• Not Fade Away: On Living, Dying, and the Digital Afterlife
• Varies of Lewdness, 1795
• Remember the time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica?
• Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties
• Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico
• Confessions of a Dot Com Entrepreneur
• Kissinger and Allende
• Teaching Children to Hate
• 1940′s Kodachrome
• Racism in Football
• Guilty as Charged: Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
• Is the Media Ignoring the Uprising in Sudan? (25 minute video)
• The Only Alternative is War
• US Shadow Wars in Africa and Obama’s Scramble for Africa
• Rwanda at 50
• Another World
• Between Fact and Fiction
• Coercion and Comic Sans
• Chumbawumba’s Long Journey
• When Rape Jokes Are Never Funny
• The Fall of the Oil Empire
• Yo as a Pronoun
• Guide to Future-Present Archetypes Part 1: The Spark
• Occupy Warzones 
• How to Make a Rape Joke or Rape Jokes that Work
• The CLASSE Manifesto
• That Oceanic Feeling

• Misreading Feminism & Women’s Rights in Tehran: Beyond Chadors, Ninjabis, & Secular Fantasies
• Interview with Khin Maung Sein, a secondhand bookseller in Rangoon
• Shafik’s Airport, Morsi’s Egypt 
• Street art initiative uses LEGO to rebuild Beirut
• Arab Kitsch: a searchable database of songs containing Arab and Middle Eastern stereotypes
• The Islamic Tartan Concept
• Google Maps mashup of Egypt’s retired army generals and where they’ve landed
• Temple built for Higgs-Boson God particle in Tamil Nadu, devotees throng to get darshan
• The history of Cairo’s Sinan Pasha Mosque
• Learning Chinese in Zambia
• South African History Online: Towards a People’s History
• The history of Egypt’s Greek community
• Japanese-Ottoman relations and Japanese subjects in Istanbul in the late 19th century

• Only connect.
• “The rules of the game in the United States are chosen in ways that do not necessarily lead to a more efficient economy, but which do lead to more inequality.”
• Shareholder value myth; the rise of crony capitalism.
• Dream of Eurotrains for US by 2040.
• Banks punish you merely for asking questions.
• “The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat.”“
• On the complete corruption of financial markets; financialization triumphs over real capital formation.
• “Every bonkbuster cliché in existence.”
• Stupid computers taking over; will likely power scan-o-rama.
• Wall Street on Parade.
• Mega-rich Mitt; secrecy on the rise.
• Pharma fail: who’s running the show in drug trials?
• Classify corporate crime fines by how many orders of magnitude away they are from real deterrence:
  1) 4 orders of magnitude off: “$25K fine for Google for impeding investigation.”
  2) 2 orders of magnitude off: ”$22.5 million is about 4 hours of revenue for Google, but it’s the largest fine ever levied on a company by the FTC.” Facebook settlement of $10 million.
  3) 1 order of magnitude off: “The bank secured a nonprosecution agreement and agreed to pay a penalty of more than $450 million, a comparatively paltry sum for a bank that had more than $50 billion in revenue in 2011.”
  4) Just right?: $3 billion fine for Glaxo. No: “Last year, GSK had a net profit of $8.2 billion on revenue of $42.6 billion. . . . ‘If pharma companies can flout the law and then simply write a check when they get caught, they’re never going to stop.’”

ReclaimUC:

• The first picture ever posted on the internet
• More open letters among writers, please. Matvei Yankelevich writes to Marjorie Perloff regarding her notions on reinventing the lyric
• Tavia Nyong’o on Frank Ocean, whose cruel optimism and lateral cruising comes from a queerness that is generationally specific
• Cynthia Carr’s bio of David Wojnarowicz is drawing out incredible reviews
• “Hear Muffs don’t look like headphones, they look more like a giant fuzzy doughnut with a bite missing.” (img)
• On Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis and the addict narrative
• Not Just Another (Piece on How Brave is [Not] Just Another) Princess Movie
• Phillip Maciak on The Newsroom 
• What if we were only allowed to tweet in airports? (David Horvitz at triplecanopy)
• “ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit” aaaannd “LandO’LakesGMFordCredit” 
• More narrative journalism like this please: a close look at one block (44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
• Tessa Hadley’s “An Abduction“
• If you haven’t read Muriel Spark, this is a wonderful way to begin 
• M. H. Abrams turns 100 this month, is still publishing, and didn’t intend to erect the English canon. We also learn why one Norton Anthology page = 4 normal pages anywhere else. 
• Birthright programs and “long-distance nationalism”
• “Urban Target Complex National Monument”: declassifying and remediating military spaces
• The digital can be durable too
• Have you heard of an “auroch” before? Have you heard of “mimetic reversal” breeding? Here.
• “Most Offensive Post” prize of the week.
• On Anthony Trollope’s fallen woman: can’t live with her, can’t write without her
• Record yourself eating a hamburger. Andy Warhol did
• A quietly gorgeous piece on Take This Waltz
• From the archives: Hilary Mantel said a lot of things we still need to hear
• A friend send this to some friends