• It’s Time to Rethink Our Nightmares about Surveillance.
• The Work of Public Work.
• The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics.
• Doing Anthropology in Public.
• Ignore Kony at Your Peril.
• Labor Abuses Rampant at U.S. Bases in Afghanistan.
• Those Without a Birthright:

Well, imagine what it is like to walk by a Birthright poster on this [Tufts University] campus, knowing that you have never, and perhaps will never see the very house your grandparents were expelled from in 1948. Yet, over one fourth of the Tufts population can see that house and they, simply by being Jewish, can eventually own that house, while their Palestinian fellow students cannot.

To us, Birthright is the erasure of our right to our homeland, and it promises our homeland to one in four students at this university. Birthright is marketed as apolitical. Participants are led to believe that it is an innocent trip of camel rides, hiking, clubbing and swimming in the Dead Sea. It offers tourists a chance to “reconnect” with a country to which they have never been, and often times, to which they have no immediate familial ties.

Yet for us, Birthright is not only political; it is violent. That may sound dramatic, but it is our reality. To make Birthright “fun” and “safe” means eradicating an Arab populace. It means erecting illegal walls and vanishing the Occupation. It means exiling our brothers and our sisters to refugee camps, prisons or worse. It is important that students at this university understand the implications of their so-called right.

• Beyond Dating, Romantic Postmodernism.
• Vermont Students and Workers Rise Up.
• A Confederacy of Kidnappers, on 12 Years a Slave.
• Before I Die: A Global Ethnography of Aspirations.
• The Wal-Martization of Higher Education.
• My Detainment Story, Or: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Country and Hate Border Agents.
• Capitalism with a Human Face.
• Get Off the Bus:

When a Google bus was surrounded on 9 December, it made the news all over the English-speaking world. Though what the blockaders wanted wasn’t so easily heard. They were attacked as people who don’t like carpools, by people who don’t get that the buses compete with public transport and that their passengers displace economically vulnerable San Franciscans. It’s as though death came riding in on a pale horse and someone said: ‘What? You don’t like horses?’ Many of the displaced then become commuters but they don’t have luxury coaches pulling up in their neighbourhoods to take them to their jobs and schools in San Francisco: they drive, or patch together routes on public transport, or sink into oblivion and exile. So the Google bus and the Apple bus don’t reduce commuting’s impact. They just transfer it to poorer people.

[…]

On the afternoon of 21 January, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency held a meeting to discuss putting in place a pilot programme to study the impact of the buses and limit them to two hundred bus stops in the city. As the San Francisco writer Anisse Gross has pointed out, if you evade your fare on a bus, you get fined $110; if you pull a car in at a bus stop, you get fined $271; if you just pay your fare it’s $2 per person. But if you’re the Google bus you will now pay $1 to use the public bus stop. This pissed off a lot of people at the hearing. Not everyone, though. Google had dispatched some of its employees to testify.

• Snapshots of History.
• M23 and Its Support Networks.
• Why Russia No Longer Fears the West.
• Is Museveni Still the West’s Man in Africa?
• When Big Numbers Roamed the Hills of LA.

February was a bad month for weekend readings, but March is off to a solid start (but no promises!) Here are some readings for you from throughout the shortest month of 2014. Read and be merry:

• The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine.
• From the Streets of Kyiv.
• The Global Salon.
• Janet Roitman on Crisis.
• Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now.
• Is Venezuela Burning?
• Death in Camp Delta.
• The Problem with Little White Girls (and Boys):

I don’t want a little girl in Ghana, or Sri Lanka, or Indonesia to think of me when she wakes up each morning. I don’t want her to thank me for her education or medical care or new clothes. Even if I am providing the funds to get the ball rolling, I want her to think about her teacher, community leader, or mother. I want her to have a hero who she can relate to – who looks like her, is part of her culture, speaks her language, and who she might bump into on the way to school one morning.

• Prosecutors Arresting Survivors of Sexual Assault is not a Zero-Sum Game.
• The Children Lose Angeles Failed.
• A Panorama of Toxicity: On Being a Trans Woman Online.
• The Cost of Disbelief.
• What Would Make You Believe a Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse? 
• “I Give Up,” The Battle Cry of the Privileged.
• Who is Obama’s “Middle Class College Student?“
• Everybody’s Doing It:

[W]hat parents and educators so often labeled as peer pressure was actually the disease-like spread of ideas. It’s a degree of symbolic freedom and movement that made adults uncomfortable. The truly horrible things that happen to teenage lives are more the result of socioeconomic reality (gang violence), the failure of the mental health state (drugs, alcohol, shooting up the school), the horrific patriarchy of larger adult society (rape), or the all-around idiotic idea of the “school” as we construct it than they ever are the sole province of a teens en masse fearing social rejection.

• Guns to Surpass Car Accidents as Leading Cause of Death for Young People.
• Teaching While Black.
• Transitional Justice and the Sandinistas.
• Untucking RuPaul’s Drag Race.
• The + in Google+ is Mostly for Google.
• V-Day, Indigenous Women, and the Myth of Shared Gender Oppression.
• Gentrification, How Do We Define It and Who Cares Anyway?
• Why Can’t He Just Be Like Everyone Else?

The new law that criminalizes homosexuality is popular among Nigerians. But it shows a failure of our democracy, because the mark of a true democracy is not in the rule of its majority but in the protection of its minority – otherwise mob justice would be considered democratic. The law is also unconstitutional, ambiguous, and a strange priority in a country with so many real problems. Above all else, however, it is unjust. Even if this was not a country of abysmal electricity supply where university graduates are barely literate and people die of easily-treatable causes and Boko Haram commits casual mass murders, this law would still be unjust.  We cannot be a just society unless we are able to accommodate benign difference, accept benign difference, live and let live. We may not understand homosexuality, we may find it personally abhorrent but our response cannot be to criminalize it.

A crime is a crime for a reason. A crime has victims. A crime harms society. On what basis is homosexuality a crime? Adults do no harm to society in how they love and whom they love. This is a law that will not prevent crime, but will, instead, lead to crimes of violence: there are already, in different parts of Nigeria, attacks on people ‘suspected’ of being gay. Ours is a society where men are openly affectionate with one another. Men hold hands. Men hug each other. Shall we now arrest friends who share a hotel room, or who walk side by side? How do we determine the clunky expressions in the law – ‘mutually beneficial,’ ‘directly or indirectly?’

Readings on gender, on higher education, and on everything else – with some sports at the end.

• “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re African.“
• Interlopers on Social Media: Feminism, Women of Color, and Oppression.
• On Twitter Feminism and Being Called Out.
• “Are transgender people only newsworthy when they are in prison, brutalized or dead?“
• On Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Anna Mae.
• Online Harassment Isn’t Virtual For Women.
• Why Women aren’t Welcome on the Internet:

But no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. I’ve spent countless hours over the past four years logging the online activity of one particularly committed cyberstalker, just in case. And as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day.

• Dr. Seuss Explains Assessment, Metrics, Administrative Blight, and Pretty Much Every Aspect of Contemporary Education System.
• Thank God for Skype: How Graduate Students Built the MLA Subconference.
• Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers.
• Shared Governance, Tenure, and Academic Freedom are Worth the Trouble.
• Who’s the Boss?
• Big Bonuses for University Presidents.
• What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?
• Even PhDs with Full Funding Have Huge Amounts of Debt.
• How the Government Could Make College Free for Everyone:

Tuition at public colleges came to $62.6 billion in 2012, according to the latest government data. That’s less than what the government already spends to subsidize the cost of collegethrough grants, tax breaks, and work-study funds, which comes to about $69 billion. It spends another $107.4 billion on student loans.

That means that with the money it already spends to make college affordable, the government could instead subsidize public college tuition, thereby making it free for all students. This would not just mean anyone could attend a higher education institution without worrying about cost, but it could incentivize private ones to reduce their costs in order to compete with the free option.

• How Colorado Disrupted the Drug War.
• The Anxiety of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway.
• Republicans Just Won the Food Stamp War.
• In the Name of Love, on the mantra of “do what you love.”
• Empire Down, on the absence of class struggle in Age of Empires II.
• Why are the Poor and Minorities Less Likely to Vote?
• How Cops Became Soldiers.
• Executioners’ Testimony Casts Dark Shadow:

The Chaplain said, “I’ve had several of them where [I’m] watching their last breath go from their bodies and their eyes never unfix from mine. I mean actually lock together. And I can close my eyes now and see those eyes. My feelings and my emotions are extremely intense at that time. I’ve never … I’ve never really been able to describe it. And I guess in a way I’m kind of afraid to describe it. I’ve never really delved into that part of my feelings yet.”

One warden said, “You’ll never hear another sound like a mother wailing when she is watching her son be executed. There’s no other sound like it. It is just this horrendous wail. It’s definitely something you won’t ever forget.”

• League of Extraordinary Gentleman, on football’s head injuries and deep play.
• The Politics in Your Superbowl.
• The Epic Battle to Save the Most Offensive Team Name in America.

Weekend Reading Lite. Less links, less calories, tastes different.

• The Parable of the Coffee Maker, on the bias of product design.
• MLK Boulevard: A Snapshot of a Dream Deferred.
• Freedom. Control, and the Act of (Mass) Killing.
• Campus Police Forces Expand Reach, Could Grow Authority.
• Workers of the World, Faint!
• Here to Make Friends:

Take the episode in which, according to a synopsis, “the new Town Council struggles to find a solution for Bonanza City’s growing trash problem.” Bullshit, Michael wrote. The kids were disposing of trash just fine by themselves. The producers created the so-called “growing trash problem” by dumping it into the town. “Without the production crew, [Kid Nation] would have been fairly boring,” Michael wrote. “The producers engineered problems when we didn’t have any. Without them, the show would have reflected very well on the children, but it would have been a snooze.”

Reality television is most addictive when it’s edited. There’s a reason viral 24/7 live cams are usually fixed on pandas and puppies. Strangers are compelling enough for serialized television only if they’re not getting along. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, essayist Rebecca Solnit argues that Survivor, the archetypical American reality show, wouldn’t be in its 27th season if the producers had simply dropped a bunch of people on an island and asked them to cope—“the goal was to produce a single winner rather than a surviving society, a competitive pyramid rather than a party of cooperation.”

• A Petrodollar and a Dream.
• Ukraine’s Protesters Have Built a Trebuchet.
• A Crumbling Sochi Hides Behind Olympic Facades.
• The Fake Signs of London’s Underground.
• Radio Disney’s Pro-Fracking Elementary School Tour.
• This is What Disability Binarism Looks Like.

Readings:

• It is Expensive to be Poor.
• What Would the Yellow Ranger Do?
• The Balancing Act of Being Female: Why We Have So Many Clothes.
• Responses to Grantland‘s Trans* Outing Piece.
• War on the Poor Erupted in 2013.
• Where No Google Buses Go.
• The Good White Folks of the Academy:

Modern filmmakers who want to accurately convey the evils of slavery could do so through the stories of Toussaint Louverture or Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass — or any of the other thousands of slaves who didn’t look to white saviors to escape their bondage. But you’d never know from watching Hollywood movies that a single slave ever freed herself. “Django Unchained,” “Glory,” “Lincoln” — these films all feature the benevolent intervention of white protagonists. Even Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” about a slave uprising, is as much about the white lawyers arguing the slaves’ case.

A particular narrative about slavery is told over and over: The institution was a historical aberration perpetrated by evil white people, but luckily there were good white people who listened to the black people, and they helped free the slaves, and now it’s all over. A similarly simplistic narrative emerges out of Hollywood’s revision of the civil rights movement: In “The Butler,” the cause was noble, but some black people took it too far and it was ultimately victorious because white presidents listened to the brave moderate blacks and beat the evil white racists. Now racism is over, because, you know, Obama.

• The Big White Ghetto.
• Centenary of Oil Exploration in Uganda: 1913-2013.
• Alive in the Sunshine, on consumption, jobs, and the environment.
• We Are All Miley Cyrus.
• Why Do Western Media Get Africa Wrong?
• Tweet Victory: How Twitter and Facebook Will Save Journalism (Mostly). [FYI: links to Playboy]
• The Frame Makes the Photograph:

The way to understand photography as it happens on social platforms is not to compare it to traditional photography, which is about creating an art object, but instead as a communicating of experience itself.  It’s less making media and more sharing eyes; your view, your experience in the now. The atomizing of the ephemeral flow of lived reality into transmittable objects is the ends of the traditional photograph, but merely the means of the social snap. As photos have become almost comically easy to make, their existence alone as objects isn’t special or interesting, rather, they exist more fluidly as communication; a visual discourse more linguistic than formally artistic. As such, social photography should be understood not as a remove from the moment or conversation but a deeply social immersion.

Turkle centers her analysis on selfies—those photos you take of yourself—arguing that we are trading the experience of the moment for its documentation. But when viewing selfies as not an abundance of self-portrait photographs but rather a sharing of experience, a communication of this is who I am, I was here, I was feeling like this, the commonality of selfies isn’t surprising or anti-social at all. Selfies, largely, are not recording the exceptionally rare events with famous people but exactly the opposite, the everyday moments that weave the fabric of life in all of its variety. An immaculately framed and perfectly lit photo of the beach makes for a good art object can be a pretty boring speech act given how that same shot multiplies in social feeds looking kind of the same. Instead, the selfie is the image-speak that is uniquely yours, no one else can take your selfie, it is your own voice-as-image and is thus especially intimate and expressive. It’s intensely in the moment and that’s exactly why we desire to share and view them.

• On Live-Tweeting One’s Own Suffering.
• Australian Sharks Are On Twitter.
• The Petty Jealousy of Arne Duncan.
• Disband West Virginia.
• “To a Nationalist Fighting Oppression, Dialectical Materialism is Like a Rifle.“
• The New York Times Discovers African Artists Use the Internets.
• The Myth of the Absent Black Father.