Save your readings for the week(end)!

• There Will Be Peplum: On the Television Uniform.
• Turkified: Why I Can Never Be a Proper German.
• Texas’ Other Death Penalty: Life and Death in the “Safety Net.“
• The Solar Industry Takes on Crony Capitalism in Arizona.
• Petropolis Now: Are Cities Getting Too Big?
• In the Pipeline, on adjunct labor.
• The MOOC Moment: Ethics, Discource, and Promises.
• The Unpaid Internship for Credit Must End:

The common practice of granting class credit for completed internships has contributed to the dramatic increase of unpaid internships. According to a survey-based study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a record 63 percent of 2013 graduates had completed an internship. A similar study by the college recruiting consultancy Intern Bridge found that just under half of interns received school credit. Credits are what universities are selling. Since outsourcing the actual teaching to employers saves money — it is cheaper to certify than instruct — American universities have jumped on the intern bandwagon.

From a student’s perspective, an internship for credit, even if unpaid, is a step toward both graduation and a job in her chosen field at the same time. But as many commentators have pointed out, employers commonly use internships as a way to skirt minimum-wage laws. College administrators and employers have colluded to invent a loophole where none existed. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of students are working for free, and actually paying their schools to certify it.

• The Rich Guys With Lions of Instagram.
• How to Stop Conflicts, Sometimes.
• Crops, Towns, Government.
• FEMA’s Flood Map Reaches Deep into Boston.
• Dig Deep: Beyond Lean-In.
• Strand Books Used Sprinklers to Spray the Homeless.
• Master of Many Trades.
• Human Rights Campaign and the Vulture Fund: Making Third World Poverty Pay for LGBT Rights:

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest US gay organization, is going international. It’s just been given at least $3 million to spread the word of marriage equality to benighted countries that treat gays badly. Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Its chief partner and donor in this project wants the people in those countries, LGBT folk included, to starve – their economies wrecked, their incomes shipped abroad, their resources squeezed and stolen to pay off odious debt. HRC is receiving its money for gay rights in the Third World from the man who “virtually invented vulture funds”: a form of speculation that’s one of the worst contributors to Third World poverty ever.

But if you’re poor and getting poorer, look on the bright side (as long as river blindness hasn’t got you, that is). You can still have a nice white wedding; and you’ll save on the food bill if your nation has no food.

• How Much Power Does Power Africa Really Need?
• Don’t Save Congo.
• Five Decades in Defense of Food Aid.
• Welcome to Dinovember.
• The Rise of Big Chocolate.
• Africa’s Media Wars.
• Twenty-Six Abortion Stories.
• Rising Up the Ladder in America: Who’s Upwardly Mobile?

The Horatio Alger myth—that hard work and pluck will lift a person from dire circumstances to enviable success—is more than 150 years old, but it has staying power: Forty percent of Americans think it’s fairly common for someone to start off poor, work hard and eventually rise to the top of the economic heap.

In reality, however, only 4% of Americans travel the rags-to-riches path, according to new research from the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. And a great many  who are born into the poorest segments of the population are stuck there for life, a finding that suggests the U.S. has much to do to improve social mobility.

Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile of household income remain there a generation later (with income of less than $28,900 in 2009 dollars, adjusted for family size).

Here’s a minimalist digest for the weekend:

• Modern Art was a CIA Weapon.
• What Lies Beneath New York City.
• Relational Economics.
• The Colonial Origins of Hate Speech in Burma.
• Instagrams from North Korea.
• Against the Gospel of ‘Africa Rising.‘
• Surviving the Post-Employment Economy.
• What Happened to Africa’s Tallest Apartment Building?
• Who Wants a Christian America?
• Etsy Touts Economic Power of… Low-Wage Earners.
• All Technology is Assistive Technology.
• Sexy? A High School Horror Story.
• Money and Class at Yale.

These links are two weeks in the making, which means they’re both twice as good and half out-dated.

• The Writer As Meme Machine.
• Where’s the Suspicion in Suspicious Activity Reports?
• Teach For America Rises as Political Powerhouse.
• Homecoming at Howard.
• America’s New Hunger Crisis.
• Charity Assets, on the Omidyar Network and social enterprise.
• How the Pope Could Tear Apart the Religious Right.
• How a Drug Raid Gone Wrong Sparked Police Reform in Utah.
• A Good Men’s Rights Movement is Hard to Find:

[M]ake no mistake: anti-woman hate is the defining feature of the [Men’s Rights Associations], and the examples above are the rule, not the exception. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a storied civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, told 20/20: “The Manosphere is an underworld of so-called men’s rights groups and individuals on the Internet, which is just fraught with really hard-line anti-woman misogyny.” A Voice For Men makes no excuses for their hatred of women, from posts ranting about women who are “begging to be raped” to treatises about how fat women want to be sexually violated because it would mean we are desired. Warren Farrell, the aforementioned “father” of the modern MRAs—he openly called date rape “exciting” and said that incest can be a good thing—has recently signed on as a regular AVFM contributor. For over a year, AVFM hosted in their “activism” section a call to firebomb courthouses written by a man who actually lit himself on fire in front of one. Paul Elam himself wrote an infamous post in which he vowed that, should he ever be called to serve on the jury for a rape trial, he would vote to acquit even if he believed the defendant was guilty.

As bad as Men’s Rights Activists are for women (and, really, for our collective humanity), they’re also doing harm to the causes they claim to care about. When an AVFM contributor in Australia called a hotline posing as a man being beaten by his wife and needing a shelter for himself and his son, he claims he was denied help. But if you listen to the recording (or read the transcript), you can clearly hear the counselor on the other line offer multiple forms of assistance, including a free hotel for himself and his son, a direct connection to a police officer specializing in domestic violence, and more. Far from their tagline “compassion for men and boys,” this incident reveals that MRAs are happy to abandon men and boys to real danger when it suits their hate campaign against women.

• Why Millenials Are Pro-Union, But Don’t Join Them.
• What Vampire Graves Tell Us About Ancient Superstitions.
• Why Doesn’t Anyone Read Dante’s Paradiso?
• On Organized Labor in New Haven.
• A Diary of a Trip to Four Nigerian Cities.
• Purity Culture as Rape Culture: Why the Theological is Political.
• The Immorality of College Admissions:

Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshman come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of US incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles.

“We admit students without any regard for financial need – a policy we call ‘need-blind admission’,” Harvard’s website proudly proclaims. Harvard charges $54,496 per year for tuition, room and board, but waives the fees for families making less than $60,000 per year.

This would be a laudable policy were Harvard admitting low-income students in any significant numbers, but they are not. Instead, they fill their ranks with the children of the elite portrayed in Miller’s article – elites who drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on private schools, exorbitant “enrichment” activities, and personal tutors that almost no Americans can afford.

• Mapping Europe’s War on Immigration.
• Ted Cruz Doesn’t Know What the Government Gives Him, and He’s Not Alone.
• The Great Forgetting.
• The Riddle of Amazon.
• Pennies From Heaven.
• Cory Booker’s Corporate Ties That Bind.
• The Way Hollywood Frames Slavery.
• What People Really Think About Women, Men, and Feminists.

These readings will improve your weekend:

• How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America.
• The “Redskins” Debate on the Reservation.
• When Your Research Population Organizes Against You, Sex Worker Edition.
• Student Data is the New Oil: MOOCs, Metaphor, and Money.
• Jordan’s Second Class Citizens.
• A Field Guide to the North American Responsibility Troll:

The responsibility troll has a problem: he or she has a lot of thoughts about the way Women Ought to Behave, but knows that it’s socially unacceptable to insist directly on double standards for men and women. Luckily, however, our society is totally fine with restricting women’s lives if it’s for their own good (or, sometimes, for their children’s). Problem solved!

The responsibility troll won’t say that it’s not ladylike for women to drink the way men do – but she wants you to be aware that studies show that women who get drunk are more likely to get raped. The responsibility troll knows you think your right to choose is important, but he feels you ought to know that studies show that women who have abortions end up sad ladies who are full of regret. The responsibility troll doesn’t tell women that they should prioritize their babies over their careers – but does feel a need to point out that studies show that exclusive breast-feeding is best for the infant. Studies show, you know. The responsibility troll loves studies.

• Am I Crazy, Or Is That Racist?
• Thomas Jefferson’s Quran.
• Why Do Airliners Continue to Shrink Seats?
• You Thought The Government Shutdown Was Over; You Were Wrong.
• The Government Shutdown was Temporary; Its Damage to Science Permanent.
• The Default Has Already Begun.
• How Slavery Helped Universities Grow.
• How Young is Too Young for Multiple-Choice Tests?

The image of 4- and 5-year-olds struggling to figure out how to take a multiple-choice test is heartbreaking enough, but the image that stuck with me was that of the children trying to help one another with the test and being told that they’re not allowed to do so.

When we talk about the values that students learn from standardized testing, we often talk about incentives to cheat (for both teachers and students) as the pressure on each individual test increases, or, as Jones noted in July, the removal of creative subjects from the curriculum. Less discussed, but just as important, is the way these tests make everything into a competition—they pit children against one another instead of teaching them to share, which can turn even a kindergarten classroom into a den of hyper-individualistic bootstrappers (or as Megan Erickson wrote, “little Lebowski urban achievers”).

This is a feature, not a bug, of the testing regime. While it’s always worth pointing out how big the testing business is and the identity of the people who stand to profit from its never-ending expansion, it’s also important to remember that testing is an ideological practice. Just as boiling teaching down to test administration breaks the bond between teachers and students and reduces highly skilled workers to automatons that can be replaced with inexperienced and often temporary Teach for America recruits, boiling learning down to filling in bubbles and getting a good score teaches very young children that they have nothing to offer each other—that their only goal should be stomping the competition on the way to the top.

• There are over 2000 surveillance cameras in the Bay Area, with 272 in downtown Oakland alone.
• What If Science Fiction Were Boringly Real?
• Corruption in the Congo: How China Learnt From the West.
• A Container Full of Halloween Items Arrives in Mombasa.
• American History (and “Indian” History).
• El Salvador: Where Women Can Be Jailed For Miscarrying.
• My Soul to Keep.
• New Ads Use Real Google Searches to Show the Scope of Sexism.

.

Same weekend channel, same weekend reading:

• Obamacare and the Conscience of a Radical.
• It Gets Better, Unless You’re Fat.
• Waterboarding is a Joke at Dick Cheney’s Roast.
• Dear Television takes on Netflix:
  • The New Canon.
  • Why We Watch Netflix in the Middle of the Night.
  • Streaming Pam Beesly.
• The Men Who Set Themselves On Fire:

Unemployment is not only the loss of a job. It is the loss of dignity. It is the loss of the present and, over time, the ability to imagine a future. It is hopelessness and shame, an open struggle everyone witnesses but pretends not to see. It is a social and political crisis we tell a man to solve, and blame him when he cannot.

When you are unemployed, your past is dismissed as unworthy. Your future is denied. Self-immolation is making yourself, in the moment, matter.

• When Our News is Gerrymandered, Too.
• Rihanna On My Mind.
• Malala Yousafzai and the White Saviour Complex.
• How Not to Help Somalia.
• New Banksy Street Art Turned Into Student Protest Propaganda.

• Upstairs, Downstairs at the University of Chicago.
• Why Anarchists Aren’t Celebrating the Shutdown.
• Wait a Second before Cheering a Police Shooting.
• The Killing of Jonathan Ferell:

“You see one of his hands partially behind his back, concealed as he … continued to advance. He was given three commands to ‘Get on the ground. Get on the ground.’ He did not. And Officer Kerrick backed up and then felt the need to deploy his service weapon.”

Later in the story the police chief makes the obvious point that not complying is not a good reason to try and kill someone. People do not comply for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they mean harm. But they also might not clearly hear you. They might be mentally disabled. Or–having just emerged from a car crash–they might be totally disoriented.

Having said that, it’s important to understand that, in America, it is broadly believed that police can–and perhaps should–kill people who do not comply with them. Roy Middleton was shot in his own driveway after a neighbor called the police on him, thinking he was a burglar breaking into a car. The car was Middleton’s. When the police arrived, they claim to have given Middleton orders to which he did not comply. Middleton thought it was neighbors playing a joke. The police claim he “lunged” at them.”It was like a firing squad,” Middleton told PNJ from his bed at Baptist Hospital. “Bullets were flying everywhere.”  The local sheriff doesn’t believe the police did anything wrong.

• Dozens Play Chess in Public to Defy San Francisco Crackdown.
• Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.
• Three Types of Buzzfeed Lists to Learn Before You Die.
• The Weird Genius of The Act of Killing.
• The 29 Stages of a Twitter Storm.
• Eulogy for a Horse(_ebooks).

.

This edition comes slightly early, as I am finding myself increasingly busy. Enjoy what made the cut:

• We’re Not Lovin’ It, on the fast food, retail, and warehouse unionization movement.
• It’s the Austerity, Stupid: How We Were Sold An Economy-Killing Lie.
• The Inside Story of One Website’s Defense of Assad.
• The Persistent Appetite for Orthodoxy, on refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
• Is a College Degree Worth It? The Wrong Debate Continues.
• On the Fashion Runway, South Sudan Forges a National Identity.
• Popular Dissatisfaction with Economic Management in Africa.
• Situating Finance.

[D]ebt is also symptom as well as cause. If education were free, as it should be, student debt wouldn’t be a problem. If we had a humane health care financing system, medical debt wouldn’t be a problem. If housing weren’t so expensive—and if rising prices weren’t taken as a sign of a “healthy” housing market (why is the rising price of one of life’s essentials a good thing?)—then mortgage debt would’t be a problem. If wages hadn’t been under relentless downward pressure for the last 30 years, people wouldn’t have borrowed so heavily against home equity during the bubble, and wouldn’t have put so much on their credit cards.

• A Government Shutdown, A Social Breakdown.
• Shutdown in the Classroom.
• Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live.
• AmeriCorps VISTA Members Are Working Without Pay.
• What You’re Missing in Yosemite.
• Why We Aren’t In The Streets?

What if we know that we Millennials were born into an already abandoned world? What if we only know the welfare state of yesteryear as a myth? What if we can only laugh when someone encourages us to declare, “it’s our government”? What if we only know a world of de-pegged dollars, of flexible production, of fast-moving finance? What if we only know a world in which the state at every turn functions to stack the world against us? What if we only know a world in which the state’s primary mode of being is as an agency dedicated to the proposition that black and brown people around the world should be incarcerated or killed? What if we only know a world in which our most “progressive” president was the one who gave us the horrible, racist Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? What if we only know a world in which liberals justify the maintenance of the state by rhetorically gesturing to the very raced and gendered populations that the state only cares to fuck over? What if we know that the devastating abandonment to which precarious populations are now subject as a result of the “shutdown” is simply the agonizing materialization of an already established fact?

What if we’re not cruel optimists because we were never optimistic in the first place.

We want to be in the streets. We showed that. We want nothing more. We want to be in the streets. Dancing, laughing, arguing. Feeding one another, caring for one another, defending one another against the organs of the state that never shut down.  Shattering windows, tearing down fences, making the world our commons. We want to build worlds where the hungry can eat, where the sick can repair. Where black skin isn’t a marker of disposability and where bodies can embody as they like. Where the forms of ableism at times implied in the political shorthand of “the streets” are annulled.

• Going to Jail for a Facebook Like.
• The Socialite Network.
• On Being a Tenure-Track Parasite o of Adjunct Faculty.
• Faculty Governance in the New University.
• Updates on Student Organizing.
• How Social Networks Explain Violence in Chicago.