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.