• Guantanamo Prison Library book for detainees
• “West Virginia’s Radio Quiet Zone has become a gathering place for the hypersensitive since the mid-2000s”
• Inside a mile-deep open-pit copper mine after a catastrophic landslide
• “Disaster management people know that the first round of help always comes from the ordinary people who live around the area.” 
• The Marathon I Want to Remember
• “On the few occasions when we graduate students write for each other, I think we indulge our worst instincts”
• Anthropologists Explain How to Approach Aliens Parked in Earth Orbit
• John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age
• On Being Brown in America
• The Wrong Kind of Caucasian
• “these images reveal a little-known religious tradition in Xinjiang—its desert shrines to Sufi saints.”
• A Song of Lament for Syria
• Bradley Manning, Bayard Rustin, and the Perversion of Pride

nathan jurgenson

• "this real, if unplanned, alliance between terrorism and the media"
• "I saw anchors and reporters staring at their phones, hoping a new nugget might arrive to give them something to say"
• "Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse"
• "many of the declarations whizzing around Boston look like sympathy but smell like attention-seeking"
• "This is the privilege we don’t talk about, because to say “privilege” at all is to possess it: Intelligence"
• "I hope when enthusiasm for this new big data toy wears off, people will invest their energies in results that matter"
• "the big lie perpetuated by Chrysler’s stories is that its recovery is America’s recovery"
• "fast-food and retail workers of the world, unite—because, you know, YOLO"
• "Human genes do not augment the body, they are the body"
• "memes circulate us rather than vice versa"
• "social networking sites are not a separate realm of political activity"
• "We need a multitude of what I call “Denial of Positivism (DoP)” attacks from various directions"
• "the Google car was treated with deference no matter how recklessly we drove"
• "“No, but I’ve seen the GIFs,” I offered. This is what the future of music videos is up against"
• "hardcore narcissists are put off by Facebook because it reveals that they are not the center of everyone else’s universe"
• googlepoetics.com
• soundsjustlike.com
• adultcatfinder.com

zunguzungu:

• Whiteness and Tokenism on the Runway
• Collapsing Factories and the “End Death Traps” Tour
• Goldmines
• Students Avoid ‘Difficult’ Online Courses
• Cheating to Learn: How a UCLA professor gamed a game theory midterm
• (Graham) Greene on Benzedrine
• Many students stay away from online courses in subjects they deem especially difficult or interesting
• The generalized resource curse and From the generalized resource curse to communism
• Counting with Abraham: Love, Justice, and Boston
• Hate Reads
• The Changing Face of Caucasian.
• UC Irvine Frat’s Blackface Video
• Marina Abramovi?: “My Facebook people!”
• The Wrong Kind of Caucasian
• Low Wage Worker’s Strike, Because YOLO
• Decoding Disinterest (video)
• Obituary
• brofilin
• Muslims in America
• Privacy is 'off the table' in a 'post-9/11 world,' says New York City police chief
• Valedictorian
•  The Virtues of Excrement: Lili Loofbourow on Blogging and the Academic Life
• Just a Couple of Young Secretaries
• What Went Wrong in West, Texas — and Where Were the Regulators?
• Take Your “Love it” and Shove it

Rahel Aima's Elsewhere on the Internet

Backslash Scott's Weekend Reading

ReclaimUC:

• On gift horses and Trojan horses: The proposed aquatics center at UC Berkeley
• UC Irvine Asian-American frat's blackface video is as bad as it sounds
• Freeze flame, black fire
• We interrupted a variety show and are receiving death threats
• Before MOOCs, "colleges of the air"
• The MOOC monster will never be satisfied
• Colleges as country clubs
• The industrial classroom
• Colleges are slashing adjuncts' hours to skirt new rules on health-care eligibility
• Are student loans becoming a macroeconomic issue?
• " . . . figures like Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis—which many researchers admit is commonplace—to outright fabrication."
• The human capital strategy (pdf)
• The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the largest university in Latin America, is occupied
• Mexican teachers' strike gains momentum and takes on the state
• Where tuition is free
• The wrong kind of Caucasian

Bint Battuta:

• Kenneth Goldsmith on UbuWeb and the Poetry of Archiving
• Six English words you didn't know came from Arabic
• The development of Urdu in the 18th century
• A Dead Portuguese City in India (1887)
• Arabic in Sicily
• Women Literati and Ottoman Intellectual Culture
• Visualizing Palestine: Design Against Injustice
• John Lieder and his Mission in Egypt: The Evangelical Ethos at Work Among 19th-Century Copts
• Review of On Hinduism by Wendy Doniger
• Podcasts on philosophy in the Islamic world
• The history of sleeping patterns
• Life in Beirut’s defunct Gaza Hospital
• On speaking Russian in Iran
• Yiddish in salsa italiana
• English-Language Resources for Arabic Poetics
• Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean
• Palestinian Ghettos in White Wall Galleries: The Problem of Nationality
• Gustave Flaubert's encounter with the Coptic monks of Gabal al-Tayr
• The Indian who discovered Ella Fitzgerald
• East Africa's Indian house crow problem (and why house crow populations have grown since 9/11)
• A collection of old footage of the Trucial States/UAE

L.E. Long:

• what resembles the grave but isn’t
• The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism
• Stereoscopic views of Detroit
• What you Can’t Expect when you’re Expecting
• In praise of Ciara
• Anywhere but Here: Kowloon “Anarchy” City
• The changing face of “caucasian”
• If media covered America the way we cover foreign cultures
• Stoya <3 (but when can we get a profile of skin diamond?)
• "she was disappointed to death."
• Manhunts Appear to Be the New Car Chases
• Right Wing Media Exploit Boston Bombings To Attack Government Assistance Programs
• Mount maker keeps museum's treasures safe
• Richard Dawkins and the ascent of madness
• Meet Robert Lipsyte, A Pro-Steroid Sportswriter and ESPN's New Ombudsman
• How Tim Duncan's Post Moves Resemble the Classic Video Game Bushido Blade

Jacob Remes:

• E.L. Konigsburg (1930-2013)
• Time Wasting Experiment
• Inside the Harvard tenure star chamber.
• Did making up a Patient Zero do more harm or more good?
• Looking historical verisimilitude in the face.
• "If a German chancellor had said the same thing, he or she would have had to resign.”
• How we respond to different types of violence.
• The Boston manhunt and the labor question.
• Unions as shitty employers.
• "Middle class."
• State-building and civil-society-building after the Ya'an Earthquake.

Kerim Friedman:

• “People wonder why reformers themselves aren’t held accountable.”
• “Where is your vanguard? ?????????”
• “Had one or more of the Rana Plaza factories been unionized, workers could have refused to enter the building the day it collapsed”
• “As a basic rule of thumb, the longer a book on Spartacus is, the less historically accurate it is likely to be.”
• “The upcoming documentary will, of course, deal with the life of a Jewish girl from Calcutta who ran away from home when she was a teenager to dance in a travelling theatre company run by Parsis. “
• Corners of the world where women have yet to tread.
• Leonid Brezhnev on the phone in his underwear.
• Diamond “can only describe—and imagine—the Papua New Guineans he has encountered in the language he uses to describe birds.”
• Charting long-term unemployment.
• “Bro, she doesn’t have a lota. I’ve used her bathroom. It’s not there.”
• “some international schools have built gigantic, futuristic-looking domes over sports fields to ensure healthy breathing”
• “apolitical money is a dangerous illusion”
• A Yahoo Pipe which generates an RSS feed of every link in every Sunday Reading.
• “Why are you in Hiroshima?” “A film.”
• Last Two Speakers of Dying Language Refuse to Talk to Each Other
• Speakers Of Tonal Languages Better At Processing Music (Or is it just that they spend more time at KTVs?)
• “the fundamental premises and methodology of Chen’s paper are so shaky that we really cannot take his sweeping conclusions seriously at all”