Sunday Reading
by zunguzungu
- Guantánamo: An Oral History
- State of the Occupation (where the tents still are)
- Science Can Neither Explain Nor Deny the Awesomeness of This Sledding Crow
- “Have a Nice Day, Buddy:” What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All
- Higher Ed in 2012: Background Thoughts on the Public Sector Under Subsidized Capitalism and How Subsidized Capitalism Hurts Innovation
- An Ambitious Plan For Putting Kickstarter Out of Business
- What does it mean to be fluent?
- Bank of America ATMs In San Francisco Turned Into Truth Machines
- DJ Spooky Fails OWS Library in Attempt at Club Night
- John Henry: A Federally-Funded Jobs Program? Lessons from the WPA
- UC Davis undergrad reflects on pepperspray’s impact on previously uninvolved students
- Endings
- Pardon Season
- No Surprise. Oakland Police Chief Lied to Discredit Occupy Oakland.
- The Court Case That Almost Made It Illegal to Tape TV Shows
- Revolution in the Arab world and An Uprising of Words. via.
- Norman Rockwell painting Nehru: Dada Sahib Painted Chacha Ji
- Why are they always together, salt and pepper
- Activists Win Against Goldman Sachs’ Greek Style Local Government Ripoffs
Fotoshop by Adobé:
- A Video Interview with Juan Cole on Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia
- Goodbye Ibrahim Aslan
- The afghan cameleers
- Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Unspoken Tragedy of Natalie Wood
- Sennett Bathing Beauties, 1915
- Kid tells Cop “No Warrant, No Search,” Cop goes ballistic, and it’s all caught on video
- The Unlikely Rise of Al-Jazeera
- Occupy Tampa to celebrate anniversary by targeting for-profit university
- So Say We All: Race and Battlestar Galactica
- Real isn’t Real
- A New Metaphor for Student Debt Burdens: Faculty Taxes
Vinay Lal, “The West is No Longer the Motor of History”:
Some lost correspondance between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson:
My Dear Thomas,
Greetings from Massachusetts! Weather here is pleasant enough, and the family is in excellent health. It is still most tremendous to think of the tireless work we committed to the building of this great nation. What young men we were, and what lofty dreams did we capture. On a separate note, I have enclosed several random Renderings. Many are of dogs. Some are of infant newborns. Yet more are of these very infants dressed to resemble dogs in costume. And still others depict small children dressed in dogs’ apparel.
I have the Honor to be &c
J. Adams
Amoun Sleem is one of the Domary, the Gypsy community of Jerusalem. As director of a local community center, she fights to help the women in her community to obtain education and economic independence:
- 6 Horrible Aftermaths Implied By Movies With Happy Endings
- The Image and the Imagined: On Why We’re not Allowed to see Detainee Abuse
- Crazy Great French Street Art
- How the Most Lopsided Trade in NBA History Explains the World
- My Life is True
- The Evil Economics of Judging Teachers
- Why You Should Never Talk to the Police : “in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”
- “I Was Shitting You People”: A Message From Ayn Rand
- In Praise of Footnotes (Polar Bear Cub/Anything But The Republicans Dept.)
- Seven essential qualities of open source
- “Rock” Raines and The Good Doctor
- Cairo’s City of the Dead
- Interview with Toumani Diabate
- The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: Vintage Arsenal of Masonic Pranksters
- President Obama, Where Is My “Half Glass”?
- The Passion of Tiger Woods
- Growing Up in the US
- The Best MLA I Didn’t Attend: Tweeting the Conference
- “Two years after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, where did the aid money go?”
- Out of the Tents and Into the Chambers and OPD Arrests Protesters for Lynching
The climate of mutual suspicion that the corporate contours of the university has produced reminds me of the late Erving Goffman’s notion of the total institution. In total institutions, human needs are under strict control — the university’s rules, regulations and administrative practices, which tend to be bureaucratic and impersonal. In total institutions individual autonomy is restricted and creativity can be seen as out of institutional bounds. In total institutions power is exercised hierarchically; it is not shared. On our corporate campuses frustrated professors have been beaten down. Most of us are grunts in a system with fewer and fewer intellectual payoffs. In the gloom our students, who deserve to be better educated, move from class to class hoping to earn enough credits to graduate with a bachelors degree in four, five, or perhaps six years. Have our university institutions prepared them to be informed citizens who will contribute positively to society?
- 30 years after The Distinction
- The Selling of Occupy Wall Street
- Cruise Control
- Recent thinking about scientific explanation
- Credit card firms don’t just steal from cardholders
- The Arabic Script in Africa
- The Economic Illiteracy of Economists
- Foxconn workers threaten mass suicide
- Dante: Near and Far
- Five Questions with Jack Balkin
- How to Spend It, and the economics of the useless
- An Interview with Josh Kosman on the Embeddedness of Private Equity in the Tax Code
- Fly By Night Journalism
- What Rick Santorum Doesn’t Know About Sex (But Was Afraid To Ask)
- Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users’ Political Sentiments
- Current Political Situation in Libya: An Interview with Ali Ahmida
- Caring: A Labor on Stolen Time
- WikiLeaks for Appalachia
On Academic publishing as a suicide bombing mission against the academy:
This system can’t last forever (though its pernicious effects might). The big four will eventually see revenues drop as they squeeze the last drops of blood out of the world’s universities. But even as they undermine their own business model, they will destroy the power of universities to generate knowledge for the betterment of society. (Yes, I’m old-fashioned that way.) Meanwhile, universities, governments, corporations, and ordinary citizens will turn to other sources of information – which they can get for free, or at least affordably – undermining the relevance of public scholarship.For-profit academic publishing is a suicide bombing mission against the academy. In pursuing their doomed business model, the big publishers risk turning the work we do as scholars into a giant echo chamber. Students take on a lifetime of debt, partly to pay for journal subscriptions that enrich a few corporations. Scholars are turned into serfs who must feed the beast new product for it to sell, or risk losing their already tenuous livelihoods. Institutions bankrupt themselves paying for ever more expensive journals without which they cannot compete. Fewer and fewer people can read the rapidly increasing number of scholarly articles.
- On colonial slavery, Islam and the origins of Afrikaans in Cape Town.
- 100 Most Powerless New Yorkers
- Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? and The TSA Proves Its Irrelevance
- Shockingly Sexist Ads That Are Allowed Today (in Pakistan)
- Google Search is Dead (As We Know It)
- Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda
- Why the NDAA will substantially reduce, if not eliminate altogether, international cooperation with respect to counter-terrorism.
- Cruise Control
- Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale
Emails between OPD and Oakland officials:
In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources.
When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week ofOctober, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan’s advisers. “Not sure how you want to share this good news,” he wrote. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland.” Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.
In all of the emails there was not a single one written by Quan. Her office told KTVU she prefers face-to-face communication.
[…] …a few lifted from zunguzungu’s increasingly misnamed Sunday Reading. […]
I’d take Juan Cole with a grain of salt after his role in the Libya pile-on. Otherwise, the kickstarter piece is a complete eye-opener for me. I actually participated in PR efforts for what turns out to be a scam.
Thanks for your stuff, as always.
[…] H/T to the latest edition of Zunguzungu’s regular “Sunday Reading” posts, which I can never finish by the time the next Sunday comes around. Feels like […]
Just wondering whether you feel Rebel without a Cause is
“overwrought and overdone”?