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.

A reading a weekend keeps the mind sharpened:

• Zero Opportunity Employers.
• “Smile, Baby:” The Words No Woman Wants to Hear.
• Higher Education Can Be Free.
• Colorado Parolees: No Job, No Money, No Skills, No Home.
• Nothing But Verdicts: The Purpose of Tribunals.
• The Campus Anti-War Movement That Came Before Vietnam.
• David Petraeus: Voldemort Comes to CUNY.
• Thoughts on Petraeus.
• NYPD to CUNY Students: Drop Dead:

The police is a unionized force made up of working class folks; its struggles should be seen by them as existing on a continuum with those of the students who attend a public university like CUNY.  But so successful has the brainwashing and indoctrination of the police been, that every time they step out, booted, uniformed, swaggering and strutting on a city street, swinging their night-sticks, and see a ‘long-haired punk,’ they fail to recognize a little bit of themselves. With every blow they hand out to a protester, they merely ensure that their miserable state of endless precinct-centered resentment and bitterness will continue.

The pity is that they don’t suffer alone; they make the rest of us bear the burden of their anomie too.

• Kenya’s Westgate Mall Attack and the Politics of Spectacular Violence.
• The FBI’s Least Wanted.
• Swarovski Kristallnacht.
• “We Felt Like We Were Above the Law”: How the NCAA Endangers Women, on the use of “hostesses” to lure in college recruits.
• Exploring the Racist “Slave Quarters” of One of Yale’s Residential Colleges.
• Why Do We Tolerate Revenge Porn?
• In Miley Cyrus’ Words:

Miley admits that her performance with Thicke got a little – her word – “handsy.” But she makes a good point: “No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never, ‘Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley.’ They’re only talking about the one that bent over. So obviously there’s a double standard.”

[…]

“America is just so weird in what they think is right and wrong,” she continues. “Like, I was watching Breaking Bad the other day, and they were cooking meth. I could literally cook meth because of that show. It’s a how-to. And then they bleeped out the word ‘fuck.’ And I’m like, really? They killed a guy, and disintegrated his body in acid, but you’re not allowed to say ‘fuck’? It’s like when they bleeped ‘molly’ at the VMAs. Look what I’m doing up here right now, and you’re going to bleep out ‘molly’? Whatever.”

• Digital Runways, Paper Dolls, on race and the runway in China.
• Lenin’s Plot to Destroy Capitalism, and it’s Lessons About Money and the Economy Today.
• NCAA Football Players Mark Gear In Protest. And It Could Signal a Movement.
• Why Nobody Likes U.S. Foreign Policy.
• Cool Pope Francis Will Let You Down.
• Getting Medieval On Tuition.
• A Nation Built For Immigrants.
• From Workplace‘s special issue on The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students:
  • From the New Deal to the Raw Deal: 21st Century Poetics and Academic Labor.
  • Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education.
  • Lines of Flight: The New PhD As Migrant.

Cloudy with a 70% chance of weekend reading:

• Death of an Adjunct.
• Occupy Wall Street was about Rupture; Celebrating Its Anniversary is Like Seeking Life from a Grave.
• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”
• What We Get Wrong When We Talk About the Financial Crisis.
• The Job Gap Between the Rich and the Poor is the Widest on Record.
• If You Are a Woman, You’re Work is Irrelevant: How Dave Eggers Can Steal a Woman’s Book About Facebook.
• Thoughts and Responses to Mindy Budgor, Bullshit Maasai Warrior.
• “Racists React to [Thing]” Posts are Just Passive White Supremacy.
• Abusers, Guns, and the Women They Kill.

The problem with that should-have, could-have conversation is the popular implication that the ability, and the responsibility, to change the behavior of abusive men lies not with the abusers, but with the partners they strike, strangle, and shoot.

It’s why the question “Why didn’t she leave?” is far more common than, “Why did he abuse her?”

But research shows us why she, whoever she might be, didn’t leave: she didn’t have the money, she didn’t want to take the kids out of school, she couldn’t find a shelter, there was no shelter, she was embarrassed, her pastor or her mother or her father or her sister told her a good wife doesn’t give up, her self-esteem was in shreds, she had literally nowhere to go, or she knew that, in leaving, she would put herself in more danger than if she stayed.

But if women can’t be blamed for inciting violence in their partners, or at least scolded for not bailing at the first red flag, the problem of why intimate partner violence happens in the first place, and what to do about it, becomes much more complicated than asking the broken-record question, “Why didn’t she leave?”

What hard evidence does show is that while the “why” may never be satisfactorily answered in every situation, we know, definitively, how most U.S. women killed by abusive partners meet their end: They are shot to death.

• Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Almost Certainly Did It (And That’s Wonderful).
• In Defense of the Humanities PhD: It’s No Crazier Than Becoming a Journalist.
• Making the Case for the Humanities.
• This is What Cis-Privilege Looks Like.
• The Queer Art of Whistle-Blowing.
• Is Miss America Too Dark-Skinned to be Crowned Miss India?
• “Build Yourself a Sukkah!” How Occupy Judaism Transformed the Movement:

[D]espite its conspicuous absence from virtually every celebrated origin story in Occupy, alongside the medical tent established by activists in the early weeks of the movement, the first tent to successfully challenge the NYPD ban on structures in Zuccotti was a sukkah replete with a portrait of Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, set up by Dan Sieradski and Occupy Judaism; a project that would go on to function as a sort of unintentional muse to the movement in New York. “The holiday immediately following Yom Kippur is Sukkot – the plural of sukkah,” Sieradski said. “A sukkah is a ritual hut – otherwise known as a tabernacle – that Jews sleep and eat in for a week to commemorate the harvest season in ancient Israel.” He knew cops weren’t letting structures go up in Zuccotti but figured a sukkah might pose a prohibitive public relations obstacle for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD. “The goal was twofold,” he said. “I really wanted to push the Occupy Judaism thing, which was using Jewish ritual as a form of direct action – transforming sacred rites into acts of justice and not just references to ideas of justice – and to see if the religious liberty argument could be used as leverage to help put some shelter over Occupiers’ heads.”

In the process, he enlisted some unlikely support – most notably from Chabad (a Hasidic sect) and a company called PopUp Sukkah, who hardly supported the movement’s politics but donated materials for the sake of supporting religious practice. “I went down to Zuccotti and met with the direct action working group, got the buy-in of the resident Occupiers, who I worried might be ill-affected by an attempt to build a structure, and then rustled up a group of friends and folks, including media and legal observers, and erected the PopUp Sukkah,” Sieradski said. As predicted, the NYPD approached, but opted to avoid the likely blowback of interfering with a Jewish rite, ultimately letting it be. “That’s when I knew we had our opening,” Sieradski said. “A couple of kids tried it. One had theirs taken down; another was able to keep theirs up. So later, in the middle of the night, it started raining. And all of a sudden from the middle of the park you heard, ‘MIC CHECK! MIC CHECK! TONIGHT… WE ARE ALL JEWS! BUILD YOURSELF A SUKKAH TO SLEEP IN!’ And thus, the tent city began. The next day the medical tent went up, and on from there it went.” Occupy-related sukkahs appeared thereafter in Seattle (where ten were arrested in the process), as well as other cities.

• Why the Central African Republic is in the Worst Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of.
• Pope Francis is Basically the Beyoncé of Organized Religion.
• The Dallas Cowboys’ Stadium Uses Three Times As Much Electricity as Liberia.
• Tips and Poverty.
• Rank Irrelevance: How Academia Lost Its Way.
• Poverty in 2013: Even Diapers Are a Luxury.
• In the Republic of Congo, a Revolution in Maternal Health.
• Dear Television Takes On The Emmys:
  • On Monica Potter in Parenthood and Conflating the Emmys and the Oscars
  • On Primetime Drama’s Perceived Supremacy and the Leading Actress Nominees
  • On Top of the Lake and the Mini-Series Category
  • On Worthwhile Moments from the Post-Emmys Black Hole and the Unscripted Margins

The NSA has pre-approved these links in list-order only:

• Superman’s Shop Floor: An Inquiry into Charter School Labor in Philadelphia.
• Women are Doing the Man Things but Men Won’t Do the Lady Things.
• Different War, Same Columnist.
• Does the Washington Post Have Any Standards?
• Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: A Story About Cape Town’s Tanzanian Stowaways, parts one, two, three, four.
• Always Emerging, Never Arriving: The Middle Class.
• Points the Internet Could’ve Helped Jon Franzen With.
• Richmond, CA, City Council Seizes Mortgages Through Eminent Domain.
• Real Drug Dealers Love The Wire.
• How the Media Put BPA On the Agenda in the States.
• Six Things We’ve Learned Since 9/11.
• Angela Davis on Guns, Violence, and History.
• How to Avoid Studying Faculty Working Conditions.

.

Weekend Reading is 99.9% pure:

• Who Works? Stick Figures, Gender, and Illustrating the Workforce.
• Adventure Time is Making You a Better Person.
• Texas Renames the Slave Trade the “Atlantic Triangular Trade.”
• Mission Congo: How Pat Robertson Raised Millions on the Back of a Non-Existent Aid Project.
• How to Drive Through Modern-Day Kabul.
• Slave Capitalism.
• Don’t Call This a Humanitarian Intervention.
• How the Military Discriminates Against Transgender Individuals.
• Steal This Article:

There is $118 trillion of wealth in the United States alone, or about $375,000 per American. For every homeless person in the country, there are 28 empty homes waiting for them right now. Laws and culture deny them a roof over their head, not a dearth of roofs. It is our legal system that funnels a disproportionate amount of wealth to a small handful of people, not the benevolent hand of a just and caring god.

Even by the standard of 20th century capitalism, things are pretty not okay. If income had kept pace with growth in the economy since 1970, the median household would be making around $92,000. The actual number is $50,000 and falling. A record 46 million Americans are living below the U.S. government’s official poverty line. Debt is one of few things the country produces anymore: Go to college and you’re liable to make tens of thousands of debt dollars, graduating into a job market where getting an unpaid internship is something to gloat about on Facebook. Working harder isn’t an option. We’re being worked hard enough and it isn’t enough to pay the bills.

All the hard work undertaken over the last several decades has been accumulating wealth not for the workers but for their bosses. Since 1970, the average income of those in thetop one percent has grown by more than 240 percent. These days, the average CEO of a company makes 354 times as much as the average worker, up from a ratio of 42:1 when Ronald Reagan was president. There is no reason to believe that CEO-ing has gotten that much more difficult. They’ve just gotten greedier. They’ve gotten away with it.

• Uganda Police to Embark on Killing Spree?
• Nigeria’s Child Brides.
• The Student Debt Bubble Isn’t Bursting.
• What It Looks Like When Fracking Moves In.
• The New New Haven.
• Fake Empire; Or, Imperial Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly.
• Sir Warsalot and The Daily Show.
• Rural Town Police Departments are Arming Themselves:

The rural communities surrounding Nashville, TN are quiet, unremarkable places. We know: we’ve been there. But now the city of Gallatin will be confronting its citizens with a $658,000 armored military vehicle that, like many of the young men in this country’s increasingly militarized police forces, has seen serious action.

Overseas, the “MRAP” is the symbol of American power on the move, a bizarrely self-parodying vehicle that attempts to encase its soft-shelled occupants from a world full of people who despise us and who will, increasingly, sacrifice their own lives to take ours. Nothing quite says “Us And Them” like rolling in an MRAP. It was developed for a world where everyone outside its reinforced-steel walls is a subhuman enemy to be killed at will.

So what does it say that four of the cities around Nashville are pleased as punch to take delivery of one?

• Here Be Duck Trees and Sea Swine, an interactive Renaissance map.
• Collaborating with a Four-Year-Old.
• Behind Enemy Lines: Living with M23 in Congo.
• If You Argue that NSA Data Has Not Been Misused, You Know Something the NSA Doesn’t.
• Can the White Girl Twerk?
• Fluid Markets, on beer distribution in eastern Congo.
• Unpaid Internships Must Be Destroyed: File Your Lawsuit Today!

As school begins, the length of weekend readings will fluctuate according to my workload. That said, there’s a new subtle change happening here. At the behest of reader Ory Okolloh, and to the benefit of all of you, clicking on these links will automatically open your selected reading in a new tab or window. Hopefully that improves your weekend reading experience. Enjoy!

• Is Ituri Ready for Truth and Reconciliation?
• The Decline of Abortion Access.
• Why is Oregon So White?
• Thoughts on College Ranking Models.
• The American Dream Should Be Called the American Debt.
• When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland:

Black feminists have critiqued the material advantage that accrues to white women as a function of their elevated status as the normative cultural beauty ideal. As far as privileges go it is certainly a complicated one but that does not negate its utility. Being suitably marriageable privileges white women’s relation to white male wealth and power.

The cultural dominance of a few acceptable brown female beauty ideals is a threat to that privilege. Cyrus acts out her faux bisexual performance for the white male gaze against a backdrop of dark, fat black female bodies and not slightly more normative cafe au lait slim bodies because the juxtaposition of her sexuality with theirs is meant to highlight Cyrus, not challenge her supremacy. Consider it the racialized pop culture version of a bride insisting that all of her bridesmaids be hideously clothed as to enhance the bride’s supremacy on her wedding day.

Only, rather than an ugly dress, fat black female bodies are wedded to their flesh. We cannot take it off when we desire the spotlight for ourselves or when we’d rather not be in the spotlight at all.

• How Scholars Hack the World of Academic Publishing.
• Why Travel is not Education.
• The Secretary of State Goes to War.
• Drunk Continent: How Much Do Africans Drink?
• Suez Has Already Happened.
• The Anti-NRA.
• On the Death of Dreams:

In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They’d seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for  work.

Martin Luther King turned this stoic tradition into high art. It was a kind of jujitsu by which our pain could be made redemptive. The price was high. If that imagery cut black folks to the core, one wonders how far it went in normalizing the idea of the black body as the rightful field for violence. If you accept that being twice as good is the price of the ticket, then you accept a double standard, and thus necessarily accept the precepts of racism.

• The Lonesome Death of Cherice Moralez.
• Pasado Compuesto, on suicide and eviction in Spain.
• McDonald’s Suggested Budget for Employees Shows How Impossible It Is to Get By On Minimum Wage.
• For Restaurant Workers, a Struggle to Put Food on the Table.
• Leaving on a Jet Plane, on hijacking planes in the 60s and 70s.
• Prostitution Law and the Death of Whores.
• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
• The Industrialization of Education.

9 out of 10 doctors say reading these links will cure you of boredom:

• Segregation in America: Neighborhood Populations Mapped Along Racial Lines.
• The Surprising Reason We Don’t Tip Flight Attendants.
• Slut-Shaming in the Digital Age.
• How Much Money Would It Take to Make Higher Education Free?
• All Hail the Queen? On Beyoncé and Feminism.
• Draw Down: How to Roll Back Police Militarization.
• What I Learned From Getting Shot:

Penn got in trouble for touting the supposed merits of New York’s stop-and-frisk policy. To the objection that the policy disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos, he responded, “And who, sadly, commits & are victims of the most crimes?”

But that’s a non sequitur. A false rationale. Take people’s fear out of the equation and the logical artifice collapses. Canadians are highly overrepresented in the field of professional ice hockey, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to walk around Alberta presumptively asking strangers on the street for autographs. When you treat everyone as a suspect, you get a lot of false positives. That’s why above and beyond the obvious injustice of it, stop and frisk isn’t wise policy. Minorities might commit most of the crime in U.S. cities, and be the likeliest victims of it, and that’s a problem with a lot of causes that should be addressed in a lot of ways. But crime is pretty rare. Not rare like being a professional hockey player is rare. But rare. Most people, white or minority, don’t do it at all.

That’s what I remembered when I began my recovery five years ago. In the preceding 25 years, I’d crossed paths with thousands and thousands of black people (including, obviously, those who became friends). Over the same stretch I’d also crossed paths with thousands and thousands of people wearing hoodies (there was surely some overlap). I got very, very unlucky one time. Adding it all up, I figured my odds of avoiding a repeat of that night are pretty good.

• Saying Sorry is a Pretty-Girl Trick.
• Black NYC Youth Reflect on Stop and Frisk.
• The Rape of Harriet Tubman.
• Don’t Fear Open Access; Embrace It!
• Hollaback, Street Harassment, and Stop and Frisk.
• There’s No Such Thing as a “Consensual” Police Encounter.
• Chris Blattman on Giving Money to the Poor:

It’s interesting: neither the government nor the charity I worked with in Uganda were willing to try just cash, if only to compare. They wouldn’t even discuss it. This might sound sensible of them, since they could be right about their “other stuff” being important. Except the “other stuff” often costs more than the cash.

This is the big “cost” no one talks about: suppose a charity could give $2000 of stuff to one person, and help them become 200% richer or healthier than they were before. Is it possible I could spend $1000 each on two people, and help get them each get 150% ahead? Wouldn’t that be better?

A lot of charities don’t like to think that way. The TAL episode talked to a woman from Heifer International, who give cows and training instead of cash. That could be the right thing to do. But she couldn’t bear the thought of finding out. She hated the idea of experimenting on poor people. They are human beings.

Let me be blunt: This is the way the Heifers of the world fool themselves. When you give stuff to some people and not to others, you are still experimenting in the world. You are still flipping a coin to decide who you help and who you don’t, it’s just an imaginary one.

• Let’s Talk About Sext Baby.
• How Twitter Can Predict an Election.
• Does International Law Forbid Complicity in the Death Penalty?
• Obama’s New Plan to Accelerate Corporate Barbarism in Higher Education.
• The American Dream Rewards Few, Enslaves Millions.
• New York City’s Disappearing Neighborhood Hospitals.
• Chicago’s Growth, in Maps.
• How Google Rediscovered the Nineteenth Century.
• Fake Birds on Film:

Birds on film are therefore important not in and for themselves but as part of a relation of figure and ground, as foils, or as objects that help us appreciate artificially rendered scale. It seems as if their function is to lend weight and sublimity to the glorious expanse of humankind’s and Hollywood’s technological prowess. At some point, somewhere in the dark corners of some digital animation studio, a version of this exchange must have taken place: “How’s this giant robot fight sequence looking, boss?” “It’s looking dope, man, but you know what — you need to throw some birds on that!” And why not? In the age of easy digital manipulation of images, how could any self-respecting CGI artist or art director help himself? After all, birds are pretty, and so easy to animate; they are a staple in the mise-en-scène of modern CGI-saturated film.

The digital flock of birds functions as a convenient proxy for “Nature” in the modern cinematic imaginary, that realm of living energy against which Man, surrounded and beset by Nature but somehow set apart from it, acts out his private and public traumas. Except where they are protagonists of the non-talking (War Horse) or, more frequently, talking variety (Beverly Hills Chihuahua), today’s films generally have little interest in animals qua animals, living their inhuman lives. These scores of birds we find littering our screens are never actors in the human drama, because in so many of these fables “Nature” itself, separated out from humankind, is chiefly employed as a cheap and easy ornament.

• Preserving the Horrors of Hiroshima.
• I Hate Illinois Nazis, on Poor Columns About MOOCs.
• Interrogating “Online” and “Offline.”
• American Public Libraries: A Forgotten Social Institution?
• Drama for Cannibals:

In a heavily controlled environment like the prison, it’s hard to talk honestly about voluntary participation. After all, no one wants to be in a prison production of Shakespeare. TheNew York Times in their feature about a performance at Rikers and This American Life both mention that actors in productions they covered have previous experience, but there’s no analysis as to why Hollywood extra and felon might be overlapping categories. Of course there are actors in prison. The plays they choose are small-scale dramas suited to the security concerns of the hosting institutions. The tragedies aren’t ensemble numbers; they don’t have roles for anyone who might want to join, like a school play does. That authorities can fill an audition with people who prefer being in Hamlet in prison to just being in prison isn’t much evidence of anything except perhaps incarceration levels. Certainly not the indomitable human spirit.

• The Selling of a Massacre: Media Complicity in Marikana Repression.
• Airline Deregulation is a Failure.
• The Manhattanization of North Jersey is Under Way.
• Conservative and Progressive States Unite to Fight Big Banks.
• On Corey Booker and Elites’ Deplorable Double-Standard on Corruption.
• Brain Trust for Sale: The Growing Footprint of Washington’s Think-Tank-Industrial Complex.
• #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Color’s Issue with Digital Feminism.
• Tim Wise, Informed by Tim Wise.
• Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal:

“Student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious” is how Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it. Collectors can garnish everything from wages to tax returns to Social Security payments to, yes, disability checks. Debtors can also be barred from the military, lose professional licenses and suffer other consequences no private lender could possibly throw at a borrower.

The upshot of all this is that the government can essentially lend without fear, because its strong-arm collection powers dictate that one way or another, the money will come back. Even a very high default rate may not dissuade the government from continuing to make mountains of credit available to naive young people.

“If the DOE had any skin in the game,” says Collinge, “if they actually saw significant loss from defaulted loans, they would years ago have said, ‘Whoa, we need to freeze lending,’ or, ‘We need to kick 100 schools out of the lending program.'”

• The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students.
• Where is Extra Tuition Revenue Going?
• The General Electric University.
• Running a Mock in Zambia: The Risks of Publishing Satire.
• How to Successfully Ruin al Qaeda’s Day on Twitter.
• Samantha Power’s First Week: When Diplomats are Activists and Activists are Diplomats.
• Rapping the News in Senegal.
• Overstating Terror in Niger.
• Meritocracy or Bias?
• History and Guilt:

[C]an you imagine a monument to the genocide of Native Americans or the Middle Passage at the heart of the Washington Mall? Suppose you could walk down the street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labour, or that the site was the home of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed? What we have, instead, are national museums of Native American and African American culture, the latter scheduled to open in 2015. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian boasts exhibits showing superbly crafted Pueblo dolls, the influence of the horse in Native American culture, and Native American athletes who made it to the Olympics. The website of the Smithsonian’s anticipated National Museum of African American History and Culture does show a shackle that was presumably used on a slave ship, but it is far more interested in collecting hats worn by Pullman porters or pews from the African Methodist Episcopal church. A fashion collection is in the making, as well as a collection of artefacts belonging to the African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman; 39 objects, including her lace shawl and her prayer book, are already available.

• A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Underage Workers, Forced Internships, School Closures, and “Left Behind Children”: Apple’s Impact on China’s Youth.
• Why U.S. Power Companies Don’t Want You Putting a Solar Panel on Your Roof.
• Georgetown Law is Giving Away Free Education, and You’re Paying For It.
• Giants of Boston.
• War Photography, War Pornography.
• This is Not the Deal:

Fine print has a habit of eliciting just such a moralizing tone. If somebody is caught out by terms contained in a section of fine print, our first thought is usually that it’s the person’s own fault for being so inattentive, reckless, or even downright lazy. “Always read the fine print.” With its definite article serving at once to distance and to universalize the practice, the old adage is deemed fair warning. And yet fine print asks specifically not to be read. It is a deliberately non-communicative speech act, erasing itself by miniaturization, accumulation, and esotericism. Its first appearance in literature makes light of its use of obscure jargon. Robert Musil, who knew a bit about accumulation too, writes in A Man Without Qualities that the funeral director “pressed into Ulrich’s hand a form covered with fine print and rectangles and made him read through what turned out to be a contract drawn to cover all classes of funerals. […] Ulrich had no idea where the terms, some of them archaic, came from; he inquired; the funeral director looked at him in surprise; he had no idea either.”