Another edition of weekend reading is here!

On Hurricane Sandy, Government Response, and Climate Change:

• Hurricane Sandy, Climate Change, and Presidential Politics.
• A Big Storm Requires Big Government.
• Adapting New York City for Monster Storms.
• A City of Darkness and a City of Light: How Sandy Created Two Manhattans.
• Hurricane Sandy Inspires Historical Superlatives.
• Staten Island Helps Its Own, but More Relief Still Needed.
• It’s Global Warming, Stupid.
• Why the Federal Government Should Handle Disaster Relief.
• We Are All New Orleans Now:

The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them. And what is a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing eleven feet of water toward our country’s biggest population center saying just days before the election? It is this: we are all from New Orleans now. Climate change—through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms—has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.

• Why Do Hospital Generators Keep Failing?
• Your Climate Change Stat of the Day.
• Hot or Not?
• Not So Fast On Levees and Seawalls for New York?
• Sandy Uproots Tree in New Haven, Reveals Skeleton.
• Ali Velshi, Hurricane Sandy, and Sending Journalists into Storms.
• The Making of Romney’s Storm Relief Event.
• “Nurture and Let Die”: Race, Class and Relief Efforts Post-Sandy:

This may seem obvious to some readers, but since the major media has been so neglectful, it seems to make sense to set the record straight. The majority of districts that are the most affected by Hurricane Sandy via power outages, no running water and lack of access to food are the same that are affected by broad, systemic patterns racial and economic injustice. Historically, most of the neighborhoods are the very same that experienced white flight during the mid-20th century while simultaneously being disenfranchised via redlining by banks and real estate agencies–a legacy that still greatly affects residents of these areas access to a long list of things other parts of the city take for granted: public parks and healthy, affordable food. Redlining succeeded in shutting off all opportunities for loans and other forms of economic investment in poor, minorities neighborhoods (in the instance of areas such as the South Bronx, Red Hook and East New York in Brooklyn).

The residents of these neighborhoods are the ones who still do not have power, who have not been featured in major news outlets cannot necessarily afford to take off from work, as stated in the Reuters article Hurricane Inequality: “Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city’s cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.”

For those working class folks who have been forced to take off work because they physically cannot leaves their homes or neighborhoods due to an utter lack of MTA service for days, they face even more challenges. [Working class people] “are losing money daily though rents are due today. And those who live here but work elsewhere can’t get there. It’s the end of the month and people can’t get their paychecks or if they are on government assistance and get their cards re-charged,” says one resident of Chelsea in lower Manhattan, “no one is taking cards and there are lots of poor people with no access to money – to cash. So, even if they are able to walk north to find stores open they can’t shop. it really is neoliberalism at it crudest – if you got [money], you can fend for yourself. if you don’t, f*** you – no one cares…” The city’s mass income inequality is indeed the root cause of disproportinate attention given to certain neighborhoods but still we find very few news outlets using basic critical thinking skills to understand why (save for this one by the Washington Post that was posted 7 hours ago).

And more reading:

• Pronunciation as Death Sentence.
• Hunting for Asians.
• Setting the Baseline, on America as Center-Right.
• The Passion of Nate Silver.
• The Socialist Origins of Monopoly.
• Grad Students to the Barricades:

The decline of professorial hiring is not due to overproduction of Ph.D.s. More people are in college than ever before; advanced research is more important, we all seem to agree, than it ever has been. The problem is universities’ refusal to create good academic jobs. As in the rest of the American economy, employers are waiting out would-be employees, seeing how low the cost of labor will fall. Hence the endless spate of articles with titles such as “Graduate School: Just Don’t Go” and “The Disposable Academic.” A much-beloved (among academics) series of animated videos stages conversations between undergraduate naïfs and embittered academics, all on the theme of “So you want to get a Ph.D. in ___.” Conservative pundit David Brooks chose the word “tsunami” to describe what awaits academia.

But this is a political conflict over priorities, not a natural disaster. And in this conflict, academics are losing. These changes in higher education are the result of concerted efforts by a coalition of university administrators, donors, and conservative politicians to seize institutional power and reorient the university system toward private purposes. As Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg argues in The Fall of the Faculty, corporate backers have installed an ever-growing army of overpaid administrators to superintend universities. From 1975 to 2008, faculty-to-student ratios stayed level, albeit with the portion of faculty who are tenured or tenure-track crashing. Meanwhile, the number of administrators doubled. This administrative staff is charged with supervising the faculty, making money off them where possible, and otherwise enlarging the endowment by extracting tuition and skimming funds from research grants. In return for the exorbitant tuition, administrators provide undergraduates with an increasingly fun experience, rather than an increasingly serious education.

• Greek Magazine Editor Names Tax Evaders, Gets Arrested.
• The War on Depression.
• I Just Don’t See Why We Throw Bricks at College Students’ Heads for Entertainment.
• 512 Paths to the White House.
• The Psychology of Tetris.

As I prepare to hunker down in the path of both my first hurricane and my first Nor’easter, you can enjoy some reading:

• U.S. Intends to Keep Adding Names to Kill Lists.
• Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.
• 2008 Called. It Wants to Know What Happened to Barack Obama.
• As Local Governments Shrink, Private Consultants Reap Rewards.
• What It’s Like Being a Teen Girl.
• The Shooting in Brookfield and Domestic Violence.
• Cutting the British Empire Down to Size.
• Apocalypse Now for California’s Public Higher Ed?
• From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education:
• Ronald Reagan may not have seen this coming when he first set out to destroy what he saw as the creeping communism of master-planned and state-funded public education. His vision at the time was essentially negative, reactionary. But the conservative project he put in place in California in the 1960s remains with us today. Reagan was the trendsetter in making higher education into a problem to be solved with fee hikes and police. Other governors approached this problem in different ways, but the decision Reagan made to begin the destruction of the Master Plan hangs over all of them. Today, we can clearly see the results. Limiting the ability of the government to plan for the education of its citizens has left us with the worst of both worlds: students and families with too much debt and too few options.
• The Corporatization of Higher Education.
• What It Was Like to Be a Telephone Operator on the Night ‘War of the Worlds’ Was Broadcast.
• Nineteen Species of Fern Now Named After Lady Gaga.
• Getting the Lowest Score Possible on the SAT (read sections 13 and 14).
• Emily Nussbaum on “Parks and Recreation”:

Leslie finds that, now that she’s been elected, her job requires literally dealing with the shit of fellow-politicians. When she tries to increase the hours at a public pool, a councilman blackmails her for access to her private bathroom; she has to eat “racist salad” with a Dixiecrat to find an ally. This is a network sitcom: no matter how corrupt things get, Leslie is unlikely to lose her soul (we wouldn’t want her to). But, for all its warmth, “Parks” suggests the brutality of politics better than many dramas. “Hey, kids, would you like to learn how Leslie got your bill passed?” her enemy sneers, threatening to disillusion the kids she hopes to inspire. “Councilman Knope traded my vote for her—” Before he can finish, he gets pushed into that swimming pool, with a tremendous splash. Lobby all you want for change in Washington; maybe what we really need is a dunk tank.

• Curls and the Patriarchy.
• The Republican Party Rape Advisory Chart.
• Infinite Jestice.
• Mourdock, Rape as a Gift from God, and Islamic Shariah.
• On Mourdock’s God’s Gift.
• The Bourgeoisie Had Bushy Beards:

What you don’t see — and only hear speak of briefly, as if in passing — are the millions of workers who had something or other to do with these Great Men and their construction of industrial America. These workers are milling about in History’s 19th century somewhere, but it’s not too clear where, why, or how. As far as The Men Who Built America is concerned, the men and women who did the actual building don’t matter. I guess mangled limbs and Pinkerton clubs don’t make for good TV? (They so do!)

The show’s complete disregard for the actual men who built America makes sense, though, when you think about life in the Second Gilded Age. We don’t have Robber Barons of the First anymore, but we’ve got Job Creators (and even some Wealth Creators). We’ve got about as much inequality. Lord knows our unions are similarly reviled by capital. Last but not least, who could ignore the parallels between that era’s environmental catastrophes and the looming armageddon of our own?

• Speaking in Memes.
• A Finnish Film About A Finnish President – in Swahili with Kenyan Actors.
• The Marketing of Mo Yan.
• Ethnic Cleansing: Colorblind Casting in Cloud Atlas.
• George McGovern and American History.
• Things Obama Says When Famous People Die.
• “This Chamber Reeks of Blood.”
• Paying Taxes to Your Boss: Another Step Toward 21st Century Feudalism:

That could soon be the law of the land in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature has passed a bill that would, asPhiladelphia City Paper blogger Daniel Denvir describes it, “allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers’ withheld income tax.” These workers will essentially be paying their employers for the privilege of having a job. Some have called this “corporate socialism,” but it also calls to mind an even older economic model that was once popular in Europe – except back then, the bosses were called lords. It’s a more modern innovation in the U.S., but combined with increased political pressure from employers and a crackdown on workers’ rights, it all adds up to feudalism, American-style.

The Pennsylvania bill is just the most recent example of state income taxes being turned into employer subsidies. It’s already the law of the land in one form or another in 19 states, and according to Good Jobs First, it’s taking $684 million a year out of the public coffers. The theory is that this will boost job creation. But the authors of the Good Jobs First report note, “payments often go to firms that simply move existing jobs from one state to another, or to ones that threaten to move unless they get paid to stay put.” In other words, it’s more like extortion than stimulus.

• Obama Sign Riddled With Bullet Holes: As Election Nears, Voter Intimidation Increases.
• Stalin’s Favorite Roosevelt.
• The Army as a Concentration Camp.
• A Beluga Whale Mimics Human Speech.
• Skinny Privilege.
• Leisure and Liberal Arts.
• Piracy Trends Off the Coast of Somalia and Nigeria.

Last weekend’s reading ended with a list of really intelligent people talking about Redditor Violentacrez and the scary world that is /r/creepshots. I’m starting this weekend’s reading with more great insight on the same:

• On Ruining Violentacrez’ Life.
• The Tyranny of Anonmymity, Reddit, and the Future of Your Body Online.
• Power on the Internet.
• “Cultural Scavengers”: Violentacrez, Reddit, and Trolls.
• Free Speech and Power.
• A Critical Look at Trolling Subculture and How We Talk About It.

And some links on other topics:

• #Kony2005.
• Diversity Against Justice.
• Incremental Extremism: on the GOP Abortion Stance.
• Is America Recovering from a Recession or a Financial Crisis?
• A Post-Debate Piece, that ends with a look at who an undecided voter is.
• Mitt, Assault Weapons, and Single Parents.
• Them’s That Got Shall Have: Criminalizing Parents Who Steal Free Education:

At the heart of this issue is how we fund our public schools. As education advocate Diane Ravitch has said, a child’s educational outcomes can be predicted based on her zip code. With few exceptions, the generational nature of wealth transfer means where we live is a direct reflection of how we were born. Wealthier neighborhoods generate more property taxes, which, in turn, can provide greater resources for their public schools. Few of those wealthy parents would advocate for legally barring poor, brown children from attending their schools. But, hardening the border between districts does exactly that: it legally sanctions poor, brown kids from attending those schools. That it also makes inequality a bureaucratic act that distances well-meaning wealthy parents from the dirty act of exclusion is just a bonus.

• Forging North-South (Neck)Ties.
• Hait to Join the African Union – Why Not?
• On Anti-Bullying Campaigns, LGBT Youth of Color Suicide, and Why I Never Supported Spirit Day.
• Out of the Ashes of Dead Trees, on Newsweek.
• A Map of the World whose legend includes everything from “savage” to “enlightened.”
• Omaha Schoolgirl Dresses as a Different Historical Figure Each Day:

This is how Stella Ehrhart, age 8, decides what to wear for school. She opens her closet. She opens her book, “100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century.” And she opens her mind.

Voilà, she is Billie Holiday, in a black dress with a red tissue-paper flower tucked into her strawberry-blond hair. Behold, she is Grace Kelly in pink satin lace on her wedding day. Poof, she is Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, wearing a hat her aunt got her in Vietnam.

The Dundee Elementary School third-grader comes to school dressed as a different historical figure or character — Every. Single. Day. And she’s done that since the second day of second grade, when this all started.

• If Columbus had been Funded by the Gates Foundation.
• The U.S. Military: 100% Right, 0% of the Time.
• The Kochs’ Libertarian Hypocrisy.
• Foreign Aid Should Not Be About Us and Them.

It’s time to do some reading, so get on that:

• The Rehetorical (De)evolution of Affirmative Action.
• Angus Johnston on Fisher v. Texas.
• Soul-Searching for Diversity at UT Austin.
• Fisher v. Texas and the Problem of Proof.
• The CEO Who Built Himself America’s Largest House Threatens to Fire Employees if Obama Wins.
• It’s the Lack of Shared Governance, Stupid.
• Consistent Confusion:

Of course there’s nothing to explain here except that intellectually dishonest hypocrites are doing more of the same. Conservatives are great at this. Hollywood is a cesspit of moral depravity and celebrities are all airheads, but they practically soil themselves with excitement when some star endorses a Republican or talks about running. Experts and academics in the ivory tower are never to be trusted, but hey did you see this new Exxon-funded study from Dr. Shameless at Texas A&M that totally disproves global warming? He’s a scientist, so it has to be true. Government is bloated and expensive and must be drowned in a bathtub, except for the military, farm subsidies, the prison system, massive and politically expedient handout programs for seniors, and more.

• When Animal Collective’s Deakin Went to Mali to Make an Album and End Slavery.
• E-mails Ignored, Meetings Denied: Bias at the Search Stage Limits Diversity.
• What Government Can Learn From Squirrels.
• One Doctor in Japan Faked 200 Articles in Medical Journals over Two Decades.
• Stateless and Stranded in American Samoa:

Sebastian took a quick flight over and spent a short amount of time there, then flew back to American Samoa. But when he tried to board a flight back home to L.A., he was barred. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said he had self-deported.

“In 2002, an immigration judge with the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review ordered Sebastian to depart the United States,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement. “In December 2011 when Mr. Sebastian traveled to American Samoa and Samoa, he was prohibited from returning to the United States due to the immigration judge’s order.”

• On California’s Decision to Deny Graduate Students the Right to Unionize.
• Texas School Uses Student IDs to Track Students.
• Is It Your Body or Not? Draw the Line, People.
• Laura Seay on Simon Fraser University’s Human Security Report.
• The Problem of the New York Police.
• From One Gilded Age to Another:

Ironically, the White House occupant who best represented the views that now dominate the American Right was a Democrat: Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic president from the eve of the Civil War to Woodrow Wilson in 1912. When Cleveland, a rotund New Yorker, was first elected in 1884, his party’s base was remarkably similar to that of the GOP today: white Southerners from all classes and white workers everywhere who did not belong to unions. The Democrats’ standard-bearer alsoexpressed doubt that any “sensible and responsible” woman would ever want to vote.

As president, Cleveland took several opportunities to denounce those Americans who, as Mitt Romney expressed it to his donors in Boca Raton, expected the government to provide them with the necessities of life. In 1887 he vetoed a bill that earmarked $10,000 to buy seed for drought-stricken farmers in Texas. “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution,” Cleveland explained in his veto message. “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.” He then added a pithy note of pedagogy: “The lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

• There Will Be a Memoir: Achebe and Biafra.
• The Arithmetic of Tenure Standards.
• How One Dutch Neighborhood Helped People Everywhere Reclaim the Commons.

• Follow-ups to Adrian Chen’s great piece, Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web.
  • Why Shutting Down Non-Consensual Porn Matters.
  • Reddit Creeps and Girls’ Real Lives.
  • How to Shut Down Reddit’s CreepShots Once and For All: Name Names.
  • Thoughts on Free Speech and Violentacrez.
  • Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Free Speech.

The Weekend Reading keeps going! Let’s start with a bunch of education links:

• Marginal Revolution’s Foray into Online Classes.
• In Texas, Public Schools Turn to Parents’ Dollars for Support.
• Indiana Jones has been Denied Tenure.
• Universities and the Urban Growth Machine:

The ability of universities to raise tuition fees at will (without any fear of institutional default) is the basic collateral requirement for securing a good credit rating, which makes it much cheaper to borrow money to service existing debts and finance large-scale construction. In turn, this capital-intensive construction generates more space per capita, which is a key metric in the US News and World Report’s college rankings.

• Think Before You Intern.
• Fifty Years After Integration, Ole Miss Grapples with History.
• And a conversation on live-tweeting at academic conferences:
  • What are the Ethics of Live-Tweeting a Conference?
  • An Idea is a Dangerous Thing to Quarantine.
  • Twitter Good or Twittergate?
  • Manners and the Live-Tweet.
  • Tweet Away.
  • My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish.
• Monetizing the Campaign in Won’t Back Down.
• Empowerment Against Democracy: Tinseltown and Teachers Unions:

Despite scapegoating teachers’ unions, Won’t Back Down is not an anti-teacher movie. Most of the teacher characters—especially Nona, played by Viola Davis—are heroic. That’s because one of the film’s messages is that busting teachers’ unions is better for teachers. In one scene, a meeting to discuss the possible takeover, Nona argues that losing the union will be worth it, “because we’ll be able to teach the way we want.” (The movie is vague on Nona’s pedagogy and why the union prevents it. In real life, charter teachers certainly don’t have any more control over curriculum than public school teachers do.) It is a ruling-class wet dream: workers who are happy to help destroy their own institutions. By giving up the organization through which they wield power, the fictional teachers reason, they will gain more power.

We have wandered deep into the swamp of Upsidedownlandia. Yet the same paradox colors the film’s view of parent power. The movie celebrates parents rising up and taking control of their children’s education—in order to rid themselves of all representation. Though the film does not discuss such pesky governance matters, a “takeover,” in real life, usually means that the school is run by a private organization with limited accountability to the public. While the state does decide ultimately which charters to shut down, there is no oversight by the school board, nor the city government, and certainly not the parents.

• In 2008 Focus on the Family predicted a 2012 under Obama. Let’s look at what really happened.
• Waiting for Malina Crater – on who gets remembered in space.
• Meeting a Troll.
• War Games at Home, Home Games at War: Geography and Military First-Person Shooting Games.
• Science Says We Think Symmeticral Faces are Prettier, so an Artist Created Some.
• The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson.
• A Kids Club Where the Parents Die:

I had asked Bea, after the day of the two dead mothers, if she still wanted to go to the club. I had been prepared for her to reconsider, but she answered resolutely that she still wanted to go. She also mentioned the popcorn again. Then she looked at her hands and said quietly, “It got me through your cancer.”

When I posed the same question to my 12-year-old daughter, Lucy, she too gave the same answer. Yes, of course she wanted to keep going. “It makes me feel normal,” she said. “It makes me a better friend.” It really does. When a classmate she hadn’t even been close to lost a parent to cancer last year, she instinctively reached out to the child. She didn’t make the kid talk about her feelings. She just sat with her at lunch, asked her about her locker. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t awkward. Because she’d been there before.

• Ben Bernanke on the Difference Between the Fed and ECB.
• The Politics of Provocation.
• Sword Fight on a Hong Kong Rooftop.
• The Polls Have Stopped Making Any Sense.
• The Beauty of the Airline Baggage Tag
• The Kissing Sailor and the Selective Blindness of Rape Culture

It’s the weekend, you know what that means:

• Party Politics, the Post Office, and the Common Good.
• Elections Matter, on reproductive rights and voting.
• Abortion Care is a Calling.
• Eikonoklastes, on the imaginary line between speech and violence.
• The Presumption of Literacy.
• Ralph Nader and the Structure of Progressive Change:

Progressives seem to almost NEVER talk about localized politics. We complain about education reform but don’t organize to take over school boards. Conservatives outflank us in part because they seem to understand that the presidency is not all-powerful. Perhaps local offices like county clerk and elected judges are as or even more important than the presidency, at least from a long-term perspective. Too many progressives believe in Green Lantern presidencies. Elect Obama in ’08 and he can force through all the changes we want.

No. That’s not how it works.

You turn the Democratic Party into what you want it to be by controlling the mechanisms of everyday party life. By becoming a force that must be reckoned with or at least co-opted.  By becoming the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s, eventually forcing the Democratic Party off its Cleveland-era support of plutocracy and helping usher in the Progressive Era. By becoming the abolitionists in the 1850s and 1860s, whose constant moral harping gave them power within the Republican Party far outstripping the small number of fanatical followers of William Lloyd Garrison. And by becoming conservatives in the 1960s who burrow into the Republican Party structure and transform it from within.

• How to Change Academic Publishing.
• Letter to the Dismal Center.
• Death Race 2012.
• Why the Blown Call on Monday Night Football Matters.
• The Failure of Muslim Rage.
• Weddings Without the Bride and Groom.
• The War on Crime as a Conservative and Progressive Assault on Liberal Philosophy.
• Are Student Loans Immoral?

• American Saints.
• A Black Jack, on Last Resort.
• Socializing in America.
• An attempt at learning about a murdered family member.
• Romney’s “Them” Problem.
• Is the Marginal Cost of a Drone Strike Too Low?
• What Its Like to Be Hit by a Drone.
• Mogadishu: A City in Healing After Two Decades of War.
• Prospects of a Keynesian Utopia.
• Questions About Transitional Justice and the Arab Spring, Part I and Part II.

Come and get it!

• Twitterland: Four case studies from Malcolm Harris on navigating new terrain.
• A Fun Fact About Privatization.
• The Neighborhood is the New Factory.
• Weaponizing Standardized Tests: Freakonomics and Chicago.
• The Other Occupy Movement.
• Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy:

Let’s be clear: I am not arguing that Occupy is a revolutionary movement, aimed at the total destruction of capitalism, the wage relation and the State. This is obviously untrue: for the most part, Occupy has a reform-oriented horizon that is clear to all. It is about class inequality in the US, about the distribution of wealth between the 99% and the 1%. Its implicit demand is: Fix this. Make our society more equal. But this demand remains almost impossible to voice, since there is no concrete policy to recommend and, arguably, little outside a revolutionary movement is likely to significantly impact inequality in the US anytime soon. As such, any attempt to reduce this unspoken horizon to some concrete object, whether the Citizens United ruling or full employment, remains curiously both too specific and too vague, likely to fragment the 99% into competing factions.

• Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt:

Debt, a growing number of organizers believe, has the potential to serve as a kind of connective tissue for the Occupy movement, uniting increasingly dispersed organizing efforts around a common problem (debt) as opposed to a common tactic (occupation). Already, organizers on the East and West Coasts have taken up this idea. Activists from Occupy Boston are rallying around the city’s indebted public transit system, calling attention to the way state subsidies have been replaced with profit-hungry private capital by chanting, “Our trains, our tracks—get this debt off our backs!” Occupy activists in San Francisco are planning a debt burning for September 17, one that unites foreclosure fighters, student debtors and other drowning citizens under the motto “Hell no, we won’t pay!”

“Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent,” Occupy organizer Yates McKee has written: from the underwater and foreclosed-upon homeowners who were first pummeled by the economic crisis, to the millions of debt-strapped students who are in default or on the brink, to all those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, to workers everywhere who have been forced to compensate for more than thirty years of stagnating wages with credit card debt, to the firefighters and teachers who have had to accept pay cuts because their cities are broke, to the citizens of countries where schools and hospitals are being closed to pay back foreign bondholders. Given the way debt operates at the municipal and national levels, the issue affects us all—even those who are fortunate enough to be debt-free, as well as those so poor they don’t have access to credit. Debt is one of the ways we all feel Wall Street’s influence most intimately, whether it’s because of a ballooning mortgage payment or a subway fare hike or a shuttered clinic.

• Behind the Scenes of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Politics.
• The Geopolitics of Refugee Crises.
• Mapping Liberty Plaza.
• The Real Birthplace of OWS.
• A 13-Year-Old Hazara Boy is Killed, Only to Become a Statistic.
• Hipstamatic Revolution: Photos on Everyday Africa.
• The Natural and the Naturalized:

In an anguished essay in The New Yorker about the recent, racially motivated, killings of Sikhs at a gurudwara in the American state of Wisconsin, Naunihal Singh draws attention to their exclusion from mainstream American life. Both the political campaigns and the media, Singh notes, treated the killings “as a tragedy for Sikhs in America rather than a tragedy for all Americans.” Singh argues that this mean-spirited, blinkered reaction represents a bigger tragedy than the shootings themselves. The historian Gyanendra Pandey, in his book Routine Violence, describes a hierarchy of citizenship practiced by all nation-states, which is manifest in a distinction between its unmarked, seemingly “axiomatic” or “natural” inhabitants and its marked, “hyphenated” minorities. Extending Pandey’s insight, one might note that even as minorities are conspicuously visible and marked because of their difference, they remain paradoxically invisible as citizens (and some more so than others). They are condemned to invisibility because their very presence — as citizens — threatens to challenge the collective amnesia about histories of exclusion on which nations are founded.

• Women Speak Drastically Less When They’re Surrounded by Dudes.
• Your Gender Bias is Showing.
• A Round on the World’s Most Dangerous Golf Course.
• Where are the First Ladies of Africa?
• Four Histories of the Right’s 47% Theory.
• Mitt Romney Versus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Repetition Without Difference.
• To the Trickster, Go the Spoils: The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Revised.
• The Art of Unfriending and Unfollowing People.
• The White Man Comment.
• Why Presidents Love Foreign Affairs.
• The Invisible Island.
• The Messiness of History.
• Somali Guerilla Artists Dare to Paint Reality.
• Black Mom-in-Chief: What White Feminists Get Wrong About Michelle Obama.
• God and White Men at Yale.

This week’s got a few themed sections, so take your pick and have at it:

On Education, Strikes, and the Chicago Teachers Union Strike:

• A thorough report on what’s happening, from Reuters.
• Chicago Teachers Go On Strike: A Background.
• How Michelle Rhee is Taking Over the Democratic Party.
• The History of Chicago Work Stoppages in Schools.
• The Hard Facts Behind the Dispute.
• Making a Job Worse is a Brilliant Strategy for Attracting Better Talent.
• Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.
• Why Do So Many Liberals Hate Teachers Unions?
• Who’s Hurting the Children?
• How Much Do Teacher Strikes Affect Students?
• Strike for America.
• There’s a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis: Ban Private Schools.
• Nick Kristof Doesn’t Like Unions, Whether Teacher or News Paper.
• Can the Chicago Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform?
• So What if Teachers are in It for the Money?

On Higher Education:

• The Rise and Demise of the Neoliberal University.
• CUNY Administration Declares War on Rebel Faculty.
• Race and Gender in Higher Education – Who Gets Degrees?
• The Combustible Campus.
• Prison.edu: The Most Effective, Underfunded College System in the U.S.
• Against Humanities: The Self-Consciousness of the Corporate University.

More miscellaneous readings:

• Charles Tegart and the Forts That Tower Over Israel.
• Denied Entry.
• On Depression and Getting Help.
• An Open Letter to Wikipedia.
• We’re Not the Entitlement Generation.
• The Standardized No. 2 Pencil Test, on measuring beauty.
• Terry Jones and U.S. Foreign Policy.
• Benghazi was a Battle.
• Looks Like the U.S. Knew About the Katyn Massacre All Along.
• “Was the Arab Spring Really Worth It?” The Arrogance of Power.
• Fear of a Black President.
• Barack Obama: Jackie Robinson of Presidents.

Have at it, people:

• The Other U.S. Educational Crisis.
• Pell Grant Outlays are Down, but There’s a Silver Lining.
• Why Scotland’s Approach to Publically Funded Education Works.
• Rules of Engagement, on political activism at American universities’ international campuses.
• A Short History of Enclosure in Britain.
• Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights:

In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before the invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied weapons. Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S. military aid and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese. (The figures and the designation of “genocide” come from a UN-formed investigative body.) This whole bloody business gets exactly one sentence in Power’s book.

What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemala—another decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a military dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at Fort Benning, and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter genocide and set the death toll at approximately 200,000. But apparently this isn’t a problem from hell.

• The End of South African Exceptionalism.
• Why are Some Founders Forgotten?
• Strange Bedfellows, on using the word ‘ally.’
• The NYPD in Israel: Hannah Arendt on the Best Police Department in the World.
• At The Elite Colleges – Dim White Kids:

What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

• Why Nathan Harden has Yale and Sex All Wrong.
• The Next Digital Innovation in Education? Grading.
• Can D.C. Lead the Way to a 21st Century Waterfront?
• An Abbreviated History of New Orleans Levees.
• Four Surprising Ways the South’s New Political Landscape is Upending National Politics.
• The Myth of an Affirmative Action President:

But there’s also something else — the frame of skepticism is, as always, framed around Obama, not around Romney. No one wonders what advantages accrued to Mitt Romney, a man who spent his early life ensconced in the preserve of malignant and absolutist affirmative action that was metropolitan Detroit. Romney’s Detroit (like most of the country) prohibited black people from the best jobs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and the best of everything else. The exclusive Detroit Golf Club, a short walk from one of Romney’s childhood homes, didn’t integrate until 1986. No one is skeptical of Mitt Romney because of the broader systemic advantages he enjoyed, advantages erected largely to ensure that this country would ever be run by men who looked like him.

• DNC Delegate Leaves Party, Joins Occupy, after “God” and Jerusalem planks reinserted.
• Work Isn’t Working.
• “OSU Haters” Tumblr Puts Ohio State’s Racist Tweets on Blast.
• Porn Star Says Harassment at Conventions is Nothing Compared to Everyday Public Harassment.
• In a Mass Knife-Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?
• Sanctions on Iran Hit World of Warcraft Players.
• Burkina Faso: How Much Longer Can Compaoré’s Rule Last?
• Chicago Teachers Take On 1% Mayor and Labor Establishment to Boot.

and some old links I dug up:

• The Stunning Geography of Incarceration.
• The Way It Was, on getting an abortion in the 60s.
• The Legacy of Sabra and Shatila: Amnesia and Impunity.
• Larry Summers is Wrong About Language.
• The Problem of Radical Heroism.

• A Not-Very-Truthful Speech in a Not-Very-Truthful Campaign.
• We’re Going to Tax Their Asses Off.
• Flag-Waving and Drowning: On the New Branding Policy of UKaid.
• Why We Need to Keep Abortion in the Healthcare Conversation.
• If You Build It They Will Come.
• Back to School… If They Need You.
• The Thin Blue Line:

The job of any investigator is to figure out who’s lying. NYPD officers lied constantly, but complainants lied all the time too. They denied behavior that justified police action, claimed beatings so severe that the mere fact of their living to tell the tale was evidence against them. But there is a fundamental difference between a lying civilian and a lying police officer. When cops lie, they are part of a system of language that is integral to the state’s monopoly on violence. I quickly came to realize that many officer interviews followed one of a handful of scripts, with troves of phrases to express and explain suspicion (“high-crime area,” “furtive movements,” “erratic behavior”), to justify an escalation of force (the “demeanor” of a “defendant” was “agitated,” “belligerent,” or “highly uncooperative;” people “resisted” by “flailing” their arms), and to establish probable cause for an arrest (“small objects” were “exchanged for U.S. currency” in a “hand-to-hand transaction”).

In cases without objective evidence like medical records or video, it was easier for investigators to accept an officer’s account of an incident because the cop’s language was far more likely to be consistent. Civilians were asked to provide multiple statements throughout an investigation (on the phone and in person), and inconsistencies between those statements were often used to discredit their claims. Meanwhile, cops were prepared immediately before their interviews by union attorneys, who remained present during the statement lest officers stray too far from the official line. If language is a weapon, cops were equipped with firepower and the training to use it, just as they were with actual guns. Meanwhile ­complainants—civilians whose circumstances put them in frequent contact with police—have been denied mastery of the official language.

• The U.S. and the ICC: Why a Closer Relationship Isn’t Necessarily a Good Thing.
• Confessions of a Seventh-Grade Texas History Teacher.
• Nice Book Reviews.
• Dad Protects Son from Bullies by Wearing Skirt.
• Enough with the Rape Gaffes.
• Fairer Sex.
• China in Revolt:

Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.

• Sarah Lawrence, with Guns, on teaching literature at West Point.
• The War of Northern Aggression.
• American Jacobins, on America’s radical social revolts:

In the American system, no political party can durably exist without the ability to win at least half the vote in a meaningful number of elections, yet almost by definition, no truly radical program can ever quickly gain such broad assent.

In the mid nineteenth century, a faction of abolitionists understood this dilemma. Figures such as Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, Joshua Giddings, and John P. Hale, rejecting the heavily prefigurative and antipolitical style of activism practiced by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, saw that a strategic approach to abolition was required, one in which the “cause of the slave” would be harnessed to a wider set of appeals.

At each stage of their project, from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party and finally the Republican Party, progressively broader coalitions were formed around an emerging ideology of free labor that merged antislavery principles with the economic interests of ordinary Northern whites.

• British Propaganda: The Napoleon Myth.
• Revolt of the Rich.
• Gabby Douglas Speaks Out, Gets Smacked Down.
• Author of No Easy Day Admits to Committing a War Crime.
• Blind Spot.
• Abraham Lincoln and the Embalmer.