If your New Year’s resolution was to click on some links, I’ve got a few for you:

• Why the Post Office Makes America Great.
• Ties That Bind: How the bond between police and prosecutors impedes justice, and Why Grand Juries Don’t Indict Cops When They Kill.
• I am Reminded I am a Woman When I Learn to Be Silent.
• $250,000 a Year is not Middle-Class.
• Erasing Black AIDS Histories.
• Digging for Justice in El Salvador.
• The Paranoid Style of American Policing:

Legitimacy is what is ultimately at stake here. When Cooksey says that her son’s father should not have called the police, when she says that they “are supposed to serve and protect us and yet they take the lives,” she is saying that police in Chicago are police in name only. This opinion is widely shared. Asked about the possibility of an investigation, Melvin Jones, the brother of Bettie Jones, could muster no confidence. “I already know how that will turn out,” he scoffed. “We all know how that will turn out.”

Indeed, we probably do. Two days after Jones and LeGrier were killed, a district attorney in Ohio declined to prosecute the two officers who drove up, and within two seconds of arriving, killed the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. No one should be surprised by this. In America, we have decided that it is permissible, that it is wise, that it is moral for the police to de-escalate through killing. A standard which would not have held for my father in West Baltimore, which did not hold for me in Harlem, is reserved for those who have the maximum power—the right to kill on behalf of the state. When police can not adhere to the standards of the neighborhood, of citizens, or of parents, what are they beyond a bigger gun and a sharper sword? By what right do they enforce their will, save force itself?

• Fanon at Ninety.
• The Fonts People Love to Hate.
• For 55 police officers involved in fatal shootings this year, it wasn’t their first time.
• When is Financial Aid Simplification a Game-Changer? And When is it Just a Game?
• Revolt in Ethiopia, on protests in Oromia.
• Nightmares of 1965, on indoctrination in Indonesia:

It is funny growing up under a free-market dictatorship masked as business as usual. A child cannot be too different, and the education system drills conformity like clockwork. Activist deaths and disappearances and suppression of freedom of speech are not on the news when we come home from school. Families affected by the long shadow of 1965 cannot speak of it, especially those with “Communist sympathizer” lineage. Despite the academic understanding some of us have of Soeharto as a dictator, it still feels funny in my mouth to say “diktator.” Despite the “real history” education at home given by parents who fell in love as student activists, he is for many years just the president. It is generally understood—despite political talk at home and leftist books filling our bookshelves, despite my friends and I not being completely oblivious to the fact that there is a status quo—that it is dangerous to speak against the way things were in public. Most everyone toes the line in public, adults behaving as obedient schoolkids do, quick to ostracize. In middle-class Jakarta, life is supposed to be “normal” and as usual, but there is a tightness in the air.

• Femminiello Pride, on an LGBT saint in southern Italy.
• Inside San Quentin’s Death Row.
• Liberal Zionism and the Ethnonational Imperative.
• Racial Prejudice is Driving Opposition to Paying College Athletes.
• “One of the biggest environmental disasters in US history is happening right now, and you’ve probably never heard of it.”
• Strange Behavior, on the 19th person killed by LAPD in 2015.