• A Boy Among Men, on sending youth to adult prisons.
• The Legacy of Malcolm X.
• The Rich Man’s Drop Out Club.
• Fostering Profits, on the dangers of the outsourcing foster care to corporations – and its consequences.
• Shadow Prisons, on the for-profit federal prison system.
• On Landings, Soft and Otherwise, and Aggressive Lacks of Proportion.
• A Rogue Army for a Fragile State.
• Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis:

Careful management, good management, is the full and sole justification for the administration class that has bloated so entirely over the college landscape since the 1980s (and whose growth is still accelerating, even in the face of permanent cuts everywhere else). Simply put the promise of the management class was that they could manage colleges better than faculty. Even by their own estimation they have completely failed at this task on every possible level. Thirty years of running it like a sandwich has every college in the country living admission cycle to admission cycle, cutting budgets and services and wages every year, careening from supposed emergency to supposed emergency without any stabilization or improvement.

Even bracketing endowments and donations altogether, generally speaking colleges have a built-in client base, already own all the land and buildings, can borrow freely, and don’t pay taxes. I could devise a harder test of management acumen. So it seems to me the approximately 100% of college administrations that are now claiming emergency and desperation year after year need to cop either to their own incompetence, or else their dishonesty, or else their active malice.

Canavan’s Razor would tell us that permanent crisis is a management strategy, the unacknowledged goal of every plan. But whichever precise combination of incompetence, dishonesty, and malice best describes a particular university administration is irrelevant. The management class simply has no reason to exist at all if their interventions in the university produce not stability but crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis…

• What happens when a whale’s body sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
• A Mumbai Slum’s Cultural Moment.
• On Calling Children “Human Capital.”
• Bolivia’s Strong-Armed Fighting Cholitas.
• And the Oscar Goes to… the White Woman Savior Complex.
• Dear Patricia Arquette: Gays and Blacks Owe White Women Nothing.
• Walls, Ground, Atmospheres, and Bodies in Palestine.
• Nicholas Kristof Saves the World.