Link-O-Licious II

I’ve been preoccupied with moving and have just now gotten caught up with the world of the blogosphere.  Turns out there’s even more good stuff out there than I posted earlier.  To wit:

Sociologist Victor Rios offers insight into the structures which serve to alienate inner-city youth from society.  It’s a brief interview but offers a couple of blindingly obvious insights which are all too often overlooked: firstly, that people in high-crime areas do welcome police presence in principle, but simply object to its common practice of suspecting the people it was charged with protecting; and secondly, that hard work is no path to a better life unless it is also accompanied by opportunity. 

The American Prospect and The Atlantic take a critical look at the sublimation of bigotry.  The Story of Electronics and TEDTalks give us a window — and a hopeful plea to industry — into the suffering that is seemingly endemic to the production of our first-world consumer goods, while Grist and ProPublica look at the regulatory failures of some of even the best-intentioned legislation.

Of course, regulatory failure is an inevitability if one isn’t serious about governing, whether it be by deficit-dodging or, as my old friend Hilary Franklin points out at The Silver Tongue Times, by shifting agency — and therefore blame — to the amorphous “people”.  

Finally, The New York Review of Books offers a bit of history, and Mother Jones a bit of data, that further confounds any clear notion of what mechanisms operate best as “education reform”.