0 What We're Reading Today (8-24-13)

College Football's Most Dominant Player? It's ESPN - New York Times
James Andrew Miller, Steve Eder, and Richard Sandomir

Taking Middle Schoolers Out of the Middle - New York Times
Elissa Gootman

Thriving on Chaos, Manziel Shocks a Traditional System - New York Times
Campbell Robertson

Profiting from Racism? Reflections on White Allyship and the Issue of Compensation - Tim Wise
Tim Wise

How my white mother shaped me into a black man - Melissa Harris-Perry
Albert L. Butler

The Economics of Hook-Up Culture - Policy Mic
Michelle Juergen

An Intimate Look at the March on Washington- The Atlantic
Garance Fanke-Ruta

Which Colleges Should We Blame for the Student-Debt Crisis - The Atlantic
Jordan Weissmann

America's Imperial Disdain For the Emerging World - The Atlantic
Zachary Karabell

On the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, a New Civil Rights Movement Emerges - The Nation
Ari Berman

Open Letter: How I Failed Chelsea Manning - The Nation
Aura Bogado

'Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society' - Common Dreams
Chelsea Manning

Will There be Justice for NYPD Victim, Ramarley Graham? - The Nation
Lucy McKeon

New York City Council Overrides Bloomberg's Veto of the Community Safety Act - The Nation
Francis Reynolds

Reducing Racial Inequality in Our Justice System - The Nation
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN)

A Long List of What We Know Thanks to Private Manning - The Nation
Greg Mitchell

34 Photos from the March on Washington 50 Years Ago - Buzzfeed
Andrew Kaczynski

A new generation of activists fights injustice, from school cuts to Trayvon Martin - Chicago Reader
Mick Dumke

50 Years After the March on Washington, Many Racial Divides Remain - Pew Social Trends

Every Protest on the Planet Since 1979 - Foreign Policy
J. Dana Stuster

A dream unrealized for African-Americans in Chicago - Chicago Reader
Steve Bogira

Yasiel Puig is a bad guy?  Sounds familiar - SB Nation
Mike Bates

How I Met Your Mother - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

No, for the Love of God, Johnny Manziel Isn't Rosa Parks - The Nation
Dave Zirin

Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance - Truth-Out
Owen Davis

The Problem With Quick Fixes to Education - New York Times
Alex Caputo-Pearl

Open Letters to Reformers I Know. Part 8: Wendy Kopp - Teach For Us
Gary Rubinstein

Open Letters FROM Reformers I Know. Part 2: Wendy Kopp - Teach for Us
Gary Rubenstein (posting a letter from Wendy Kopp)

From the Mailbag: A Teach for America Defector Speaks - Cloaking Inequality
Julian Vasquez Hellig

0 What We're Reading Today (8-17-13)

'Dropping Science': Profile of the Science Genius Program - NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Mark Anthony Neal

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - New York Times
Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari

When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative - LA Review of Books
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Bill De Blasio's Vision - New Yorker
George Packer

The Betrayal of Helen Thomas - Counterpunch
Barbara Lubin and Danny Muller

This Week in 'Nation' History: James Baldiwn's Four Decades of Prophecy, Confession, Emotion and Style - The Nation
Katrina vanden Heuvel

White is the New White - The Nation
Aura Bogado

Black leadership is missing from education reform - The Grio
Dr. Andre M. Perry

Kiese Laymon's Overdue Success Proves Publishers Can Change - NPR
Karen Grigsby Bates

#BlackPowerIsForBlack: Letters from Brothers Writing to Live - NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Mark Anthony Neal, Kiese Laymon, Mychal Denzel Smith, Kai M. Green, Marlon Peterson, Hashim Pipkin, Wade Davis II, Darnell L. Moore

Racial Profiling Lives On - New York Times
Devon W. Carbado, Cheryl I. Harris, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

The Problem with "Privilege" - Andrea 366
Andrea Smith

Tim Wise, informed by Tim Wise - Critical Spontaneity
Suey Park

Stop and Frisk, South Asians and Kal Penn's Tweets - Color Lines
Rinku Sen, Deepa Iyer

Kal Penn, Stop & Frisk, and Andrea Smith - Loud-Mouthed Bookworm
Ju-Hyun Matthew Park

Modern Loneliness, Explained - The Atlantic
James Hamblin

The Killing Machines - The Atlantic
Mark Bowden

Thanks Much! On the Geography of Language - The Atlantic
James Fallows

The One Chart That Shows the Importance of Egypt's Massacre - The Atlantic
Olga Khazan

Entrepreneurship: The Ultimate White Privilege? - The Atlantic
Jordan Weissmann

Can the GOP Fix Its Woman Problem in Time to Fight Clinton? - The Atlantic
Garance Franke-Ruta

A Texan Tragedy: Ample Oil, No Water - Mother Jones
Suzanne Goldenberg

The Misremembering of 'I Have a Dream' - The Nation
Gary Younge

Chaos and Bloodshed in the Streets of Cairo - The Nation
Sharif Abdel Kouddous

Having the Sexism Talk: Lessons for My Daughter - The Nation
Jessica Valenti

Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime - Mother Jones
Kevin Drum

Egypt's Day of Rage - The Daily Beast
Sophia Jones

The Week's Best Longreads - The Daily Beast
David Sessions

Why the democratic spring lies closer to Iran than to Egypt - Al Jazeera
Shervin Malekzadeh

Generals and patrons: The American-Egyptian military - Al Jazeera
Marwan Bishara

Arab revolutions: Ignoring a potential catastrophe - Al Jazeera
Peter Hotez

Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance - Truth-Out
Owen Davis

Teach Trayvon: What's not in the Common Core & how to close the education gap - I Am an Educator
Jesse Hagopian

Study Links High Stakes Testing to Higher Incarceration Rates - The Real News Network
Jaisal Noor

Why Women Need Their Own Money - Alice Walker's Garden
Alice Walker

The Battle for Egypt - The Economist
The Economist

AP/Getty Photos

0 Help Me Show My Students that Reading is Wonderful

Hi friends,

so as many of you know, I will be teaching 6th grade reading in Houston this coming year at Black MS.  As a reading teacher, I am excited to cultivate a love of reading with my students and expand their knowledge of what is possible for them to achieve in their own lives.

Something I noticed this past summer as a teacher for a different group of students was just a general foreignness to the process of reading, an unfamiliarity with the joys of it and a rejection of the notion that reading was something done for pleasure.  This isn't unsurprising considering how these students are bombarded with passages from standardized tests more often than they are given books and taught to develop literary skills.  In the face of this, I want my students to look past the test and to aspire toward a more comprehensive and enriching attitude toward reading.

Therefore, I am calling upon anyone and everyone who is interested to assist me.  It requires very, very little time for you to do so.

Here is what I am asking:

Write a postcard to my students that addresses the following: 

• Start with "Dear Students," or "Dear Panthers," or "Dear Mr. Cotton's Class," something like that 
• Who are you? (Just a quick sentence or two about where you are from, what you do, etc.) 
• What is your favorite book (and/or thing to read) and why?  Or, what was your favorite book when you were in 6th grade?
• (If you want, feel free to ask questions of my students too.  They will be 6th graders.)  

I would really appreciate it if what you sent me was hand-written (so that the students know that I'm not just mass-producing these postcards).  Also, I think it would be extra-great if your postcard represented YOU in some way (an image of your university, your hometown, etc.)

If you are interested, please just comment below, on Facebook, shoot me a text message, or something else and I will give you my address.


Where is this idea coming from?

My high school mentor/life coach/role model, Mr. Wright, had postcards on the walls in his classroom that were written to him from former students.  When ever one of his students went on a trip, or graduated on to college, or moved, they would write Mr. Wright a postcard and he put it on the wall.  It really cultivated a sense of community in the class and showed us that he cared about where we were going long after we had left his classroom.

It is one of the favorite things I remember about these classes and I think that postcards from you all would be a wonderful opportunity to connect my students to other locales, people, and to show them that there are people beyond their immediate vicinity who are A. fired-up about reading and B. interested in them and their lives.

If this goes well, hopefully you all will get a postcard back!

This is THE postcard wall and that is Mr. Wright

0 What We're Reading Today (8-10-13) - Featuring the Mantis Shrimp

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave - Mother Jones
Mac McClelland

Grand Jury Decides Not to Charge Officer Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Youth in Bronx - New York Times
Joseph Goldstein

Forget Hitler - it was America that snubbed black Olympian Jesse Owens - Daily Mail
Philip Delves Broughton

Where are the White Folks?  Your Sympathy is not Solidarity - Osaynde.Org
Ewuare X. Osaynde

The Minor Glories and Dank Humanity of Kiese Laymon - Random House
Anupa Mistry

Hip-Hop as Performance Art: Jay Z, Appropriation, and Critiques of Whiteness - The Feminist Wire
Janell Hobson

How Many Gentrification Critics Are Actually Gentrifiers Themselves? - The Atlantic Cities
Emily Badger

This Week in 'Nation' History: James Baldwin's Four Decades of Prophecy, Confession, Emotion and Style - The Nation
Katrina vanden Heuvel

Help Thy Neighbor and Go Straight to Prison - New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof

From Selma to Shelby, Voting-Rights Struggle Lives On - The Root
Peniel E. Joseph

The 69 Greatest Quotes About Sex - Thought Catalog
Charlie Morrigan

MHP Show: How Reporting Helped Shape the Civil Rights Movement - NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Mark Anthony Neal

Breaking Up Is Not Hard to Do - Foreign Affairs
Husain Haqqani

The Most Powerful Dissent in American History - The Atlantic
Andrew Cohen

Erin Burnett's Cringe-Inducing Discussion of Oprah Winfrey's Brush with Racism - The Atlantic Wire
Philip Bump

Martin Luther King, race-baiter? - Al Jazeera
Paul Rosenberg

Eid under occupation - Al Jazeera
Active Stills

The price of energy - Al Jazeera
South to North

The Washington __________ - Slate
David Plotz

My Metonym for Self-Reference Weighs a Ton - Slate
Mark O'Connell

The US v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked - Huffington Post
Robin D.G. Kelley

Bill de Blasio for Mayor - The Nation
The Editors

Welcome to Post-Constitution America - The Nation
Tom Dispatch

Annotated Mathematics State Test Questions for Grades 3-8 - New York Times

Bill Clinton and the Sport of Hating Poorness - Gawker
Ria Fay-Berquist

0 What We're Reading Today (8-8-13)

The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington - Dissent Magazine
William P. Jones

How Sleep Deprivation Makes Us Want to Eat Fat - The Atlantic
James Hamblin

The Surprising Reason We Find Babies Cute - Huffington Post
Dan Dennett

Scales of Activism, Allyship, and the Embodiment of Resistance: a dialogue - The Becoming Collective
Morgan Clare and Sarah Hunt

You Are the Second Person - Guernica Mag
Kiese Laymon

Education Reform, Chicago Style - The Nation
Rick Perlstein

Why I Started Running

How to Drake it in America - Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie

Why we must do more than repeal 'stand your ground' laws - Al Jazeera
Addie Rolnick

Stop Telling Women to Smile

English is a Dialect With an Army - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Trayvon Martin's America - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our American Summer: Jackie Robinson, Riley Cooper, and White People Boycotting Ebony - The Nation
Dave Zirin

This Guy's Never Met a Map He Didn't Want to Fix - The Atlantic
Mark Byrnes

Researchers Finally Ask Henrietta Lacks's Family If They Can Study Her Cells - The Atlantic
Allie Jones

ALEC Convention Met With Protests in Chicago - The Nation
Micah Uetricht

The Importance of Judicial Empathy - The Nation
Emily Jane Goodman

White House Losing Its Grip on the Middle East - The American Interest
Walter Russell Mead

0 What You NEED To Read Today 8.5.13

I've been reading numerous articles on Trayvon Martin and the resulting dialogue on race, anti-blackness and white supremacy in the United States. I've been waiting for an article that calls out our lack of focus of the criminalization, the repression, and the exploitation of black women more explicitly and more boldly; an article that recognizes the need for collective and community memory when the women gather crying. This article discusses one of the many implications of this case, and of many cases, that are too often left out. The criminalization and persecution of black men and boys AND black women and girls. We must be angry at ALL of our deaths. Remember ALL of us.  Marissa Alexander. Sybrina Fulton. Black Women.

"Invisible Women: The Consequences of Forgetting Sybrina Fulton" by Mychal Denzel Smith

"Black women’s pain fuels but then becomes obscured in the popular narrative about the consequences of racism and the fight for racial justice, as it becomes framed through the experiences of black men. All of us who do work around these issues are guilty of this oversight, myself included. In our attempts to address the problem of anti-black racism in the US, we neglect to consider the experiences of black women as part of that story." Read more on The Nation.

0 What We're Reading Today (7-31-13)

Don Lemon and the Failure of Respectability Politics - Buzzfeed
Jesse Taylor

Why Don Lemon Was Wrong - Ebony
Dr. R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy

What Has ObamaCare Done for Me Lately?

Don Lemon and the Middle Class Embrace of Pathological Blackness - For Harriet
Kimberley Foster

Images of Bedouin displacement foreshadow a "Nakba in the Negev" - +972 Mag
Matt Surrusco

Chicago's rap scene produces some of the genre's best music amidst waves of violence - Washington Post
Chris Richards

8 Shocking Ways America Leads the World - AlterNet
Lynn Stuart Parramore

This Charming Man - New Yorker
Sasha Frere-Jones

Don Lemon and the Complexity of Race - The Root
Peniel E. Joseph

Anthony Weiner and Liberal Morality - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Rahm's two cities - Chicago Sun Times
Don Rose

What Univision's milestone says about US demographics - Pew Research
Mark Hugo Lopez

Fruitvale Station: love, matriarchs and murdered black men - Washington Post
Rahiel Tesfamariam

The Dubious Math Behind Stop and Frisk - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Racist Mind - Color Lines
Rinku Sen

Spike Lee Talks Old Boy, Kickstarter & Trayvon Martin - NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Mark Anthony Neal

The Naivete We Need: Notes on a Climate Action - The Nation
Wen Stephenson

The Trials of Bradley Manning - The Nation
Chase Madar