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2022 Banished Words List Press Release
Wait, What? No Worries.
Lake Superior State University
Banishes Those and Other Familiar but Problematic Words and Terms for 2022
Dec. 31, 2021
Sault Ste. Marie, MI — Mass communication? Miscommunication!
If you’re going to turn to the vernacular to make yourself known, be sure you’re accurate and concise. Avoid error in and exploitation of everyday language. In short, do the opposite of what the public and the media did this year.

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Posted on January 11, 2022

The Past, Present & Future Of Poop

By Jenny Morber/Undark

In Osaka, Japan, in the early 1700s, neighboring villages fought over rights to city residents’ excrement.
Much of Japan’s soil – sandy and poor in nutrients – produced feeble crops and supported few animals, so farmers depended on human fertilizer to grow food. And they were willing to pay for it.

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Posted on December 11, 2021

Foxconned

By Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner

When then-President Donald Trump held the first White House press conference in 2017 to tout the prospect of a massive television flat-screen factory for the Taiwan manufacturer Foxconn coming to Wisconsin, Madison writer Lawrence Tabak was immediately intrigued.
“If nothing else, as a Wisconsin taxpayer, I was concerned that this was going to be a major spending event for all of us who live in Wisconsin,” Tabak said in an interview. It also had a deja-vu quality.
Two decades earlier, Tabak had written a takedown for The Atlantic on the endless building spree of convention centers from one city to the next, driven by a revolving-door coterie of consultants who predicted they would revitalize local economies.
“It reminded me a bit of what I suspected was behind the enthusiasm for the Foxconn project,” Tabak says. “Which turned out, of course, to be exactly the case.”

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Posted on November 20, 2021

Sweden Should Press China To Release Swedish Book Publisher

By Sophie Richardson/Human Rights Watch

This week marks the sixth anniversary since Chinese authorities abducted Gui Minhai, a Swedish book publisher, from his home in Thailand in 2015.
After enduring a forced confession on state media and a sham trial, Gui was briefly freed in 2017, before being rearrested. In 2020, a court handed down a 10-year sentence on questionable charges, and the authorities have provided no information on his whereabouts ever since, forcibly disappearing him. He is feared to be in poor health.
Beijing’s recent release of two U.S. citizens who had been arbitrarily prohibited from leaving China, and two Canadians held as diplomatic hostages in exchange for an indicted Huawei executive, is both very welcome news and a cause for profound concern. It confirms Beijing’s willingness to use human beings as pawns, and reminds us of those who remain wrongfully detained, like Gui Minhai.

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Posted on October 14, 2021

The Flesh Between Us

By SIU Press

In The Flesh Between Us, the speaker explores our connections to each other, whether they be lovely or painful, static or constantly shifting, or, above all, unavoidable and necessary.
Intensely and unapologetically homoerotic in content and theme, The Flesh Between Us sensuously conducts the meetings between strangers, between lovers, between friends and family, between eater and eaten, between the soul and the body that contains it.
Pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally acceptable for gay and erotic content and themes, the poems adapt persona, Greek mythology, Judaism, and classic poetic forms to interrogate the speaker’s relationship to god and faith, to love and sex, to mother and father.

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Posted on October 11, 2021

How Slavery Infiltrated California

By Kevin Waite/The Conversation

The history of American slavery generally conjures a set of familiar images: sprawling plantations white with cotton, gangs of enslaved African Americans stooped low over the fields, bullwhips cracking in the summer heat. It’s a strictly southern story – or so we’re told.
But that narrative misses a huge swath of the North American map and a crucial chapter in U.S. history. American slavery wasn’t confined to the cotton fields and sugar plantations of the south. By the mid-19th century, it had reached the western end of the continent.
Human bondage had already been outlawed in California for two years when Robert Givens, a gold prospector and rancher, began planning to bring a black slave named Patrick into the state from Kentucky in 1852. Givens understood California’s antislavery law, but wasn’t concerned. Send Patrick west anyway, he urged his father, a Kentucky slaveholder. “When he gets in,” Givens wrote in a letter that resides at the University of California-Berkeley: “I should like to see any one get him out.”


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Givens’ confidence was justified. Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans were forcibly transported to California between 1849 and 1861. Hundreds arrived before the state’s constitutional ban on slavery went into effect in 1850, but many others came after. California, as Givens realized, was a free state in name only.
I’m a scholar of slavery in the American far west. My new book, West of Slavery, explains how Southerners, including Givens, transformed California and neighboring territories into an appendage of the plantation states.
Despite excellent earlier works on the subject, the history of slavery in the American West hasn’t received the public attention it desperately warrants. Amid the ongoing global dialogue on slavery and its legacies, the American West is often left out of the conversation.
That’s partly because myths of the West – as a landscape of freedom and rugged individualism – are rooted deep in popular thinking. And today, Californians tout their reputation for cosmopolitan liberalism and cultural pluralism. Slavery has little place in the stories Americans tell about the West. Scratch beneath the veneer of this mythology, however, and a much darker history emerges.

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Posted on October 2, 2021

Against Ramp Meters

By Charles Marohn/Minnesota Reformer

The following is an excerpt from chapter six of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, the latest book in the Strong Towns series. It has been slightly modified for this space.
Ramp meters are those mini-traffic signals that queue vehicles as they enter the highway. Wikipedia explains their rationale succinctly: “Ramp meters are installed to restrict the total flow entering the freeway, temporarily storing it on the ramps, a process called ‘access rate reduction.’ In this way, the traffic flow does not exceed the freeway’s capacity. Another rationale for installing ramp meters is the argument that they prevent congestion and break up ‘platoons’ of cars.”
There is nearly total consensus among transportation professionals that ramp meters are a positive innovation. Even critics cede that ramp meters allow more efficient use of roadways. With ramp meters, more cars travel through the same lanes in less time. Ramp meters cut overall travel time, improve safety, and make efficient use of highway capacity.
Getting more out of existing transportation investments without needing to build any additional capacity is a level of genius that would make any engineer proud. Sadly, the professional consensus on the benefits of ramp meters is wrong. Understanding why will help us move beyond the fiction of models to an approach not dependent on traffic projections.

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Posted on September 13, 2021

Making The World Safe For Dictatorship

By Alexander Dukalskis/The Conversation

Earlier this year, the staff of Rwanda’s minister of justice accidentally sent Al Jazeera journalists a video recording that included the minister’s preparation sessions with a public relations firm for an upcoming interview. The interview was about the Rwandan government’s involvement in a scheme to lure exile Paul Rusesabagina to Rwanda so that he could be arrested and tried.
Rusesabagina helped save hundreds of Rwandans during the genocide by sheltering them in a hotel, a story that was made into the movie Hotel Rwanda. He later became a vocal and sometimes controversial critic from abroad of Paul Kagame’s government. He now faces trial on terrorism charges.

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Posted on September 2, 2021

Institutional Sexual Abuse In The #MeToo Era

By SIU Press

In this timely and important collection, editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications.
These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag.

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Posted on August 5, 2021

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