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.