This reading was compiled on the I-95, but should not be read while driving. Read responsibly, people.

• This (Stolen) Land Is Our Land.
• Why Are Prison Riots Declining While Prison Populations Explode?
• The Central African Republic is on the Verge of Genocide.
• Time Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Ever.
• Public Universities Should Be Free.
• No, Public Spending on Higher Ed Isn’t Regressive.
• Free Education For All?

Universal free public higher education, in the short run, would provide a greater economic boost, in raw numbers, to the middle class and the rich than it would to those in poverty.

But so do libraries. So do roads. So do fire departments. So do high schools. The argument for free public higher education isn’t that it’s a targeted income redistribution program, it’s that it’s a universal, communal project, a powerful concrete statement of our values and priorities as a society.

• Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics.
• Neville Longbottom is Peter Pettigrew.
• In Which WalMart Holds a Food Drive For Its Own Employees.
• The Erin Brockovich of Revenge Porn.
• The Problems With White Hats.
• Are Mass Atrocities Modern?
• Friends in High Places.
• Ventra Capitalists, on transit in Chicago.
• America’s Angriest White Men:

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the “urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about “welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen spelled CLASS.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.

• Crowd-Sourcing Murder.
• American Conservative Politics and the Long Shadow of Slavery.
• How America Exports Inmates to Private Prisons.
• Shared Services Backlash at theUniversity of Michigan.
• The tl;dr Self.
• Self-Portraits Done While On Drugs.
• How I Went From Unpaid Intern to Intern Organizer.

Save your readings for the week(end)!

• There Will Be Peplum: On the Television Uniform.
• Turkified: Why I Can Never Be a Proper German.
• Texas’ Other Death Penalty: Life and Death in the “Safety Net.“
• The Solar Industry Takes on Crony Capitalism in Arizona.
• Petropolis Now: Are Cities Getting Too Big?
• In the Pipeline, on adjunct labor.
• The MOOC Moment: Ethics, Discource, and Promises.
• The Unpaid Internship for Credit Must End:

The common practice of granting class credit for completed internships has contributed to the dramatic increase of unpaid internships. According to a survey-based study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a record 63 percent of 2013 graduates had completed an internship. A similar study by the college recruiting consultancy Intern Bridge found that just under half of interns received school credit. Credits are what universities are selling. Since outsourcing the actual teaching to employers saves money — it is cheaper to certify than instruct — American universities have jumped on the intern bandwagon.

From a student’s perspective, an internship for credit, even if unpaid, is a step toward both graduation and a job in her chosen field at the same time. But as many commentators have pointed out, employers commonly use internships as a way to skirt minimum-wage laws. College administrators and employers have colluded to invent a loophole where none existed. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of students are working for free, and actually paying their schools to certify it.

• The Rich Guys With Lions of Instagram.
• How to Stop Conflicts, Sometimes.
• Crops, Towns, Government.
• FEMA’s Flood Map Reaches Deep into Boston.
• Dig Deep: Beyond Lean-In.
• Strand Books Used Sprinklers to Spray the Homeless.
• Master of Many Trades.
• Human Rights Campaign and the Vulture Fund: Making Third World Poverty Pay for LGBT Rights:

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest US gay organization, is going international. It’s just been given at least $3 million to spread the word of marriage equality to benighted countries that treat gays badly. Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Its chief partner and donor in this project wants the people in those countries, LGBT folk included, to starve – their economies wrecked, their incomes shipped abroad, their resources squeezed and stolen to pay off odious debt. HRC is receiving its money for gay rights in the Third World from the man who “virtually invented vulture funds”: a form of speculation that’s one of the worst contributors to Third World poverty ever.

But if you’re poor and getting poorer, look on the bright side (as long as river blindness hasn’t got you, that is). You can still have a nice white wedding; and you’ll save on the food bill if your nation has no food.

• How Much Power Does Power Africa Really Need?
• Don’t Save Congo.
• Five Decades in Defense of Food Aid.
• Welcome to Dinovember.
• The Rise of Big Chocolate.
• Africa’s Media Wars.
• Twenty-Six Abortion Stories.
• Rising Up the Ladder in America: Who’s Upwardly Mobile?

The Horatio Alger myth—that hard work and pluck will lift a person from dire circumstances to enviable success—is more than 150 years old, but it has staying power: Forty percent of Americans think it’s fairly common for someone to start off poor, work hard and eventually rise to the top of the economic heap.

In reality, however, only 4% of Americans travel the rags-to-riches path, according to new research from the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. And a great many  who are born into the poorest segments of the population are stuck there for life, a finding that suggests the U.S. has much to do to improve social mobility.

Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile of household income remain there a generation later (with income of less than $28,900 in 2009 dollars, adjusted for family size).

Here’s a minimalist digest for the weekend:

• Modern Art was a CIA Weapon.
• What Lies Beneath New York City.
• Relational Economics.
• The Colonial Origins of Hate Speech in Burma.
• Instagrams from North Korea.
• Against the Gospel of ‘Africa Rising.‘
• Surviving the Post-Employment Economy.
• What Happened to Africa’s Tallest Apartment Building?
• Who Wants a Christian America?
• Etsy Touts Economic Power of… Low-Wage Earners.
• All Technology is Assistive Technology.
• Sexy? A High School Horror Story.
• Money and Class at Yale.

These links are two weeks in the making, which means they’re both twice as good and half out-dated.

• The Writer As Meme Machine.
• Where’s the Suspicion in Suspicious Activity Reports?
• Teach For America Rises as Political Powerhouse.
• Homecoming at Howard.
• America’s New Hunger Crisis.
• Charity Assets, on the Omidyar Network and social enterprise.
• How the Pope Could Tear Apart the Religious Right.
• How a Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked Police Reform in Utah.
• A Good Men’s Rights Movement is Hard to Find:

[M]ake no mistake: anti-woman hate is the defining feature of the [Men’s Rights Associations], and the examples above are the rule, not the exception. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a storied civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, told 20/20: “The Manosphere is an underworld of so-called men’s rights groups and individuals on the Internet, which is just fraught with really hard-line anti-woman misogyny.” A Voice For Men makes no excuses for their hatred of women, from posts ranting about women who are “begging to be raped” to treatises about how fat women want to be sexually violated because it would mean we are desired. Warren Farrell, the aforementioned “father” of the modern MRAs—he openly called date rape “exciting” and said that incest can be a good thing—has recently signed on as a regular AVFM contributor. For over a year, AVFM hosted in their “activism” section a call to firebomb courthouses written by a man who actually lit himself on fire in front of one. Paul Elam himself wrote an infamous post in which he vowed that, should he ever be called to serve on the jury for a rape trial, he would vote to acquit even if he believed the defendant was guilty.

As bad as Men’s Rights Activists are for women (and, really, for our collective humanity), they’re also doing harm to the causes they claim to care about. When an AVFM contributor in Australia called a hotline posing as a man being beaten by his wife and needing a shelter for himself and his son, he claims he was denied help. But if you listen to the recording (or read the transcript), you can clearly hear the counselor on the other line offer multiple forms of assistance, including a free hotel for himself and his son, a direct connection to a police officer specializing in domestic violence, and more. Far from their tagline “compassion for men and boys,” this incident reveals that MRAs are happy to abandon men and boys to real danger when it suits their hate campaign against women.

• Why Millenials Are Pro-Union, But Don’t Join Them.
• What Vampire Graves Tell Us About Ancient Superstitions.
• Why Doesn’t Anyone Read Dante’s Paradiso?
• On Organized Labor in New Haven.
• A Diary of a Trip to Four Nigerian Cities.
• Purity Culture as Rape Culture: Why the Theological is Political.
• The Immorality of College Admissions:

Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles.

“We admit students without any regard for financial need – a policy we call ‘need-blind admission’,” Harvard’s website proudly proclaims. Harvard charges $54,496 per year for tuition, room and board, but waives the fees for families making less than $60,000 per year.

This would be a laudable policy were Harvard admitting low-income students in any significant numbers, but they are not. Instead, they fill their ranks with the children of the elite portrayed in Miller’s article – elites who drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on private schools, exorbitant “enrichment” activities, and personal tutors that almost no Americans can afford.

• Mapping Europe’s War on Immigration.
• Ted Cruz Doesn’t Know What the Government Gives Him, and He’s Not Alone.
• The Great Forgetting.
• The Riddle of Amazon.
• Pennies From Heaven.
• Cory Booker’s Corporate Ties That Bind.
• The Way Hollywood Frames Slavery.
• What People Really Think About Women, Men, and Feminists.