Spring has sprung, reading has rung:

• Chinua Achebe’s Second Death.
• On Ending Tuition and Abolishing Student Debt.
• The Making of an African Narco-State.
• Dear Politicians, Stop Calling People “Taxpayers.”
• Sri Lanka: Narrating Violence and Trauma.
• The Future of a Failed State, on Haiti.
• Lip-synching to the Academic Conversation.
• Empire Records, on Guántanamo Diary‘s connections to American empire.
• The Brain’s Empathy Gap.
• Its Poverty, Not the Teenage Brain, That Causes Youth Crime:

[Of] the more than 50,000 homicides in California from 1991 to 2002. As one would expect, teenagers perpetrated more of the homicides than other age groups—but only when he did not control for poverty. When he did control for poverty, teenagers committed more crimes than other age groups only in high-poverty areas. In the areas where teenagers had as much money as other middle-aged people, they tended to commit fewer violent crimes. And in the areas where middle-aged people had as little money as other teenagers, those middle-aged people tended to commit just as many violent crimes.

In other words, financially secure teens act as responsibly as stereotypical middle-aged people; and poor middle-aged people act as recklessly as stereotypical teens. The financial situations of the would-be perpetrators had a lot bigger impact than what age they were at the time. And that impact was huge: The homicide rate among the poorest teenagers Males looked at was 18 times higher than it was among the wealthiest.

• Red By Any Other Name, on reclaiming socialism.
• The Unmanageable University.
• Not Just Trees: The Politics of the Jacaranda, Eucalyptus, and Hyacinth in Africa.
• Was Singapore’s Growth Really Exceptional?
• Edutopia.
• “Any more Heinz ketchup, and America is doomed.”
• The Cold Rim of the World.
• How Slow Responses Made the Ebola Outbreak So Deadly.