Against the Grain: Place Matters

Nato Thompson, editor of the recent Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism , and University of Alabama law professor Debra Lyn Bassett are guests on the most recent Against the Grain radio program.

I’m busy tonight (hence the light posting) but I plan to listen to the rest of this in the morning (and hopefully post some more).

1 in 31 U.S. Adults are Behind Bars, on Parole or Probation

The Pew Report linked here good source for the sobering data on incarceration rates in the United States.

In the past two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid spending has grown faster.  Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer burden of $68 billion a year.  Despite this increased spending, recidivism rates have remained largely unchanged.

The full report and individual reports for each state are available as PDF downloads at the bottom of the page.

'Post-speculative melancholia,' saltation & a cemetery in a parking lot

‘Post-speculative melancholia’ [via blackbeltjones]
This post does what everybody circa 1999 thought blog posts would do nothing but: “I felt like X when I walked down the street today and saw Y.” What sets this post apart, of course, is that it describes and names that feeling X we’ve all been having lately when we walk down the street and see Y (let Y=any number of ridiculous iPod accessories). It’s post-speculative melancholia:

in which a sweeping utilitarianism suddenly arises, in which
technologies must do something or else get lost and the drugged
up sense of nothing mattering is followed by a come-down in which the
whole thing seems regrettable.

Through the sandglass: the man who figured out how deserts work
[via rodcorp]
An article about Ralph Bagnold, the man who “documented saltation, the process by which flying sand grains land and kick yet more grains into the air.” In his delicious comments for this bookmark, rodcorp wonders what else works like this? Any suggestions?

Oklahoma’s strip-mall graveyard
[via criticalspatialpractice]
A Native American cemetery in the middle of a parking lot:

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