• The Cruel and Unusual Execution of Clayton Lockett, an important read on capital punishment and one of its victims.
• The King and Queen of Haiti, on the island country’s importance to the Clintons, their foundation, and their politics.
• Uber Goes to Kenya.
• This is the Day to Read African Titanics.
• Rohingya asylum seekers keep fleeing Burma because refugee deterrence strategies don’t work.
• The Gentrification of Higher Education:

Research by Ozan Jaquette, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, has found a direct relationship between declining state appropriations and the rising number of out-of-state students. He has also found that as out-of-state enrollment rises, the number of black and Hispanic students falls. “If we envision the student body as a pie chart, with various student populations representing slices, the slice of low-income students narrows as the slice of out-of-state students grows, with a greater shift at highly ranked institutions and at institutions in high-poverty states,” he writes in a forthcoming paper in The Journal of Higher Education, coauthored with Bradley R. Curs and Julie R. Posselt.

As this happens, public universities become more and more like private ones. At the University of Wisconsin, for example, out-of-state undergraduate tuition, currently around $25,000, is set to go up $10,000. Right now, the state caps the number of out-of-state students at 27.5 percent, but given recent massive budget cuts, many expect that cap to be lifted, meaning the university will be catering more and more to affluent students.

“It’s raising the cost to the country of educating its younger population,” says Christopher Newfield, a professor of literature and American studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author ofUnmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. “All the states are now trying to educate the students of other states so they can charge them three times more. The American funding model that we’ve had, it’s broken.” All the private money coming in doesn’t subsidize the public mission of the university. Instead, it undermines it.

• Palestine’s Abandoned Parliament Building in Abu Dis.
• Celebrating Revolutionary Blackness on Haitian Flag Day.
• On the First Chinese Stock Exchange Building.
• Victims at the ICC – Who’s Representing Who?

• Smart Social Programs, investing in disadvantaged communities works.
• Also, Upward Mobility for the World’s Destitute.
• Why the CAR’s Hybrid Tribunal Could Be a Game Changer.
• Death in the Browser Tab:

Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photograph of a Spanish militiaman purports to record such a moment: The militiaman falls backward on a sunlit battlefield, his body accelerating to meet its shadow. The photograph is contested now — was it staged, or was it truly caught, by serendipity and skill, in the heat of battle? — but it is an image that, for its time, is imaginable. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to make a picture like it half a century earlier. And by 32 years later, in a world full of small cameras and quick-loading film, there is no longer any doubt that death can be photographed candidly. On a street in Saigon, the American photojournalist Eddie Adams clicks the shutter and captures the precise moment at which Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese general, fatally shoots Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong commander, in the head. A second before the bullet hits Lem, his face is relaxed. Then the shot — simultaneously of the gun and the camera — but there’s no blood, no splatter, only Lem’s face contorted in mortal agony. A second later he’s on the ground, blood gushing out of his head. We know these things because the execution was also captured on film, by Vo Suu, a cameraman for NBC. Suu’s footage is invaluable, but Adams’s picture, more striking and more iconic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The picture was remarkable for the rarity of its achievement, in recording the last moment, unscripted and hardly anticipated, of someone’s life. But when you see death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies. The fact that a photograph exists of a man being shot in the head in Vietnam is easier to remember than Lem’s biography or even his name.

This is me not grading papers. This a distraction. This is a distraction in a fire in a barrel.

• First, a reminder of the first Memorial Day and is meaning .
• Every Single Part of Los Angeles is Unaffordable at $15/Hour.
• “More than 62 workers will die for each [World cup] game played during the 2022 tournament.”
• The Bankruptcy of Washington’s Thinking on Africa.
• What Its Really Like to Live with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
• Europe’s Accidental Country, on modern Albania.
• The untold story of the strike leader who died for worker’s rights at Marikana.
• Western Canon, Meet Trigger Warning:

Women weren’t admitted to Columbia College until 1983. They went to Barnard, across the street, instead. Two years later, Literature Humanities added its first book by a female author, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” joined later, but that’s it. On a syllabus of 21 books, only those two are by women. Contemporary Civilization, a crash intro to Western philosophy, is worse, with 33 readings and only Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” and Woolf’s essay “Three Guineas” by women. The only critical text on race in either class is W.E.B. DuBois’s short “The Souls of Black Folk.” There are no female authors of color and no Asians or Latinos represented in the core curriculum.

To expect the women of color who wrote the Spectator piece to feel comfortable or safe in a class where they are not even a curricular afterthought is disingenuous. The Columbia core and the Western canon were written by and for white men, and that has not been an especially contentious statement for a long time now. Columbia hasdebated this problem for decades, and in 1990 the school instituted a generic requirement, now called “global core,” that students take courses in cultures not covered in Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities. It’s an explicit admission: Europe is required; every other culture is optional.

Requiring courses in the literature and thought of Western civilization that introduce critiques at the end is passive-aggressive, an institutional microaggression.

• How an American Tourist Lost His Passport and Got Sucked into Syria’s War.
• Resurrecting Thomas Sankara, on the Burkinabè revolutionary’s legacy.
• Africa as Battlefield.
• Some Somali refugees in Kenya are being driven out by fear.
• Breakfast in Bedlam.
• The History of Trigger Warnings and PTSD.
• A city of immigrants, Escondido, CA, keeps passing anti-immigrant laws and policies.
• When the Gang-Bangers are White Guys:

I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak out.

• The World’s First Skyscraper, on Chicago’s Life Insurance Building.
• The Nucleus of a New City, on the cathedral in La Plata, Argentina.
• Reactionary Professors Discuss Rape.
• Why We Should Stop Talking about the Founding Fathers.
• The Santa Barbara Oil Spill in context.
• There’s Beauty in the Jones for More, against No FOMO.

• Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing.
• Breaking Baltimore’s Blue Wall of Silence.
• The Betrayal of Student Activism? On harsh punishments at UCSC.
• Everything but the Burden: Publics, Public Scholarships, and Institutions.
• Nairobi was Built in the Wrong Place.
• Capitalism and Nazism.
• The Joker was the Real Hero of The Dark Knight:

The bank is a mob bank. It houses millions of dollars of funds gained through extortion, drugs, theft, murder, you name it. Not only does The Joker rob the bank, he does so in a way in which all his criminal accomplices murder each other one by one thinking that they’ll get a bigger cut if they do. This is supposed to look diabolical bit of insanity but it’s really him immediately eliminating five dangerous murderers while he’s literally in the middle of crippling the mob financially… the real result is that The Joker completes a major anti-mob strike while getting a quintet of thugs off the streets for good. He doesn’t kill any civilians, and only wounds the manager with a shotgun in self-defense. Even then he lets the guy live with a joke.

In fact, for the whole movie his target is mostly the same mob that Batman has apparently been unable to really stop since Batman Begins. Not only are these crime families still going strong, but they are augmented by the fact that Batman was unable to stop the spread of Scarecrow’s fear toxin, creating a permanently deranged underclass that are now presumably desperate and starving. It’s these largely forgotten downtroddens that The Joker recruits for his army, which implies that Gotham has left them to rot.

• Why Executive Election Rules Matter in Dictatorships.
• Ruminations? Or Ruinations? in the work of Santu Mofokeng.
• How the media covered Baltimore before and after the state of emergency.
• Brazil’s World Cup Legacy Includes a $550 Million Stadium-Turned-Parking Lot.
• Drug Trafficking and Post-Conflict Colombia.
• Bodies of Water:

The oceans are full of bodies. This is nothing new; the currents are imbricated with centuries-old ghosts of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of millions of Africans, the acceptable loss in the conversion of people into commodities. At Cape Horn, the particles of African ghosts mingle with the fragments of Chilean and Argentinean disappeared and whisper together of endemic violence. They are joined by the bodies of refugees turned away from shore, taken by the sea at the behest of state policy. The wind and the waves are always already full of ghosts, the particles of all the bodies rolling together with marine debris. The body is made of hydrogen and oxygen and when the body comes apart it becomes a part of what surrounds it, what consumes it.

[…]

Thousands of people disappeared in the regime of U.S.-backed state repression that swept through the Southern Cone of South America, particularly in Argentina and Chile, beginning in the 1970s, under what was known as Operation Condor. Disappearance is not just a euphemism for state murder, it is the central design of an act of terror. The disappearance—the murder without the corpse, operates in multiple ways. The systematic concealment of evidence is designed to exonerate the perpetrators. The withholding of information purposefully misled people and made them hold onto the unrealistic hope that they would find their detained loved ones alive. Extrajudicial detention, torture, and assassinations were carried out with the intention of intimidating survivors by setting an example of what could happen to them.

• Tanzania’s Troubling Move against Freedom.
• Genocide is Going Out of Fashion.
• How a City in Alberta Ended Homelessness.
• On Burundi’s attempted coup, and the repression that’s followed.

Let’s catch up on some reading and start some arguments.

• In Burkina Faso, Mansion Offers Glimpse into Revolution.
• The Struggle Continues in Baltimore.
• Black Faces in High Places Haven’t Helped Average Black People.
• On the Variety of Ways Not to Praise Charlie Hebdo.
• Texas Jails Teens for Skipping School.
• “every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials” for over twenty years.
• The Untouchable John Brennan:

Under Bush, Townsend had conceived of the job primarily as a counselor to the president. “You’re not the decision maker,” she told me. “You have a responsibility not to put your thumb on the scale. The president gets all the options as clear and concise as possible.” Brennan saw it differently. He didn’t simply enact the president’s policies; he shaped them.

What may well prove to be Obama’s most lasting legacy took shape in Brennan’s cramped quarters. It was here, 35 quick steps from the Oval Office, that Brennan built the drone program. He was the architect, the man responsible for taking the raw infrastructure the Bush administration had left behind and molding it into an institution that would survive. He selected the targets, and he brought their names to the president. Everything ran through him.

• Islamophobia as Narrative Device.
• The Most Diverse Cities are Often the Most Segregated.
• An Italian Futurist Building Still Sits in the Capital of Eritrea, Asmara’s Fiat Tagliero Station.
• Welfare is the Best Weapon against Nepotism.
• Most Togolese Support Term Limits, but They just Elected their President to a Third Term.
• #BlackLivesMatter, International Papal Edition, on remembering the Herero and Nama Genocide.
• The Last Message of a Free Syrian, Drowned in the Mediterranean:

Don’t worry Oh immigration department, I will never be a heavy burden on you.

Thank you Oh sea, because you accepted us without a visa or a passport.

Thanks to the fishes that will share me without asking about my religion or my political affiliation.

Thanks to the news channels that will share the news of our death for five minutes an hour for two days.

• Forcing Black Men Out of Society.
• Baltimore and the Language of Change.
• The Meaning of the Paris Commune.
• Achille Mbembe on South Africa’s xenophobic attacks.
• Where Traditionalist and Modernist Architecture Collide in Berlin.
• The Great and Beautiful Lost Kingdoms of Buddhist India.
• Counterproductive, on black bodies as productive but not human:

To call the riots counterproductive… isn’t to say that they are useless. They are not merely unproductive. Instead, they confirm the worst judgments held about those in question. They set back Progress. As in: it is the fault of those who riot that nothing productive happens.

[…]

But the relevant question isn’t productive as opposed to counterproductive, and never has been. The question is: productive of what?

America only accepted those who would come to be called black Americans because they were productive: because they were slaves who produced the material wealth on which American and Western power was built. Because they were not tolerated but kidnapped, sold, and killed, all to produce a population that was never just addendum, bonus, or small crutch which could have been foregone. Between 1500 to 1820, African slaves made up around 80 percent of all Atlantic passage westwards, the majority of lives on whom the rest rested and the necessary machinery to complete the Atlantic trade triangle. The nascent American state made this unmistakably clear by legally codifying slaves as actual property, as something to be mobilized for economic gain and which had no place outside those sites of production. They were to be hunted down and dragged back on escape: it was the legal obligation of citizens to return productive property to where it could be put to work again. There, they were policed and terrorized not as exception but as routine, as maintenance and training.