Click on some links:

• The Banality of G-chat.
• The History of Political Violence in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal.
• The Cost of Opting Out.
• Facebook Makes a Huge Data Grab with Photo Sync.
• Tenured Radical Responds to the Stanford 5-Year-PhD, Part One and Two.
• The Five-Year PhD as Improved Plumbing.
• Dancing Around Genocide.
• Undercover Videos Are Fine, Except When They’re About Animal Abuse. That’s Terrorism:

Earlier this year, Iowa and Utah became the latest states to approve “Ag Gag laws” that criminalize undercover investigations of animal abuse on factory farms. When activists enter a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation under false pretenses (usually by getting hired) for the purpose of secretly videotaping the daily gratuitous atrocities committed against pigs, cows, chickens and other livestock, their conduct in states with Ag Gag laws is criminal. The FBI has recommended they be prosecuted as terrorists.

• Working for Change in Higher Education.
• Against the Coupon State.
• I Know Where You Tweeted Last Summer.
• Frodo Shot First, a (Long) Conversation About The Hobbit movies.
• Organizing McDonald’s and Walmart, and Why Austerity Economics Hurts Low-Wage Workers the Most.
• What Jovan Belcher’s Murder-Suicide Says About Our Attitudes Toward Guns, Football, and Domestic Violence.
• Questioning Clay Shirky.
• Let Us Eat Cake, on the University of California’s new logo:

Who knows how much this cost. But be reassured, Californians, it’s not your tax dollars at work, here, and that’s kind of the point. Your opinions matter only the shrinking percentage of the university’s budget that the state actually pays for, down from $16k per student in the 1990’s to less than $7k today, and still falling. The state needs that money for building new prisons, for keeping property taxes low, and for not charging vehicle registration fees. But that’s why the state isn’t trying to impress its citizens, isn’t it? It’s appealing to the tech industry, signaling its desire to hook up for the night with all the subtlety and finesse of a 17 year old at a frat party. It even makes a certain kind of sense: instead of serving the public good by educating students, the university’s fiscal strategy is now a matter of attracting donations and customers, so image and advertisement are the important things. Enter the magic of design.

• Thomas Jefferson, American Fascist?
• Jefferson’s Race Obsession is a Response to Emancipation, Not Slavery.
• Hitler’s Logical Holocaust.
• Stop Talking About Civil Society.
• The Sign Language African-Americans Use is Different Than That of Whites.
• A Compendium of Chuck Grassley’s War on Deer.
• Tweets of Rage: Does Free Speech Exist on the Internet?

So we’re living in a period of uneasy truce: people around the world are sharing their voices on the internet like never before in history, but they’re doing so under private censorship regimes equally unique in time. There is more speech than ever under more potentially unchecked control than ever. It is “a double-edged sword,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Trevor Timm, with large corporations both enabling and controlling the ability for average people to reach a much larger audience than previously possible. “The top decision maker at YouTube has more censorship power than any Supreme Court justice,” he says. “We have to develop policies that better protect free speech from not only government interference but also corporate censorship.”

• The Ardor of Secession.
• Devastation in Meatspace.
• Students’ Fossil-Fuel Divestment Campaign Aims at Colleges’ Creamy Moral Centers.
• And since everyone is writing about Susan Rice:
  • What Susan Rice Has Meant for U.S. Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • How Rice Dialed Down the Pressure on Rwanda.
  • Ambassador Rice as a Window into U.S. Africa Policy.
  • Failing Up with Susan Rice.

Let’s read. First. a list of writings on Lincoln:

• Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy.
• In Lincoln, Passive Black Characters.
• The Night They Drove Down Old Dixie.
• When It Comes to Lincoln, We’re Still Virgins.
• The Trouble with Spielberg’s Lincoln.
• Lincoln Against the Radicals:

When Lincoln sets about abolishing slavery–out of the goodness of his heart, essentially–his first adversaries turn out to be the radical abolitionists, in whose number the movie is careful not to place the great emancipator. Before anything can happen, in other words, the first order of business is to steamroll men of principle like Thaddeus Stevens and James Ashley into doing what Lincoln wants them to do. Stevens is too wildly idealistic and unrealistic to be allowed to speak his mind; he isn’t quite a caricature—if only because Tommie Lee Jones brings too much gravitas to the part—but he’s the uncle everyone is embarrassed of, even if they love him too much to say so. He’s not a leader, he’s a liability, one whose shining heroic moment will be when he keeps silent about what he really believes. And James Ashley is portrayed as too cowardly and weak to even bring the amendment to a vote (while casting David Costabile for the part speaks volumes for what kind of a role they think it is). The two radical abolitionists in the film, in other words, cannot be trusted to take charge of a radical project like the abolition of slaves. A radical and revolutionary change must be placed in the hands of a compromising moderate.

• The Pessimism of Time: The Paradoxes of the Left.
• The Campaign Tumblr is Dead! Long Live the Campaign Tumblr!
• Inside Israel’s Twitter War Room.
• What Do We Talk About When We Talk About World Wars?
• What Happened When NYU Students Realized They Could Email 40,000 People at Once.
• Lost to History: Missing War Records Complicate Benefits Claims by Veterans.
• I Lost a Job for Calling Out the Company’s Rape Apology.
• The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio:

The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”

Purdue is among the U.S. colleges layering up at the top at a time when budgets are tight, students are amassing record debt, and tuition is skyrocketing. U.S. Department of Education data show that Purdue is typical: At universities nationwide, employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty. “Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas. In a 2010 study, Greene found that from 1993 to 2007, spending on administration rose almost twice as fast as funding for research and teaching at 198 leading U.S. universities.

Tuition versus Earnings for Workers with a BA

• Austerity in Uniform.
• Racists Watch Red Dawn, Tweet About It.
• The Short and Bizarre Diplomatic Tenure of Andrew W.K.
• Why Walmart is Bad.
• The Prison Phone Industry Could be Regulated.
• The Cat’s Cradle of Congolese Politics.
• Rwandan Ghosts, on Susan Rice’s Diplomacy.
• The Rise of the New Baltimoreans.
• Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter?

The friends we mobilize to support our projects appear to us as a community, but to Kickstarter they are raw material to be converted into commodity—a conversion we must also embrace. Members of our networks become investors, not so much in our projects, but in Kickstarter itself. Every fundraising campaign that is launched reaches into our intersecting communities. Newer and newer layers of people are extracted to invest in Kickstarter. Like any other for-profit entity, its goal is to make money. Our projects that facilitate the funding are a side effect, a cost of doing business—the business of drilling our relationships for all they are worth. This is the logic we are allowing to dictate the whos, hows, and whats of cultural funding in our society.

Clearly, Kickstarter extracts value from our communities—10 percent of the capital raised and an unknown amount of networked and social value—but it does something less obvious as well. It converts support and community building into a shopping experience. By building a commodity-based rewards system into the platform, Kickstarter naturalizes the idea that supporting a friend is similar to any other online purchasing experience. You charge your credit card and something cool shows up in the mail in the future.

• What Would Facebook Look Like Without Quantification?
• Online Instruction, Budget Transparency, and the Cost of Education.
• Historic Jewish Cemetery in the Caribbean Fades Away.
• Which Bond Villain Plans Would Have Worked?
• The Internet’s Best Terrible Person Goes to Jail.
• Hold On Reality… Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook are Here!
• Why China’s People’s Daily Found Kim Jong-Un So Sexy.
• A Vacant Lot Offers Refugees a Taste of Home.