First, The Arizona Republic‘s longform series on the migrant trail through Central America:

• Pipeline of Children: A Border Crisis.
• The Beast.
• Nothing to Lose.
• River of Hope, Despair.
• What Happens Now?
• Countries in Chaos.

“I was four months from graduating from high school, and I had to leave the school because they threatened me,” he said. “I couldn’t go out of the house, I couldn’t meet with friends. It was too dangerous.”

It took more than a year before Briseño felt safe enough to go out into the community again.

He lives in a single, ill-lit room with his father, off a narrow courtyard they share with three other families, along with a common bathroom and large sink. Anyone arriving or leaving carefully locks the outer door, made of thick iron bars. Briseño and his friend, Omar Barrera, 19, both spoke matter-of-factly about why it may be a death sentence for those who try to leave but are caught and sent back.

One friend fled a year and a half ago after he was threatened and gang members murdered his father, a policeman. Their friend was trying to reach his mother in Maryland, but he was stopped in Mexico and returned to San Salvador.

“He was murdered the week after he got back,” Barrera said, shaking his head.

• Anti-Charter Democrats Declare War in Education Battle.
• The Leader of the Unfree World, on incarceration.
• Disability is not Just a Metaphor.
• For Colleges, ‘Free’ is about Much More than Money.
• How Big is Uganda’s Drug Problem?
• The Limits of Libertarianism.
• The Conscientiousness of Kidpseak.
• Zoo Animals and Their Discontents:

Several staff members at Roger Williams told me, privately, that they felt uncomfortable talking about what their animals felt, especially in front of supervisors, though they were convinced that their animals experienced thoughts and emotions. At its worst, anthropomorphism, the fallacy of attributing human characteristics to nonhumans, leads us to imbue animals with our perceptions and motives, reducing the worldview of another species to a bush-league version of our own.

Yet avoiding anthropomorphism at all costs may be the main cause of the schism between scientists and the public in the debate about animal sentience. “Most reasonable people will be on the side of animals being sentient creatures despite the absence of conclusive evidence,” Jaak Panksepp told me.

• What I Saw on Rikers Island.
• “Culture of Brutality” on Rikers Island.
• Al Shabab and the Origins of East Africa’s Recent Violence.
• Why IBM Execs Don’t Want to Hire Women.
• Rape Culture-Smashing Website Stands in Solidarity with Victims.
• It is not Anti-Semitic on Say “Not in My Name,” on Gaza.
• Jared Diamond and Future Public Anthropology.
• Why Jogging and Going to Church can Get You Arrested in Burundi.
• Building, Not Rebuilding, Public Education:

In 1954, I was in the first grade at David W. Harlan Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware. I could buy a hot lunch prepared by cafeteria workers who were employed by the Wilmington Public Schools. I took music lessons for free, using a violin the city schools lent me. We had a school library, chorus, and band. We had art classes three times a week.

Yet schools on Wilmington’s east side got the leftover musical instruments and much less money for books, supplies, and maintaining school facilities like the playground. Harlan was all white, intentionally segregated. Real estate developers and brokers in its attendance zone had homeowners sign racial covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to blacks.

When decrying today’s corporate reform, too many gloss over the second experience and universalize my own, appealing to a past that was always deeply unequal.

• Conflict Dynamics in Kenya’s Coast.
• Why Do Peacebuilding Interventions Fail?
• Millenials’ Politics are Shaped by Our Dysfunctional System.
• Water is a Human Right, but Who is Considered Human?
• The Way We Kill Now.
• Outing the Death-Drug Distributors.
• Class Brought to Life.

Sun’s out, reading’s out.

• Losing Sparta.
• The Responsibility to Protect the Bad Guys in South Sudan.
• The Caine Prize for African Writing: Off-setting the Continental-Diaspora Deficit?
• The Curious Grammar of Police Shootings.
• GOP Moderates Revolt in Kansas.
• Sirens in the “Villa Surrounded by the Jungle:” Manufacturing Ideological Spectacle in Israel.
• Mishandling Campus Rape Investigations is Pretty Much Legal:

The federal government regulates campus sexual assault adjudications in a variety of ways. Campuses are required, for instance, to inform students of their right to make a complaint to law enforcement, and to use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in resolving all complaints that are addressed on campus. No federal law or regulation, however, gives students the right to have a lawyer, counselor, or other adviser present during their appearances before such judicial bodies.

At Hobart and William Smith, both Anna and the men in the case were permitted to bring an “adviser” with them when they testified before the committee, but in accordance with college rules those “advisers” were forbidden to speak at any time. As a result, Anna had no one present to assist her when members of the committee misrepresented witness statements to her detriment, asked her inappropriate questions about her behavior on the night in question, or invited her to speculate about events that transpired while she was blacked out due to excessive alcohol consumption.

• The Darker Side of University Endowments.
• On Boyhood and Video Games.
• Africa’s Contemporary Art is Booming.
• How to Pay for a Free, Non-Racist Higher Education.
• To Fight Trucker Fatigue, Focus on Economics, Not Electronics.
• The Strange Case of the Congressman that Resigned and Never Left.
• Dutch Higher Education Reform Focuses on Quality.

Liberate these links:

• Trigger Warning: Breakfast.
• On the city of Hartford, Connecticut.
• What the Media Isn’t Telling You about Israel’s Attack on Gaza .
• Why Israel’s Racist Violence is Getting Worse.
• Ruth Bader Ginsberg was Right, and We Already Have Proof.
• Rich People Curses.
• Property v. Liberty, on Hobby Lobby.
• Marriage and Modernity, from Shari’a law to Same Sex Marriage.
• The Political Motives of Mass Killers:

[V]iolence against black Americans is rarely called terrorism, while attacks on government or corporate structures (even those resulting in no casualties, like the ELF and ALF arsons in the 1990s and early 2000s) or public gatherings with large groups of white people are. The militia-movement inspired Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the anti-technology mail bombs of the Unabomber and Eric Rudolph’s attacking the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for “spreading world socialism” were all seen as acts of terrorism. Meanwhile, the targeted shootings and bombings at abortion clinics, gay bars and synagogues throughout the 1980s and ’90s and the attacks on Muslims and mosques more recently are often understood as hate crimes.

And yet even with this racist and reactionary definition of terrorism, school and mass shooters, who often attack affluent white people at random and in public, are never included. Rather, their actions are understood as senseless tragedies. But if the acts are really senseless, why do they keep happening, week after week? And why do the newscasters have to keep telling us, with increasing desperation, that they’re senseless?

• How Jeff Koons Turns Money into Art.
• Nowhereland, on separatism in Western Sahara.
• How Syria’s Ancient Treasures are Being Smashed.
• Dead Trees and Fallen Leaves Near Chernobyl aren’t Decaying.
• Nullification: Jurors’ Secret Weapon against Harsh Sentencing.
• On Facebook, Tech Companies, and Social Science Research.
• Why Hate Soccer?

The findings of our study largely support Foer’s argument that attitudes about globalization are the key driver of soccer hate. The best predictor of anti-soccer attitudes was not political party, social class, education, nor income. Rather, anti-soccer attitudes were best explained by how respondents felt about whether “American culture is strengthened by values and traditions…[of] new immigrants.”

In a sense, soccer represents a double-threat — it’s European and Hispanic! — to those who feel threatened by the encroachment of cultural globalization. Coulter admits as much when she says, “If more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law.”

• Dead People Can’t Take Selfies, on the one-sided violence in Israel-Palestine.
• In Sweden, Being a Prostitute is Legal – But Paying One Isn’t.
• American Quakers Have Created an “Underground Railroad” for Uganda’s LGBT Population.
• Inside the Quiet Struggle for LGBT Rights in Ukraine.
• On the Neoliberal Rhetoric of Harm.
• Inventing the Social Network.
• This is Not a Vermeer & Uber for Art Forgeries.

Let reading ring:

• Ruth Bader Ginsberg was Right, and We Already Have Proof.
• On the city of Hartford, Connecticut.
• What the Offices of Tech Giants Say About the Future of Work.
• Rich People Curses.
• Property v. Liberty, on Hobby Lobby.
• Marriage and Modernity, from Shari’a law to Same Sex Marriage.
• The Quiet Clash between Transgender Women and Drag Queens.
• Why Hate Soccer?
• The LGBT Movement’s Transphobia Problem:

A recent survey of more than six thousand self-identified transgender people showed that 41 percent have attempted suicide, a staggering twenty-six times the rate of the general population. This percentage rises even more for self-reported victims of discrimination and violence, to as many as 78 percent for those who have experienced violence in school. Imagine the headlines if close to half of gay people attempt suicide. Yet the most play this statistic gets is in a New York Times advice column about how to broach the topic of transgender transition on social media—and has not even been discussed in other national news publications like The Washington Post and USA Today.

Compare this to the media attention surrounding the suicide of Tyler Clementi in 2010, a gay white Rutgers student who committed suicide after his roommate filmed him having sex. This merited front page coverage and 85 related articles in the Times, while trans people are being outed routinely and our suicides generally go unreported. For instance, the transgender writer Donna Ostrowsky, who contributed to the Lambda Literary Award-winning The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, committed suicide in New York on June 10 last year, and her death remained unreported by any media outlet, including theNew York Times.

• How Jeff Koons Turns Money into Art.
• The Only Academic Authorized to Test Marijuana Use Just Got Fired.
• On Facebook, Tech Companies, and Social Science Research.
• An erroneous period raises questions in the Declaration of Independence.
• “We just ran 23 million queries of the World Bank’s website.“
• China Sends Troops to Africa.
• The Princess Effect:

The personal is political, the saying goes, but for women, the political is removed from the person, replaced by trite obsessions with clothes, hair, child care choices and exercise routines. The media’s preoccupation with such trivia is no mere relic of an earlier era. Even today, several generations removed from the devastating critique of their triviality that was at the heart of first-wave feminism, Marie Claire and other women’s magazines remain obsessed with the appearance of female public figures, an obsession that still extends far beyond them into leading news publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. You can take the woman out of the woman’s magazine, but the style of coverage—and it is all about style—remains the same.