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:
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.
