• 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.