Different year, different list of links:

• TV’s New Girls’ Club, on a new genre of television.
• The Memory of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso.
• India and the Right to Suicide.
• Why are Mass Killings so Common in Nigeria?
• United States of Amoeba, on polarized politics in Congress.
• The Benefits of Fewer NYPD Arrests.
• Who Gives the Orders? Oakland Police, City Hall, and Occupy.
• Racists Getting Fired: The Sins of Whiteness on Social Media.
• How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter:

Though it’s a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality State has imposed felony charges on schoolchildren for “crimes” like throwing peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of this goes under the rubric of “zero-tolerance” discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence legally imported into schools.

Despite a long-term drop in youth crime, the carceral style of education remains in style. Metal detectors—a horrible way for any child to start the day—are installed in ever more schools, even those with sterling disciplinary records, despite the demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no guarantee against shootings andstabbings.

Every school shooting, whether in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, or Littleton, Colorado, only leads to more police in schools and more arms as well. It’s the one thing the National Rifle Association and Democratic senators can agree on. There are plenty ofsuccessful ways to run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom, but politicians and much of the media don’t seem to want to know about them. The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a jargon term coined by activists, is entering the vernacular.

• The Long History of Satire in the Middle East.
• The Suburbanization of America’s Working Class.
• Ferguson – When Social Media Changes the Conversation, but not the Power Structure.
• The Complex Story of a Child Soldier.
• Demolished: The End of Chicago’s Public Housing.
• Dear White Protesters.
• Keep Marching On.
• When Will the North Face Its Racism?

It was a measure of how dire conditions were in the South that the Great Migration continued into the 1970s. When it began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it ended, nearly half of all African-Americans lived elsewhere.

Notably, however, high profile-cases of police brutality have recently come to be associated with the North rather than the South. And it is in the South that two recent cases of police shootings of unarmed black people resulted in more vigorous prosecution. Last month, as protests raged over the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York and John Crawford and Tamir Rice in Ohio, Randall Kerrick, a police officer in Charlotte, N.C., made his first court appearance on a charge of voluntary manslaughter in the 2013 death of Jonathan Ferrell. Mr. Ferrell was an unarmed black motorist who was shot 10 times as he sought help after a car accident. In September, Sean Groubert, a South Carolina state trooper, was fired after shooting an unarmed man, Levar Jones, during a traffic stop over a seatbelt violation. In a widely circulated video of the incident, Mr. Jones asked the trooper with humbling composure, “What did I do, sir?” Then: “Why did you shoot me?” He survived his injuries. The trooper was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and battery, a felony that carries a possible 20-year prison term.

The nation still has far to go, but this, at least, seems cause for hope. It suggests that the South, after decades of wrestling with its history, is now willing to face injustice head on. And it suggests that the North, after decades of insisting that it was fairer and more free, could eventually do the same.

• On Property-Based Ethics,Riots, and Priorities in Our Society.
• The Samantha Power Doctrine.
• When They Stopped Waiting: Behind the Lawsuit against Arizona’s Gay Marriage Ban.
• Gaza is Almost Totally Cut Off from the World.
• The Sea Nomads that Survived the Tsunami, Ten Years On.
• When Rioting is Rational.
• You, Me, and a Thousand Strangers: Popular Mass Direct Action in Oakland after Ferguson.
• Is Live-Streaming the Future of Media, or the Future of Activism?