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Posts Tagged 'Breaking Bad'
* Been waiting for this one for a while: Chris Ware talks Rusty Brown.
* Boots Riley has a key read on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that has been left out of nearly every review or thinkpiece I've seen. Here's one thinkpiece that does take it up.
Re Once Upon A Time In Hollywood:
The Manson Family were overt White Supremacists who tried to start a race war w the goal of killing Black folks.
They werent "hippies" spouting left critiques of media. They were rightwingers.
This fact flips Tarantino's allegory on its head.
— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) August 24, 2019
* Elsewhere on the Tarantino beat: Box Office Milestone: 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' Crosses $200M Globally, one of only two non-franchise films to earn that much this year.
* What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires. The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It's Gone. Why Are We Even Responding to John Delaney? The Democrats are climate deniers.
The liberal order doesn't even have a way to say "now, now, Mr. Bolsonaro, that's not nice" when the future is at stake.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2019
no it was the rich people who did it https://t.co/ICNi1SOlgb
* Summer on the swollen Great Lakes.
This. Climate reporting should be a major beat with serious devotion of resources. It takes connecting many particular human experiences to global transformation to make change. https://t.co/J2sd5dyKr8
— erica robles-anderson (@fstflofscholars) August 25, 2019
* The Bone Thief died. :( David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier.
* The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren.
* We got him! I'd like to see Ole Donny Trump wriggle out of THIS jam!
* Northern Ireland is already spiralling out of control but no one is paying attention.
* When Your Rapist Demands Custody.
* Gamergate will always be with us.
* Aaron Bady on Ready or Not.
Such an ending would imply that the ludicrous caricatures we imagine into existence to justify our preposterous wars with each other are, actually, just the pretexts we want and need to justify violence. In other words, it would skewer movies like The Hunt, and the ideological fantasies that divide the country into red and blue caricatures. If The Hunt seems to take a side — endorsing, by all indications, the worldview of its "deplorable" protagonists — Ready or Notnearly ends by suggesting that the stories we might tell ourselves to normalize violence are nonsense.
Instead, as it turns out…
* An update on a bizarre story: Ugandan mothers want justice for their children who died in care of an unlicensed American health worker.
* When You Can't Afford School Lunch, the Toll Is More Than Just Physical.
* The New American Homeless.
* "The difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years."
* Insulin Prices Killed Josh Wilkerson. Now His Mother Is Taking On Big Pharma.
* Negative interest rates are coming and they are downright terrifying.
* Hellen Keller was a revolutionary socialist who wanted to abolish capitalism lol
* Suffering makes better art.
JUST SAYIN pic.twitter.com/kIjUTnrHlF
— I am the utterance of my name (@filamena) August 24, 2019
* Fairy stories have always been radical.
* The legality of owning a kangaroo in the United States. Kudos to Wisconsin for keeping freedom alive.
* And, finally, the story that never needed to be told is here!
Tagged with actually existing media bias, America, animals, art, Beto O'Rourke, Big Pharma, Bolsonaro, Boots Riley, Borders, Brazil, Breaking Bad, Breaking Bad: The Movie, capitalism, Charles Manson, Chris Ware, class struggle, climate change, climate denialism, comics, David Koch, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, denialism, depression, diabetes, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, fairy stories, Gamergate, general election 2020, Great Lakes, Helen Keller, homelessness, insulin, John Delaney, kangaroos, Lake Michigan, liberalism, life expectancy, lunch debt, missionaries, nationalism, Northern Ireland, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, One Upon a Time in Hollywood, politics, poverty, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Ready or Not, Rusty Brown, school lunches, suffering, superheroes, Tarantino, taxes, the Amazon, the bone thief died, the most dangerous game, the news, Tolkien, true crime, Uganda, war on education, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, zunguzungu
* In local news: Dangerous Levels of 'Erin Brockovich' Chemical Found in Local Drinking Water.
* Great little Wisconsin story about the hotel NFL teams stay at when they play the Packers.
* A brief history of Tetris.
* To understand Charlotte's rage, you have to understand its roads. A Homegirl Reflecting on Charlotte Uprising.
* Homeless and in graduate school.
* The survey that Williams was part of, the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), may be the first rigorous, detailed look at eviction in a major city. Interviewers like Williams spoke to about 1,100 Milwaukee-area tenants between 2009 and 2011, asking them a battery of questions on their housing history. The survey has already fundamentally changed researchers' understanding of eviction, revealing the problem to be far larger than previously understood.
* The rise and rise of tabletop gaming.
* It's genuinely disturbing how easy it is to make a 269-269 electoral map, and how plausible that outcome seems.
* Here's Everything Donald Trump Has Promised to Do on His First Day as President. Seven Days of Donald Trump's Lies. Scope of Trump's falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate. Donald Trump's Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths. The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. Bruce vs. Trump. Trump's jet vs. the taxpayers. Intel Officials Investigating Trump Advisor's Ties To Putin Allies. Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia. Pregaming the debate. And again. And again. And again.
"Trump looked like a president tonight" will be the media's mantra tomorrow night barring anything short of a stroke on stage.
* Obama legacy project, take one.
* Know your 1%.
* From the right: "Against democracy."
* Roughly speaking, a white voter will lean left if she is "more college than church" and will lean right if she is "more church than college."
* Democrats don't actually want to win, exhibit 37,000.
* If you want a vision of the future:
The Democrats have become the party, not of some specific ideological agenda, but of the traditional system as such. One of Obama's major goals has been to rehabilitate the Republicans and force them to act as a worthy opponent rather than an implacable foe. This approach was naive and in many ways dangerous, as shown most vividly when Obama tried to "leverage" the Republicans' unprecedented brinksmanship on the debt ceiling to engineer a "grand bargain" on the deficit, but it fits with the view that the system only works if there are two worthy opponents locked in an eternal struggle with no final victories. We can see something similar in Clinton's controversial decision to treat Trump as an outlier rather than letting him tar the Republican brand as such. It works to her political disadvantage — showing that her centrist opportunism is weirdly principled in its own way — but from within her worldview, the most important thing is to restore the traditional balance of forces.
The situation we are in shows the intrinsic instability of party democracy. An eternal struggle between worthy opponents is not possible in practice. Eventually, one of the two teams is going to decide that they want to win in the strong sense, to defeat the opponent once and for all. And if that desire cannot be achieved immediately, it will inevitably lead to a long period where the old enemy is treated as a foe — as intrinsically evil and illegitimate. Within the American system, with its baroque structure of constraints and veto points, that will lead to a period where government is barely functional, because the natural tendency will be for the radicalized party to refuse to go along with the system until they have full control over it.
* Clinton's policy team.
* This would be a better story if they were going to dive in to how creepy this would be: Geordi La Forge Has a Ship Full of Datas in This First Look at Star Trek: Waypoint.
* Tonight in Jungeland: Chris Christie's Chances For Impeachment Just Went Way Up.
* On the Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Brute Luck.
* Scientists have found a better version of the Dyson Sphere. Meet the Dyson Swarm, a vast mega-structure comprised of a plethora of solar panels.
* Mars! Still! Again!
* The circle of lfe.
* Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.
* A walking tour of New York's surveillance network.
* The Stolen War: How corruption and fraud created a failed state in Iraq—and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
* The Fallacies Of Neoliberal Protest.
* Please be true, please be true: Arrival Is a Scifi Masterpiece You Won't Stop Thinking About.
* "The Battle of Algiers" at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point.
* Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said a two-year study he led concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. Challenge accepted.
* Cats sailed with Vikings to conquer the world, genetic study reveals. Trade between China and Rome in the ancient world, as tokened by a pair of corpses found in a London cemetery. (On that second one others say not so fast.)
* "…Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more "newsworthy" tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area."
* Breaking Bad at a Bronx charter.
* The Three-Body Problem in, well, China.
* A Law Professor Explains Why You Should Never Talk to Police.
* A History of Native Americans Protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.
* The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich's relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler's final days – the Führer, by Ohler's account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht's successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.
* A brief history of gang violence in Chicago.
* This is what word processing machines, word processing software, and word processing as an office management strategy all have common: they are techniques for providing the essential labor required to produce texts while also concealing that labor, thereby generating the impression that the command to produce a document can itself produce documents.
* Colin Kaepernick's silent protest is a start, but what if pro athletes refused to play? Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America — and Being Threatened for It.
* And if you want a vision of the future: They're gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies.
They're gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies https://t.co/Ms9H5T61Te
— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) September 24, 2016
Tagged with actually existing media bias, America, apocalypse, Arrival, bacteria, Barack Obama, Battle of Algiers, board games, Breaking Bad, cats, Charlotte, charter schools, Chicago, China, Chris Christie, class struggle, Colin Kaepernick, collapse, comics, computers, Dakota Access Pipeline, data, debates, democracy, Democrats, don't talk to the cops, Donald Trump, drugs, Dyson Sphere, Dyson Swarm, Electoral College, epistocracy, Erin Brockovich, eviction, ferries, film, five-second rule, food, football, futurity, games, gangs, general election 2016, Geordi LaForge, giant octopuses, graft, graveyards, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, Hitler, I grow old, inequality, lies and lying liars, luck, Mars, Milwaukee, NASA, Native Americans, Nazis, Nevermind, New Jersey, NFL, Nirvana, North Carolina, outer space, Packers, police, police brutality, policy, politics, polls, pollution, protest, Putin, race, racism, Republicans, rich people, riots, Rome, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, SETI, sports, Springsteen, Star Trek, Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang, Tetris, the Bronx, the circle of life, the courts, the law, The Three-Body Problem, TNG, total system failure, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Viking, violence, voting, water, white people, Wisconsin, word processing, worthy opponents
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: "Working Out What's True and What Isn't."
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a "new normal" that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that "forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession."
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Now That We Have Transformed Our Institutions to Compete with the University of Phoenix, It's on Life Support.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa's science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville's latest.
* "City of Ash," by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a "cli-fi" series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: "It's Not Climate Change, It's Everything Change."
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president's $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Refusing to foreground the actual monetary costs of academic labor in the current economy is a kind of grad-student gaslighting, and a form of abuse.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach "universally acceptable" here is a very short "We're sorry, but the position has now been filled."
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the "harbingers of failure," with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India's Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn't exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year's Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada's Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an "Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery."
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* iTunes Really Is That Bad.
* "You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4."
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Eight Years After Student's Unjust Expulsion from Valdosta State U., $900K Settlement Ends 'Barnes v. Zaccari.'
* Doug Williams used to give polygraph exams. Now he's going to prison for teaching people how to beat them.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* Fitbit as confession.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with 'monklike tendencies' became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers' Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union's Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he's right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee's roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Chomsky in Jacobin.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: "I Am Not Well."
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* House of Picards.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago's rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there's this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn't trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* Gasp! Middle class parents use 'glass floor' to ensure their children succeed over poorer peers, report finds.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I'm duly shamed.
* Science ain't an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* Is fat a sixth taste?
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with "virtually no brain" has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner's dilemma as pedagogy.
* Class and free will.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry's on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women's-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* The austerity delusion.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that's even more sickening than "the heart wants what it wants."
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* #FreeJudyGreer.
* #FreeBritneySpears.
* #BanCarAlarms.
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What's it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Everyday evil.
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don't even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The World Turned Upside Down, or, The Folly of Man Exemplified in Twelve Comical Relations upon Uncommon Subjects.
* The latest in Twitter's executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC's new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don't have to take my word for it! That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket.
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
Oops, Forgot a Title Links
* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they've run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife.
* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was "produce more adjuncts," but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.
* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.
Idea though that T/TT benefit from this move is still almost certainly wrong. Money is flowing to admin/graft/waste. https://t.co/nh76QWAYqP
* University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.
* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.
* On working dads.
* #charlestonsyllabus
* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar's Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar's 'No Nonsense' New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.
* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.
* The flag might actually come down.
* For every "justifiable" gun homicide, there are 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and two accidental gun deaths.
* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.
* The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why.
* CCC, call your PR office.
* The brutal truth is that most of American political history is an experiment in seeing what will happen if national political elites agree not to offend white supremacist Southern white men.
* "Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton."
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.
Surge!
* But set Obama's impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They're certainly finding every possible way to blow it.
* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.
* For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.
* The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.
* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.
* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.
* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.
* What happens when the sea swallows a country?
* It's just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.
* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.
* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.
* Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple's App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell's revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don't simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.
* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.
* 'Star Trek' Fan Invited to Pitch 'Star Trek Uncharted' TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.
* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From 'Breaking Bad' Will Appear in a Future Episode of 'Better Call Saul.'
Tagged with #dads, academia, adjuncts, administrative blight, Amazon, America, Andy Weir, apocalypse, Aurora, austerity, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Better Call Saul, Bill de Blasio, blockage, boards of trustees, books, Breaking Bad, Canavan's Razor, cartoonish supervillainy, CEOs, Charleston, charter schools, Clash of Clans, class struggle, Democratic primary 2016, demographics, Erasmus Darwin, exploitation, fandom, fans, five-year Ph.D., flexible accumulation, freemium, Fury Road, games, graduate student life, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, Hot Girls Wanted, How the University Works, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, libraries, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mad Max, Marc Bousquet, Marc Maron, mass shootings, McDonald's, medicine, microgaming, Milwaukee, my media empire, neoliberalism, never tell me the odds, NYPD, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, plantations, politics, polls, porn, post-Fordism, prisons, race, racism, Rhodesia, scams, science fiction, Seveneves, Star Trek, Star Trek Uncharted, statistics, suicide, Sweet Briar, syllabi, television, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, The Cold Equations, the Confederacy, the Left, The Martian, the South, The Water Knife, trans* issues, UC Irvine, University of Iowa, USC, use/mention distinction, Utopia, vast right-wing conspiracies, Vince Gilligan, voting, war on education, waste, whiteness, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, WTF
Friday Links!
* I'll be speaking at this event on June 4th in DC: Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs.
* SF-flavored art exhibit at the Racine Art Museum.
* I think it's fair to say Marquette has had a pretty rough year.
* Mass contingency is not compatible with shared governance.
* How Austerity Killed the Humanities.
* "If Students Are Smart, They'll Major in What They Love."
* Why Technology Will Never Fix Education.
* Alex Rivera on Hollywood and the War Machine. See also!
* Games Without Wages. The video game industry has long relied on the unpaid labor of "modders." Is it ready to finally pay up?
* Nice work if you can get it: Yale Gives Former President $8 Million Retirement Gift.
* Professors Face Long Odds in Court Battles Over Speech Rights.
* Everybody Calm Down About Breastfeeding.
* The dangerous trick here goes like this: someone fantasizes about a world in which rape frequently occurs and consistently goes unpunished; to explore this emotional fantasy, they set it in a premodern narrative fantasy world where they can displace their own desire onto "history." The dark impulse or desire isn't theirs, then; it's the world's. It's history's. And once a dark personal fantasy becomes "realism," gazing upon this dark thought or idea isn't a kind of humiliating or dangerous self-reflection, it's laudable: it's an honest engagement with truth.
* "Most pro-life women oppose abortion with four exceptions: rape, incest, the life of the mother, and me."
* I suspect even Notre Dame can't really explain why it's suing the federal government over contraception anymore.
* The New Mexico Law Review just published an issue dedicated entirely to Breaking Bad.
* Canadian Aboriginal Group Rejects $1 Billion Fee for Natural Gas Project.
* Study Links Record Dolphin Die-Off In The Gulf Of Mexico To Deepwater Horizon Spill.
* They paved built an oil rig in paradise.
* The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That's Sweeping Wall Street.
* Nearly one in four financial services employees say it's likely their co-workers have acted outside of the law. Dismaying as that statistic may be, it is nearly double the 12 percent who said the same in 2012.
* This senior level position is responsible for developing and implementing best practices in fostering the development and launch of companies based on innovations generated from University faculty. Percent Effort: 100.
* If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever New Jersey.
* We Are Spending Quite a Bit of Money on Jails.
* A Dishonest History of the Last War. Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That's Not What Happened. Bush and Cheney Falsely Presented WMD Intelligence to Public.
* Here's how much of your life the United States has been at war.
* Here's the widely available supermarket cheese you should avoid if you don't want to be complicit in prison labor.
* America Has Half as Many Hypersegregated Metros as It Did in 1970. Somehow, Milwaukee soldiers on.
* Scrabble adds even more garbage words to its dictionary.
* U.S. Releases Contents Of Bin Laden's English-Language "Bookshelf."
* Is there anyone who won't run for the Republican nomination in 2016?
* Why Have So Many People Never Heard Of The MOVE Bombing?
* "We do not think anyone is going to dispute this at all," he said.
* Uber, but for putting gas in your car.
* I can't understand why on Earth Marvel wants to emulate the New 52.
* Not the E.T. sequel we need, but the one we deserve.
* Great moments in "our bad": Norway's 'We're Sorry' Monument to 91 Dead Witches.
* You say "equality" like it's a bad thing.
* How The Soviet Union Tracked People With "Spy Dust."
* A Professor Tries to Beat Back a News Spoof That Won't Go Away.
* The health insurance regime: still the worst.
* Israel knew all along that settlements, home demolitions were illegal.
* Very surprising, given the lawsuit: Emma Sulkowicz allowed to bring mattress into Class Day ceremony.
* These numbers are horrifying.
* Irregularities in LaCour (2014). Amazing story.
* Does Color Even Exist, Man?
* An oral history of Industrial Light & Magic.
* Western canon, meet trigger warning.
* 9. Should a nuclear apocalypse happen, The Sound of Music will be played on a loop.
* I wish to outlive all my enemies.
* Everything about this pedagogical model is insane.
* Study Suggests Intelligent Aliens Will Probably Be The Size Of Bears.
* Does Shakespeare pass the Bechdel Test?
* Monkey Day Care: Growing Up as a Child Research Subject.
* "Keep Foreskin and State Separate."
* And Matt Weiner is sick of your bullshit misinterpretations of his genius. Do you hear that, Limbaugh?
Tagged with 2012 or never, abortion, academia, academic fraud, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Alex Rivera, aliens, America, art, artificial intelligence, Assata Shakur, austerity, Battle: Los Angeles, Bechdel test, books, Breaking Bad, breastfeeding, Bush, California, Canada, capital, cheese, Cheney, circumcision, class struggle, color, Columbia, contraception, corruption, DC Comics, Deepwater Horizon, do what you love, dolphins, Don't mention the war, E.T., English majors, entrepeneurs, entrepeneurs in residence, espionage, fantasy, film, First Nations, flexible online education, Game of Thrones, games, genies, George Lucas, Gulf of Mexico, health insurance, hedge funds, high-speed trading, history, Hollywood, How the University Works, hypersegregation, IL&M, indigenous peoples, international law, Iraq, Iraq War, Israel, Jeb Bush, labor, lies and lying liars, Mad Men, mad science, Marquette, Marvel, mass contingency, Matt Weiner, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, monkeys, monkeys' paws, MOOCs, MOVE bombing, museums, my scholarly empire, Norway, Notre Dame, nuclear holocaust, nuclear war, nuclearity, oil, oil spills, Osama bin Laden, our brains work in interesting ways, Palestine, parody, pedagogy, Philadelphia, politics, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, race, Racine, racism, rape, rape culture, realism, Republican primary 2016, Republicans, research, Rush Limbaugh, Santa Barbara, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scrabble, segregation, sequels, series finales, Shakespeare, shared governance, single payer, spy dust, spy stuff, Star Wars, teaching, technology, technopositivity, tenure, the canon, the courts, the humanities, the law, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the Singularity, The Sound of Music, the wisdom of markets, trigger warnings, true crime, Uber, USSR, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war machines, war on terror, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Whole Foods, Wisconsin, wishes, witches, words, work, Yale
Easter Links! Find Them All!
* The 2015 Hugo nominees have been announced, and they're a mess. The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They're Only Political. A Note About the Hugo Nominations This Year. The Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voter's Guide. The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of declares war. "Why I Declined a Hugo Award Nomination."
* And in response to the question "Well, what should have been nominated for a Hugo?": "Andromache and the Dragon," by my brilliant Marquette colleague Brittany Pladek!
* "The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslany": In portraying a horde of clones on 'Orphan Black,' the actress has created TV's strangest — and most sophisticated — meditation on femininity. And a special bonus companion piece: Meet The Woman (Besides Tatiana Maslany) Who Plays Every Single "Orphan Black" Clone.
* Reddit's Bizarre, Surreal, Maddening, Hypnotic, Divisive, and Possibly Evil April Fools' Joke. I've become obsessed with this.
* CFP: Ephemeral Television. CFP: Into the Pensieve: The Harry Potter Generation in Retrospect.
* Watching them turn off the Rothkos.
* Somali Militants Kill 147 at Kenyan University.
* Iran's Been Two Years Away From a Nuclear Weapon for Three Decades. The Iran deal. What if the Iranians are people too?
* So how much money is the NCAA making? In 2010, CBS and Turner Broadcasting gave the NCAA $10.8 billion for a fourteen-year broadcast monopoly on March Madness games. Estimated ad revenue for the 2013 tournament reached $1.15 billion, while ticket revenue brought in another $71.7 million. Last year no less than thirty-five coaches pulled down salaries higher than $1 million before bonuses; Duke's Mike Krzyzewski topped the list with an income of more than $9.6 million.
* Guarding against the errant, suicidal murderous pilot belongs to a category called "wicked problems" — the complexity of the system and the conflicting incentives mean that every solution introduces another set of problems, so the only way forward is always going to be an imperfect one. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that this once again reveals how, as humans, we are lousy at risk assessment, and also lousy of accepting this weakness. The problem is wicked, but its occurrence is so rare that it is almost unheard of — partly why it terrifies us so. Our imagination, biases and fears are terrible guides to what should actually be done to keep us safer, and this has significant consequences in a whole host of fields, ranging from terrorism to childcare to health-care.
* So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we've got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.
* How the Slave Trade Built America.
* But unlike its predecessor, the show has no obvious narrative progression. Nacho's important, or he's not; the Kettlemans are half the show, or maybe we should care about Sandpiper. There are flashbacks to Jimmy's past where Bob Odenkirk is playing either 25 or 57—a savvy criminal or a neophyte screw-up. In the lead-up to Better Call Saul, there were theories that the show would be funnier than Breaking Bad (maybe a sitcom?) or more procedural than Breaking Bad (maybe The Good Wife for bad boys?) or more episodic (like X-Files with lawyers!). None of that is true, and all of that is true. It's interesting, but not the way great TV is interesting. Better Call Saul reminds me more of Treme or John From Cincinnati: post-masterpiece meanders.
* In TV's Silver Age, a logjam of shows that are 'pretty good,' but not great.
* Here's A Map That Shows All The Future Megacities From Science Fiction.
* Can science fiction be a form of social activism? Walidah Imarisha thinks so, and she's recruited everyone from LeVar Burton to Mumia Abu-Jamal to help her prove it.
* Johns Hopkins Faces $1-Billion Lawsuit Over U.S. Experiments in Guatemala.
* sirens.io, blogging from seven years in the future.
* Are Aliens Behind Mysterious Radio Bursts? Scientists Weigh In.
* Calif. Governor Orders Mandatory Water Restrictions For 1st Time In History. It's up to us to singlehandedly save california from drought by turning off the tap when we brush our teeth! California is pumping water that fell to Earth 20,000 years ago. California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth. R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We'll Lose And Learn From The World's First Major Water Collapse. Children of the Drought.
* Starting this week, 25,000 households in Baltimore will suddenly lose their access to water for owing bills of $250 or more, with very little notice given and no public hearings.
* Oceans might take 1,000 years to recover from climate change, study suggests.
* Drug field tests used by cops are so bad they react positively to air, soap, candy.
* Trolley Problem: The Game. Advanced Trolley Problems.
* Scott Walker's budget cuts $5.7 million from pollution control efforts.
* The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On A Theory We Know Is Wrong. Most antidepressant users have never had depression.
* 12 New Science Fiction Comics You Absolutely Need to be Reading.
* From Shaman to Equinox: The Challenges and Failures of Indigenous Representation in Superhero Comics Read More: Indigenous Representation in Superhero Comics.
* Hero Price Is Right model begins the revolution by just giving away a car.
* First as an unexpectedly great show, then as I don't know it doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.
* All told, the "Detroit Industry" frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
* The happiness spigot.
* New report says manned Mars mission could reach orbit by 2033, land by 2039.
* Clarke makes her point not with stirring courtroom rhetoric or devastating legal arguments but by a process of relentless accretion, case by case, win by win. This is her cause. Because if the state cannot put these defendants to death, then how can it put anyone to death? Thirty-five executions took place in the United States in 2014 for crimes that form an inventory of human cruelty—and yet few were as willful and egregious as those committed by Judy Clarke's clients.
* Here is an example of the priorities in New York state's budget: There is no increase in the minimum wage, but purchasers of yachts that cost more than $230,000 are exempt from the sales tax.
* U.S. Court Officially Rules that Friendship Is Worthless.
* Tales from the Trenches: I was SWATed.
* Texas Just Does Not Care How Hot Its Prisons Get.
* Duke tries throwing polio at cancer, as you do.
* Interesting article on design: The Secret History of the Apple Watch.
* Senate Republicans say the current system is unfair because rural residents are effectively supporting urban counties' schools and services when they shop there. Yes, that's literally how the system is intended to function.
* The dystopian lake filled by the world's tech lust.
* So you want to resurrect a college.
* These Slow-Motion Videos of Fluids Vibrating on Speakers Are Wonderful.
* Now Full House, and the Muppets too.
* These Photos Of Melanie Griffith And Her Pet Lion In The 1970s Are Everything. (UPDATE: Here's the article that seems to be the original source, plus a little bit on Roar's rerelease. Noteworthy lines from Wikipedia: "Over 70 of the cast and crew were injured during the production of this film.")
* Being Andre.
* Landlord Sends Man $1,200 Bill To Cleanup His Roommate's Blood, Who Was Shot Dead By Police.
* Stan VHS, A Tumblr Blog Featuring 1980s-Style VHS Cover Art for Modern Television Shows and Movies.
* A Linguistic Comparison of Letters of Recommendation for Male and Female Chemistry and Biochemistry Job Applicants.
* SF Short of the Weekend: "Burnt Grass."
* …and your short short of the weekend: "No One Is Thirsty."
* I finally found enough time to be annoyed by Obama interviewing David Simon about The Wire.
* This Easter, we remember.
* And because you demanded it: An oral history of Max Headroom.
Tagged with airplanes, aliens, America, Andre the Giant, Apple, Apple Watch, art, austerity, Baltimore, Barack Obama, because rich people that's why, Better Call Saul, bias, big cats, Big Pharma, blogs, Boston, boycotts, brains, Breaking Bad, Brittany Pladek, California, cancer, capitalism, CFPs, charismatic megafauna, cities, class struggle, climate change, clones, Coach K, college, college basketball, college sports, comics, David Simon, death penalty, depression, design, Detroit, Diego Rivera, Diplomacy, dragons, drought, drugs, Duke, dystopia, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Easter, ecology, equality, ethics, fandom, fantasy, feminism, film, finance capital, frescoes, Frida Kahlo, friendship, Full House, futurity, Game of Thrones, gay rights, George R. R. Martin, Guatemala, happiness, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, horrors, How the University Works, Hugos, if you want a vision of the future, Indiana, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, informed consent, insider trading, Iran, Islamophobia, Johns Hopkins, Judy Clarke, justice, Kenya, kids, kids today, letters of recommendation, Levar Burton, liches, Lili Loofbourow, lions, mad science, maps, Marquette, Mars, Max Headroom, medical ethics, medicine, megacities, megadrought, Melanie Griffith, misogyny, moral panic, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Muppets, murder-suicide, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, ocean acidification, oceans, Octavia Butler, Octavia's Brood, Orphan Black, outer space, parenting, Perry Bible Fellowship, photography, police brutality, police violence, polio, politics, pollution, prison-industrial complex, prisons, psychopharmacology, race, racism, rationality, reboots, Reddit, Republicans, risk assessment, Roar, Rothkos, Sad Puppies, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Water, SETI, sexism, short film, Sistine Chapel, slavery, social justice, Somalia, sound, superheroes, SWAT teams, Sweet Briar, Tatiana Maslany, taxes, technosis externality clusterfuck, television, terrorism, Texas, the 1980s, the Anthropocene, The Button, the courts, the law, the long now, The Price Is Right, the revolution is here, the undead, The Wire, tigers, trolley problem, Tumblr, unnecessary sequels, very short film, VHS, Vince Gilligan, Vox Day, war on drugs, water, wicked problems, Wisconsin, yachts
* Coetzee: There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?
…in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society.
* If you can't make a case for a discipline on the basis of the actual objects studied by that discipline, it's doomed. The field needs to have confidence in the things it takes as its subject matter.
* Huge drop in humanities majors at Swarthmore.
* Not for the first time, vandals are wreaking havoc in central Europe. Russian police say they're looking for the intellectually minded miscreants who graffitied "Kant is a moron"—along with a flower and heart—on the philosopher's home outside Kaliningrad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 16: Flexibility. Special appearance by Plastic Man.
* Higher Education and the Politics of Disruption.
* Black UVA Student Beaten Bloody by Police Over Alleged Fake ID: Reports. UVA's White President Outsources Outrage Over Martese Johnson to Two Black Administrators.
* Chapel Hill Will Pay $335,000 to Whistle-Blower in Fraud Scandal.
* More Scrutiny of Decision to Close Sweet Briar.
* Penn State Fraternity's Secret Facebook Photos May Lead to Criminal Charges.
* Despite Progress, Only 1 in 4 College Presidents Are Women.
* The New York Times ran the Duke story—a story about the internal politics of an English department—on its front page.
* I can't remember if I already linked to Jalada #2: "Afrofuture(s)," but it's great. I think my favorite little piece is one of the short poems, "Found: An Error in the System."
* Schools Plan Massive Layoffs After Scott Walker Guts Funding.
* 21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor.
* Why The U.S. Won't Let the U.N. Look Inside Its Prisons.
* Modern-Day Caligula Orders Everything Bagel.
* Everything's different in Denmark: Porn belongs in the classroom, says Danish professor.
* What could possibly go wrong? The Scientist Who Wanted To Bring A Death Row Inmate Back From The Dead.
* Starbucks loses its damn mind. Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race. But Does It Want To Talk To You About Racism? Starbucks's Race to the Center of Civic Life.
Big opportunity for a competing coffee chain to guarantee that their employees absolutely won't try to talk to you about race if you go in.
"No awkward conversations. No eye contact.That's the Cup O' Canavan guarantee."
* Simians, Cyborg-Women, and Godzilla: 40 Years of Terror of Mechagodzilla.
* 41 Awesome Euphemisms For Vagina Around The World, Because Your Pupusa Speaks All Languages.
* Mars One Finalist Explains Exactly How It's Ripping Off Supporters.
* The New Optimism of Al Gore.
* Antarctica appears to be melting from below.
* Climate change and full communism.
* When the CIA funded the National Student Association.
* The Problem With History Classes.
* Rise of the Gender Novel: Too often, trans characters are written as tortured heroes. We're more complex than that.
* The lonely shame of student debt.
* Queer Silence and The Killing Joke.
* #LightenUp: On Comics and Race.
* I'm Al Lowe and I created a series of games called Leisure Suit Larry for Sierra back in the '80s and '90s along with another 20 games and titles back in that period. I was with Sierra from 1982 until 1998 when it — well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals. How about that for an opening?
* Did Terry Brooks save epic fantasy? Given the years involved if anything did it seems more likely to me that it was Dungeons and Dragons, but it's a nice remembrance of the franchise regardless.
* I'm good for five seasons at least: Bridgeport Priest Who Ran Meth Ring Pleads For Leniency.
* Really bad idea watch: Sherlock Goes Old-School For Its Christmas Special.
* The Walking Disney.
* The Hidden History of Miscarriage.
* One chart that shows just how ridiculously huge Wall Street bonuses are.
* Where to expect upsets on your NCAA bracket.
* New edition of Catan coming down the pike.
* You had me at fully automated luxury communism (FALC).
* And because you demanded it! Sam Jones Says New Flash Gordon Is A Sequel.
Tagged with #accelerate, academia, academic fraud, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Al Gore, America, Antarctica, austerity, automation, bagels, Batman, Brave, Breaking Bad, CEOs, CIA, class struggle, climate change, Coetzee, coffee, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, cyborgs, Disney, disruption, drugs, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, English departments, English majors, epic fantasy, fan art, Flash Gordon, flexibility, fraternities, fully automated luxury communism, games, gender, Godzilla, graffiti, history, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, innovation, Kant, Leisure Suit Larry, mad science, March Madness, Mars, Mars One, Mecha-Godzilla, meth, miscarriage, misogyny, NCAA, neoliberalism, outer space, Ozymandias, Penn State, police brutality, police violence, politics, pornography, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, queer theory, race, racism, rape, rape culture, robots, ruins, science fiction, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, Shannara, Sherlock, Sierra Online, simians, Starbucks, Stephen Moffat, street art, student debt, Sweet Briar, Terry Brooks, the humanity, The Joker, The Killing Joke, The Walking Dead, trans* issues, true crime, UNC, United Nations, UVA, Wall Street, war on education, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, words, zombies
Thursday Morning Links!
* Report: Only 20 Minutes Until Introverted Man Gets To Leave Party.
* Silicon Valley's "Thunder Lizards" Want to "Hack" America's Broken Universities. But are they vultures instead?
* Momentum is building to establish a new geological epoch that recognizes humanity's impact on the planet. But there is fierce debate behind the scenes.
* Wheeeee! Some top Democrats are alarmed about Clinton's readiness for a campaign.
* A police shooting in Madison, WI, highlighted the city's alarming racial disparities.
* Twitter Just Banned Revenge Porn and Doxxing. Good, but, uh — they weren't already banned?
* The situation at UC Irvine just seems totally surreal to me. ROTC standing guard over the flag? Really?
* MORE FLAGS.
* From the archives: U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.
* Moral panic watch: The bill does, however, make the school liable to any cisgender (nontrans) student who "encounters a person not of the student's biological sex" in a bathroom, locker room, or shower. Every student who successfully proves the school violated this would-be law "shall be awarded … exemplary damages in the amount of $2,000." That sum does not include the "actual damages," which the bill notes includes "damages for mental anguish even if an injury other than mental anguish is not shown."
* When Tim Morton met Björk.
* Gasp! Welfare drug tests fail to save expected cash.
* The "Blurred Lines" Verdict Is Bad News, Even If You Hate Robin Thicke.
* Video games and breast physics. Potentially NSFW link at Kotaku.
* The headline reads, "Mount Everest's Poop Situation Is About To Go From Bad To Worse."
* Vince Gilligan says to quit throwing pizzas on the roof of the Breaking Bad house. You've changed, man.
* Unemployment up in all Wisconsin counties, major cities. Chachi shrugged.
* Meanwhile, this exists: Charles in Charge: The Novelization.
* NCAA nearly topped $1 billion in revenue in 2014. Nice work if you can get someone to do it for you without wages.
* Seeking a friend for the end of the world.
* What every state is best at. Take that Vermont, though "longest cat lifespans" remains tantalizingly out of reach…
* And in a world without heroes, there was… Mystery Man Suspected Of Pooping On At Least 19 Cars In Ohio.
Tagged with academia, America, American flag, bathrooms, Björk, Blurred Lines, Breaking Bad, breast physics, California, cats, Charles in Charge, charts, cheese, class struggle, climate change, college sports, copyright, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, doxxing, ecology, flags, flexible online education, games, Happy Days, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, ideology, imperialism, introversion, longevity, Madison, maps, MOOCs, moral panic, Mt. Everest, music, nationalism, NCAA, Ohio, parties, pizza, police brutality, police violence, politics, poop, race, racism, revenge porn, Robin Thicke, ROTC, safety net, scams, science, Scott Baio, Scott Walker, Silicon Valley, story of my life, the Anthropocene, The Onion, Timothy Morton, trans* issues, Twitter, unemployment, University of California Irvine, Vince Gilligan, vulture capitalism, war on drugs, welfare state, Wisconsin
* But at least one line in the tax form gives pause: The college lost roughly $4-million in investment income compared with the previous year, for unknown reasons. That year the college posted a deficit of $3-million, compared with a $325,000 deficit the previous year. I certainly hope someone follows up on that little oddity.
* Of course, it's not entirely insane: How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion.
* Academia and the Advance of African Science Fiction.
* SimCity, homelessness, and utopia.
It seems we all now live in a Magnasanti whose governing algorithm is to capture all work and play and turn them not only into commodities but also into data, and to subordinate all praxis to the rule of exchange. Any data that undermines the premise that this can go on and on for 50,000 years, has to be turned into non-data. If there's work and play to be done, then, it's inside the gamespace that is now the world. Is there a way that this gamespace could be the material with which to build another one?
* Parenting and the Profession: Don't Expect Much When You're Expecting.
* Higher Education and the Promise of Insurgent Public Memory.
While the post-9/11 attacks have taken an even more dangerous turn, higher education is still a site of intense struggle, but it is fair to say the right wing is winning. The success of the financial elite in waging this war can be measured not only by the rise in the stranglehold of neoliberal policies over higher education, the increasing corporatization of the university, the evisceration of full-time, tenured jobs for faculty, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the view of students as customers, and the growing influence of the military-industrial-academic complex in the service of the financial elite, but also in the erasing of public memory. Memory is no longer insurgent; that is, it has been erased as a critical educational and political optic for moral witnessing, testimony and civic courage. On the contrary, it is either being cleansed or erased by the new apologists for the status quo who urge people to love the United States, which means giving up any sense of counter memory, interrogation of dominant narratives or retrieval of lost histories of struggle.
* Precarious / Stability.
* 158 Private Colleges Fail Government's Financial-Responsibility Test.
* Down to zero in Arizona.
* The gangsters of Ferguson. But even this is still not "proof!"
* The Ferguson PD is NOT medieval. It's modern white supremacy.
* Judge who invented Ferguson's debtor's prisons owes $170K in tax.
* It's Not Just the Drug War: Progressive narratives about what's driving mass incarceration don't quite add up.
* Sotomayor May Have Saved Obamacare.
* A video poker machine dealt Justin Curzi a strange hand. Now he's calling the Oregon Lottery's bluff.
* Designing The Grand Budapest Hotel with Marquette alum Adam Stockhausen.
* Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People?
* "Rahm Emanuel pays the price for not pandering." Why should the poor man be voted out of office just because his policies are horror-shows that no one likes?
* A corrupt politician from New Jersey? What will they think of next?
* Wow: Ringling Bros. Circus Will Stop Using Elephants By 2018.
* Life imitates Breaking Bad.
* Cities Are Quietly Reviving A Jim Crow-Era Trick To Suppress Latino Votes.
* Hartford, CT says friends can't room together unless some of them are servants.
* This Is What It's Like To Go To Prison For Trolling.
* Brianna Wu vs. the Troll Army.
* Short film of the weekend: "Chronemics."
* Gasp! Science proves men tend to be more narcissistic than women.
* The Time That Charles Babbage Tried To Summon The Devil.
* Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast.
* Wellesley Will Admit Transgender Applicants. Planet Fitness Under Fire For Supporting Trans Woman, Kicking Out Transphobic Member. Students seeking to redesignate restrooms as "all gender" face harassment and police detention at UC Berkeley. US Army eases ban on transgender soldiers.
* The headline reads, "Decades of human waste have made Mount Everest a 'fecal time bomb.'"
* Colonization: Venus better than Mars?
* On Iain M. Banks and the Video Game that Inspired Excession: Civilization.
* Get it together, Millennials! "Millennials like to spank their kids just as much as their parents did."
* The Catholic Church Opposes the Death Penalty. Why Don't White Catholics?
* What's Next After "Right to Work"?
* David Graeber talks about his latest book, The Utopia of Rules.
* The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme That Shook Canada.
* Conservative columnist can't mourn Nimoy's death because Spock reminds him of Obama. Is there nothing Obama can't destroy?
* 9 Social Panics That Gripped America.
* How Unsafe Was Hillary Clinton's Secret Staff Email System?
* To whatever extent Doctor Who series 8 was a bit rocky, it seems like it's Jenna Coleman's fault.
* Making teaching a miserable profession has had a completely unexpected effect.
* Why Are Liberals Resigned to Low Wages? What could explain it?
* Is Yik Yak The New Weapon Against Campus Rape Culture?
* Tilt-shift effect applied to Van Gogh paintings.
* They say we as a society are no longer capable of great things.
* And the kids are all right.
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, adjunctification, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, alcohol, anarchy, animals, Arizona, art, austerity, Barack Obama, bathrooms, Breaking Bad, Brianna Wu, bureaucracy, Canada, Catholic Church, Charles Babbage, Chicago, circuses, civilization, class struggle, color, communism, community colleges, Connecticut, corruption, cultural preservation, David Graeber, death penalty, debtors prison, democracy, Department of Justice, Department of State, disenfranchisement, Doctor Who, drugs, drunkenness, elephants, emails, endowments, Excision, facts are stupid things, fecal time bombs, Ferguson, film, final frontier, Gamergate, games, gender, gerrymandering, Hartford, Harvard, health care, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, human waste, Iain M. Banks, income inequality, Jenna Coleman, kids today, Larry Summers, Leonard Nimoy, liberals, lotteries, Magnasanti, Marquette, Mars, mass incarceration, maternity leave, memory, military-industrial complex, millennials, Milwaukee, Missouri, modernity, moral panics, Mount Everest, narcissism, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Oregon, outer space, P.T. Barnum, parental leave, parenting, photography, play, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, Ponzi schemes, precarity, prison, prison-industrial complex, progressives, prom, proof, public urination, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, real wages, resistance, revolution, right to work, Ringling Brothers, Robert Menendez, running, science, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, short firm, SimCity, Sonia Sotomayor, spanking, Spock, St. Louis, Star Trek, Stephen Moffat, Supreme Court, Sweet Briar, teaching, television, the courts, The Culture, the Devil, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, tilt-shift, trans* issues, trolls, Utopia, Utopia of Rules, van Gogh, Venus, voting, Wellesley, Wes Anderson, white supremacy, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, Yik Yak
* Marquette English's course offerings for summer and fall 2015, including my courses on Science Fiction as Genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, and American Literature after the American Century.
* Speaking of my courses, this is such an incredible answer to the last few weeks of my cultural preservation course I almost feel as though I somehow made it up.
* An amazing late comment on my Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis post, including some great commentary on the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
* My review isn't coming for a few months, but I really loved Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. I can't wait to talk to people about it. I don't want to spoil anything so I'll keep my mouth shut for now.
* If you want a vision of the future: Sweet Briar College, Citing 'Financial Challenges,' Will Close Its Doors in August. (More, more.) Clarkson U., Union Graduate College Explore Merger. It's Final: UNC Board of Governors Votes To Close Academic Centers. Jindal cuts higher ed by 78%.
* Where has all the money gone? The decline in faculty salaries at American colleges and universities over the past 40 years.
* It's always "the end of college."
* "De-tenure." Don't worry, it's just another regrettable drafting error!
* Why we occupy: Dutch universities at the crossroads.
* The academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has focused largely on how fake undergraduate classes helped athletes maintain their eligibility to compete. In an article in The News & Observer over the weekend, a former UNC official says athletics officials also sometimes asked the university's graduate school to bend the rules to admit athletes in order to extend their eligibility.
* This is the best Dean of Eureka Moments post yet. Maybe literally the best possible.
associate vice provost of failure successes
— Dean O. Eureka (@deaneureka) February 28, 2015
* College admissions and former inmates.
* Nine out of ten startups fail, which is why every institution in society should be converted to the startup model immediately.
* The Search for a Useable Past: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Radical America.
* The politicization of even the idea of knowledge.
* Michigan Frat's 48-Hour Rager Wrecks Resort, Causes $430,000 in Damages.
* Le Guin vs. Ishiguo: "Are they going to say this is fantasy?"
* The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s.
* US sea level north of New York City 'jumped by 128mm.'
* A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years.
* Vox considers the end of American democracy: 1, 2.
* Against the West Wing.
* Against "learning styles."
* Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules. Hillary Clinton's personal email account looks bad now. But it was even worse at the time.
* …whose frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things…
* Why aren't the seven witnesses to Dendinger's nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren't the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger's prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.
* When A Newspaper Gave Blade Runner's Replicant Test To Mayor Candidates.
* "An ode to Juiceboxxx, a 27-year-old rapper from Milwaukee no one's ever heard of."
* "When Your Father Is the BTK Serial Killer, Forgiveness Is Not Tidy."
* Scott Walker Wants To Stop Funding Renewable Energy Research Center. Of course he does.
* Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company.
* The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism.
* Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.
* Justice department determines Ferguson is a terrible place.
* Wrong way Obama?
* The Americans and austerity.
* Two ways of looking at income inequality.
* How a French insurer wrote the worst contract in the world and sold it to thousands of clients.
* Teach students about consent in high school.
* Vermont Town May Allow 16- And 17-Year-Olds To Vote In Local Elections.
* Crunching the numbers: How Long Can A Spinoff Like 'Better Call Saul' Last?
* What Marvel Characters End Up Being Called In Other Languages.
* Panpsychism's Labyrinth.
* Careers of the future: professional dumpster diver.
* It's where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son. After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson's but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.
* The globalist sublime.
* Mars One colonists better off eating frozen pizza than local veggies.
* Local Lab In Berkeley Accidentally Discovers Solution To Fix Color Blindness.
* Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.
* How the MFA Glut Is a Disservice to Students, Teachers, and Writers.
But there's another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either—no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person's money is as green as the next, after all. If you've received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you're in.
* 10-Year-Old Math Genius Studying for University Degree.
* The Last Man on Earth really shouldn't work. And yet…
* Officials at Arizona State University probably weren't expecting the full Stormfront treatment when its English department advertised a spring semester class exploring the "problem of whiteness."
* No shades of grey in teaching relationships.
* Pendulum keeps swinging: Now Americans Should Drink Much More Coffee.
* But not Keurig.
* It's been so long so I posted one of these I haven't even linked to anything about the dress yet.
* In 1971, William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.
* Why Americans Don't Care About Prison Rape.
* Robear: the bear-shaped nursing robot who'll look after you when you get old. What could possibly go wrong?
* The invention of blue.
* In the 1800s, Courts Tried to Enforce Partnerships With Dolphins.
* The 16 Strangest Dragons In Dungeons & Dragons.
* Mark your everythings: Community comes back March 17.
* First the gorilla who punched the photographer, now this.
* Wes Anderson's X-Men.
* Abra kazam.
* LLAP.
* And the arc of history is long, but: North Carolina Legalizes Call Girls For Politicians.
Meanwhile, in heaven … #LeonardNimoy #LLAP pic.twitter.com/kn1a6RiDuA
— Kirsten Heffron (@KirstenHeffron) February 27, 2015
Tagged with academic fraud, administrative blight, Africa, America, American century, American literature, Anarchist's Cookbook, anarchists, animals, apocalypse, Arizona State University, Aurora, austerity, Barack Obama, Better Call Saul, Bill Clinton, Blade Runner, blue, Bobby Jindal, books, Breaking Bad, California, Clarkson University, class struggle, climate change, coffee, collapse, college admissions, college sports, color, color blindness, comedy, comics, community, consent, contracts, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, deflation, defund everything, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, Department of Justice, dictatorship, dolphins, don't date your students, don't sleep with your students, dumpster divers, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, eldercare, emails, epistemic closure, eureka moments, fantasy, fascism, Ferguson, fraternities, frozen pizza, genius, genre, health, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, income inequality, insurance, Juiceboxxx, Kazuo Ishiguro, Keurig, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge, learning styles, lies and lying liars, live long and prosper, Louisiana, magic, Marquette, Mars, Mars One, Marvel, megadrought, MFAs, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, mining, mismanagement, modernism, Monica Lewinsky, MOOCs, moral panics, museums, Native American issues, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netherlands, New York City, North Carolina, nursing, obituary, octopuses, our brains work in interesting ways, Ozymandias, panpsychism, Parkinson's, Paul Buhle, pedagogy, permanent crisis, permanent cuts, photography, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, prostitution, race, racism, Radical America, rap, rape, rape culture, renewable energy, RIP, rising sea levels, Robear, robots, sabotage, sadness, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, serial killers, sex, shock doctrine, slavery, speculative realism, Spock, St. Louis, Star Trek, State department, Steve Shaviro, Students for a Democratic Society, subjectivity, Sweet Briar University, teaching, television, tenure, the 60s, The Americans, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, The Buried Giant, the courts, the dress, the kids are all right, The Last Man on Earth, the law, the rich are different, Tolkien, Twitterbots, UNC, Union Graduate College, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Voight-Kampff Test, voting, war on drugs, water, Wes Anderson, West Wing, what it is I think I'm doing, whiteness, Wisconsin, words, writing, X-Men
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine's Day
* Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in: Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
* Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted. Oh, okay.
* The Art of the Deal, or the Man Who Would Be King: University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross.
* The UW: Update from the Struggle.
* How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of "just so" arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
* Inside Edition Used The Chapel Hill Homicides To Set Up A Segment On How To Find Parking At The Mall.
* The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here's a link to the full article, which has a definition of "merit" (as/against "prestige") I can't make heads or tails of.
* Being Yanis Varoufakis.
* The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft's work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft's fiction was "finicky," "childish," and "antagonistic to reality." But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being "shocked" is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren't reading Jason Shiga's Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it's great.
* The social network's ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees — the same level that Facebook strives for. "We're well below that now," he said. I'm sure if you keep up what you're doing you'll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat: The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he's a communist.
* Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
* An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC '16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant. I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice, but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
* To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. "Restore." You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
* I'm Brianna Wu, And I'm Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
* When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
* Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him. I've come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I'm not a scientist.
* Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where "you didn't know you were poor." But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin'.
* The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony's Secret Spider-Man Deal.
* The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
* By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It's Going to Get. I've had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I've resolved to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
* Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
* South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
"If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks," the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
* NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
* Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn't 'Appreciate Her Tone.'
* The Imprisoner's Dilemma.
* Silicon Valley as cult.
* Casting some bodies as inherently rational and others as incapable of true speech makes those with bodies most at risk for harm unable to protest.
* The arc of history is long, but: Putin Banned From 'Mighty Taco' Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc., Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc. Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up: Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week's The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
* The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals. Wash that "good Vox" taste out of your mouth with this "bad Vox" chaser: The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white prisoners.
* Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer. Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Hulu thoughtfully removes any obligation you may have felt to care about its upcoming 11/23/63 adaptation.
* Somber news this Valentine's Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
Tagged with 11/22/63, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, admissions, Africa, Airbnb, alcohol, always historicize, amateurism, America, animals, austerity, Austin, Avengers, bell hooks, Better Call Saul, binge drinking, Breaking Bad, Brianna Wu, Brooklyn, capitalism, Chapel Hill, class struggle, college, college sports, Columbia, comics, coups, Cthulhu, cultural preservation, Daily Show, Demon, desperate, digital economy, digitality, embodiment, English majors, evolution, FBI, Gamergate, gorillas, Greece, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, historicize everything, Hitler, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, How the University Works, Hulu, if you want a vision of the future, incest, Islamophobia, Jason Shiga, Jessica Williams, JFK, Jon Stewart, kids today, Lincoln Memorial, Little League, male privilege, Marvel, memorials, miscarriage, money, Montana, monuments, murder, Namibia, Nazis, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, North Carolina, NYPD, photography, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, prestige economy, prison, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, public housing, Putin, pyramids, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Ray Cross, Republicans, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, school-to-prison pipeline, science, Scott Walker, sex, sharing economy, social media, Sony, South Carolina, Spider-Man, Stephen King, stop snitchin', tacos, tar sands, Tea Party, teeth, television, tenure, the adolescent fear that justice does not exist, the adolescent passion for justice, The Americans, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, The Avengers, the dark side of the digital, the humanities, the Left, time travel, Title IX, Tumblr, Twitter, Uber, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, Vince Gilligan, war on education, white people, white privilege, white supremacy, Wisconsin, Yanis Varoufakis, Yemen, yoga pants, you keep using that word
* I'll be speaking next Thursday at "Between Activism and Apocalypse: The Work of Margaret Atwood" at Indiana University. The schedule for the symposium is here.
* CFP: Stage The Future 2: The Second International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre.
* SF short-short of the day: Isaac Asimov's "Silly Asses."
* Here's the calendar of events for C21 this semester.
* Cheryl Abbate has a blog post on the vicious hate mail she's received after being thrust into the media spotlight.
* "Things like computer vision are starting to work; speech recognition is starting to work There's quite a bit of acceleration in the development of AI systems," says Bart Selman, a Cornell professor and AI ethicist who was at the event with Musk. "And that's making it more urgent to look at this issue." AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World's Brightest Minds.
* Of course it's already worse than you think.
* Elsewhere in mad billionaire news: Internet! in! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
* Gender Differences in the Road to the Doctoral Degree. Less support, more debt, more time to degree.
* Forbidden Planet reviews Richard McGuire's incredible graphic novel Here.
* Hours After State Of The Union, Senate Targets National Parks. Once again, it's always worse than you think.
* Saul Goodman, the last difficult man.
* A smart observation from Peter Paik: "Common Core teaches students that there is only one way to read a text (to glean information) but there are many ways to solve a math problem (the target of much outrage on social media)."
* Some Colleges Are Moving Past Eve Ensler's "Cisnormative" 'Vagina Monologues' — And That's OK.
* Occupy the Syllabus.
* Milestone Media rides again.
* How 'Harry Potter' fans won a four-year fight against child slavery.
* English professors combine areas of study for new specialization.
The department, known for its expertise in disability and LGBT studies, is looking to newer faculty to blend the two topics into a common subject area.Robert McRuer, who chairs the English department, said he was the first scholar to combine LGBT studies with disability studies and call it "crip theory." The theory looks at the histories of and issues within the LGBT and disabled communities, which have both faced marginalization. "Crip" is a term that people with disabilities have "reclaimed," he said.
Personally I'd send that name back for another round of workshopping, but what do I know.
* Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia.
* I actually always thought Joss should have had a David Boreanaz cameo in the background of the Firefly pilot and then never mention it again.
* Marvel is teasing a big Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths-style reboot, for the first time in its history.
* Simon Pegg is co-writing Star Trek 3. [raises one eyebrow]
* And great news for KSR fans: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV's 'Red Mars' Drama Series Project.
* This is a supercut of all the moments in A New Hope where characters interacted with machines, doors, screens, levers, knobs and buttons.
* Violent crime on college campuses is decreasing, but the number of sworn and armed police officers on campuses continues to rise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics… Nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities operated full law-enforcement agencies in 2012, and 94 percent of those officers are authorized to use a firearm.
* Meanwhile, on the town and gown beat: NYU decided not to report an attempted murder to the police.
* Abolish college sports watch: Before Gary Andersen goes on, he wants to make one thing clear. A part of his surprising departure from Wisconsin had to do with admission standards.
* When choosing between doing good and doing evil, don't forget there's always a third option.
* Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
* And a reminder that SFFTV is looking for your submission for its "Star Trek at 50″ special issue.
Tagged with abuse, academia, AI, Angel, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Cabin in the Woods, Center for 21st Century Studies, CFPs, charts, Cheryl Abbate, choice, climate change, college football, college sports, comics, common core, disability studies, droids, ecology, Elon Musk, English professors, fan activism, fandom, fantasy, feminism, Firefly, freedom, gender, grad student nightmares, Harry Potter, hate mail, Here, How the University Works, Indiana University, Isaac Asimov, J. Michael Straczynski, Joss Whedon, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, Marvel, math, Milestone Comics, misogyny, my scholarly empire, national parks, NCAA, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYU, Occupy, Oregon, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, PhDs, queer theory, race, racism, reboots, Red Mars, Richard McGuire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, sexism, silly asses, Simon Pegg, slavery, Star Trek, Star Trek 3, Star Wars, student debt, superheroes, syllabi, the Internet, the Senate, the Singularity, theater, trans* issues, true crime, University of Wisconsin, usability, UWM, Vagina Monologues, war on education, white supremacy, Wisconsin
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
* Malcolm Harris reviews Ivory Tower.
Speaking for the elite private liberal arts school is Wesleyan President Michael Roth, who argues for small classes, a balanced education and a lot of contact with professors. "Ivory Tower" gives Roth a fair hearing, but he can't avoid coming off like a huckster of humanities when pitching the $60,000-plus annual price tag to the parents of potential students. (Hell, for 60 grand you could rent an apartment in Brooklyn and your own post-grad fellow.) The cost of this kind of education makes it both a model of learning for learning's sake — yes, a high cost but a priceless reward — and totally inaccessible to most young people.
* Euclid: The Game!
* Massive data dump on academic employment.
* Vladimir Nabokov's Unpublished Screenplay Notes For Stanley Kubrick's 'Lolita.'
* Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Ian Bogost, when the walls fell.
* Let's pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. No More Imperial Crusades.
* Prosecutors closing in on Chris Christie and Scott Walker. How the State of Wisconsin alleges Scott Walker aides violated the law, in 1 chart.
* Aren't You A Little Short To Be A Stormtrooper? The Passing of the Armor to A Bullied Little Girl. Fighting bullies with stormtroopers.
* The golden age of girls' running.
* Higher Ed Pays a High Price for Mediocrity.
* James Madison University Punished Sexual Assault With 'Expulsion After Graduation.' Department of Education Offers Proposed Campus Sexual Assault Regulations. Rape Victims At Fundamentalist Christian College Say They Were Told To Repent For Their Sins.
* "Turn Detroit into Drone Valley." Sigh.
* "The death of a great American city: why does anyone still live in Detroit?"
* "By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water."
* The death of the mall.
* What we Yo about when we Yo about Yo.
* In celebration of Juneteenth.
* I'm losing hope for Episode 7, but Episodes 8 and 9 have promise.
* One more on Louie: This isn't a model for romance. It's a blueprint for abuse.
* Labor and the Locavore shows that our society's tendency to idealize local food allows small farmers to pay workers substandard wages, house them in shoddy labor camps, and quash their ability to unionize to demand better working conditions.
* "It's a much bigger, more powerful question to ask, If today we are using management techniques that were also used on slave plantations," she says, "how much more careful do we need to be? How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?"
* The secret history of Chief Wahoo.
* When drones crash.
* Pennsylvania Instructed Its Employees To Ignore Residents Sickened By Drilling. Duke Energy Was Warned About Potential For Dan River Spill Decades Ago, Documents Show.
* The Lost Generation.
* Marriage, kids, college, and class.
* Great moments in governance.
In Kansas, 9-year-old Spencer Collins has been told by authorities that he must stop sharing books with his neighbors, and close the little free library–honestly, it's just a bookshelf–in his yard.
* The "good" Anthropocene?
* The sixth season of The Twilight Zone we almost had.
* And Better Call Saul already has a second season. We just have to wait to see if that's a good thing or a bad thing…
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, AMC, apps, austerity, baseball, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, bullies, campaign finance reform, Chief Wahoo, Chris Christie, class struggle, Cleveland, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, Detroit, drones, Duke, ecology, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Euclid, feminism, film, food, fracking, games, geometry, girls, governmentality, How the University Works, human rights, humanitarianism, imperialism, Iraq, Juneteenth, kids, Kubrick, labor, libraries, locavores, Lolita, Louie, malls, marriage, mascots, military interventionism, millennials, misogyny, money in politics, Nabokov, Native American issues, neoliberalism, North Carolina, oil, oil spills, Pennsylvania, politics, pollution, rape, rape culture, Rod Serling, running, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, slavery, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, television, the Anthropocene, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Twilight Zone, Title IX, TNG, tuition, water, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?
Happy Happy Monday Monday Links
* I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it's kind of depressing. TCJ: The Bill Watterson Interview (1989).
* "Nada": The comic adaptation of the short story that inspired They Live!
* The PhD Deluge.
* Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114. Taking the "over" on whether there'll still be human beings alive in a hundred years, I guess…
* Anthropocene or Capitalocene?
* It was the final night of Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival's midnight ritual to begin.
* Terrible New York Times article on a fascinating topic: the "year zero" project of cultural destruction in Mali.
* Aboriginal rights a threat to Canada's resource agenda, documents reveal.
* After Holding Mentally Disabled Man Hostage for 34 Years, Texas Rules He Conspired to Keep Himself in Jail.
* In order to pay for his son Cole's life-saving surgery, he transported meth. But he got caught. Eighteen years later, his family, and the man who prosecuted him, are still working to set him free.
* Women prisoners sterilized to cut welfare costs in California. Of course it was illegal.
* Half of New York City Teens Behind Bars Have A Brain Injury, Study Finds.
* Every once in a while Matt Yglesias still writes something good: The case for confiscatory taxation.
* Carceral leftism: jail time for wage theft?
* Piketty reviews from James K. Galbraith and Doug Henwood.
* Synanon's Sober Utopia: How a Drug Rehab Program Became a Violent Cult.
* Inside the "certified miracle" that will make Pope John Paul II a saint.
* The Case for Drawing and Doodling in Class. Can't we just medicate this impulse away?
* The liberal version of unskewing the polls is declaring victory in election cycles that are years away. We've got them right where we want them!
* College is probably cheaper than you think, though that's not saying much.
* I Ran the Pyongyang Marathon.
* Powdered alcohol: what could possibly go wrong?
* Your personal information is worth just $0.16.
* Coming out as a porn star. From Vox, the site dedicated to explaining the news with clarity and specificity traditional news outlets can't afford.
* Meanwhile, at a traditional news outlet: Can the Klan rebrand? They've tried before. Kudos, CNN, you remain the absolute worst.
KKK klays off 3000 workers with more klayoffs to klome; reklanding efforts deemed klatastrophe; management to refocus on klore klompetencies
* Hugo nominees 2014. If you know who Vox Day is, you know how messed up things are about to get.
* Criminal Cab Driver Mastermind (Allegedly) Evaded 3,000 Tolls.
* Antonin Scalia, Patriot.
* Abandon all hope watch: "The Democrats have a mega-donor problem." Why can't these naive billionaires see that Democrats who won't support good policy are better than Republicans who oppose good policy!
* On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
* There's A Hidden Timebomb In The Senate Rules That Will Go Off If A Supreme Court Justice Retires. But don't you dare suggest anyone retire now to avoid disaster.
* Life is not a game. Neither is Candy Crush.
* Tumblr of the week: They Get It.
* This was the story of the Hurricane. Hurricane Carter's dying wish.
* Marek Edelman: Last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
* I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load. If you can't tell that an A+ student in anything is doing singularly impressive work I don't think "rigor" is your strong suit.
* Beyond the quantum computer: temporal computing.
* Nebraska School Gives Most Idiotic Advice Ever to Deal with Bullies. Don't defend yourself, don't ask for help…
* Paging Margaret Atwood: Drug that wipes out vultures may cause an EU eco-disaster.
* The Farscape movie is happening.
* Why did the TV version of Game of Thrones change Jaime Lannster into a rapist? More here. I'd gotten the impression that Jaime's arc in the novels goes from "does the worst possible thing imaginable in very first appearance" to "kind of heroic?"'; last night's episode makes that reading seem impossible.
All of which is build-up to pointing out that in the book, the reunion between Cersei and Jaime is seen from Jaime's point of view. And once we consider that, those moments when Cersei has questions of propriety in the middle of their love making can take on a more sinister tone. What if we're being kept from the true horror of what Jaime's doing because we're inside his head?
* The inventor of the American suburban shopping mall was a socialist. Could his creation have been saved?
* The politics of the liberal arts nanny.
* And the 26 Best Cities In The World To See Street Art. Below: Philadelpia.
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, America, apocalypse, Bill Watterson, billionaires, Breaking Bad, bullies, bullying, cabs, California, Calvin and Hobbes, Canada, Candy Crush, Capital in the 21st Century, capitalism, Capitalocene, carceral leftism, Catholicism, charts, cities, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college, comics, cults, cultural destruction, cultural preservation, Dark Mountain Project, Democrats, despair, disaster, ecology, energy, English majors, Farscape, film, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Carter, indigenous peoples, Jared Diamond, kids today, KKK, Les Miserables, liberals, Mali, malls, marathons, Marxism, miracles, misogyny, money in politics, nannies, Nazis, North Korea, Olduvai theory, only the super-rich can save us now, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police corruption, politics, Pope John Paul II, pornography, primitivism, prison-industrial complex, prisons, quantum computers, race, rape, rape culture, Ray Nelson, religion, revolt, saints, Scalia, science fiction, socialism, sterilization, street art, Supreme Court, taxation, taxes, temporal computing, the Anthropocene, the courts, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the Senate, They Live!, Thomas Piketty, Timbuktu, tolls, tuition, Tumblr, unskewed polls, Utopia, Vox, Vox Day, vultures, wage theft, war on brains, war on drugs, war on education, Warsaw