Spring has sprung, weekend reading is weekend read.

• Foreclosed Homes as Haunted Houses.
• Can Women Stand Their Ground?
• Eight Years of Solitude: On Freelance Labor, Journalism, and Survival.
• The Media’s Strange Approach to Low Wage Workers.
• On Writing for Free (or Not):
  • Moonlighting.
  • Scabs and the Seduction of Neoliberalism.
• A Stillborn Child, A Charge of Murder,and the Disputed Case Law on ‘Fetal Harm‘:

The definition of fetal harm in such cases has been broad: An Indiana woman who attempted suicide while pregnant spent a year in jail before murder charges were dropped last year; an Iowa woman was arrested and jailed after falling down the stairs and suffering a miscarriage; a New Jersey woman who refused to sign a preauthorization for a cesarean section didn’t end up needing the operation, yet was charged with child endangerment and lost custody of her baby. But the vast majority of cases have involved women suspected of using illegal drugs. Those women have been disproportionately young, low-income and African American.

• Human Rights as a Disciplinary Force.
• U.S. Foreign Policy’s Gender Gap.
• Hashtags as Decolonial Projects with Radical Origins.
• How Hollywood Has Destroyed America.
• Does Conflict Produce Winners and Losers? Or Just Survivors?
• After the Protests:

Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.

• Slick Moves, on the oil industry, the SEC, and corruption in Angola.
• Flying Internet Drones over Africa is a Dumb, Libertarian Fantasy.
• Our Culture Loves College Porn but Hates College Porn Stars.
• The Magnetic North, On Mining in Canada.
• Leaving Academia for Buzzfeed.
• The Problem with Privilege.