2012

by zunguzungu

I’ve been posting most of my online writing to the New Inquiry these days–with a handful of exceptions–but since people still hitch me to the post of ye old wordpress web-log, I’m re-posting my ZZ’s best of 2012 list here, a year which felt like it happened in the passive voice:

Some films were reviewed:

• Zero Dark 30
• At Jacobin, Lincoln Against the Radicals (preceded by The Young Mr. Lincoln)
• Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman
• The Albatross Around Johnny Depp’s Brain

Some books were written about:

• Autumn of the Patriarch, Forgetting to Live: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memory
• Damning With Faint Prize: Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial”
• What It Takes to Build Your Credit: Billy Kahora’s “Urban Zoning”
• Everything Fantastic is Credible: Babatunde Rotimi’s “Bombay’s Republic”
• David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words

Some television was watched:

• The Privileged White Men of Treme, and Their Hard Working Others
• The Earnestness of Being Grantham: Anglophonia and Marital Inaction
• The Jimmy McNulty Gambit: Mike Daisey and the Thickening Crust of Our Awareness

And of course, a lot of writing on higher education was done:

• With Mike Konczal, From Master Plan to No Plan was written on the slow decline of California public higher ed, and with Gina Patnaik, a piece On Privatization and Brutalizing Campuses
• On the late, great UC logo debacle: first, Let Us Eat Cake and then A Different Baton.
• Some stuff on other campuses; Quebec: Il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants: Québec’s Law 78; UVa: What Terry Sullivan’s Reinstatement at UVa tells us; and UC Davis: Reading Katehi: The Pepper Spray Chancellor
• Most recently, an Inside Higher Education piece Questioning Clay Shirky (on MOOC’s and the techno-utopianism thereof).
• And some thoughts on academic social media: My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish

In an election year, some America stuff happened:

• American Democracy’s Bad Infinity and America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama

As Occupy was ended, the violence of the state was considered:

• Eikonoklastes: Violence and Speech
• Dumb Computers, Smart Cops
• Political Language on Police States and Political Language
• Hearing Like an LRAD: When Violence is Speech and Speech is Violence
• We Cannot Afford to Protect the Anuses of the Condemned

And the intersections of speech and forbidden speech:

• Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of “Free Speech”
• Obscenity: I Know It When I See It
• The Deep Resentment of Having to Think About It: Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke
• “What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

Finally, A Breather was taken.