Sunday Reading

Jacob Remes:

• Sex, Economics, and Austerity
• Canada's Conservative government muzzles scientists.
• The US government starves science.
• Martin O'Malley, data technocrat.
• German sociologists boycott academic rankings.
• "The scene reads a bit differently if the choice was dictated by a CIA propaganda officer."
• "Radicalization is not the issue. Terrorism is."
• Abe's rightist agenda.
• The last Beguine.
• NPR names aren't actually all that weird.

L.E. Long:

• 175 years of resistance
• The infinite corpse
• Unpacking the White Privilege of Tim Wise
• Guantánamo Is Not an Anomaly — Prisoners in the US Are Force-Fed Every Day
• Keguro Machari on love (but no, for real always read gukira)
• 7 thoughts on women in games (And trans people, and queers, and everyone else who feels this.)
• Kill all men.
• Cool quotes on Punk and Fashion from the Met Gala
• Cat Imagery in the Suffrage Movement
• Fuck You: A magazine of the arts
• The Double Life Of A Gay Dodger
• Depression, Part Two
• The Dream-hunters of Corsica
• Voina explain themselves
• Star Trek: Into Whiteness
• This week was the anniversary of John Brown's birthday
• This week was the anniversary of Ulrike Meinhof's death dayRace, Redemption and Charles Ramsey
• Tamerlan’s corpse — and ours
• Hacker's Manifesto
• Every noise at once

Kerim Friedman:

• “the microbes, fungi, nematodes, mites and even gophers”
• The Jewish [NY] accent (Woody Allen) is syntactically different from the Italian accent (“The Godfather”). And, in turn, both are different from the Irish accent [Archie Bunker].
• “They claimed that their god had given humans domination over the earth.”
• “Keep on walking, for we are not at the destination yet.”
• “Politics, Nietzsche complained, had become ‘an instrument of the stock exchange’ rather than the terrain of heroism and glory. “
• “If I really were a ‘gay-basher’…why would I have asked Andrew Sullivan, of all people, to be the godfather of one of my sons”
• “The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before. But for Ferguson ‘it was a magical time’…”
• Entomologists: “Stop feeding corn syrup to honeybees.”
• George R.R. Martin Explains The Religions Of Game Of Thrones
• “Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army.”
• Pickpocket

Aaron:

• Britain's Brezhnev-style capitalism
• Notes Towards a People’s History of Pakistan
• Bob Meister’s MOOC on MOOCs
• What if people told European history like they told Native American history?
• The View from Flyover Country
• Home
• Comments on Algeria
• The Awkward Laughing Moment of Charles Ramsey’s Hero Tale
• The impact of the drone war in Pakistan (podcast)
• Predator Drones in Africa
• Viral Occupation
• ali abdulemam
• Capital of Inequality

nathan jurgenson

• "Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it"
• "Airbnb indulges the fantasy that we might temporarily inhabit another life"
• "the MOOC threatens the liminal space currently held by colleges and universities within the life course"
• "after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information"
• "Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr or Sherry Turkle a tastefully brief Snapchat"
• "no one remembers what YOLO meant"
• "It was a dazzling taste of something I’d previously seen only in science-fiction movies"
• "Finley creates a limited edition of paintings inspired by “sexts” that she receives"
• "To deny the indulgence of verification is a small gesture which holds religious meaning to me"
• "it activates the sensory linkages that allow us to experience touch and movement through our visual sense"
• "After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away"

• "In-person Bitcoin purchases rely heavily on QR codes. I’ve never seen so many people actually using QR codes"
• “You don’t get a real sense of personal, individual self until the end of the 19th century”
• "It is no coincidence that when women fight back, it is seen as disgusting"
• "Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice"
• "I was told, "We have to be extra careful with you all after the Boston bombings"
• "Doritos-based flavors represent a whole new framework for Taco Bell to build on"
• "The anti-hipster censure includes a healthy dose of typically American anti-intellectualism"
• "There is no rage quite like the desperate rage of those who refuse to acknowledge their own bigotry"
• "Comedy clubs are an overtly hostile space for women"
• "Beauty is about class, money, power and privilege – and it always has been"
• “The relationship between drugs and irony is not limited to the novel’s low-level libido”
• "Riker was stepping over chair backs like some kind of maniac and making it look perfectly natural"
• "The Kink actors were more like athletes, or stuntmen and -women performing punishing feats, and part of what fascinated me was the ease with which they went in and out of it"
• long list of good art tumblrs
• pizza-compass.com

Bint Battuta:

• A look at the lyrics of the famous Iraqi song "Foq al-Nakhel"
• The last words of Fela Anikulapo Kuti
• How to Read Ghalib
• The history of Arabic type
• "Turkey is keen for its relationship with Somalia to be seen as a brotherhood"
• A Photograph of Four Orientalists (Bombay, 1885): Knowledge Production, Religious Identities, and the Negotiation of Invisible Conflicts
• On Islamophobia and race
• Perso-Indica: An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions
• Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire
• Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait
• The popularity of ghost stories in Bengali children’s fiction
• The life and work of Ibn Khaldun
• Wallace Stegner's letter to a young writer in 1959
• Hadhrami migration in the 19th and 20th centuries
• The Sudetenland’s last Germans
• Mandaic/Aramaic speakers in New York
• Kuwait's Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950-90
• Muhammad Ali in Qatar, 1971

Kitabet:

• Happy Mother’s Day to All the Allomothers
• ‘The Tears of Somalia’: Turkey’s ‘Moral’ Foreign Policy
• Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters
• Artists Announce They’ve Found All the Beauty Then Can in Urban Decay
• Stoop Books of Brooklyn
• The Blaschka Glass Menagerie: “570 superbly wrought, anatomically perfect glass sculptures of marine creatures from the 19th century….we hope to find out whether they are surviving in the sea as magnificently as they do in glass.”
• The Silverberg Variations: a story in twelve movements
• “Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way.”
• (some of) The Best New Architecture in the Muslim World)
• A Lapata-tastic interview
• Towards a People’s History of Pakistan
• “this is an impressive achievement, but it should not prevent citizens from asking the candidates vying for their votes: what kind of Pakistan have you made?”
• “when we talk about America’s victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the mass slaughter of civilians.” 
• The Art of Tunisian Protest

Reclaim UC:

• The exploitation of undergraduate workers at UC Berkeley's Student Learning Center
• Yolo County DA punts, UC Davis bank blockaders walk #YOLO
• Ronald Reagan and the fall of the UC (cf.)
• I'm a scholar not a criminal: The plight of black students at USC
• Why Cooper Union matters
• The tragedy of US higher education
• Outsourcing grading
• The American university and the establishment of neoliberal hegemony
• Can venture capital deliver on the promise of the public university?
• "[T]he high tuition-high aid approach has been a failure for low-income students" [pdf]
• "[E]ducation professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country"
• "Recently I have been feeling that Taylor Swift is China."