These links only circle the Earth once every seven days:
- Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Want Your Vote.
- The Story of the Missing Trans Women of El Salvador.
- The Selfish Side of Gratitude.
- The International Criminal Court “remains a structure in search of a purpose.”
- France’s Diminished Liberties.
- Found Families.
- Libertarian Fairy Tales: The Bundy Militia’s Revisionist History of Oregon:
For the Bundys, then, nothing really happened before the 1870s. They do not mention Spanish explorers in 1532, or French Canadian trappers, or the British occupation after the war of 1812, or Oregon statehood in the 1850s. Their story most definitely does not begin thousands of years ago, when the first people settled the region. They have no time for how the U.S. Army resettled the northern Paiute in the Malheur Indian reservation in 1872—emptying Harney County for settlement by white people—nor how those same white settlers demanded (and got) the reservation dis-established in 1879 so they could have that land, too.
[…]
The U.S. military first had to ethnically cleanse the land, getting rid of the various native peoples that had lived in these stretches for thousands of years. But even after the land had become “free” to white settlers, prospective ranchers still needed markets for their cattle, especially once their primary market for meat, the U.S. Army, had moved on to other territories. It was the federal government that stepped in and bailed them out, taking on debt by an act of Congress to finance and build a railroad system. Without the Central Pacific Railway, those thousands of cattle could never have been sold.
- When Your Curriculum Has Been Tumblrized.
- The Making of a Conflict in Eastern Congo: Trouble in the Ruzizi Plain.
- The Sudden but Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel.
- “You can’t always get what you want,” on corporate innovation, MOOCs, and what people actually want.
- Roots and DNA: The Quest for African-American Identity.
- Through the Plexiglass: A History of Museum Dioramas.
- How the Klan Got Its Hood:
As Reconstruction ended and Southern white men reclaimed political power, they dropped out of the Klan, no longer limited to secret outlets for their violence… The Klan itself was dying, but only because white supremacy was resurging right out in the open, with the sanction and participation of law enforcement and white society at large. Now they had Jim Crow laws. They had a criminal justice system that disproportionately punished Black people and imprisoned them in prison farms, on former plantations. They had lynch mobs, who no longer concealed their identities.
As Gwendolyn Chisholm would comment over a century later, about the white supremacists who tortured and murdered James Byrd Jr. in 1998, “They look like normal people, don’t they? That’s the way they are nowadays—they don’t wear hoods anymore.” Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lynchers also looked like “normal people.” The complete absence of any hood, costume, or concealment presented, literally, a new face of white supremacy. Journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett estimated that in the twenty-five years after the Civil War, lynchers murdered 10,000 black Americans. Starting in the 1880s, spectacle lynchings attracted crowds of up to 15,000 white participant-witnesses, who booked special excursion trains to reach lynching sites. They snatched victims’ clothing, bone fragments, and organs as souvenirs; they photographed themselves, smiling, posing with their kids beside the broken, burned bodies of their victims; they scrapbooked the photos and mailed them as postcards, confident that they’d never be held accountable for their terrorism. They didn’t wear hoods, because they didn’t need to.
- Chill on Funding Still Limits Gun Violence Research.
- The Anti-Terror Raid That Asked All the Wrong Questions.
- “Turn the Camera”: On Fascism, Racism, and Donald Trump.
- The Pentagon Thwarts Obama’s Attempt to Close Guantanamo.
- God Exists in Yemen, pt 1: On the Meaning of Livelihood and pt 2: The Moral Economy of Rizq.
- Blind Pessimism and the Sociology of Hope.
- Firestone and the Warlord.