Sunday Reading from zunguzungu

looking for something to read? fat link collection from zunguzungu should keep you busy, maybe even engaged or enraged. if the latter, bear in mind that messengers are not season ~ ever. Scroll to bottom of site for a gander at source blogs and categories (i.e. blogs that are trained, embalmed blogs, stray dogs and others). zunguzungu seems a flâneuse kind of blog; otherwise, our multiple online personae have been hard put picking an appropriate folder. despite academented provenance, we went with snark. zunguzungu explains itself here.

Sunday reading, as usual, blah blah. EXCEPT! Today, with special bonus links from two awesome guests! Scroll down to the bottom!

• Occupy the Farm: Whole Foods, Your Tax Dollars and Occupy the Farm, a model of action
• Ideology and Electricity: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan
• The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss
• Makode Linde–the ‘Swedish Cake’ artist–explains himself
• The verdict on Charles Taylor and The Verdict on Charles Taylor (Take Two)
• What’s at Stake on May Day
• Kenyan Afro-jazz trumpeter and composer Christine Kamau
• Africa News Roundup
• Anatomy of a Hoax and Media Credulity
• Why I Don’t Care if You Go To Graduate School
• Forgiving Dead Student’s Zombie Loans
• Slavoj Zizek: 2011 Year of Living Dangerously
• Mad Cow California 
• Historic NYPL Photos

The Debate over Student Loan Interest is Nothing But A Sideshow:

“Keeping the cost of borrowed money a bit lower for one more year won’t cure the rising cost of higher education. It’s not even a bandage. It’s more like giving some comforting words to a critically injured patient. It might make a few people feel better, or win some votes, but it won’t do much to help our problems."

• The Accidental Sex Offender
• Northrup Frye
• From Passive to Active Spectacle: Afterimages of the LA Riots” — in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the riots and Photos of the LA Riots: 20 Years Later
• Occupy and Inviolability of Private Property
• Nigeria: Oil Exploitation, the Environment and Crimes Against Nature
• How Unequal State Support Diminishes Degree Attainment
• Locking Down an American Work Force
• The Literal Violence of the Wall It’s worth watching the whole video from beginning to end, by the way.
• David Stovall: The Facts and Failures of Educational Policy
• The Street Photography of The Czech Secret Police
• A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’
• Mad Men’s Maddening Decline
• Occupy and Failure
• n+1 Occupy Gazette Issue 4
• Invisible Borders that Define American Culture
• Leave Your Cellphone at Home
• Music, Modernism, and the Twilight of the Elites
• The Rise of the Wonky Left
• DAVID GRAEBER, On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time
• THE U.S. BISHOPS’ CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE CONTRACEPTION MANDATE
• Social Media’s Small Positive Role in Human Relationships
• Train à grande paresse
• I Hope Prisoners Dismantle Any Robot That Is Put In Place To Police Them
• The Naming of America
• 10 of Thomas Friedman’s Dumbest
• Interview with Elif Batuman
• How Not To Write About Africa
• Guggenheim’s map–Where is the rest of Africa?
• What Ogopogo Can Teach Us About the G-Spot

Mona Eltahawy’s “Why Do They Hate Us?”

…and some responses:

• Oh, Mona
• On Listening
• On Native Informants
• It’s Not That Simple
• How Not To Write About Women
• Let’s Talk About Sex

About “illegal immigration”:

• We are not being flooded with illegal Mexican migrants. The total number of migrants from Mexico has varied very little since the 1950s. The massive influx many have written about never happened.
• Net illegal migration has stopped almost ­completely.
• Illegal migration has not stopped because of stricter border enforcement, which Massey characterizes as a waste of money at best and counterproductive at worst.
• There are indeed more undocumented Mexicans living in the United States than there were 20 years ago, but that is because fewer migrants are returning home — not because more are sneaking into the country.
• And the reason that fewer Mexican citizens are returning home is because we have stepped up border enforcement so dramatically.

From Bint Battuta, whose warning that not all her links are new should be taken as an invitation, not a disclaimer:

• Birobidzhan: Frustrated Dreams of a Jewish Homeland
• The history of the Deshaposhini Public Library in Kozhikode, Kerala
• Rooh Afza, the syrup that sweetens the subcontinent’s summers
• Atatürk – the Font
• Shelf Portrait
• House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera [pdf]
• ooty, an instagrammatology
• Nairobi street photography
• Catching Up with the Last of the Levantines
• Pageantry, Military Myths, and Egypt’s “Daddy Complex”
• Tatānikeyam, or the Titanic in Sanskrit

From Frank Pasquale, who should be working on his book instead:

• “How does the government profit from student loans? In two words, yield spread.”
• How to cheat at Klout.
• But don’t be a Klouchebag.
• Debt collectors embedded at hospitals.
• “help art become searchable by emotion or even life events: loneliness, love, marriage, bereavement . . . .This could be the cultural equivalent of the mental health app Buddy”
• The political economy of Google.
• Apocalypse ain’t that scary.
• The wealth/power snowball: Wal-Mart took part in lobbying campaign to amend anti-bribery law
• Stanford as “Get Rich U.“
• Hospital’s former cancer director on US medicine; background on the cash-strapped Grady Hospital of Atlanta:

A third of the ambulances need to be put out of their misery, said Astria L. Benton, a paramedic supervisor. Every week or so, a vehicle simply gives out while in transit, and Ms. Benton prays that the patient will not die before she can orchestrate a rescue. . . . The orthopedic department has a waiting list for elective procedures that one doctor quantified as “infinity.” Its doctors intermittently instruct other departments to not send them patients.

Sunday Reading from zunguzungu