As school begins, the length of weekend readings will fluctuate according to my workload. That said, there’s a new subtle change happening here. At the behest of reader Ory Okolloh, and to the benefit of all of you, clicking on these links will automatically open your selected reading in a new tab or window. Hopefully that improves your weekend reading experience. Enjoy!

• Is Ituri Ready for Truth and Reconciliation?
• The Decline of Abortion Access.
• Why is Oregon So White?
• Thoughts on College Ranking Models.
• The American Dream Should Be Called the American Debt.
• When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland:

Black feminists have critiqued the material advantage that accrues to white women as a function of their elevated status as the normative cultural beauty ideal. As far as privileges go it is certainly a complicated one but that does not negate its utility. Being suitably marriageable privileges white women’s relation to white male wealth and power.

The cultural dominance of a few acceptable brown female beauty ideals is a threat to that privilege. Cyrus acts out her faux bisexual performance for the white male gaze against a backdrop of dark, fat black female bodies and not slightly more normative cafe au lait slim bodies because the juxtaposition of her sexuality with theirs is meant to highlight Cyrus, not challenge her supremacy. Consider it the racialized pop culture version of a bride insisting that all of her bridesmaids be hideously clothed as to enhance the bride’s supremacy on her wedding day.

Only, rather than an ugly dress, fat black female bodies are wedded to their flesh. We cannot take it off when we desire the spotlight for ourselves or when we’d rather not be in the spotlight at all.

• How Scholars Hack the World of Academic Publishing.
• Why Travel is not Education.
• The Secretary of State Goes to War.
• Drunk Continent: How Much Do Africans Drink?
• Suez Has Already Happened.
• The Anti-NRA.
• On the Death of Dreams:

In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They’d seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for  work.

Martin Luther King turned this stoic tradition into high art. It was a kind of jujitsu by which our pain could be made redemptive. The price was high. If that imagery cut black folks to the core, one wonders how far it went in normalizing the idea of the black body as the rightful field for violence. If you accept that being twice as good is the price of the ticket, then you accept a double standard, and thus necessarily accept the precepts of racism.

• The Lonesome Death of Cherice Moralez.
• Pasado Compuesto, on suicide and eviction in Spain.
• McDonald’s Suggested Budget for Employees Shows How Impossible It Is to Get By On Minimum Wage.
• For Restaurant Workers, a Struggle to Put Food on the Table.
• Leaving on a Jet Plane, on hijacking planes in the 60s and 70s.
• Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores.
• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
• The Industrialization of Education.