• On Obama and the federalist approach to same-sex marriage.
• Naked Dissent in Northern Uganda.
• Smartphones intervene in our conversations before we even check on them.
• A look at what will happen regarding the ICC and NATO investigations in Libya.
• Remembering the first Memorial Day in 1865.
• And How to Forget on Memorial Day:

From the moment the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, how to deal with the actual American war dead was always considered a problematic matter. The Bush administration and the military high command, with the Vietnam War still etched in their collective memories, feared those uniformed bodies coming home (as they feared and banished the “body count” of enemy dead in the field). They remembered the return of the “body bags” of the Vietnam era as a kind of nightmare, stoking a fierce antiwar movement, which they were determined not to see repeated

• Updates in the War on Civilian Privacy.
• Some facts to go with John Scalzi’s “lowest difficulty setting” post.
• Preying on the Poor.
• Hollywood and the Pentagon come together in the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
• Sasha Baren Cohen’s racism.
• In support of UK Uncut’s street party .
• The Fall and Rise of the Populist Left.
• The National Security State Wins (Again):

Of course, the election cycle alone is hardly responsible for our national love of weaponry and war. Even in today’s straitened fiscal climate, with all the talk of government austerity, Congress feels obliged to trump an already generous president by adding yet more money for military appropriations. Ever since the attacks of 9/11, surging defense budgets, forever war, and fear-mongering have become omnipresent features of our national landscape, together with pro-military celebrations that elevate our warriors and warfighters to hero status. In fact, the uneasier Americans grow when it comes to the economy and signs of national decline, the more breathlessly we praise our military and its image of overwhelming power. Neither Obama nor Romney show any sign of challenging this celebratory global “lock and load” mentality.

• Yet another reason why people in Oakland don’t like their police department.
• And how the NYPD got a little pushy at the Quebec solidarity march in Manhattan.
• The Poetry of the Taliban.
• Burma’s reforms need a little perspective.
• Old King Coal rules over Kentucky.
• Games used to be about bringing people together. Now everybody just plays Words with Friends.
• Universities are still Super-White, and they could get whiter:

My point with all of this is to highlight the power of definition. When admissions offices take race into consideration it is defined as “affirmative-action” and therefore a betrayal of American ideals of meritocracy; when they take where your parents went to school into consideration it is simply a legacy admission, protecting the unique “traditions” of each school. Schools take lots of things into consideration: but somehow the act of taking race into consideration gets picked out, put into a separate category of decision making, and subjected to a separate critique and logic than do those processes which benefit white people. One of the privileges of whiteness, then, is its invisibility, as society naturalizes and normalizes the very processes that give white people advantage, sewing white privilege into the unexamined fabric of social reproduction, while subjecting to the most strict and withering examination any systems that try to remedy existing inequality by benefiting black or Hispanic students.