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Posts Tagged 'McSweeney's'
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I'm still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven't had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it's a big compendium of more or less everything I've found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there's just no way I can put everything I've looked at since August on here. So today's format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn't really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin's historic threepeat.
* Resisting and Persisting: An interview with the contributors to Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix's music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep's Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
When it comes to climate, if it's not action at disruptive scales and speeds, it's predatory delay.
That's when we are, now, after decades of inaction. That's the curve we're on.
We're completely out of time for gradual, incremental approaches and small comfortable steps.
— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) August 13, 2018
Annual global temperatures from 1850-2017 (The colour scale represents the change in global temperatures covering 1.35°C) https://t.co/sqreCwhbDu pic.twitter.com/eY4TyVXmFh
— Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 (@kerim) August 24, 2018
* "Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future," according to Harvard's Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami's Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina's massive pig manure lagoons?
There has been weather monitoring in the city of Wilmington, NC for nearly 150 years.
The most recent NCEP WPC rainfall prediction for Hurricane #Florence would shatter the historical record for 7-day rainfall accumulation by more than a foot. pic.twitter.com/CsSrSfRMKE
— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) September 13, 2018
* Puerto Rico after Maria: "Water Is Everything."
* Air pollution causes 'huge' reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
Here's where I would like to propose a thought experiment. Fast forward 66m years. Imagine some intelligent life form arrives (or re-evolves) on earth. It wants to know: what "caused" the sixth great extinction? What are they likely to conclude from the available evidence? 9/
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) August 26, 2018
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future "Hothouse Earth."
* Just another headline here in hell.
* Should Rivers Have Rights?
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
The popular scifi of the 21st century will be Americans sublimating their guilt by imagining themselves as victims, and the rest of the world sublimating the nightmare that is an actually-existing hostile, amoral entity antithetical to human life
— بوكيبلينكي (@pookleblinky) August 14, 2018
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here's who QAnon supporters actually are.
* Spaaaaaaace Fooooooooorce!
* Elon Musk and his space-baron brethren want our admiration. Their narcissistic exploits deserve nothing but our scorn.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn't care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler's Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn't enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to 'trap' immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. "Yo me quiero morir," the boy says. "I want to die." 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* The Church of Trump.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Fascism and the university.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Building a Better MFA.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player's Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football's Rotten Culture.
* "Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University."
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don't matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they're wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn't a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* No, you're not too old.
Toni Morrison: 40
Mark Twain: 41
Marcel Proust: 43
Henry Miller: 44
JRR Tolkien: 45
Raymond Chandler: 51
Richard Adams: 52
Annie Proulx: 57
Laura Ingalls Wilder: 65
Frank McCourt: 66
Harriett Doerr: 74
Harry Bernstein: 96
No, you're not too old to publish your first book.
— Allison K Williams (@GuerillaMemoir) August 19, 2018
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* "I don't believe in aliens anymore."
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* "Mount Everest is a 'fecal time bomb.' Here's one man's idea for handling 14 tons of poop."
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don't think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in "proper bleeding control techniques" in preparation for "mass casualty events."
* Why the middle class can't afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* It's immoral to be rich.
* Socialism in our lifetime.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America's jails.
* 'Abolish Prisons' Is the New 'Abolish ICE.'
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Startling jump in NFL player claims for Parkinson's and ALS pushes payout projections past 65-year total in 18 months.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV's Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You've been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don't be poor.
* The man who owns the Moon.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* PFT explains Louis C.K.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Wiffle Ball 2.0.
* Insulin should be free.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn't Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don't work, and of course it's our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* On Wakandacon.
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don't ever want to die.
Tagged with #MeToo, #TheResistance, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, academia, academic jobs, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air pollution, algorithms, aliens, America, animals, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, autism, Baylor, Black Panther, Bojack Horseman, Brett Kavanaugh, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, Chinese science fiction, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, college football, concussions, Confederacy, conferences, conspiracy theory, corruption, cryogenics, David Foster Wallace, decolonize everything, deportation, DHS, diabetes, dinosaurs, divorce, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Elon Musk, empire, ethics, evangelicals, fascism, fear, fecal time bombs, flooding, Florida, football, futurity, games, genre, god mode, guns, Haggerty Museum of Art, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Florence, hurricanes, I grow old, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Infinite Jest, insulin, intelligence, Japan, Jimi Hendrix, John McCain, Johns Hopkins, Ken Starr, labor, labor movement, lead, Louis C.K., mad science, magic, manure, Marquette, Maryland, mass shootings, McSweeney's, medicine, mental illness, Mexico, MFAs, Miami, millennials, Milwaukee, Minecraft, MLA, monkeys, Mt. Everest, musicals, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, natural disasters, NCAA, NFL, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, obituary, Octavia Butler, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pesticides, Philip Pullman, philosophy, police corruption, politics, poverty, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, Puerto Rico, Purdue, QAnon, race, racism, rape culture, real estate, real wages, Reddit, religion, Republicans, rich people, rivers, Sable Elyse Smith, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Second Life, self-driving cars, Serial, sexual harassment, SFRA, Silent Sam, socialism, souls, Space Force, sports, strikes, student debt, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, television, the courts, the humanities, the law, the middle class, the Moon, the Navy, the rich are different, the rule of law, the shy, the university in ruins, the VA, The Village Voice, there is not such thing as a natural disaster, time travel, Twitter, UFOs, UNC, unions, University of Akron, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, Veronica Mars, veterans, virtual worlds, volcanoes, Wakanda, weird Twitter, welfare, Wes Anderson, West Virginia, whiteness, wiffle ball, Wilmington, Wisconsin, work, writing, you and I are gonna live forever, zunguzungu
All Your Friday Links!
* The itself.blog Star Trek: Discovery event is underway! Star Trek: Discovery Is Optimism, But Not for Us. "Can you bury your heart"? Having feelings about Discovery. Star Trek: Discovery as the End of Next Generation Triumphalism.
* CFP: Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction (MLA 19).
* Jaimee Hills is officially a dangerous woman.
* The Male Glance.
* The university in ruins: UW Stevens Point. The administration clearly doesn't even understand what it's proposing:
When releasing the plan, university officials said that English majors for teacher certification would continue. But Williams said that under the state Department of Public Instruction's certification criteria, a person looking to become an English teacher has to have been an English major.
"They just both have to exist, or both have to be eliminated," Williams said. "One depends directly on the other."
The most salient fact of academia today is that low-cost humanities classes subsidize every other aspect of university operations. You will never hear a single administrator acknowledge this basic fact and indeed they insist that the money flows the other way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2018
* Professors earn about 15 percent less than others with advanced degrees, finds a study circulated Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Though perhaps some of us make it up in job satisfaction (really).
* It's gotten so bad in the humanities even the Yale grads don't get jobs handed to them as soon as they graduate.
* Why Creative-Writing Programs Have Been Havens for Harassment.
* It has taken me two and a half decades to recognize that my experience of having a senior male nominal adviser and a female (usually more junior) actual adviser is common throughout academe. On Ghost Advising.
* Abusers and enablers in faculty culture.
* 5% raises in West Virginia. Onward to Oklahoma.
Today's front page is one worth saving pic.twitter.com/ig9SNqbpuZ
— Jake Zuckerman (@jake_zuckerman) March 7, 2018
* Marquette vs. Trauma.
* Snowflake students claim Frankenstein's monster was 'misunderstood' — and is in fact a VICTIM.
* On the Blackness of the Panther.
* Loved this from Barbara Ehrenreich: Body Work: The curiously self-punishing rites of fitness culture.
If anything, the culture of fitness has grown more combative than when I first got involved. It is no longer enough to "have a good workout," as the receptionist at the gym advises every day; you should "crush your workout." Health and strength are tedious goals compared to my gym's new theme of "explosive strength," achieved, as far I can see, through repeated whole-body swinging of a kettleball. If your gym isn't sufficiently challenging, you might want to try an "ultra-extreme warrior workout" or buy a "home fitness system" from P90X, which in 2016 tweeted a poster of an ultra-cut male upper body, head bowed as if in prayer, with the caption "A moment of silence please for my body has no idea of what I'm about to put it through." Or you could join CrossFit, the fastest-growing type of gym in the world, and also allegedly the most physically punishing. The program "prepares trainees for any physical contingency," the company boasts, "not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable, too. Our specialty is not specializing," and the latter category includes the zombie apocalypse. The mind's stuggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
* Too big to tax.
* In this economy you're either burned out, or you're boxed out.
* The Secret NYPD Files: Officers Can Lie And Brutally Beat People — And Still Keep Their Jobs.
* A prosecutor who obtained a wrongful conviction that sent a Houston man to death row for nearly 10 years didn't just withhold evidence but also denied under oath that he had information that supported Alfred Dewayne Brown's alibi, court records show.
* Twilight of the cult film.
* Could Trump get a White House job if he weren't president? Didn't we already know Trump couldn't get a loan before he was president?
* Beware Liberal-Baiting "White House in Chaos" Stories. Trump's Position Is As Solid As It's Ever Been.
For that reason win or lose I think the fights on the liberal-left will be a lot nastier after 2020 than they've been before. A huge part of the Democratic base is still living in denial about what this country has become.
Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
— jesse farrar (@BronzeHammer) October 2, 2016
* Gratuitous cruelty by Homeland Security. Lying to the immigrant soldiers you promised citizenship.
* A Dozen Democrats Want To Help Banks Hide Racial Discrimination In Mortgages.
* Guess Who's Not Coming To America? International Students.
* Kobe Steel's Chief to Step Down as It Discloses Wider Quality Problems Fifty-Year Conspiracy to Defraud Customers.
* Toddler feelings helpline.
— If you still feel pretty messed up about how they were just going to burn the Velveteen Rabbit, please mash all of the keys but mostly 2.
* White flight remains a reality.
* Liberate our schools.
[future history class]
Teacher: How did World War 3 start? Anyone? Yes, Khaleesi.
Girl: It started bec-
Teacher: No, I meant Khaleesi M. She had her hand up first.
Girl 2: It started because president Trump was hangry.
Teacher: Correct. [holsters gun]
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) March 3, 2018
* '50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.'
* The grim reality of job hunting in the age of AI.
* The Marvel Cinematic Universe only really makes sense when you remember Captain America is a trans man.
* Wait, what exactly was Luke Skywalker's plan in Return Of The Jedi?
* The opioid crisis has become an "epidemic of epidemics." Meanwhile, a new study suggests opioids are no better than Tylenol for treating some kinds of pain.
* Kentucky's 'child bride' bill stalls as groups fight to let 13-year-olds wed.
* U.N. Report On Magical Realism Warns Of Increased Incidences Of Women's Tears Flooding The Entire World.
* False news stories travel faster and farther on Twitter than the truth.
* There's no idea so terrible there isn't someone in favor of it.
* York University philosophy professor and team submit brief supporting chimpanzee personhood.
* Ok, but you're on a very short leash.
* Her name was Kanga and she was trouble.
I thought of how it all used to be, back when C.R. was young, when we still all believed things would get better. When we still had hope. In a way, hope is as powerful a drug as honey.
— Lavie Tidhar (@lavietidhar) March 7, 2018
* I Am the Very Important Longread Everyone Is Talking About.
* The United States of Middle-earth.
* Understanding Fight Club.
* And the arc of history is long, but.
Tagged with academia, activism, actually existing media bias, advising, Amazon, America, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Barbara Ehrenreich, Black Panther, capitalism, Captain America, chimps, class struggle, consent, creative writing, cult film, dangerous women, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, English departments, fake news, Fight Club, film, fitness, Frankenstein, fraud, games, graduate student life, guns, harassment, homeland security, How the University Works, humanzees, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, international students, Jaimee Hills, job satisfaction, Kentucky, kids, liberals, Lili Loofbourow, longreads, Lord of the Rings, magic realism, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, McSweeney's, Middle-Earth, Milwaukee, MLA, mortgages, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Oklahoma, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pain, parenting, perjury, poetry, police brutality, police corruption, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Return of the Jedi, school shootings, science fiction, segregation, sex, sexual harassment, Sopranos, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, steel, strikes, Super Smash Brothers, taxes, teachers, Teju Cole, tenure, the gym, the humanities, the male glance, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Twitter, unions, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, West Virginia, white flight, Winnie the Pooh, Yale
Tuesday Morning Links!
* A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life. Launch the S.S. Donald Trump for a Space Race Victory!
* When Unpaid Student Loan Bills Mean You Can No Longer Work.
* A spectre is haunting grad students.
* Why are we still doing alumni interviews? They're so transparently bad that I'd forgotten they even existed, and I did some! Among other things they seem like such an obvious discrimination and harassment vector legal counsel would have shut them down years ago.
* For several years Durazo's union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
* The university in ruins, English department edition.
* This Is Just How Badly Scott Walker Has Decimated Public Schools in Wisconsin.
* "Schools are segregated because white people want them that way."
* "No one can prevent Trump from using nuclear weapons, experts say."
* How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York's Subways.
* Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Tarantino's upcoming movie, according to a source who read the script, focuses on a male TV actor who's had one hit series and his looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick—who's also his stunt double—is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Manson's cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.
* Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* We Have Come to a Bad Moment, and We Must Change: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. And some bonus KSR content: a podcast!
* The end of net neutrality, again, and this time for real.
In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages. pic.twitter.com/TlLYGezmv6
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) October 27, 2017
* Little Man, Little Man is the only children's book by acclaimed writer James Baldwin. Published in 1976 by Dial Press, the book quickly went out of print. Now, at a time when Baldwin is more popular than ever, and readers, librarians, and booksellers are clamoring for more diverse children's books, Duke University Press is proud to bring the book back into print. It will be available in August 2018.
* It's wild that The Simpsons is the longest running comedy of all time and also basically Amos and Andy.
* Making the film versions of every kid in America's childhood should be a license to print money. And yet.
* For the love of God, someone please complete this crossword puzzle!
* Make Nepotism Great Again: 20 Families Got Jobs in Trump Administration.
* Al Franken should have resigned last week like I said. He should resign today.
* How Congress hides its sexual harassment settlements.
* Normal country doing normal country things.
* Meet One of New York's Best Professional Dungeon Masters.
* In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.
* Black Mirror literally did this one.
* Abolish the Bushes.
* And just for fun: The coming coup.
Anybody who thinks they can fathom the precise way that Trump will fuck up the turkey pardon has learned nothing.
— Brett Martin (@brettmartin) November 20, 2017
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic jobs, Al Franken, alumni, America, Antarctica, Batman, Black Mirror, books, Bush, Charles Manson, civilization, class struggle, college, college admissions, Congress, coups, crossword puzzles, Donald Trump, dungeon masters, Dungeons and Dragons, English departments, games, George H. W. Bush, grad student nightmares, graduate school, ice sheet collapse, James Baldwin, Justice League, Kim Stanley Robinson, McSweeney's, net neutrality, New York, nuclear weapons, outer space, pardons, politics, Quentin Tarantino, race, rape culture, schools, science fiction, Scott Walker, sea level rise, segregation, sexual harassment, social media, Space Race, student debt, Superman, Tarantino, taxes, the Anthropocene, The Problem with Apu, the Senate, The Simpsons, the subway, the university in ruins, turkeys, unions, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, white people, Wisconsin
July the 5th Be With You Links
* Coming attractions.
Today I finally put to bed the upcoming special issue of @sfftvLUP on the Mad Max franchise. pic.twitter.com/Y0EPwnAA1x
— Dan Hassler-Forest (@DanHF) July 3, 2017
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose "job hunt" turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my "individualized" health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: "You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien." The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Announces its 12th annual Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a critical essay on the fantastic originally written in a language other than English.
* The "mass graves" story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* Why Afghanistan? Why Now?
* Batman and 1960s America.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution. Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman's name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don't we know her story?
* CTRL-F "rape" CTRL-F "slave" CTRL-F "Hemings"
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings's slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
The worship of Jefferson is so bizarre. At least once a year I refer to him as a rapist and then realize that's probably a firing offense.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 4, 2017
Anyway, it's good that they found his rape dungeon and I hope to still be alive the day Monticello is torn down.
The second DNA tech emerged, Jefferson-Hemings went from "he would never, how dare you" to "theirs was a love beyond law and beyond time."
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/QZUEDKH0xY
— amanirenas. (@thegirllogan_) July 2, 2017
* Dear TNI Contributors,
Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor's mansion in New Jersey, too.
A scene from my remake of Brewster's Millions, where a NJ governor is given a 70% approval rating and told he has to lose it all in 5 years pic.twitter.com/n1E5rkcBSB
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) July 2, 2017
* In sum, here's what they found: If you're going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
🎶 Duck Tales, woo-ooh 🎶 https://t.co/I9MM413x39
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) July 3, 2017
* America's future is Texas.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* Horrifying story: Authorities have charged a former Ph.D. candidate with kidnapping a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yingying Zhang, originally from China, is now presumed dead.
* 'Beta Males' Want To Kill Women Because They Can't Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
I've never wanted anything more than I want a full transcript of the conversation in which Rahm was convinced this hed was actually ok pic.twitter.com/RoKYEbGe1F
— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) July 3, 2017
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn't? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don't ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don't worry folks; we've got this.
It's called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of '90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn't die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* Some lesser-known spells.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don't Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don't speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
* Kafka's joke book.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn't have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don't speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don't Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. [47/50]
Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. [48/50]
A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. [49/50]
Anyway, that's why Zack Snyder hasn't been a great fit for the DC Cinematic Universe and the company should move in a new direction. [50/50]
Tagged with #TheResistance, 25th Amendment, academia, academic jobs, academic journals, Adam West, Aetna, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, alien abduction, aliens, America, American flag, American Revolution, animals, Antarctica, apocalypse, asteroids, austerity, Batman, brain expansion meme, Brewster's Millions, capitalism, Captain America, Chicago, Chris Christie, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, comics, concrete, crowdfunding, Dan Hassler-Forest, Democrats, diabetes, don't tread on me, Donald Trump, Duck Tales, ducks, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, fake news, Foundation, Founding Fathers, Founding Mothers, Fourth of July, freedom, futurity, How the University Works, IAFA, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, impeachment, jokes, journalism, Junot Díaz, Kafka, KKK, LEGOs, liberty, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max, Mad Max: Fury Road, magic, Marxism, mass extinction, McSweeney's, Metformin, Mills College, misogyny, Monticello, moral panic, murder, Neil Gorsuch, neoliberalism, New Inquiry, New Jersey, New York, parenting, patriotism, pedagogy, police, police state, police violence, politics, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, Republicans, revolution, Roman Empire, Rome, Sally Hemings, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, SETI, sexism, slavery, Space Corps, Star Wars, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, tenure, Texas, the 1960s, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independent, the Hamptons, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, there's always money in the banana stand, Thomas Jefferson, Tolkien, true crime, UFOs, United Kingdom, Win the Future, women
Wednesday Links!
* Great episode of I Was There Too today starring Ahmed "Jar Jar Binks" Best, a genuinely fascinating figure in the Star Wars culture industry. I link this great EW profile of Best every few years. They talk about the Aftermath scene I didn't like, and Best gives a nice explanation of why the treatment of Jar Jar as a character is so regrettable from a storytelling perspective in the context of defending the otherwise execrable Darth Jar Jar Theory.
* There's an unexpected bonus episode of the Hello from the Magic Tavern spinoff Offices and Bosses out today, too. Truly, nothing can stop me now.
* A nice writeup of Buffy at 20 from the Marquette Tribune.
* Also at Marquette Wire: Marquette's Live Poets Society breaks the silence with their poems on mental illness and suicide.
* Strange Horizons on "Kirk Drift."
* Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia.
* I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.
* How to tell if you're a pervert.
* United's stock falls 1.1%, wipes out $255 million off the airline's market cap. Maybe they should have offered people $2000 to give up their ticket? Just a crazy thought. Now they're sorry. Does The Fine Print In United's Contract Prevent Kicked-Off Passenger From Suing Airline? The Corporation Does Not Always Have To Win. And from the archives: The black art of overbooking. The Landing: Fascists without Fascism.
* Jeff Sessions Prepares DOJ For Crackdown On Unauthorized Border-Crossers.
Sessions painted the matter in stark terms, saying that gangs and cartels "turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders."
"Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings," Sessions said in prepared remarks. "It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth."
When he delivered the speech, Sessions did not use the word "filth," saying only "where we first take our stand."
Sounds like the rivers will be running red with the blood of the unclean soon. #MAGA!
* Another Day, Another Charter Scandal.
* The rule is you don't talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can't talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system's inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave. Hiking the Appalachian Trial while Black.
* Superbabies don't cry.
We want a SuperRace because we want to eradicate absolutely everything that terrifies us. We want SuperHumans so we can transcend that thing we are: human. But a SuperHuman would lack that crack in everything through which, as Leonard Cohen sang, the light gets in. There's something in our suffering that we need. We've known this for millennia, and we make it clear in the stories we keep telling. The Buddha gave up his palace and meditated beneath a tree for a week. Jesus of Nazareth said yes to a cross. Our ache is our unfortunate, undeniable doorway. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, says the copper lady with the torch. When we walk into our pain, we sometimes find ourselves on the other side, freed of what we once thought we needed to feel free.
* They saved MST3K's brain.
* The ACLU filed a lawsuit Friday against the city of Maplewood, Missouri, over a policy that allegedly evicts domestic violence victims and banishes them from the St. Louis suburb if they call police for help more than twice in six months.
* Laurie Penny says The Expanse is perfect…ly fine. I haven't been able to muster the enthusiasm a lot of other people seem to have for the series, though I liked the first season well enough; I haven't even started the second season yet.
* The DC Cinematic Universe turns to the only hero who could possibly save it: The Rock. The Rock can make anything good, but there are limits. There are limits.
* Let's scrape together The Shining epilogue that Stanley Kubrick destroyed.
* And Some Math Problems for English Majors.
An English major explains his career options to three mechanical engineers for fifteen minutes. How many beers will the English major drink in explaining that, really, he has it figured out as he's applying to eighteen grad schools, and after the PhD, maybe become a professor, or go for a post-doc, maybe? What if he's trying to impress someone? What if that someone's also a mechanical engineer?
Tagged with Ahmed Best, air travel, airlines, always obey cops, Appalachian Trail, Buffy, charter schools, children, chocolate, class struggle, contraception, corpocracy, corporations, crime, David Foster Wallace, depression, disability, Donald Trump, dystopia, Easter, English majors, Episode I, eugenics, fan theories, fascism, Hello from the Magic Tavern, I Was There Too, immigration, Infinite Jest, Jar Jar Binks, Jeff Sessions, Make America Great Again, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, math, Matt Gourley, McSweeney's, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater 3000, neoliberalism, Offices and Bosses, overbooking, parenting, perversion, Phantom Menace, podcasts, poetry, police, police state, politics, pregnancy, prophecy, race, racism, science fiction, Stanley Kubrick, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stephen King, suicide, superbabies, the customer is always right, The Shining, United
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
(here's part one)
* The story behind the Christmas Truce of 1914, simultaneously the most and least utopian thing that's ever happened.
* Now that's running it like a sandwich: College Can't Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
* The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary 'F*cking Ignored' Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don't know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump's Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it's too late to rewrite the book
* Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
* Their fake news, and ours.
* The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* A sense of ennui and overdetermination binds the audience of NPR podcasts together in a bloc of obnoxious explainerism.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase's Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for "Permanent Flooding."
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There's no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let's all fight about Shakespeare again.
* Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
* We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
* The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division's 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
* My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Tagged with academia, academic job market, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Aleppo, Anne Frank, apocalypse, Arrival, austerity, authoritarianism, autocracy, basket of deplorables, Billy Joel, Blade Runner, Bob Dylan, books, career services, Christmas, Christmas truce, CIA, City College of San Francisco, class struggle, climate change, Colbert Report, collapse, comedy, comics, Daily Show, Death Star, Democrats, denialism, design, drugs, dystopia, ecology, engineering, English departments, explaintainment, Exploding Head Syndrome, fake news, fascism, FBI, film, fire, first contact, flooding, futurity, general election 2016, Ghost Ship, Google, hacking, health care, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, institutionalization, Jacobin, James Comey, John Oliver, journalism, Lord of the Rings, maps, massacres, McSweeney's, Michigan, My Lai, Nazis, neoliberalism, New York City, Norm MacDonald, Oakland, obstructionism, online teaching, oxy, Penn, Peter Frase, Philip K. Dick, plastic, podcasts, politics, polls, pollution, post-truth, precrime, psychiatry, quantum mechanics, rape, rape culture, reasons I haven't been writing, REM, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, Rex Tillerson, Rick Perry, Rogue One, Romulans, run it like a sandwich, Russia, Rust Belt, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, search committees, sex, Shakespeare, smog, Star Trek, syllabi, Syria, the archives, the canon, the Holocaust, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, the oceans, the SS, the university in ruins, trash, United Nations, Utopia, Vietnam, welfare fraud, Won't somebody think of the children?, Wonder Woman, World War I
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney's link in years, maybe ever: "A Poem about Your University's Brand New Institute."
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas 'astonishingly different' in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. 'Back in time 60 years': America's most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
Overnight totals:
4 injured officers
17 arrests
7 squads damaged, 2 totaled
48 ShotSpotter activations
6 businesses set on fire
— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 14, 2016
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
This is fine. pic.twitter.com/uJawEv7mo7
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) August 11, 2016
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid's A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here's how I'll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump's Tongue. Former supporters describe their 'last straw' when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump's 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump's 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump's Campaign Chief. I didn't blog for a few days and the "Second Amendment People" thing already seems like a million years ago. It's unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland's Pirate party may form next government.
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then they google to make sure it's actually THAT pirate party
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 13, 2016
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It's making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of "warrior cops" that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment "soldiers" by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I'm really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn't they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I'll be honest: I'm all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man's Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It's So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This "proton radius puzzle" suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there's no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Hidden Hawaii.
* The Invisible Labor of Women's Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of "good" and "bad" altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop's descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* When mental health professionals systemically misdiagnose patients of color, treatment looks more like punishment.
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* "When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA's Sabotage Field Manual."
* Homeless at college.
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* A place called Mebane.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
English has a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" https://t.co/6Inp9xNJ4n
— AllThingsLinguistic (@AllThingsLing) August 14, 2016
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren't Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There's never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The "disease model" remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
* Teach the controversy.
CONSPIRACY THEORY:
AUSTRALIA IS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/BJvqgK8USd
— anna (@ttylgay) August 10, 2016
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I'm a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* The future of street signs.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* How to be rich.
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Ballad of Ray Kurzweil.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: "I do little but the benefits are incredible."
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I'm a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Creating The Night Of.
* Making a Murderer's Brendan Dassey's conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* 'Hot' Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* 'Suicide Squad' suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, "The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice."
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan's Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Rest in peace, R2.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware's The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it's all I think about now, too.
I saw this yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since pic.twitter.com/S2RVoBswyJ
— sam (@SamSt3bbins) May 16, 2016
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, abolish the Senate, abuse, academia, addiction, alcoholism, aliens, American exceptionalism, anagrams, animals, anime, architecture, austerity, Australia, Barack Obama, Bigfoot, body cameras, books, bronze medals, Bryan Fuller, Case Western, CFPs, cheating, Chernobyl, childbirth, chimera, China, China Miéville, Chris Ware, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, Cloud Atlas, cockroaches, comics, CWRU, David Mitchell, DC Comics, deafness, decency, democracy, disease, Disney, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, doping, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Electoral College, English majors, epistemic closure, ethics, faculty meetings, family leave, fantasy, feminism, film, Flint, flooding, FMLA, game theory, games, Gawker, general election 2016, girlhood, God, group writing assignments, groupwork, guns, Harry Potter, Hawaii, Hawaii Sign Language, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, human-animal hybrids, ice, Iceland, immortality, institutes, James Tiptree Jr., Jessica Jones, karate, Kenny Baker, language, lawns, lead, lead poisoning, license plates, linguistics, literature, Lois Lane, long jump, Louisiana, mad science, Making a Murderer, maps, Marquette, Mars, mass extinction, Mayor McCheese, McDonald's, McSweeney's, Mebane, medieval studies, mental health, mental illness, Merrick Garland, MetaFilter, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, Moirai, money, monstrosity, movies, Mr. Burns, muons, music, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, neoliberalism, New York City, Niku, No Man's Sky, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYC, Ocean's Eight, Octavia Butler, Olympics, online harassment, Orion, outer space, Paul McCartney, pedagogy, personality, Peter Thiel, physics, Pirate Party, podcasts, poetry, police, police violence, politeness, politics, polls, pregnancy, prisoner's dilemma, protons, Proxima Centauri, PT Cruisers, public universities, Puerto Rico, pulse drive, R2-D2, race, race-walking, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, Ray Kurzweil, reading, real estate, refrigeration, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, revenge, rickrolling, riots, sabotage, science fiction, Scooby Doo, segregation, self-driving cards, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, shipwrecks, silver medals, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, street signs, suicide, Suicide Squad, superheroes, Supreme Court, surrealism, surveillance society, syllabus, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Beatles, The Last Days of New Paris, The Last Saturday, The Little Mermaid, the Moon, The Night Of, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the Universe, Third Amendment, this is fine, ties, totality, traffic stops, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unions, violence, voting, water, wealth, weather, white privilege, whiteness, wilderness, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, writing
Easter Monday (Hardly Knew 'Er)
* Marquette suspends McAdams through the fall 2016 semester. Marquette's statement. McAdams has some interesting comments specifically with regard to the the apology requirement on his blog. What a mess.
* Alien vs. Predator: Connecticut Politicians Want to Tax Yale Endowment.
* Husband and wife HMS students seek treatment for her fatal disease. It isn't Huntington's, though it's very similar, and Huntington's research does play a minor role in the story.
* Good Friday in Middle-earth.
* Batman v. Superman: you know, for kids. But, honestly, at this point I almost feel bad.
* For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it's at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It's the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been 15 years in the making. We're neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn't passing. We simply are the villains.
* Why Superheroes Don't Kill.
Captain America: America and decency
Iron Man: the war machine and social progress
Hawkeye: archery and being coolhttps://t.co/hCS4ggdvte
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 27, 2016
* Sanders had a strong week, and this has been a crazy year in politics. But there's nothing in the recent results to suggest that the overall trajectory of the Democratic race has changed. Clinton was and is a prohibitive favorite to win the nomination. The Long March of Bernie's Army.
* For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.
* These Are The Phrases That Sanders And Clinton Repeat Most.
* The death of Twitter.
* Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat. The links keep coming after the picture.
* The Harvard Library That Protects The World's Rarest Colors: The most unusual colors from Harvard's storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.
* The woman who can see 100 times more colors than you can.
* Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience.
* The emergency managers Snyder imposed on Detroit and Flint had no chance of restoring those cities to solvency. Forced austerity can't solve financial problems caused by a low tax base and a lack of revenue sharing. Meanwhile, in Illinois: How to destroy a state.
* Civic leaders in Portland, Oregon, want to start busing homeless people out of town. The city council there quietly set aside $30,000 to buy one-way tickets for certain homeless individuals last week, the Portland Mercury reports.
* Fighting over my vote: Who's the Most UFO-Friendly Presidential Candidate? Related: Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs. And in local news: Aaron Rogers Describes Seeing a UFO in New Jersey in 2005.
* Remembering Perot.
* Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam.
* N.F.L.'s Flawed Concussion Research and Ties to Tobacco Industry. Jerry Jones: Absurd to Link Football to CTE. Absurd!
* How to Make a Hugo.
* The True Story Behind the Legendary "Lost Ending" of The Shining.
* How 4chan and 8chan turned that chatbot racist. How Not to Make a Racist Bot.
* 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life.
* Happily ever after? Advice for mid-career academics.
* About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can't be found in any history books—the written word didn't become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
* Somehow I'd forgotten Netflix is actually doing Voltron, and that wasn't just a joke about the creative bankruptcy of our times.
* This, however, I'm 100% in favor of.
* Why Cryonics Makes Sense.
* Mr. Speaker, this is not a perfect bill. I never said it was. I saw Hamilton, so now I'm going to orphan my son.
* With The Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling Shows Us Harry Potter's Future Isn't What You Expected.
* Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026.
* Harrowing tales of true crime.
* Secret history of the Clinton email scandal.
* They stole Shakespeare's skull!
* To Boldly Go Provides a Rare Look Behind the Scenes of Star Trek.
* Bedrock City in Ruins: The rise and fall of the Flintstone empire.
* Just the thought every parent wants in their mind on the happy occasion of their daughter's fourth birthday: I had a baby in my 40s. Part of my job is preparing my daughter for life without me.
* And there's nothing sweet in life: Red Mars TV Series Now On Hold After Showrunner Suddenly Departs.
Tagged with 1992, 4chan, 8chan, academia, academic freedom, Africa, America, animals, austerity, Batman v. Superman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, chatbots, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, college, color, colors, comics, Comics Code, concussions, Connecticut, conservation, cryonics, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, Detroit, disease, Donald Trump, Easter, ecology, email, endowments, Fast Nein, Flint, Flintstones, football, Freddy Got Fingered, futurity, Good Friday, Hamilton, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugos, Huntington's disease, Illinois, J.K. Rowling, John McAdams, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kubrick, Lord of the Rings, lost endings, Marquette, McSweeney's, medicine, Middle-Earth, military-industrial complex, millennials, mortality, Nazis, neoliberalism, Netflix, NFL, Oregon, Ozymandias, parenting, pedagogy, Perot, photography, politics, Portland, prion disease, pseudolaw, pseudoscience, race, racism, Red Mars, Republicans, ruins, Scandal, science, science fiction, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's skull, social media, Star Trek, Suicide Squad, superheroes, superpowers, taxes, teaching, technology, television, tenure, The Fast and The Furious, the law, the Moon, The Return of the King, The Shining, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, VHS, vigilante justice, Voltron, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, words, Yale, Zoey
One Thousand and One Wednesday Links!
I've been incredibly busy lately, and things are only going to get worse in the next few weeks. But for now, some links!
* I made a Twitterbot that I'm pretty pleased with: @LOLbalwarming. It's the only authentic voice left to us in these tough times.
most lethal superstorm in a generation lolwut
— LOLbalwarming (@LOLbalwarming) January 28, 2015
* Book plug: Shaviro's No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism is really good. It's the #3 book you should buy right now after the longstanding #1 and #2.
* And while I'm hawking stuff on Amazon: they discontinued my Swiss Army canvas wallet, so I had to find a new one. It's leather, alas, but this Fossil wallet is everything else I want. It's great.
* Submitted without comment: Letters in support of John McAdams from FIRE and AAUP.
* The shame of America's parental leave.
* Why, in this day and age, is there even a Save command in any application? Its very presence implies — indeed, guarantees — that the default state of the world is unsafe. This breaks the rule our ancestors learned over billions of years of interaction with the objective world: when you do something, it stays done, until undone. Saving considered harmful. After what happened to me the other week, I am 100% on board with this.
Help: Word just turned my entire conference paper, which is in an hour, into 130 pages of gibberish. Is there any way to recover the file?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 29, 2015
* Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.
* On Weird Fiction and the Interstitial.
* Chris Ware, The Art of Comics No. 2.
* Great job alert: Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured).
* Salaita Goes After University Donors in Lawsuit Over Job Loss at Illinois. UIUC responds.
* The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation.
* Facebook vs. the News Feed.
* Against professors as mandatory reporters.
* Scott Walker budget cut sparks sharp debate on UW System. Deep cuts in Wisconsin. Anticipating budget cuts, nervous UW System tried to strike deal. Republican UW Professor Has Sharp Words For Walker Over Faculty Comment. Scott Walker's State of Ignorance. A reckless proposal. A self-inflicted wound. Be skeptical. Chasing away UW's stars. Cut athletics.
* Of course there's time to kill primary and secondary ed, too.
* From the archives, apropos of absolutely nothing: Stalin, CEO.
* "No Crisis" is a Los Angeles Review of Books special series considering the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. A new installment to the series will be released at the beginning of each month through the fall of 2015. Our aim, as our introductory essay explains, is to "show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times."
* As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities. I want to suggest further that their disinterest is right and even salutary, because what I really mean is that undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.
* Exciting new degradations: Bill Would Allow Texas Teachers To Kill Students.
* Howard Middle School Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History.
* Detroit Cop Who Killed 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones While She Slept Walks Free.
* Texas school suspends 9-year-old for making 'terroristic threats' with magic 'Hobbit' ring.
Kermit Elementary Principal Roxanne Greer told the Odessa American that she could not comment on the suspension, because "all student stuff is confidential," but Steward said that she told him that any and all threats to a child's safety — including magical ones — would be taken seriously by the school.
* Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor tries to put a good spin on what for all the world looks like elder abuse.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15, Cont'd: "Wellness" and the Anti-Vaxxers.
* In France, police bravely defend liberal democracy from an eight-year-old boy.
* The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland.
* Why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?
* Grace has Type 1 diabetes, for which there is no cure. Now 15 years old, she has endured approximately 34,000 blood tests, 5,550 shots and 1,660 medical tubing injections to keep her alive.
* "Soldiers familiar with social media sought for 77th Brigade, which will be responsible for 'non-lethal warfare.'"
* The War Photo No One Would Publish.
* On running and street harassment.
* Bring the Jubilee: Croatia Cancels Debts For Tens Of Thousands Of Its Poorest People.
* Boing Boing reviews David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules.
* Understanding The Man in the High Castle.
In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick's version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it's a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. "Truth, she thought. As terrible as death." That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick's novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it's still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.
* The Institute for Dark Tourism Research aims to advance knowledge about the act of visitation to tourist sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre.
* Jupiter Ascending is the latest movie to prove there's no movie so bad the Wachowskis won't be allowed to make another one.
* Americans Are Working So Hard, It's Actually Killing People.
* The kids aren't all right.
* Study: You Can't Change an Anti-Vaxxer's Mind.
* Roald Dahl vs. the measles.
* Let's politicize vaccines because why not.
* But friends, I'm here to tell you: it gets worse.
* Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they'd committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he'd committed 40.
* Great read about one of the founders of the Men's Rights Movement, a former national feminist.
* Inside that creepy Nationwide ad. "Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun."
* Which Racist UNC Building Are You Today? The University of North Carolina's Silent Sam Statue Represents a Legacy of White Supremacy.
* Clergy Send In Photos To Replace Images Of Black Youth Police Were Using For Target Practice.
* Food Not Bombs Sues Fort Lauderdale Over Homeless Feeding Law.
* A brief history of the Star Wars expanded universe.
* A brief history of the Super Bowl points spread.
* The shame of the Patriots fan. They even managed to sneak in one more on their way to the championship last weekend.
* Study Links Playing Tackle Football Before Age 12 To Cognitive Impairment.
* Watching football after a traumatic brain injury.
* Football has become a sport of science fiction, one that inhabits a world that only exists on television.
* The last days of football.
* Florida says parents can't opt out their kids from standardized tests.
* The Cops Don't Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
* BREAKING: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.
* Propaganda has gotten way more sophisticated since the old days.
* Man Wakes Up From Bender With Financial Problems Solved.
* Consumption Of Buncha Crunch Reverently Paused During Unsettling Scenes Of 'American Sniper.'
* Report: Most Americans Can't Even Name Their State's Shadow Lord.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Student evaluations are terrible, episode 281.
* Transgender Kids Identify With Their Gender As Completely As Cisgender Kids.
* Coming out as poor at an elite university.
* Probably wouldn't be my first choice if I had that kind of cash, but: The Vatican Will Offer Free Shaves And Haircuts To Rome's 3,276 Homeless People.
* Emoji and the law.
* Disability, the state, and minimum wage.
* Pettiness and the human condition.
* UVM Recognizes "Neutral" as a Gender Identity.
* Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
* How to tell if you are in a soft science fiction novel.
* Fun With Conspiracy Theories: Did the Chernobyl Disaster Cover Up Something Even Worse? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
* New York cooks up a special unit for kicking hippies.
* When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild.
* Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults.
* When you stare too long into the abyss.
* The #1 reason people die early, in each country.
* Useless but Interesting Facts About America's Married Couples.
* No, you're lonely and depressed and lack self-control.
* The United States is becoming a terrible place for air travel. "Becoming."
* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is back.
* And you can always spot the children of sociologists.
Tagged with 2 Kill 2 Mockingbirds, AAUP, academia, academic freedom, accelerationism, actually existing media bias, air travel, airplanes, all your nightmares are real, Amazon, America, apocalypse, austerity, binge watching, black history, bureaucracy, busy, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, CEOs, Chris Ware, class struggle, climate change, comics, crisis, David Graeber, death, decadence, depression, digital humanities, disability, ecology, eldercare, Eliezer Yudkowsky, empire, endowed chairs, Facebook, fan fiction, film, fire, gender, Green Planets, Harper Lee, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, Howard University, if you want a vision of the future, kids today, lame excuses for why I haven't been blogging enough, lizard people, LOLapocalypse, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles Review of Books, Madison, manifestos, Marquette, marriage, maternity leave, McSweeney's, mortality, my media empire, neoliberalism, Netflix, Oakland, outer space, paperwork, parental leave, pedagogy, police violence, politics, preschool, race, rape, rape culture, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, save, science fiction, Scott Walker, self-control, sociology, Stalin, statistics, Steve Shaviro, Steven Salaita, teaching, television, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Hobbit, the humanities, the law, the One Ring, the suckiness of Microsoft Word, Title IX, To Kill a Mockingbird, trans* issues, Twitter, Twitterbots, UIUC, University of Wisconsin, unnecessary sequels, Utopia, UWM, vaccines, violence, wallets, war on education, wellness, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words
* The end of UW: Gov. Scott Walker to propose 13 percent cut, more freedom for UW System. UW System predicts layoffs, no campus closings under budget cuts. Layoffs, Building Closures, Slowdown on Admissions. But "few details."
* But there's always money in the banana stand.
* In praise of zombies. A response to yesterday's anti-Canavanist IHE polemic.
Giving students access to an important, brilliant, historically significant corpus of art seems to be an entirely appropriate activity for the undergraduate classroom at a university. After you have taken a Zombie Course, you may discover you have actually just taken a Great Books (or in the case of Ware, a Great Box) course without realizing it, and you may also decide that any Great Books course worthy of its name cannot afford to ignore the recent surge of brilliant zombie art. If anything, we need more Zombie Courses than we have, and one hopes — in time — even full-blown Zombie Majors (or at the least Zombie Double-Majors).
* Multiple Choice and Testing Machines: A History.
* "What I would say about the university today," he says, "is that we're living through an absolutely historic moment – namely the effective end of universities as centres of humane critique, an almost complete capitulation to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism."
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is coming soon.
* Higher Education Is Not a Mixtape.
* The Climate Science Behind New England's Historic Blizzard. Massive Blizzard Exposes How Decrepit New York City's Infrastructure Is.
* All Our Grievances Are Connected.
* How the Left Won Greece.
* Forget immoral; the latest legal challenge to Obamacare is still nonsense.
* Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes On the Entire Internet. It's a terrible op-ed that makes an important point badly in the midst of saying a bunch of incorrect things, all in the service of a fundamentally bad framing — so of course it's all we can talk about.
* To Collect Debts, Nursing Homes Are Seizing Control Over Patients.
It was a guardianship petition filed by the nursing home, Mary Manning Walsh, asking the court to give a stranger full legal power over Mrs. Palermo, now 90, and complete control of her money.
Few people are aware that a nursing home can take such a step.
* Associate Dean of What?
* Drone, Too Small for Radar to Detect, Rattles the White House.
* Defending those accused of unthinkable crimes.
* One aspect of that danger is the "abstract authority" of astrologers, now mirrored by the black-box algorithms of the cloud. The opacity of the analytic method lends forecasts their appearance of authoritative objectivity. In "Astrological Forecasts", Adorno notes "the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning." "Treated as impersonal and thing-like," stars appear "entirely abstract, unapproachable, and anonymous" and thus more objective than mere fallible human reason. Similarly, as Kate Crawford pointed out in an essay about fitness trackers for the Atlantic, "analytics companies aren't required to reveal which data sets they are using and how they are being analyzed." The inaccessible logic of their proprietary algorithms is imposed on us, and their inscrutability masquerades as proof of their objectivity. As Crawford argues, "Prioritizing data—irregular, unreliable data—over human reporting, means putting power in the hands of an algorithm." As Adorno puts it, "The cult of God has been replaced by the cult of facts."
* America and fractal inequality.
* 100% of the women of color interviewed in STEM study experienced gender bias.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* Today, more U.S. women die in childbirth and from pregnancy-related causes than at almost any point in the last 25 years. The United States is the one of only seven countries in the entire world that has experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past decade.
* Marissa Alexander is out of jail after three years.
* What has happened before will happen again, subprime auto edition.
* Huckabee Complains That Women Can Cuss In The Workplace: 'That's Just Trashy.'
* Oklahoma GOP wants to restrict marriage to people of faith.
* Corey Robin, against public intellectuals.
* I linked to a story about this the other day, but here's the resolution: Vanderbilt Football Players Found Guilty of Raping Unconscious Student. Of course the next horrifying story in this wretched, endless series is already queued up.
* American Sniper focuses in tight on one man's story of trauma, leaving out the complex questions of why Kyle was in Iraq being traumatized in the first place. The Iraqis in the film are villains, caricatures, and targets, and the only real opinion on them the film offers is Kyle's. The Iraqis are all "savages" who threaten American lives and need to be killed. There's some truth in this representation, insofar as this is how a lot of American soldiers thought. Yet the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the "war on terror." It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero.
* Freakishly Old System Of Planets Hint At Ancient Alien Civilizations. Okay, I'm in for three films with an option on a television reboot.
* Vulture says Jason Segel is good as David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour, but I'll never accept it.
* The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing.
* The Politics Of The Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have Civil Rights?
* It's finally happening, and of course it's starting in Florida: 'Zombie cat' crawls out of grave.
* And while this may be of interest only to those whose children have made them watch untold hours of Dora the Explorer, it's certainly of interest to me: Swiper the Fox has a totally bananas backstory.
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Adorno, America, American Sniper, apocalypse, astrology, atheism, austerity, Barack Obama, Big Data, blizzards, childbirth, Chris Hayes, civil rights, class struggle, climate change, comics, Corey Robin, David Foster Wallace, debt, defense attorneys, Dora the Explorer, drones, ecology, eldercare, English majors, extrasolar planets, facts, film, Florida, fractal inequality, free speech, games, gender, Ghostbusters, ghosts, Great Books, Greece, guns, health care, How the University Works, Huckabee, income inequality, infrastructure, Jason Segel, Jonathan Chait, kids today, Marissa Alexander, marriage, marriage equality, McSweeney's, medicine, Milwaukee, misogyny, MOOCs, multiple choice, narrative, neoliberalism, New York, nursing homes, Oklahoma, outer space, pedagogy, political correctness, politics, public intellectuals, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, scams, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, single payer, speech codes, sportsball, stadiums, stand your ground, standardized testing, Stanford, statistics, subprime loans, Supreme Court, Swiper no swiping, Terry Eagleton, the courts, the elderly, The End of the Tour, the law, the Left, trauma, University of Wisconsin, UWM, violence, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, what it is I think I'm doing, White House, Wisconsin, writing, zombies
A Very Special Second Helping of Friday Links
* A new Kelly Link story at McSweeney's. It's a very Merry Christmas indeed.
* Serial decided when it would end, so it could continue. What's the Verdict? Racism and the Case against Serial. More on That Later: The Truth about Serial. I don't want to brag guys but I solved this whole thing yesterday in just one tweet:
SINGLE TWEETS THAT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING: legality, legitimacy, ethics, and "the truth" are distinct but overlapping categories.
* Silent Spring: Autism linked to 3rd trimester pollution exposure.
* Why Many Inner City Schools Function Like Prisons. School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson.
* Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.
* Your Waitress, Your Professor.
My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I'm not only an academic, but a "survival" jobholder, I'll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and "intelligent" work.
* The best thing on the Internet today: Pulp Nintendo 1, 2, 3.
* You'll never get me into one of those things: the transporter is real.
* John Protevi has another good post on the situation at Marquette for those following this story on which I am not commenting (am not commenting, AM not commenting, am NOT commenting…):
As to Marquette's current course of action, I find it troubling, but I would hazard a guess at to their motivations, based on a presumption that university administrations use a risk management rationality: MU may think that their risk of losing a Title IX suit or OCR complaint claiming that they did nothing when a student was subject to the creation of a hostile work or education environment was greater than the risk of their losing a wrongful discipline case by McAdams, as well as the cost to their reputation if people cast this as an academic freedom issue and the cost to their donor base by alums who take McAdams's side.
The above is an explanation, not a justification. The university's risk management calculations might converge with normative values if one feels that a claim of academic freedom does not excuse the creation of a hostile environment for a student.
* Gritty Realism, Snowpiercer, and the Tedious Trauma of the Real. I'm just glad we've finally found a scenario where rotating enslavement of children is the progressive solution.
* Who do you think would win if Batman fought Superman?
* And Merry Christmas, just kidding: Santa's real workshop: the town in China that makes the world's Christmas decorations.
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, air pollution, autism, Batman, China, ecology, existential dread, Ferguson, How the University Works, Kelly Link, kids today, Marquette, McSweeney's, Merry Christmas, Metroid, Nintendo, politics, prison-industrial complex, public health, Pulp Fiction, race, racism, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school-to-prison pipeline, science fiction, science is magic, segregation, Serial, Silent Spring, slavery, Snowpiercer, St. Louis, Star Trek, Super Mario, Superman, sweatshops, the courts, the law, Title IX, transporters, true crime, Utopia, war on education, white privilege, whiteness, Won't somebody think of the children?, Zelda
Wednesday Everything
* Too big to disaccredit: I should have realized the insanity at Oregon was because of college football.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 14: Failure.
* One weird trick to actually get a cop fired for brutally assaulting someone. You'll never guess what makes this case special!
* Meanwhile: Grand Juries Should Be Abolished.
* Even if you think that IQ tests are unscientific mumbo-jumbo, it's amazing to learn that some US police departments don't, and furthermore, that they defended their legal right to exclude potential officers because they tested too high.
* 20 Key Findings about CIA Interrogations. The Intercept's live blog. The Torture Apologia Chart. Obama, war criminal. But the ACLU has One Weird Trick to fix everything.
America Announces It Will Donate 15% of Net Proceeds to Anti-Torture Charities
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2014
Got Caught Torturing, Pay $15
Release Torture Report, Lose a Turn
* Today's science fiction, tomorrow's light switch: 22 unexpected sources of power that will exist in the future.
* Ultimately, the Lovecraft statue must go. He may be replaced by Butler, or Carrie Cuinn's sea serpent wrapped around the world idea or any of the many other options, but the fantasy community cannot embrace its growing fanbase of color with one hand while deifying a writer who happily advocated for our extermination with the other.
* The College Rape Overcorrection. I know this article is infuriating a lot of people, but I must admit I found it informative, and challenging despite its flaws.
*Best Way for Professors to Get Good Student Evaluations? Be Male.
* The death of cinema. The death of television.
* Scenes from the charter school scam: an exciting opportunity for administrative bloat.
* The Best Children's Books of 2014.
* You thought you had Frozen Fever before.
* "I can even go back to being Ronnie Bridgeman, but I'm not," he said. "They killed Ronnie Bridgeman. They killed his spirit. They killed everything he believed in, everything he ever wanted. I wanted to be something, too. I could have been a lawyer possibly. I could have been Barack Obama. Who knows?"
* From the McSweeney's archives: I'm an English Professor in a Movie.
* Easily the most Harvard thing that's ever happened.
* The Left Can Win.
* And because you demanded it: The Superman prequel will finally tell the story of Superman's grandfather. Decades of waiting, redeemed at last!
Tagged with 2014, academia, accreditation, ACLU, administrative blight, administrative bloat, America, austerity, Barack Obama, books, Bush, charter schools, children's books, CIA, class struggle, Cleveland, college football, college sports, Disney, Don't mention the war, energy, failure, fantasy, feminism, film, Frozen, grand juries, H.P. Lovecraft, Harvard, headbrick, How the University Works, IQ, Krypton, McSweeney's, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, NCAA, Octavia Butler, pardons, pedagogy, police, police brutality, police state, prequels, race, racism, rape, rape culture, scams, science fiction, student evaluations, Superman, television, the courts, the law, the Left, torture, University of Oregon, war crimes, what it is I think I'm doing, words
All the Weekend Links (100%)
* Jaimee has one of her phobia poems up at Drunken Boat's "funny" issue: "Derrida Eats a Dorito."
* CFPs: ICFA 36: The Scientific Imagination. Joss Whedon's Comics. Assemble! The Making and Re-Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction.
* MLA Subcon is trying to raise some money for its operations at indiegogo.
* New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change. Speaking for all of Wisconsin: this does not bode well.
* I have to say I really like what Freddie says about privilege and merit here.
Instead, the point should be to ask people to see the ways in which all of our lives are conditioned by vast forces we cannot control, that these forces in general work to the benefit and hindrance of certain broad groups of people in a way that conflicts with our conceptions of justice, and that we can build a more just, more equitable world if we acknowledge that no one's life is the product only of their work ethic and intelligence.
The long-term project of those who decry the role of unearned advantage in human society should not be to try and parse who is most and least privileged. The project should be to deny the salience of "merit" as a moral arbiter of material security and comfort. The very notion of just deserts– the notion that some people have legitimate accomplishments that we must celebrate because they represent "merit," whatever that is, distinct from their privileges– is what has to die. There is no space where privilege ends and legitimate accomplishment begins. There is, instead, a world of such multivariate complexity that we can never know whose accomplishments are earned and whose aren't. Instead, we should recognize the folly of tying material security and comfort to our flawed perceptions of other people's value, and instead institute an economic system based on the absolute right of all people to food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education.
* Kazuo Ishiguro to publish first novel since Never Let Me Go. I am on board. More links below the photo!
* And on the other side of the spectrum: Margaret Atwood's new work will remain unseen for a century.
* Shock, horror: Most college classes cost more online than on campus.
* The Classroom of the Future.
* Q. How did you make the transition from professor to president? A. Maybe some of our problems in education today stem from the fact that someone like me is considered an unconventional choice. Maybe academic institutions should be run by academics, the way they used to be.
* Wisconsin inches closer to dubious obesity milestone.
* On Christopher Tolkien protecting The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales from New Line. I hadn't realized that Peter Jackson was prohibited from making reference to those works in his films; that's fascinating…
* If Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
* "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'u' and 'i' in the same eight-person, windowless office."
* The New York Times pans a novel for being insufficiently pro-conquistador. The Economist wrings its hands over whether maybe we're not being fair to slaveowners.
* The Justice Department will investigate the entire Ferguson police force. How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. Twitter Headquarters Has Painted #Ferguson On Its Office Wall.
* Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received "many" specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.
* Feisal G. Mohamed and Cary Nelson debate the Salaita firing. Salaita and the Accreditors.
* This Is What It's Like To Sit Through An Anti-Union Meeting At Work.
* Gaming doesn't have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming's advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.
* Five myths about California's drought. The news is not good, friends.
* Here's Who Really Controls California's Water.
* Staff at an Arizona gun range reportedly told investigators that the release forms signed by the family of a 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi last week were unavailable because they had been "blown away by the wind." I've head less convincing excuses, I guess.
* Biden's warning to ISIS militants: 'We will follow them to the gates of hell.' 200 U.S. troops headed to Ukraine for 'peace-keeping exercise' as Obama condemns Russian aggression.
* Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead.
* Today in the rule of law: Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And When.
* But don't worry: The system works. Antonin Scalia's Favorite Murderer Is Innocent.
* Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.
* L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA.
* NYPD Pays $33K to Settle Suit After Mistaking Jolly Ranchers for Meth.
* Police telling victims to solve crimes by themselves.
* In New York, a human rights lawyer has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD after she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk while waiting for her husband and kids to use the bathroom at a Times Square restaurant.
* The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
* The Worst Airbnb in the Universe: 22 Beds in One Apartment. Imagine this being your home. Imagine this being your neighbor.
* The fight for the Senate is getting weird y'all.
* For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police.
* A horrifying new study says one in five women have been raped.
* "After the football season ended."
* Vox says your revolution is over, the bums lost.
* Our congresswoman was arrested today at a fast food workers' strike.
* The killable horde.
* For the first time ever, neuroscientists have demonstrated the viability of direct — and completely non-invasive — brain-to-brain communication in humans. Remarkably, the experiment allowed subjects to exchange mentally-conjured words despite being 5,000 miles apart.
* Science fiction classics in the news: Syfy Greenlights Six-Hour Miniseries Childhood's End.
* BP May Be Fined Up to $18 Billion for Spill in Gulf. Almost 18 days revenue, less than a year's profit…
* Workers At Coal Waste Landfill Told That Coal Ash Is 'Safe Enough To Eat,' Lawsuit Says.
* Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny. Joan Rivers and today's comediennes.
* Downloaded Games Have A Larger Carbon Footprint Than Blu-Ray Discs. There's some really questionable assumptions in here, but the argument that theres's some point where this is true is an important one.
* A Child Helps Your Career, If You're a Man.
Ms. Budig found that on average, men's earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women's decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people's labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.
* Here's why CVS stopped selling cigarettes.
* Here's why Twitter shouldn't algorithmize users' feeds.
* This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe.
* Bold new directions: Shazam will differ from other DC movies by being fun.
* Every popular text eventually gets an "it was all just a hallucination" rewrite. Today it's Harry Potter's turn.
* New Girl at School Had to Wear "Shame Suit" After Dress Code Violation.
* Werner Herzog will guest star on Parks And Recreation.
* Nothing good will happen anymore: Actually, HBO didn't commission more Flight Of The Conchords.
* Here's something I should probably waste all my money on.
* New Miracleman Comics Stories (Including One by Grant Morrison) Coming Soon.
* This Map Shows How Hunting Wiped Out Whales In Less Than A Century.
* And FiveThirtyEight is there with a hot take: If Tony Survived The 'Sopranos' Finale, He's Probably Alive Today.
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic bias, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, Airbnb, algorithms, animal personhood, animals, Arthur C. Clarke, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, books, BP, Breaking Bad, California, capitalism, Captain Marvel, carbon footprint, CFPs, Childhood's End, CIA, cigarettes, class struggle, climate change, coal, college football, colonialism, comedy, comics, communism, CVs, DC Comics, death penalty, Deepwater Horizon, deliberate misreadings, Derrida, dress codes, drought, ecology, Fantastic Mr. Fox, fast food, fathers, Ferguson, film, flexible online education, Flight of the Conchords, forever war, games, graduate student life, Grant Morrison, guns, Gwen Moore, Harry Potter, HBO, Hell, How the University Works, ICFA, Iraq, ISIS, Jaimee, Joan Rivers, Joe Biden, Joss Whedon, Kansas, Kazuo Ishiguro, kids today, labor, Laniakea, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, mass extinction, McSweeney's, merit, meth, Milky Way, Milwaukee, Miracleman, misogyny, Missouri, MLA Subcon, neoliberalism, NYPD, obesity, oil, oil spill, parenting, Parks and Recreation, patriarchy, pedagogy, Peter Frase, phobias, poetry, polar vortex, police, police brutality, police state, politics, pollution, privilege, progress, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rule of law, Scalia, science fiction, science is magic, sexism, Shazam, slavery, socialism, Sopranos, St. Louis, standardized testing, Steve Salaita, stop-and-frisk, strikes, Supreme Court, SyFy, teaching, technology, telepathy, television, tenure, The Buried Giant, the cosmos, the courts, The Hobbit, the law, the long now, The Onion, The Rock, the Senate, The Silmarillion, Tolkien, Twitter, UIUC, Ukraine, unions, We're doomed, We're screwed, Werner Herzog, Wes Anderson, whales, what it is I think I'm doing, white people, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, zombies
All the Monday Links!
* Look alive, Octavia Butler scholars! 2015-16 Fellowships at the Huntington.
* Exciting crowdfunding project on disability and science fiction: Accessing the Future.
* If what we were fighting against in World War II were not just enemy nations but fascism and militarism, then did the atomic bombs that massacred the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — coming as a grand climax to our "strategic bombing" of European and Asian cities — help bring us victory? Or defeat?
* The long-standing paradox of human rights is that the declaration to observe them is a hollow scream that follows their loss.
* Is Genocide Right For You?
* The Sheep Look Up: 7 Things You Need To Know About The Toxin That's Poisoned Ohio's Drinking Water. Farming practices and climate change at root of Toledo water pollution.
* Newborns laugh in their sleep, say Japanese researchers.
* Common sense solutions to alt-pop song problems.
Problem: We all want something beautiful, man I wish I was beautiful.
Solution: Diet, exercise, and plastic surgery.
* Op-ed: Adjuncts should unionize.
* What colleges can learn from journalism schools. English departments seem particularly well-positioned to apply some of these lessons.
* Meet The Sexual Assault Adviser Top U.S. Colleges Have On Speed Dial.
* Understanding college discounting.
* The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
* Emirates becomes first major international airline to suspend all flights to virus-affected region. Why you're not going to get Ebola in the U.S.
* When Moral Panics Collide! GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination.
* The Golden Age of Comics Is Now.
* Just another weekend in Milwaukee.
* IRS Agrees To Monitor Religious Groups For Political Campaigning.
* How an honors student became a hired killer.
* A Thai surrogate mother said Sunday that she was not angry with the Australian biological parents who left behind a baby boy born with Down syndrome, and hoped that the family would take care of the boy's twin sister they took with them. Honestly, I think I'm pretty mad at them.
* Is Howard the Duck Really Marvel's Next Franchise? A Close Look at the Evidence.
* They say Western civilization's best days are behind it, but Bill Murray will star as Baloo in Disney's live-action The Jungle Book.
* Ever tried. Ever meowed. No matter. Try Again. Meow again. Meow better. Beckittens.
* Filming is apparently wrapping on Fantastic Four, but they didn't even have a teaser trailer for Comic-Con. This film must be a complete disaster. Can't wait!
* Why are we impeaching Obama today?
* The third Lev Grossman Magicians book ships tomorrow. Soon to be a TV show, maybe!
* Presenting the all-new, all-different Ghostbustrixes.
* Always remember: The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.
* And it took its sweet time, but the Singularity is finally here.
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, assassination, babies, Barack Obama, Bill Murray, class struggle, climate change, comics, cosmonauts, Counting Crows, disability, disasters, dissertations, Down Syndrome, ecology, English departments, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Fantastic Four, fellowships, film, First Amendment, genocide, Ghostbusters, Google, guns, Hiroshima, How the University Works, Howard the Duck, human rights, Huntington Library, immigration, impeachment, industrial agriculture, IRS, Jungle Book, kittens, Lev Grossman, Marvel, McSweeney's, Milwaukee, moral panics, motivational posters, music, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Ohio, outer space, pedagogy, poison, politics, pollution, rape, rape culture, religion, Samuel Beckett, satire, science fiction, surrogate parents, taxes, the archives, The Magicians, The Sheep Look Up, the Singularity, theses, Title IX, Toledo, true crime, tuition, unions, vaccination, virtual reality, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, water, World War II, writing, xkcd, zunguzungu
Tuesday Night Links
* Welcome to My Massive Open Online Cult!
Welcome to my MOOC—Massive Open Online Cult—a 10-week course based on the revolutionary educational models of Coursera and edX. Due to the "massive" nature of this course, I am unable to interact with prospective cult members individually. Though I am acutely aware that the most fulfilling cult leader/acolyte relationship arises from months of sustained and deeply personal psychological manipulation, this is simply not an option with the MOOC format. However, I will do my best to break down your resistance mechanisms throughout the taped lectures.
* Alex Kudera considers adjunct misery. Treating graduate students as people, not just scholars in training, will make them better professionals. Our Dirty Little Secret.
Now that three-quarters of college teachers are contingent faculty members like Duffleman, the depiction of professors as tweedy, pipe-smoking dons or turtlenecked, bearded radicals with actual authority is inherently reactionary. It paints all faculty members as a pampered elite, disconnected from the "real world," ignoring the reality that most of them have more in common with Wal-Mart employees than they do with the one-percenters who preside over Kudera's urban academic hellscape of poverty, terrorism, outsourcing, deskilling, externalization of costs, and privatization of profits.
* Hollis surveyed administrators in higher education, with the somewhat startling result that "close to 62% of respondents . . . confirmed that they had been bullied or witnessed bullying in their higher education positions in the last 18 months" (36). And while "African Americans, women, and members of the LGBT community experience proportionally higher levels of bullying," Hollis found that men in higher education still reported rates of bullying higher than the national rate (41, 42). Hollis argues that these differential rates demonstrate that there is considerable intersection between bullying and harassment, which may expose colleges and universities to legal jeopardy.
* University of California – Diploma Mill.
(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.
* As the debate about the drone and the war on terror in America emerges, these are the voices that are not heard—those of the victims and the targeted communities.
* Salesmen in the Surgical Suite.
* SCOTUSblog menu of today's coverage of the Proposition 8 argument. Emblazoned in red, same-sex marriage dominates social media.
At this blog, Lyle Denniston observes that, with the Justices so clearly split along ideological lines, focusing on Justice Kennedy to predict an outcome was an "even more reliable approach this time" than usual, and Justice Kennedy appeared strongly tempted to conclude that the case was improvidently granted. Thus, as Amy Howe observes in her review of the arguments "in Plain English," "the real question before the Court is not whether it would strike down Proposition 8, or what the broader effect of such a decision might be, but whether it is going to reach the merits of the case at all." Tom Goldsteinexplains that if these indications hold true, the Court's ruling will take one of two forms: Either the Court could conclude that the proponents of Proposition 8 lacked standing to bring the claim, in which case it would "vacate the Ninth Circuit opinion but leave in place the distinct court decision invalidating Proposition 8," or "the Court may dismiss the case because of an inability to reach a majority. . . . The upshot of either scenario is a modest step forward for gay rights advocates, but not a dramatic one."
* Atheism as the next civil right issue? We shall overcome…
* Robots Have Taken All the Good Jobs, Report Economists.
* Aaron Bady vs. magical realism. Aaron vs. the Great American Novel.
* Google Objects To Existence Of New Swedish Word.
* Planetary gets an omnibus.
* John Brunner accurately predicted 2013.
* Rand Paul continues his hard pitch at the readers of this blog: Sen. Paul: Obama, Bush 'lucky' they weren't arrested for smoking pot as kids.
"Look, the last two presidents could conceivably have been put in jail for their drug use," Paul said on "Fox News Sunday."
"Look what would have happened. It would have ruined their lives. They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don't get lucky. They don't have good attorneys. They go to jail for these things. And I think it's a big mistake."
* And another great what if: With today's technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I?
Tagged with 2013, 9/11, academia, activism, adjuncts, America, atheism, automation, bullies, bullying, Calfornia, civil rights, comics, cults, diploma mills, drones, empire, Facebook, gay rights, Google, graduate student life, Great American Novel, How the University Works, John Brunner, magical realism, marijuana, marriage equality, McSweeney's, medicine, MOOCs, my particular demographic, Occupy Cal, Planetary, politics, Rand Paul, robots, science fiction, Stand on Zanzibar, Supreme Court, Sweden, the courts, the law, trademarks, Voyager, war on drugs, words, Zero Dark Thirty, zunguzungu

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