As I slowly get back into the Weekend Reading routine, here are some links:

• Education’s Future in the Age of Neoliberalism and Terrorism.
• The Algorithm Giveth, but It Also Taketh Away, on Twitter’s Algorithms.
• A reading list on gaming and feminism.
• Black Queer Studies Now.
• Guess who’s behind these secret payday loan websites.
• The Top 10% of White Families Own Almost Everything.
• Teach for America is Changing (still skeptical, but worth reading).
• Policing Empire:

[W]e should be skeptical of calls for police reform, particularly when accompanied by cries that this (militarization) should not happen here. A close look at the history of US policing reveals that the line between foreign and domestic has long been blurry. Shipping home tactics and technologies from overseas theaters of imperial engagement has been a typical mode of police reform in the United States. When policing on American streets comes into crisis, law-enforcement leaders look overseas for answers. What transpired in Ferguson is itself a manifestation of reform.

From the Philippines to Guatemala to Afghanistan, the history of US empire is the history of policing experts teaching indigenous cops how to patrol and investigate like Americans. As a journalist observed in the late 1950s, “Americans in Viet-Nam very sincerely believe that in transplanting their institutions, they will immunize South Viet-Nam against Communist propaganda.” But the flow is not one-way: these institutions also return home transformed.

• “I can no longer throw my students to the testing wolves” – on resisting standardized testing.
• Epiphanies from Teju Cole.
• Communism for Children.
• The Public is Political, on feminism and the internet age.
• Notes on Resistance.
• Viking Women Warriors and Diversity in Literature.
• Freedom Fighter, on abolitionism in Mauritania.
• Neoliberal Feminists Don’t Want Women to Organize:

When Jill Abramson was fired from her position as executive editor at the New York Times, reportedly after she confronted the paper’s publisher over her discovery that her pay was less than that of her (male) predecessor, among the many outraged reactions from feminists was the response that leaning in doesn’t work after all. Abramson’s experience, similar to that of so many women, seemed a rebuke to the idea, promoted in Sandberg’s book, that individual women were holding themselves back. It reminded us that no matter how hard we try, sexism—sexism in the workplace—cannot be defeated individual success story by individual success story.

One of the insidious things about neoliberalism is how it has managed to absorb our vibrant, multifaceted liberation struggles into itself and spit them back out to us as monotone (dollar-bill-green) self-actualization narratives. The way this has happened to feminism is particularly instructive. As I wrote in Dissent last winter, the so-called “second wave” of feminism fought for women to gain access to work outside of the home and outside of the “pink-collar” fields. Yet in doing so, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, some feminists wound up abandoning the fight for better conditions in what had always been considered women’s work—whether that be as teachers and nurses, or the work done in the home for little or no pay.