Let’s do some reading:
- The University of Pittsburgh bans transgender students from using gendered locker rooms.
- Why Sheriff Joe has Wyatt Earp in His Posse.
- Peter at PhD Octopus reviews David Harvey’s Rebel Cities.
- What Parents Tell Their Children About John Derbyshire.
- Who really benefited from the Citizens United ruling? It wasn’t corporations.
- Librarians and historians in Timbuktu protect historical manuscripts after rebel takeover.
- A series of posts on alien films and allegory by Christian Thorne:
- A street artist tricks a South African diamond trading company into funding anti-diamond art.
- A 9-year-old builds the coolest cardboard arcade ever – and a flashmob comes to play.
- A woman jumps a curb and crashes into a kid on a go cart because he doesn’t belong in her neighborhood. Guess what race he is.
- The Racial Cold War is Heating Up.
- Hilary Rosen explains why Ann Romney isn’t the best adviser.
- The Real War on Moms:
“Choice” was the word on Ann Romney’s lips in her Fox News appearance this morning. “We need to respect the choices that women make,” she said several times, adding, “Mitt respects women that make different choices.” “Choice,” of course, is a word that represents in other contexts, like abortion rights, a negotiated truce on rights and liberties of women to live within and without their traditional roles. But Ann Romney’s use of it shows how limited it is as a trope: Is it a relevant “choice” for the vast majority of American women to decide whether to use their degree in French in the workforce or rationally rest on their husband’s millions to focus on five children – six, according to Ann, if you count mischievous Mitt?
The more pertinent “choice” involves a series of unappealing options when it comes to affordable childcare or workforce opportunities. According to the census, the proportion of mothers with a recent birth in the labor force increased during the recession, from 56 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2008. And another Census Bureau report suggests that the 5.6 million stay-at-home mothers, a minority among mothers, have little in common with Ann Romney. They tend to be younger, Latina and foreign-born – and they are less likely to have graduated from high school or attained a bachelor’s degree. These women face markedly different circumstances from the more publicly visible stakeholders in alleged Mommy Wars, the ones who opted out of the workforce and who have the ear of people making movies and writing novels, but the women with the luxury to live on a single income at their expected standard of living are a statistical and demographic blip. The bulk of stay-at-home moms have characteristics that correlate to lower earnings in the workforce, and for them, with the high cost and inaccessibility of childcare, the “free” childcare offered by staying at home is also a rational economic choice.
- The Other Gentleman’s Agreement: the President of the World Bank and the Pope.
- Debating Palestine: Representation, Resistance, and Liberation.
- Alex Thurston argues why the NATO intervention in Libya was a mistake.
- A look at Wikipedia edits reveals a lot about the GOP primary candidates.
- The Food Fight of Our Lives – Millions Against Monsanto.
- How the New York Times invented disaster reporting 100 years ago by covering the sinking of the Titanic.
- How J. Bruce Ismay, Chair of the White Star Line, Coped With Being the World’s Most Hated Man.
- The survivors of the Titanic survived thanks to wireless telegrams.
- Yes, the 99% Spring is a Fraud:
The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.
The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.
- The head of Mali’s new junta is staying in the picture when it comes to transitions to democracy.
- How the U.S. looked the other way while Bahrain crushed the Arab Spring’s most ill-fated uprising.
- Barbie’s Plastic Politics.
- Community‘s Battle of Greendale as a guide to mass atrocity/conflict resolution.
- From Boston Review’s forum on the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement:
- “A Framework for Democratic Change” by Tom Hayden
- “Rock the Vote” by Angus Johnston
- “Toward Participatory Democracy” by Danielle Allen
- “An Anachronistic Reading” by Jennifer Hochschild
Scott Ross 