Here’s another edition of weekend reading for you:

• Shame has become Our Stick for Beating the Poor.
• Firing Day at the Charter School.
• “Good News First, Bad News Never,” an evaluation of a Peace Corps Volunteer.
• Corporate Hypocrisy in Climate Change.
• Whites and the Whale.
• On Mountaintop Removal, Photography, and Congress’ Bullying: Obscenity: I Know It When I See It and More Coal Porn.
• Public School Clubs to Learn Biblical Genocide.
• In favor of hypocrisy:

What’s nice about hypocrisy is that it at least maintains some point of connection with morality. It keeps moral principles — like “you don’t torture people” or “you don’t send killer robots to murder people on your sole say-so” — enshrined as norms, meaning that there’s some kind of leverage for change. Actually committing the crimes is bad enough, but publicly proclaiming them to be the right thing to do is an even more horrific crime, because it closes down the possibility that the crimes may end in the future.

• Obama, Drone Strikes, and Human Rights.
• Drone-Strike the Jobless.
• Blame the Drone: On Remote Pilots and PTSD.
• A Knife into the Heart of the Confederacy, on Sherman’s March and the South’s Will to Fight.
• Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Sick and Dying in Arizona’s Prisons.
• Our Man in Great Neck: Smuggling Goods to Soviet Jews.
• Solving Happiness.
• The Secret Shopper:

Producing identification with the bosses; smashing labor; and making solidarity difficult through contract labor, precarity, and remote working are key features of neoliberal workplace organization. But central to this vision, too, is workplace surveillance. Jay Gould, ninth richest man in American history, railroad speculator, and widely despised robber baron, famously remarked upon the hiring of strikebreakers, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.” Neoliberalism allows for the return of the robber barons by producing the technologies and techniques to replace Gould’s “kill” with “watch.” Heightened workplace surveillance helps build a workplace where no time is wasted, where all effort is put directly into the production of the bosses’ product. But it transforms more than just the bottom line.

The threat of the ever-present spy, the fear that the woman who forgot her ID in the car but swears she’s 18 is actually a scab employed by your boss, means you trust no one, expecting them all to be against you, out to catch you breaking management’s rules, which you now enforce with paranoiac efficiency. Surveillance, ultimately, isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about making police.

• In history, there’s no weapon stronger than a good statistic.
• I’d Rather Be Us Losing Than Them Winning.
• A Solidarity of Strangers.
• One Year Longer, One year Weaker: Wisconsin and the Left.
• The Horrible Mistake of Channeling Popular Uprising into Electoral Politics.
• Greek Neo-Nazi Party Spokesman Attacks Two Female Politicians on Live Television
• How Many People are Surviving on Leaves in the Nuba Mountains? On More of Kristof’s Reporting.
• No Boys Allowed: Let the Ladies Have Our Own Book Awards:

So my feeling, as a lady-writer, is LET THE LADIES HAVE OUR FUCKING PRIZE. Women can be successful novelists, but we don’t win shit. And until we fix that, cultural institutions like the Orange Prize aren’t “ghettoizing” women, they’re bringing women INTO the fold of award-winning novelists. It’s inclusive, not exclusive. The alternative is…what? Sitting and waiting for systemic inequalities to magically evaporate? As long as the prize is judged in a serious, non-gendered way—as long as it’s not like, “This book wins because it has the most shopping in it! Weeeeeee!”—it’s merely drawing attention to the underappreciated. Pushing back against inequality does not create inequality, and to say so is to ignore that there’s a problem. Suggesting that a prize for female novelists creates a barrier between the sexes overlooks the fact thatwomen are already segregated.

• The United Nations Won’t Tell the Public Where It Gets It’s Money.
• NYPD Testimony Shows Cops Regularly Plant Drugs.
• A look at Mexican Youth, Authentic Democracy, and Yo Soy 132.
• A Brief History of Pots and Pans, from Argentina to Quebec.
• An Army of One.

• Please… no more “Don’t Go to Grad School” Articles.
• Young, Depressed, and Of Color: Why Schools and Doctors Get It Wrong.
• A look at Philadelphia, America’s most privatized school system.
• Five Ways Obama and Romney are Selling Out our Schools.
• Travel Souvenirs and Forced Perspective Photography.
• On the Forgotten Anti-Jewish Riots in 1947 Britain.
• Laurie Penny on Ru Paul, Lady GaGa, and Model Behavior:

All performed femininity — like all performed masculinity — is a drag race. Cinderella was a drag queen. Margaret Thatcher was a drag queen. Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj and most especially Lady Gaga are drag queens, and doing drag well and self-­consciously is always an exercise in queering, no matter what you’ve got between your legs. That kind of drag is what the beauty-industrial complex of advertising, magazines, makeover shows, and music videos are terrified by, and yes, it is queer, and yes, it is feminist.

Drag queens of all genders know that performing femininity is always contingent, always within the context of a world where beauty means disguise, means conformity and misogyny and racism and self-erasure — but that one can always take those tropes and remake them joyfully, with choreography and courage and a handful of glitter. The woman game doesn’t have to be played by the rules. It doesn’t have to be played to win or to please your partner or to keep your job. It doesn’t have to be played at all, but if you play with a wink in your eye and some sequins up your sleeve, you can still spoil the game a little for the bigots.

• On the President who has Weekly Assassination Meetings:
  • The Kill List of Barack Obama.
  • Obama at Large.
  • The President’s Kill List.
  • Obama and Drone Warfare.
  • Do Obama’s Drone Strikes Imperil Americans?
• A list of English-language resources on the crisis in Quebec.
• Getting Detained at the Border – On the Way to Montreal.
• Night Falls, Power Rises, in Montreal.
• Pots and Pans in the Streets of Montreal.
• “Black Bloc, Red Square,” by Malcolm Harris and Max Fox:

In the USA, it may very well be safe to wear a red square for a while – it doesn’t mean much here yet – but it has a potential for resonance that could shift the symbolic terrain. And we don’t know how many chances like this we’ll get. “Occupy” was one and it has done important work, both intended and unintended by its early advocates. But the State’s move to isolate The Black Bloc ups the urgency of a conceptual and stylistic jostling of the terms in play. Tiqqun was right in their call to reappropriate in advance the terms that will necessarily be applied to us, but they should know better than most that we won’t get “civil war,” at least not soon. We will be a movement or we will be terrorists. If only for each other’s near-term safety, let us choose the former.

The Quebecois drew the shape from a pun which, happily, works the same in English. The carré rougesignified that they were carrément dans le rouge – squarely in the red of debt. Students are fighting against the imposition of a costly regime of debt through tuition, which has also been the single largest issue-cause of the occupations in the US and UK.

Adopting it as a badge of identity here would distill another potent slogan from the Occupy sequence: “We Are the Crisis” – we are multitudes of unemployable debtors, threatening to capsize the system by our presence alone. It also points to clear affinities with the “Movement of the Squares” whose appearance last summer directly inspired the organizers who led the first General Assemblies to plan Occupy Wall Street. Hell, let it stand for the red cube looming over Zuccotti Park, as good as a symbol as any for that strange dear place where many people saw their lives change. And as always, the red stands for blood, and should remind us that the heaviest payments are extracted first and foremost from the already vulnerable.

• “It’s a War Between the People and Capitalism” in Greece.
• Exploding the Myth of Feckless, Lazy Greeks.
• Bankers at the Gates, of Athens now and Constantinople then.
• Protesting the Empire from Oakland to Chicago.
• Police or Prosperity?

Because this is part of a larger paradigm, the one that people gathered in Montreal, Chicago and Frankfurt are protesting. It reflects a political consensus in which there is an unlimited budget for the police, and the real purveyors of violence in this society, unlimited tax cuts for the rich and corporate citizens, while universities, schools, libraries, sanitation systems, roadways, public transit, welfare and food stamps, counseling and free clinics all must close to meet budget targets.

• Unmanned and Dangerous. Louise Arbour on NATO’s Drones.
• What Could be Better than Dinner with Romney and Trump? Twitter Answers.
• Women’s Rights, Race, and Discrimination.
• The Neoliberal Sherlock Holmes.
• The World of Pixar’s Cars Starts in Wall-E.
• Has Avaaz Been Lying About its Role in Syria?
• Jillian C. York with four critiques of Avaaz in Syria and in general.
• Reading Guide Books for Foreigners Coming to the U.S.
• How Roman are the Olympics?

• On Obama and the federalist approach to same-sex marriage.
• Naked Dissent in Northern Uganda.
• Smartphones intervene in our conversations before we even check on them.
• A look at what will happen regarding the ICC and NATO investigations in Libya.
• Remembering the first Memorial Day in 1865.
• And How to Forget on Memorial Day:

From the moment the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, how to deal with the actual American war dead was always considered a problematic matter. The Bush administration and the military high command, with the Vietnam War still etched in their collective memories, feared those uniformed bodies coming home (as they feared and banished the “body count” of enemy dead in the field). They remembered the return of the “body bags” of the Vietnam era as a kind of nightmare, stoking a fierce antiwar movement, which they were determined not to see repeated

• Updates in the War on Civilian Privacy.
• Some facts to go with John Scalzi’s “lowest difficulty setting” post.
• Preying on the Poor.
• Hollywood and the Pentagon come together in the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
• Sasha Baren Cohen’s racism.
• In support of UK Uncut’s street party .
• The Fall and Rise of the Populist Left.
• The National Security State Wins (Again):

Of course, the election cycle alone is hardly responsible for our national love of weaponry and war. Even in today’s straitened fiscal climate, with all the talk of government austerity, Congress feels obliged to trump an already generous president by adding yet more money for military appropriations. Ever since the attacks of 9/11, surging defense budgets, forever war, and fear-mongering have become omnipresent features of our national landscape, together with pro-military celebrations that elevate our warriors and warfighters to hero status. In fact, the uneasier Americans grow when it comes to the economy and signs of national decline, the more breathlessly we praise our military and its image of overwhelming power. Neither Obama nor Romney show any sign of challenging this celebratory global “lock and load” mentality.

• Yet another reason why people in Oakland don’t like their police department.
• And how the NYPD got a little pushy at the Quebec solidarity march in Manhattan.
• The Poetry of the Taliban.
• Burma’s reforms need a little perspective.
• Old King Coal rules over Kentucky.
• Games used to be about bringing people together. Now everybody just plays Words with Friends.
• Universities are still Super-White, and they could get whiter:

My point with all of this is to highlight the power of definition. When admissions offices take race into consideration it is defined as “affirmative-action” and therefore a betrayal of American ideals of meritocracy; when they take where your parents went to school into consideration it is simply a legacy admission, protecting the unique “traditions” of each school. Schools take lots of things into consideration: but somehow the act of taking race into consideration gets picked out, put into a separate category of decision making, and subjected to a separate critique and logic than do those processes which benefit white people. One of the privileges of whiteness, then, is its invisibility, as society naturalizes and normalizes the very processes that give white people advantage, sewing white privilege into the unexamined fabric of social reproduction, while subjecting to the most strict and withering examination any systems that try to remedy existing inequality by benefiting black or Hispanic students.

• Barack Obama, the Great Deceiver.
• The Presumption of Male Neutrality: in which Jonathan Franzen thinks Edith Wharton’s looks made her sympathetic.
• DC (and everywhere, really) has an unpaid internship problem.
• And a Girl Shall Terrify Them: On the Catholic school that refused to play against a girl.
• Examining the similarities between the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Athens, Tottenham, and Occupy.
• Surveillance and Occupy.
• Lions in Winter, Part 1 and Part 2 – a really great read on the New York Public Library.
• Randa Jarr on getting sent to “The Arab Room” at Ben Gurion Airport:

Finally, they took me to a room in the corner of the baggage claim area. It was becoming clear to me that at Ben Gurion, unjust things happened in corners. The guards asked me to open my bags. I did as I was told. I noted that the room was filthy. The Israelis were concerned with showing a clean and gleaming exterior—the floors of the airport outside shone–but for suspected threats and people like myself, behind closed doors, tucked away in dirty corners, they hadn’t bothered. A very butch young woman asked me to follow her. She led me to yet another room, where the walls were faded and filthy, and the floor was covered in dirty carpet, littered with small bits of paper and hair clips. It reeked of intimidation, and of humiliation.

• Israeli police brutally arrest permitted demonstrators.
• George Lucas gets revenge on his neighbors.
• Notes on Nostalgia – Mourning Becomes the Mad Men.
• Another critique of TOMS’ buy-one-give-one model.
• The Genderless War on Women’s Health.
• On completing a condition report when a museum displays photos of women with eating disorders:

There are 54 large photographs in the exhibition.  I know because I had to look at each one yesterday and complete a condition report.  (For those of you non museum people a condition report is a document completed when a loaned exhibition or item comes into a museum.  The condition of the piece is documented in case there are any issues which need to be reported back to the lending institution)  The photographs are emotionally devastating.  I was in collections storage by myself looking at picture after picture of emaciated women and girls as young as 14 who have completely destroyed their bodies in order to be “thin.” On each condition report I would describe the photo.  Below that section was the area of the form to note the condition.  In the museum world most conditions are scaled using the terms – excellent, good, fair, poor.  The photographs and their frames were pristine.  Underneath each description, I kept writing the word “excellent.”  After a while it felt like a sick commentary on the descriptions of the photos I had created above.  “Emily, 15 from Tampa, FL weighting 80 pounds”  Condition –  “excellent.”  It became harder and harder to write that word.

• Straight White Male: The lowest difficulty setting there is.
• Jewish Culture Wars in Israel and America.
• A fascinating look at social jet lag, internal clocks, and why we’re so tired.
• People who think Obama is gay.
• Chaperon-moms spray Lysol on girls for grinding at prom.
• On Presidents, Opinions, and Activism.
• On the Times’ horrible coverage of a fire victim, from Autumn Whitefeld-Madrano:

If the nation’s most venerable newspaper can get away with describing any dead person in these terms in the very first line of the piece, that means it really only stopped describing all women in those terms because they “had” to, in order to shut up those mouthy feminists. The journalistic “twist” of incorporating Lorena’s beauty into the piece “works” because the reader isn’t initially picturing a trans woman, but a biological one. It also works because it gives us exactly what we want: the dead, beautiful woman, her hourglass figure forever taken from our gaze.

• The Education of a Vietnamese American Writer.
• Back to 1806: Revisiting the Accidental Origins of the Filibuster.
• Digital Democracy: Inside the French Presidential Elections.
• Activism in Arizona.
• The Enough Project frames the conflict minerals debate as profits vs. people, ignores other critics.
• Jar-Jar Jesus, or Lucas Christ Superstar:

In The Phantom Menace, there was a chamber drama about a trade dispute, an origin story about the prophesied chosen one, an escape romp, and a children’s farce with bantha poodoo. There was also an attempt at romantic predestination in which a small child swooned for a teenager he mistook for a “space angel.” All this happens against the backdrop of repeated shots and dialogue fragments meant to evoke the first three films, a cinematic version of rhyming stanzas, Lucas argued. In trying to explain precisely how incoherent and bizarre the movie is, one falls into a complicated web of ideas wherein the criteria for evaluating good and bad disintegrates. The Phantom Menace is the end of cinema not in the historical sense but in the topographical sense. It takes the linear story-driven movie to the limits of credulity, a simultaneous homage to and desecration of its origins.

• Data Transgression:

Just as we might understand what religious people aspire to by studying what traits they attribute to their deity, we can understand Web worshippers by what they attribute to the Internet. These include such things as boundless creativity, innovation, unlimited potential for novelty, entrepreneurism, multifaceted, a shape-shifting network that rejects stable identities and embraces change. Following Ludwig Feuerbach’s hypothesis that man created God in his own image, one might say that the deified Internet embodies all the attributes of the perfect neoliberal subject that economic conditions require, offering a point of identification for the precarious worker and dignifying their situation. Perhaps this is why curation more so than creation has emerged as the fundamental mode of interaction on the Internet. Curators (or remixers or bricoleurs) model themselves as media for information transformation and transmission, performing a small-scale imitation of what the personified Internet does on a massive scale, rendering their identities legible.

• Hearing Like an LRAD: The Only Language They Understand is Force.
• Quebec Government Tries to Bludgeon Student Strikers.
• And a short look at Quebec’s sweeping anti-protest laws.
• A look at how the new law in Quebec treats rights.
• Political Scientists: The New Pariah?