The thrill of clicking on links, and watching readings appear, can never be replaced.

• The Slow Boat to China, dispatches aboard a container ship traveling across the Pacific.
• What a port shutdown looks like from the air.
• Are Efforts to Limit Presidential Terms in Africa Working?
• Why Women are actually joining ISIS, and their role there.
• Honduras’ Five-Century War.
• No Profit Left Behind, on how Pearson reaps money from public education.
• The History of “Death of America!”
• Enemy Aliens, on the concentration camps of the Great War:

In the first days of the Great War, Britain intended only to detain suspect enemy aliens as prisoners of war. Pressured by Parliament to arrest all enemy aliens, British Home Secretary Reginald McKenna resisted, saying he would proceed under the Hague Conventions, in which the military was responsible for designating enemy aliens for arrest. Internment, he noted, was reserved only for enemy aliens who were military personnel or seen as dangerous to the nation. After the Lusitania’s sinking, however, the political resistance vanished, all military-age enemy aliens were rounded up, and civilians were transformed into prisoners of war.

As declarations of war multiplied across the globe between signatories of the Hague Conventions, a complex bureaucracy of detention began removing groups of civilians en masse from society…. In November 1914, Germany moved to arrest all British, French, and Russian men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five, and by war’s end held more than 111,000 enemy aliens. During the same period, France interned 60,000 German and Austro-Hungarian civilians; Bulgaria rounded up more than 14,000 Serbian and Croatian noncombatants; and Romania held 6,000 civilians, mostly Germans and Austro-Hungarians.

[…]

In an era of widespread conscription, any male of fighting age was a potential soldier. Generals worried that able-bodied foreigners deported to their home countries on one day might show up on the battlefield the next, further discouraging any desire to make distinctions between civilians and combatants. Internees knew that compared to life in the trenches, a concentration camp offered relative safety, but internment had its own price. Even where they had spent decades as part of a community, foreigners’ businesses were ransacked or shuttered, or their assets seized by governments. Internees were not soldiers, but instead a new kind of low-grade hostage. Not expected to fight or die, they only endured.

• The Wealth of the Prosperity Gospel in Central African Republic.
• Uganda’s Far-Flung Troops.
• Wounded Eagles: how Boko Haram capitalizes on the rot at the core of the Nigerian army.
• The Data Sublime.
• What ISIS Really Wants, and…
• What The Atlantic Gets Wrong about ISIS, and…
• End Times and ISIS.
• Explaining Boko Haram’s strategies and expansion:

Boko Haram’s relentless attacks against individuals tied to the Kanuri establishment demonstrate its antipathy toward the northeast’s existing hierarchy. In areas it has captured, Boko Haram has allegedly seized the property of local notables and allocated it among its followers. The contours of a vicious class struggle within Kanuri society are readily evident.

In addition to the northeastern elites, Boko Haram’s worldview is at odds with rural Kanuri communities. Salafism – both its peaceful and violent varieties – remains primarily an urban phenomenon in Nigeria’s northeast. Cities tend to have a higher concentration of youths bereft of established kinship networks and therefore attracted to the universalist message espoused by Islamic revivalists. Conversely, the countryside serves as a bastion of traditionalism, with many Muslims practicing syncretic forms of Islam that incorporate elements of indigenous religions.

Boko Haram’s transition to a largely rural-based insurgency has placed the Salafi-jihadi movement in an operational environment where the majority of inhabitants regard it as an alien interloper. Rather than adjust its messaging to appeal toward the wary peasantry, Boko Haram appears to have elected to pursue a strategy of armed coercion in order to secure local compliance. This approach helps account for the surge in civilian fatalities as well as Boko Haram’s seemingly growing reliance on conscription and monetary compensation to replenish its ranks.

• To Shill a Mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s “new” novel.
• Droning On, on a theory of the drone.
• War Punished Gaza.
• When Americans Lynched Mexicans.
• The Colour of Muslim Mourning.
• Anti-Sikh Violence in the Pacific Northwest’s History.
• The Husband Did It, on Gone Girl.

Read a few links to celebrate Arizona’s statehood, Frederick Douglass’ birthday, or the latest Hallmark holiday:

• The Women Suffering for Your Valentine’s Day Flowers.
• The End of Baghdad’s Twelve-Year-Old Night-Curfew.
• White Happened to You.
• I TURNED CAPS LOCK ON FOR A WEEK AND EVERYBODY HATED IT.
• Here’s N+1’s symposium on labor and magazines.
• Zoo Security Drills: When Animals Escape (with animal costumes).
• African Artists Subvert Colonial Imagery.
• Selling the Sacred Cow: India’s Beef Industry.
• Time’s Resistless Stream.

Not only do we bend the natural world to mathematics and science, then, but we also bend mathematics and science to political ends as well. No calendar is innocent, no temporal system is neutral…

Nationalist attempts to remake the date aren’t new — in perhaps the most famous example, the French Republican Calendar not only reorganized the days and months around a ten-day week called a décade, but also restarted the entire thing at Year I. At the time John Quincy Adams decried it as “superficially frivolous” and “coarsely vulgar,” not to mention “irreligious” — but this was of course the point: the de-Christianization of the calendar, and a temporal arrangement of time with an entirely new set of symbolic compass points. A calendar that was no longer based on saints’ feasts and religious holidays towards one named after the progression of the seasons and the plants and vegetables of nature, where September 22 (the date of the founding of the French Republic), not January 1, was now the beginning of the year, and the year itself was no longer 1792.

• Guilty, Then Proven Innocent, on North Carolina’s Innocent Inquiry Commission.
• A Radical Standard of Pain.
• Arizona State University is the “New American University” and its Terrifying.
• Zionism and the New McCarthyism.
• Sex after Sexual Assault, Life after Rape.
• University of California BDS Campaign Diverges from Elite Schools’.
• The Death of the Three-Time Candidate.
• The Conspicuous Absence of Solidarity.

Twitter’s trending hashtags suggests that Americans can bring themselves to talk about the #ChapelHIllShooting but they can’t utter their names. They can’t be these people. While it is clear that we don’t need another parade of hoodie-clad white people claiming #IamTrayvon it is striking that there isn’t even an attempt to do so. White America can immediately identify with a racist French satire magazine they’ve never heard of, but can’t possibly stand in solidarity with fellow Americans that also happen to be Muslim.

The straight-forward narrative that makes #JeSuisCharlie so legible to so many people is inaccessible to the marginal. The causes of violence perpetrated by white men is exploded by white supremacist patriarchy’s insistence that each instance of white terror is actually the confluence of psychological illness, the availability of guns, video games, or anything else that doesn’t threaten the racial order or patriarchy head-on.

When uprisings occur, when people that are systematically denied the preconditions of solidarity ––the ability to continually meet each-other unharassed, a common language, the material support to mobilize against one’s oppressors–– find them through perseverance and creativity, the invisible background radiation that maintains their oppression suddenly becomes opaque and solid. The sustained and largely invisible strategies of hegemony are temporarily traded in for the tactics of swift and immediate police violence. To those not paying attention it might seem to come out of nowhere, but for everyone else it is utterly predictable.

• The Most Common Type of American Terrorist is a White Man with a Weapon and a Grudge.
• When Girls of Color are Policed Out of School.
• On Reverse Engineering, an anthropological look at algorithms.
• Real Africa Emerging.
• Everyday Life: A Feminist Analysis.
• How To Improve Police-Community Relations? Hold Bad Cops Accountable.
• The Condemnation of Memory: What’s Behind the Destruction of UNESCO World Heritage Sites?

Just add water.

• How Inequality Screws With Our Perspective.
• Proprietors and Proletarians, on Spain’s anti-eviction movement.
• Public Authority: The End of Higher Education in Wisconsin? And a follow-up Welcome to Our New University System Overlords.
• Are Millenials Post-Racial or Tolerant Racists?
• I’d Love to Help My Wife With The Dishes, But I’m Trapped Under Something Heavy.
• Passport Tales from Pakistan.
• The Day the Purpose of College Changed:

[T]he prevailing consensus endorsed liberal education. A presidential commission chartered by Harry S. Truman recommended in 1947 that colleges strive to more fully realize democracy “in every phase of living,” promote international understanding, and deploy creative intelligence to solve social problems. College wasn’t a way to get a job or make a buck.

For a long time, the pushback to that philosophy was productive. It forced higher education to be dynamic, to respond to conditions beyond campus, says Mr. Roth, who is president of Wesleyan University and sits on the AAC&U board. People understood that liberal learning served individuals, regardless of their jobs, as well as society at large. That’s no longer true, he says.

A farmer reading the classics or an industrial worker quoting Shakespeare was at one time an honorable character. Today’s news stories lament bartenders with chemistry degrees. “Where once these ‘incongruities’ might have been hailed as signs of a healthy republic,” Mr. Roth writes, “today they are more likely to be cited as examples of a ‘wasted’—nonmonetized—education.”

• The Tyranny of “Awesome.“
• Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women Disrupt Surveillance Theory.
• South Sudan’s Slow Liberation.
• Authentic Sharing, on the “sharing economy” market.
• Real Life in One of America’s Poorest Towns.
• The Slave-Holding Democracy, on the U.S. slavery debate’s international aspects.
• Freeing African Minds:

External “assistance” in Africa proved limited in effect, created debilitating forms of aid dependency, and suppressed the creation of organic movements that can aptly respond to struggles of their time. Therefore, the search for a sovereign consciousness, which when found will give birth to new forms of grassroots activism, must begin with a repudiation of existing arrangements of power between Western donors and their NGO handmaidens in the South. Such a refusal would no doubt be met with resistance and punishment in the form of aid withdrawal by the West, if not worse. But that is the essence of the redemptive battle at hand.

We can only sing our redemption song and emancipate ourselves if we deny the white saviour industrial complex its ideological hold on us, and to do this we must collectively rethink our civil society relations and consciousness as Africans.  Failure to do so will result in us being continuously “chained to the obligation of gratitude” that Madonna implicitly expects. And it will result in Africans losing possession and control of their histories and memories, even if they reside in the form of something as seemingly unimportant as an autopsy report.

• Sri Lanka’s Surprise Political Transition.
• Canada’s Trans Prisoners Need More Than a Policy Change.
• The Souls of Drone Folk.
• On American Sniper and the Culture Wars,
• Fast Asleep and Wide Awake, etymologies.
• The Islamic State is Failing at Being a State (from December).
• Why Soldiers Should Not Be Building Peace.

Weekend Reading forecast says 74% chance of weather happening. Also sports I guess. Have at it:

• How Expensive It Is To Be Poor.
• Blizzards and the Birth of the Modern Mayor.
• Islamaphobic Bus Ads Covered with Muslim Superhero.
• The Cops Don’t Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
• And a feminist writer interviews one of her online trolls.
• Is It Time to #KickOutTheKKK?
• The Age of the Drone: No-Fly Zones and the Future Fear of Blue Sky.
• Oregon was Founded as a Racist Utopia:

The constitution was put to a popular vote in the state in 1857 and included two referendums that were to be voted on independently. The first was whether they should reject slavery. Roughly 75 percent of voters opted to reject the adoption of slavery. The second measure was whether or not to exclude black people from the state. About 89 percent of voters cast their vote in favor of excluding black and mixed race people from the state. And thus, the exclusionary aspects of the state constitution were adopted.

[…]

The voters who overwhelmingly embraced this exclusion rationalized it not as blind hate, but as a progressive move that was simply keeping their new land “pure.” Utopia often means starting from scratch, and just as often it means excluding undesirables.

• Students were Tear-Gassed and Pepper Sprayed Over 300 Times in Alabama Schools.
• Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions.
• For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
• French Prisons Prove to be Effective Incubators for Islamic Extremism.
• Shot by the Police in Albuquerque:

Since 1987, the police department has shot at least a hundred and forty-six people. The shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, looked almost routine to people in Albuquerque. They had seen such incidents many times before. Few people protested, and no one paid much attention. Police violence appeared to be a matter of concern only to Albuquerque’s underclass: those who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, Native American, or Hispanic and poor. David Correia, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, told me, “There’s this myth here of tri-cultural harmony—indigenous people, Mexican-Americans, and Anglos—but this precarious arrangement is built on a long history of violence against Spanish-speaking and indigenous people that still plays out.”

The city has hired a succession of experts, a new research team every few years, to analyze the police department’s use of force, but officials seem to have viewed the act of commissioning a report as a proxy for doing something about the problem. Samuel Walker, an expert in police accountability who was hired in 1996 to co-author one of the reports, after the police killed thirty-two people in ten years, said, “When we gave an oral presentation to the city council, I had a very strong impression that many city-council members were not interested.” He described his conversation with Martin Chávez, the mayor, as one of the most hostile interviews he’s ever conducted. He said that the police chief would not look him in the eyes when he briefed him. One city-council member refused to meet with him or return his calls.

• Kobane after the Islamic State – a Town in Ruins.
• Ivy League Endowments, and Why Harvard Owns California Vineyard Real Estate.
• Lost at Sea, Legos Reunite on Beaches and Facebook.
• Prosecutors who challenge the police are penalized.
• Money Talks, on inequality and “money as speech.”
• Alfredo Jaar’s depiction of a divided America at MLK’s funeral.
• The Map Maker’s Conundrum.
• Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm is a Human.