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Short answer? No.
For starters, Twitter has denied that they’ve blocked “Troy Davis” (or #TroyDavis, or any other variant) from trending. Different topics relating to the story have been trending locally and nationally all day — as I type this, two Davis-related topics are trending in the US, while “Who Is Troy Davis” is trending in NYC and Atlanta, among other places.
So what’s the story? Why isn’t “Troy Davis” trending — or why isn’t it trending more broadly and consistently?
Because Twitter’s trending topics don’t measure Twitter users’ interest in a topic directly. They’re not intended to. I wrote about this in excruciating detail last December, when similar questions were being asked about the failure of the #Wikileaks tag to trend.
You can go read that whole post if you like. But the upshot was this:
Twitter wants trending topics to be novel, and widely tweeted, and tweeted by disparate users. They want their trending topics to be trendy.
They don’t censor terms like “Troy Davis” or “Wikileaks.” They don’t have any policy preventing them from trending. But at the same time, they’re not interested in having any topic like these — an ongoing discussion of a major social or political issue, going through peaks and lulls and times of broader and narrower resonance — make the list.
Twitter’s trending topics aren’t intended to measure what people are interested in. They aren’t intended to measure what people are passionate about. They aren’t intended to measure what people are committed to. They aren’t even intended to measure what people are fascinated by.
They’re intended to measure “Ooh! Shiny!”
As university budgets are squeezed, admissions officials are recruiting students who don’t need financial aid:
“More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September. Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.”
A Canadian student has filed a human rights complaint over a campus blackface incident:
“Anthony Morgan filmed the students at a Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) school sporting event earlier this month, as they were dressed in Jamaican colours with their skin painted black. They were also chanting in mock Jamaican accents about smoking marijuana.”
Mother Jones reports on the “gutsiest” student newspapers of 2011:
“In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business profwho’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. The paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.”
Maurice Sendak talks about why he doesn’t think of himself as a children’s book author:
“I don’t know what that means. How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it. I knew that my books would only be published as children’s books. And I once objected fiercely to that. I wanted Outside Over There to be realized as a complex work of art. Well, it wasn’t. And I had to live with that. And yet, perhaps, in some ways, it’s my favorite book of everything I’ve ever done. But it’s a weird book. It’s a weird book. It’s a weird world.”
A British observer warns her country against following America’s higher education model:
“Unfortunately, with our tripling of tuition fees and the shifting of the burden from state to the individual, it is the US trajectory that the UK seems to be following – one that evidence shows is unwise. As massive tuition-fee increases and poor state support in the US take their toll, graduation rates have fallen well behind those of most other industrialised nations.”
Students at a Cairo university have ended a weeklong sit-in after administrators met most of their demands:
“The conflict is also part of a larger wave of campus activism sweeping Egypt. At state universities, students and faculty are demanding the resignation of presidents and deans appointed during the Mubarak era, and the holding of elections to select their replacements. They are also demanding more openness and an end to security interference in campus affairs. The national Egyptian Student Union was reconstituted after a conference at the American University in Cairo in August. Its activities had been suspended 32 years ago by then-president Anwar Sadat.”
“Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all and, despite the effort of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake. This is not to say that the problems with the death penalty today are identical to those that were present 20 years ago. Rather, the problems that were pursued down one hole with procedural rules and verbal formulas have come to the surface somewhere else, just as virulent and pernicious as they were in their original form. Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death can never be achieved without compromising an equally essential component of fundamental fairness – individualized sentencing.
“It is tempting, when faced with conflicting constitutional commands, to sacrifice one for the other or to assume that an acceptable balance between them already has been struck. In the context of the death penalty, however, such jurisprudential maneuvers are wholly inappropriate. The death penalty must be imposed ‘fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all…’
“This Court, in my view, has engaged in a futile effort to balance these constitutional demands, and now is retreating not only from the promise of consistency and rationality, but from the requirement of individualized sentencing as well. Having virtually conceded that both fairness and rationality cannot be achieved in the administration of the death penalty, the Court has chosen to deregulate the entire enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements with mere aesthetics, and abdicating its statutorily and constitutionally imposed duty to provide meaningful judicial oversight to the administration of death by the States.
“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored – indeed, I have struggled – along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed…
“In my view, the proper course when faced with irreconcilable constitutional commands is not to ignore one or the other, nor to pretend that the dilemma does not exist, but to admit the futility of the effort to harmonize them. This means accepting the fact that the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.”
—Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun gives up on the death penalty (Callins v. James, 1994).
Sunday night I tweeted, as Jon Stewart won his I’m-not-even-making-this-up ninth consecutive Emmy for Best Variety Show or whatever, that “Jon Stewart is like 63% of the way to being the guy he started out mocking. Maybe 64%.” And then today I stumbled across this, a Tom Junod profile of Stewart from next month’s Esquire that makes the case far better than I possibly could.
The thing is full of great lines, including the one I quoted this morning, and the one about how
even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.
The bit about why nobody ever does a Jon Stewart impression is right on the money too. Read the whole piece, but the takeaway is this: Jon Stewart’s public persona is profoundly disingenuous, and ultimately toxic to American political discourse.
But there’s one part of the piece that I’d quibble with, and it’s the passage on Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held in DC on the weekend before the 2010 midterm elections:
Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness. And three days later, when the side he didn’t even say was his side was routed in the midterms, he pretty much proved his point. He was no player. He had no political power. He’d proven he was beyond all that by presiding over the biggest celebration of political powerlessness in American history.
There’s nothing incorrect here, but there’s one pair of dots that Junod doesn’t quite connect, and it’s this:
By holding that rally on that day, Stewart took two hundred thousand of his most political fans out of the game on electoral fieldwork’s biggest weekend. The kind of folks who would show up to a Jon Stewart rally are pretty much exactly the kind of folks who would knock on doors for local candidates in the run-up to an off-year election. And what did Stewart do? He gave them a reason not to.
If you believe in the political process, if you believe in civic engagement, if you believe in local communities, if you believe in reforming America from the ground up, the last thing you do is hold a huge fake rally for politics dorks in Washington DC on the weekend before the midterms. I mean, come on.
I used to love Jon Stewart. But that’s when he really lost me.
The faculty council of New York City’s Brooklyn College has unanimously condemned NYPD’s spying on their campus’s Muslim student organization, saying it has a “chilling effect” on academic freedom.
Documents made public earlier this month indicate that the New York Police Department has been monitoring Muslim student groups at seven local colleges — City, Baruch, Queens, Brooklyn, LaGuardia Community College and St. John’s. At Brooklyn and Baruch, the department sent undercover police officers to spy on the groups directly. St. John’s college is private, while the rest of those targeted are part of the City University of New York.
The NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim organizations was undertaken in concert with the CIA, whose inspector general is now investigating whether the Agency’s involvement violated the law.
The Brooklyn College resolution said that the faculty “opposes surveillance activities by the NYPD and affiliated agencies on our campus either directly or through the use of informants for the purposes of collecting information independent of a valid and specific criminal investigation,” and called on the college’s administration to reveal “their knowledge of or involvement in this surveillance and information gathering.”
Brooklyn College president Karen Gould, who took office in 2009, said the NYPD had not informed her administration of its spying.
studentactivism.net 
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