Not much seemed to happen this week, but maybe it’s because the ToM editorial team was black-out drunk most of the last seven days. Meanwhile, friend-of-the-blog Jacki Antonovich settled into her new job at Muhlenberg College, while our bud Mauricio Castro joined the History Department at Georgia State University. (Shout out to all! Let’s get paid.)
We also learned about Paul Manafort’s weird thing for $15k ostrich skin suits, raising all sorts of questions: were the bizarro duds a form of elaborate money laundering for the cash flowing from his shady foreign clients and offshore bank accounts, or is Paul just into Fashionnova thongs? Does he have a fetish for 1970s pimp aesthetics? Why didn’t Pauly sing like a bird like his erstwhile frenemies Michael Cohen and Rick Gates?
Who left our cake out in the rain, and do boys rarely make passes at girls who wear glasses?
All Reproduction Is Assisted (Boston Review, by the great Merve Emre)
Menstruation in the 1990s: Feminist Resistance in Saskia’s Heavy Flow Zine (Nursing Clio)
Depressed People Use These Words More Often (Tonic, originally The Conversation)
Chicago PD entraps youths with a truck full of Nikes (Matt Bruenig, originally Atlanta Black Star)
How Medicare Was Won (The Nation, big ups to Natalie Shure)
Socialism and the Liberal Imagination (Dissent)
Inside Atlanta’s Immigrant Cages: A Report on the Conditions of the Atlanta City Detention Center (Project South)
Like the Working Families Party of Georgia on Facebook and support the campaigns of great progressive candidates such as Stacey Abrams, El-Mahdi Holly, and Sam Park
Photographs of Buildings That Become Abstract Art (WIRED)
Spoiler alert, but… let’s say the authors studiously avoid finding answers:
The Mystery of Puny Pay Raises (Bloomberg) and Solving the Wage ‘Puzzle’: Why Aren’t Paychecks Growing? (NPR)
Tankus has a different take:
Towards a Political Economy of Inalienable Property Rights (Nathan Tankus)
And an interesting project we just learned about: Data for Progress (Sean McElwee et al)
And finally, the great Becky Nicolaides on the oft-unspoken crisis of academia’s own digital divide; anyone who has departed grad school or found themselves without a post at a college or university (or simply got a job at a school with fewer resources) knows exactly how jarring it is to be barred from the books and journals necessary to do scholarly work:
Locked Out (AHA Perspectives)