Posts Tagged 'welfare state'
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
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Happy birthday, OEB.
* Coming soon at Marquette: "Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and "Anticipation" in Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy." And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students' blog is really good too, though I'm embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* "These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation." That "actually" is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it's talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* On the job market while pregnant, or, maybe the worst abuse of the famously abusive academic job market.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton's Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: "Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet." A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there's even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site. This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago "black site" should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano's claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC's current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can't say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC's core function.
* Institutions Adrift: Dealing with Declining State Appropriations at Kentucky's Regional Comprehensive Universities.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there's no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That's true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called "Everyday Bias," by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That's something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we're accused of "privilege."
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won't Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America's fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part "safely" in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings.
* The most important legal scholar you've likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie's comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is up for reelection tomorrow, promising to continue his campaign against public education in the city.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* "Let's stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind."
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we're rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That's Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He's also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza's leadership has failed miserably. But it's not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the "clopening" unless employees want to "step up."
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott's opening to Harris's last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men's rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn's Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*'Two and a Half Men': TV's Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It's already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* "Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it's taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence." Oh, come on, it wasn't Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* "Mass Incarceration, Deportation, Stop and Frisk: The Urban Ecology of the Prison-Industrial Complex."
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I'll hear Spielberg out.
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alejandro González Iñárritu, algorithms, America, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, Batman, Birdman, black sites, books, Catholics, CFPs, chance, cheese, Chicago, climate change, clopenings, college, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, Cops, democracy, denials, diversity, drugs, ecology, education, England, English majors, European Union, fellowships, film, first contact, free speech, Genghis Khan, genocide, Glenn Reynolds, God, Golden Girls, Greece, guns, Harris Wittels, hate speech, housework, How the University Works, Hugh Jackman, hydrofracking, Idaho, Instagram, Instapundit, Jeb Bush, Joseph Kahn, Kentucky, kids today, labor, libertarians, Lord of the Rings, majors, male privilege, Marc Maron, Marquette, Mars, men's rights, meritocracy, microstates, misogyny, music, my scholarly empire, National Adjunct Walkout Day, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Octavia Butler, orcs, Oryx and Crake, Oscars, photography, playlists, police brutality, police state, police violence, poverty, Power Rangers, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, privilege, public authority, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, reboots, recycling, right to work, Robert Heinlein, robots, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexism, Silk Road, sitcoms, sperm donation, Starbucks, Starship Troopers, states of exceptions, STEM, Steven Spielberg, strikes, superheroes, Superman, Syriza, tech economy, television, Tetris, the courts, The Ecstasy of Order, the humanities, the law, the Left, the Singularity, Title IX, Tolkien, torture, Twitter, Two and a Half Men, UNC, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, welfare state, Wes Anderson, white privilege, Wisconsin, Wolverine, work-life balance, WTF, Žižek
Friday Morning Links!
* The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research relating to H.P. Lovecraft, his associates, and literary heirs.
* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket
* Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it's rare. '1 in 5': how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault statistic. Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College. Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.
* University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.
* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.
* Yes we can! The measure, championed by Senate Democrats, would cut Pell Grants in order to free up money to pay companies that collect student loans on behalf of the Department of Education.
* Down and Out: The Democratic Party's losses at the state level are almost unprecedented, and could cripple it for a long time to come.
* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.
* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial's Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.
* Good news from Rome: "All Animals Go to Heaven." I'm really glad we settled this.
* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.
* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.
* CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn't work, but why aren't the architects of torture in jail? Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who "went too far." The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That's why they did it.
* First, do no harm: Medical profession aided CIA torture.
* The Supreme Court Just Rejected A Wage Theft Suit Against Amazon. What Does It Mean For Other Workers?
* Capitalism's gravediggers.
* "Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism." A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.
* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.
* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.
* Why James Cameron's Aliens is the best movie about technology.
* Why we can't have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.
* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.
* Elderly man nailed for clever identity theft scheme: prosecutors say he changed victim's name to his own.
* Censorship (Pasadena, California).
* The nation's millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.
* Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.
* Meet The Oldest Living Things in the World.
* And this used to be a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.
Tagged with #readyforhillary, 21 Jump Street, academia, academic job market, Adnan Syed, aliens, Amazon, animal personhood, animals, Avengers, Barack Obama, Berkeley, California, Camus, Candyland, capitalism, Captain America 3, cars, Catholicism, censorship, CIA, class struggle, college, college sports, comics, Democrats, Don't mention the war, fellowships, Ferguson, first do no harm, Foucault, futurity, games, general election 2016, Greenpeace, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, Hillary Clinton, Hippocratic oath, How the University Works, identity theft, Interstellar, Iraq, Iraq War, lightsabers, longevity, Marvel, Men in Black, Michigan, millionaires, Milwaukee, NASA, Nazca lines, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, Pasadena, Pell grants, Peru, Peter Frase, philosophy, podcasts, politics, postdocs, protest, rape, rape culture, religion, research, Sartre, science fiction, Serial, sleep, socialism, Sony, Spider-Man, St. Louis, Star Wars, student athletes, student debt, Supreme Court, surveillance society, surveillance state, the archives, the closing of the frontier, the Pope, they say time is the fire in which we burn, This American Life, this used to be a free country, torture, traffic, unions, very old things, wage theft, war on terror, welfare state, yes we can
Wednesday Links! Some Especially Good Ones!
* Paradoxa 26, "SF Now," is on its way, and has my essay on Snowpiercer and necrofuturism in it. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams's introduction to the issue is online.
* Extrapolation's current call for reviewers.
* UCR is hiring: Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian.
* African SF: Presenting Omenana 1.1. Of particular note: "The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fan Girl."
* Nnedi Okorafor, Ytasha Womack, Isiah Lavender, and Sigal Samuel discussion #BlackStormTrooper.
* NASA Officially Announce Plans To Put Humans On Mars With Orion Space Capsule.
* UAB shuts down its football program. Of course, the reason is austerity:
"The fiscal realities we face — both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint — are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB," Watts said in a statement released by the university. "As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the athletic department, football is simply not sustainable."
We just can't afford to throw bricks at students' heads any more — not in these tough times.
* Teaching fellows strike at the University of Oregon.
* "Hypereducated and On Welfare": The adjunct crisis hits Elle.
* Stefan Grimm and academic precarity: 1, 2.
* Meanwhile: College Hilariously Defends Buying $219,000 Table.
* Work, the welfare state, and what counts as "dignity."
* It really pains me to say it, because I think the consequences for anti-rape activism will be dire, but significant questions have been raised about Rolling Stone's UVA story that neither the journalist nor the magazine have good answers to. It's a good day to think carefully about what Freddie deBoer says here: "…it's an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool."
* Imagine a World Without Prisons: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Superheroes, and Prison Abolition.
* Against New Atheism: The "New Atheists" have gained traction because they give intellectual cover to Western imperialism.
* The mass transit system Milwaukee didn't know it needed. Now, if you could just snake another couple lines up the lake side… More links below the map.
* The Ferguson PD victory lap continues: Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown's stepfather intended to incite a riot.
* How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street.
* How One Woman Could Hit The Reset Button In The Case Against Darren Wilson.
* Utah's Insanely Expensive Plan To Seize Public Lands. "…a price tag that could only be paid if the state were able to increase drilling and mining." Oh, so not insane, then, just evil.
* There are boondoggles and there are boondoggles: Federal prosecutors subpoenaed dozens of records and documents relating to the Los Angeles Unified School District's iPad program, including emails, proposals and score sheets dealing with the bids that led to a multi-million Apple contract with the district.
* For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25…
* Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today.
* Keeping Kayfabe.
* And the market for Girl Scout cookies is about to be disrupted. I gained ten pounds just reading this story.
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Apple, austerity, books, boondoggles, caution, CFPs, college football, college sports, comics, Darren Wilson, delicious Girl Scout cookies, dignity of work, disruption, drill baby drill, education, empire, Episode 7, ethics, Extrapolation, fandom, Ferguson, film, football, fraternities, headbrick, How the University Works, imperialism, innovation, iPads, Isiah Lavender, Islamophobia, kayfabe, libraries, Los Angeles, maps, Mars, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASA, national parks, NCAA, necrofuturism, New Atheism, Nigeria, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Omenana, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paradoxa, pedagogy, philosophy, police brutality, police unions, police violence, precarity, prison abolition, prison-industrial complex, prisons, professional wrestling, public transportation, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Snowpiercer, Star Wars, Stefan Grimm, strikes, suicide, superheroes, the commons, the courts, the law, theft, there's always money in the banana stand, trolley problem, UAB, UC Riverside, University of Oregon, Utah, UVA, war on education, welfare state, what it is I think I'm doing, why I am not coming into work today, work, xkcd, Ytasha Womack
* In case you missed it, a Twitter conversation inspired a post with actual content on this blog yesterday: Meritocracy, Lottery, Game: Notes on the Academic Job Market. Of course, I wasn't first:
@gerrycanavan back in the day a berkeley grad student circulated a satirical "game theory" paper about the academic job market
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) October 1, 2014
@gerrycanavan the dominant strategy, it argued, was something called "the woodchipper strategy"
* Elsewhere in the academic job market genre: Not Lottery/Not Meritocracy, What Is It? From 2013! The Top 5 Mistakes Women Make in Academic Settings. Twelve Steps to Being a "Good Enough" Professor.
* And elsewhere in my media empire:
@mattfrost Yes. I sent that @gerrycanavan tweet to my staff yesterday saying it was the cornerstone of understanding contemp American gov.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 1, 2014
The insightful tweet was this one:
The "policy" disjuncture between "domestic policy" (byzantine proceduralism) and "foreign policy" (half-cocked chaos) is really interesting.
One out of 63,000's not bad!
* We were also riffing on Twitter yesterday about the possibility of TV shows about campus police, never stopping to realize that of course it's all already happened years ago.
* Eight faculty members go on strike at the General Theological Seminary, which the administration says is tantamount to quitting. A big precedent could be set here if they get away with it.
* It will take nearly $34 million each year over a 20-year period to address deferred maintenance needs and capital improvements at four major Milwaukee cultural institutions and provide public financing for a new arena.
* Elon Musk explains how we'll colonize Mars.
* A brief FAQ on Steven Salaita.
I have some other weird idiosyncratic justification for why he was fired that avoids the plain reality that he was fired for holding controversial political views.
* A critique of the Gotham programme: Marxism and superheroes.
* Brain disease found in 76 of 79 NFL players examined in study.
* Muslim NFL player penalized for praying after touchdown.
* Pa. Official Admits Errors In Investigation Of Whether Fracking Waste Spoiled Drinking Water. "Errors" undersells what seems to be pretty deliberate omissions and lies.
* Here's What Happened The One Time When The U.S. Had Universal Childcare.
* Decadence watch: "A 'Tetris' Movie Is in the Works."
* Resource curse watch: This Month the U.S. Could Pass Saudi Arabia as the World's Biggest Petroleum Producer.
* I think I already linked to this one, but why not: A long medium post on the moneyless, post-scarcity economics of Star Trek.
* Netflix has reached a deal with The Weinstein Co. for its first original movie — a sequel to Ang Lee's 2000 martial arts pic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" — set to hit IMAX theaters and the streaming-video service simultaneously next summer. I am on board.
* And Community just can't catch a break: now Yvette Nicole Brown is leaving, too.
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academic freedom, academic job market, academic jobs, America, Ang Lee, byzantine proceduralism, campus police, childcare, Chris Hayes, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, community, concussions, Cops, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Dan Harmon, decadence, Elon Musk, film, football, fossil fuels, games, Gaza, governmentality, half-cocked chaos, headbrick, hydrofracking, Islam, Israel, labor, lies and lying liars, lottery, Mars, Marxism, masculinity, meritocracy, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, my media empire, natural gas, Netflix, NFL, oil, outer space, Palestine, pedagogy, Pennsylvania, policy, politics, pollution, post-scarcity, religion, resource curse, Saudi Arabia, science fiction, sexism, sports, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, strikes, superheroes, teaching, television, tenure, Tetris, Twitter, war games, water, welfare state, women
Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise
* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR's The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I've put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!
* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.
* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.
* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain's Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and "ratings agencies could downgrade the university's credit by as many as two notches." In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators' overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.
* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.
Why would the university award aid in this way? Couldn't it just adjust the ratio of merit aid to need-based aid? Unfortunately, the "high tuition/high aid" model only "works" when it's organized like this. That's because, for many university administrators, financial aid is not so much a form of charity as it is an instrument for maximizing tuition revenue.
* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.
* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city's schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.
* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.
* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
* …disaster relief and the "disaster narrative" is central to the development of the American welfare state.
* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.
If you accept the premise that someone's experience of sexual violation "counts" as rape, regardless of whether they granted verbal permission beforehand, then in order to avoid being accused of rape you'll have to shift your mindset from, "I'd better make sure I was told it was okay to do this first," to "I'd better make damn sure this person isn't going to wake up tomorrow and feel like I raped them." The latter is a standard requiring much more communication, understanding, and compassion from the people involved than the former, especially in situations with near-strangers like one-night stands, hook-ups, or play partners you might meet at a club.
I don't know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it's an idea I'll be thinking about a while. There's a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can "withdraw" consent.
* "Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others." The Case for Staying Home from Work.
* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.
* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:
I remember one particularly bad day at a games conference. The event was, as is typical, about 10 percent female. At the start of the day, one of those "I'm just really touchy-feely" men put his hands where I had not invited them when we were crushed together in a crowded corridor. Then, in a talk, one dude took it upon himself to give a very detailed and enthusiastic account of a "rape game" he'd invented—where you had to stare deeply into the eyes of the "other player" while describing to them how you're going to rape them, until they tell you to stop. It was genuinely traumatizing to hear the glee in his voice as he talked about it. Shaken, I went to sit in a quiet, empty room to regain my composure. A well-built man at least a foot taller than me came in, sat between me and the door and said: "You know, I messaged you on OKCupid but you never messaged me back." By this point I genuinely felt too afraid to tell him to just fuck off. So I played nice and smiled and apologized.
* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.
* The case against the Supreme Court.
* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.
* Corey Robin on the emerging "right to be forgotten."
* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.
* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can't-believe-they-haven't-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.
* That's they're actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.
* Provocation: It's not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.
* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.
* SMBC on proof by induction.
* The only link from this list you really need: There's A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.
* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont's own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, America, austerity, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, comics, consent, continuity, course evaluations, democracy, disaster capitalism, Don't mention the war, Ello, Fanon, film, financial aid, gentrification, Google, governmentality, grad student life, graduate school, How the University Works, humanitarianism of a particular sort, Iraq, ISIS, Jack Kirby, Kim Stanley Robinson, legalism, liberalism, logic, Marvel, metacommentary, military interventionism, Milwaukee, misogyny, mousetrap, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, presenteeism, proof by induction, public health, race, rape, rape culture, Red Mars, rule of law, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, Silicon Valley, social media, solitary confinement, Star Trek, superheroes, Supreme Court, Syria, television, the courts, the end of culture, The Expendabelles, the law, The Lucky Strike, the mental fog of proceduralism, the right to be forgotten, torture, true crime, tuition, University of Chicago, Vermont, war on education, welfare state, Y: The Last Man
Tuesday Links
* Local police involved in 400 killings per year.
* What I Did After Police Killed My Son: Ten years later, we in Wisconsin passed the nation's first law calling for outside reviews.
* Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him. But cops agree: cops haven't used excessive force in Ferguson. 40 FBI agents are in Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown, and they already know who did it. 'Let's Be Cops,' cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. Reparations for Ferguson. John Oliver: Let's take their fucking toys back. A movement grows in Ferguson. Ferguson and white unflight. Michael Brown's autopsy suggests he had his hands up. An upside flag indicates distress. More links from Crooked Timber.
* Man Dies After Bloody, 10-Minute Beating From LAPD Officers. Texas Incarcerates Mentally Disabled Man for 34 Years without Trial.
* Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem. The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson. For blacks, the "war on terror" hasn't come home. It's always been here. Mapping the Spread of the Military's Surplus Gear. A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public. Even the liberal Kevin Drum agrees: We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake. "By mistake." So close.
* Meanwhile: Detroit police chief James Craig – nicknamed "Hollywood" for his years spent in the LAPD and his seeming love of being in front of the camera – has repeatedly called on "good" and "law-abiding" Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.
* Law professor Robert A. Ferguson's critique of the U.S. prison system misses the point that its purpose is not rehabilitation but civic death.
* Poor, Non-Working Black and Latino Men Are Nearly Non-Existent.
* A quarter century later, the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500. The racial wealth gap among working-age families, in other words, is a stunning $236,500, and there is every reason to believe that figure has widened in the five years since
* A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by leeching free content from real schools. Sounds legit!
* Change we can believe in? CBS, Produce a new Star Trek Series Featuring Wil Wheaton as the Lead role/Captain of a federation Vessel. Any true fan would know that Wesley quit Starfleet to pursue his destiny with the Traveler, but perhaps I've said too much.
* Coming soon to the Smithsonian Galleries: Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.
* Yahoo really wants you to think Donald Glover is in the next season of Community. That "I am serious. I am Yahoo Serious." tag is pretty gold, though.
* And while I'm on the subject: I know it's not for everyone, but if you ask me this may have been the most quintessential Harmontown of all time: melancholy, silly, ranty, with some great improv D&D. Give it a listen if you like Dan Harmon.
* The twenty-first century gold rush: debt collection.
* No Child Left Behind achieves its destiny: virtually every school in the state of Washington is a "failing school."
* All students at MPS now eligible for free meals.
* Teaching Is Not a Business.
* New Media: Time, Inc rates writers on how friendly they are to advertisers.
* Technocratic tweaks that will definitely solve everything: what if presidents only had one term? The icing on the cake is that if anything this would probably have the opposite effect.
* The problem with self-driving cars: they're still cars.
* Paul Campos with the latest on the law school scam.
* This November, the organizing committee of the MLA Subconference comes to Milwaukee.
* The Post-Welfare State University.
* Students who graduated in 2008 earned more credits in the humanities than in STEM, the study found. Humanities credits accounted for 17 percent of total credits earned by the typical graduate. In contrast, STEM credits accounted for 13 percent.
* Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way) more likely than women to earn tenure.
* The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List.
* Top Legal Scholars Decry "Chilling" Effect of Salaita Dehiring.
* Huge asteroid set to wipe out life on Earth – in 2880. 865 years, that's all we've got…
* Mining Spill Near U.S. Border Closes 88 Schools, Leaves Thousands Of Mexicans Without Water. Meet The First Pacific Island Town To Relocate Thanks To Climate Change. The Longest River In The U.S. Is Being Altered By Climate Change.
* The venture capitalist are now weaponizing kids. Of course, when you find out how much raising a kid costs, child labor starts to make a lot of sense. Plainly parenting is a market ripe for disruption.
* What is your greatest strength as an employee? Bonus SMBC: on internship as neologism.
* How air conditioning remade modern America.
* How to Hide a Nuclear Missile.
* The winners of the 2014 Hugos.
* The rumor is that Doctor Strange will be part of a new Marvel paradigm that rejects origin stories.
* Twitter's management is very, very eager to ruin Twitter. Can Facebook catch up in time?
* Primary 2016 watch: Only Al Gore can save us now.
* And they've finally gone too far: Edible LEGO. Some lines man was just never meant to cross.
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Afghanistan, air conditioning, Al Gore, America, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, books, Bush, cars, Center for 21st Century Studies, change we can believe in, charter schools, child labor, civil death, class struggle, climate change, community, consumer debt, Dan Harmon, debt, debt collection, Democratic primary 2016, Detroit, Doctor Strange, Don't mention the war, Donald Glover, Duke, ecology, education, entrepreneurs, Facebook, FBI, Ferguson, film, futurity, Gaza, Google, guns, Harmontown, Hillary Clinton, honesty, How the University Works, Hugo awards, income inequality, incumbents, internships, Iraq, Israel, kids today, LAPD, law school, LEGO, long reads, Marvel, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Minerva, Missouri, MLA, MLA Subconference, MOOCs, museums, neoconservativism, No Child Left Behind, now they've gone too far, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, origin stories, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, podcasts, police brutality, police coups, police riots, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, Robin Williams, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, school lunch programs, science fiction, self-driving cars, St. Louis, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, teaching, technocrats, tenure, Texas, the presidency, the Smithsonian, time, true crime, Twitter, war on schools, Washington, water, wealth, welfare state, Wil Wheaton, Wisconsin, Yahoo
All the July 4th Links You Wanted — And More!
* The Declaration of Independence has a typo; America is abolished. Happy Fourth of July.
* America at 238, by the numbers.
* Hobby Lobby as Pandora's Box. The icing on the cake.
* Like the Founders intended, an investigation into Blackwater was squashed after a top manager threatened to murder a State department official. Checks and balances. The system works.
* Remarks of Thurgood Marshall at the Annual Seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association in Maui, Hawaii, May 6, 1987.
I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever "fixed" at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.
* As a Canadian I rather like the idea of the American Revolution being aborted and our Yankee cousins staying within the Empire. Among other things it would have meant that slavery would have ended in America a generation earlier and without violence (the British outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1834).
* Meanwhile, a great moment in American democracy.
* Great new web comic from Jason Shiga, whose Fleep and Meanwhile I've praised here before.
* Some Dawn of the Planet of the Apes prequels.
* A new China Miéville short story.
* Zoo Animals Are Depressed.
* Gynofuturism: Zoe Saldana says the best roles for women are in space.
* Here's a List of What Junot Díaz Wants You to Read.
* Judy Clarke defends the indefensible.
* Maria Bamford's new web series wants to put you in The Program.
* Philosophy Job Placement 2011-2014: Departments with Relatively High Placement Rates.
* "Neuroeconomics."
* "The Princess Effect: How women's magazines demean powerful women—even when they're trying to celebrate them."
* Lionel Messi Is Impossible. More.
* How Belgium built one of the top contenders for the 2014 World Cup, and what the team means to this fractious nation. How Tourette's-afflicted Tim Howard went from international ridicule to World Cup history. Really, All Hail Tim Howard. How Spain Succumbed to the Innovator's Dilemma. Why the last group stage game is played simultaneously. Who Won the World Cup of Arm-Folding?
* Zwarte Piets were once openly characterized as Santa's slaves. Man, Santa's legacy is complicated.
* Cop Keeps Job After Violently Shoving Paraplegic Man From Wheelchair. The search continues for something a cop can do that will actually cost them their job.
* At time of austerity, 8 universities spent top dollar on Hillary Rodham Clinton speeches.
* The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the basic human right we all know about to see other people's faces in public.
* A radical reply to Hobby Lobby: Take Away the Entire Welfare State From Employers. And another: Hobby Lobby, Student Loans, and Sincere Belief.
* The rules underpinning Porky Pig's stutter.
* Shirley Jackson reads "The Lottery."
* Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
* Lies Your Doctor Told You.
* Oklahoma is now the earthquake capital of the country, thanks to tracking.
* Membership has its privileges: African leaders vote to give themselves immunity from war crimes.
* A Brief History of the Smithsonian.
* A People's History of the Peeing Calvin Decal.
* In 1990 this nation faced a horrifying outbreak of Richard Nixon rap parodies. This is that story. (via @sarahkendzior)
* Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out.
* The arc of history is long &c: Oakland Raiders Will Pay Cheerleaders Minimum Wage This Season.
* American Gods is alive! It's on Starz, but it's alive!
* "Exclamation points have played a distinguished role in the history of Marxism." Why We're Marxists.
* SMBC on fire: If God is omniscient and omnipotent, how could he let this happen? Telepathy machines were created. Check Your Bat-Privilege. I'm the superfluous female protagonist.
* Scenes from the next Paolo Bacigalupi novel: An abandoned mall in Bangkok has been overtaken by fish.
* The UNC fake-classes scandal has gotten so outrageous even the NCAA has been forced to pay attention.
* Should "free college" be framed as a right or a privilege?
* When two good guys with guns confront one another.
* The Hard Data on UFO Sightings: It's Mostly Drunk People in the West.
* Let's colonize ourselves by 3D printing ourselves on other planets.
* Catfish and American Loneliness.
* The Hooded Utilitarian has been running an Octavia Butler Roundtable.
* Another Pixar conspiracy theory: the truth about Andy's Dad.
* All about the miraculous Community revival. And more. Yay!
* Introducing the Critical Inquiry Review of Books.
* And some more good news! Bear rescued after head gets stuck in cookie jar. Happy Fourth of July!
Tagged with 3D printing, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, academic jobs, Africa, alcohol, alternate history, America, American Gods, animals, austerity, Bangkok, Batman, bears, Belgium, Blackwater, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cartoons, Catfish, checks and balances, cheerleaders, China Miéville, class struggle, climate change, college sports, community, contraception, cookie jars, Critical Inquiry, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Declaration of Independence, defense attorneys, democracy, Demon, depression, disability, earthquakes, exclamation points, Facebook, fish, Fleep, football, Fourth of July, guns, gynecology, gynofuturism, heroines, Hillary Clinton, Hobby Lobby, human rights, hydrofracking, Islamophobia, Jason Shiga, Judy Clarke, Junot Díaz, Lionel Messi, loneliness, Looney Tunes, malls, Maria Bamford, Marxism, Meanwhile, medicine, mercenaries, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Mississippi, museums, NCAA, Neil Gaiman, neuroeconomics, NFL, Oakland Raiders, Octavia Butler, Oklahoma, outer space, Paolo Bacigalupi, pelvic exams, philosophy, Pixar, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, Porky Pig, problem of evil, quantum mechanics, rap, religion, Richard Nixon, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, Shirley Jackson, short stories, slavery, Smithsonian, soccer, Spain, sports, student debt, Tea Party, teaching, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, telepathy, television, the Constitution, the courts, the Founders, the law, The Lottery, The Program, the West, theory, Thurgood Marshall, Tim Howard, Toy Story, typos, UFOs, UNC, war crimes, web comics, welfare state, women, World Cup, Zoe Saldana, zoos, Zwarte Piet
4/5ths
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Tagged with America, neoliberalism, precarity, the social safety net is for closers, very late capitalism, welfare state
A Few for Friday
* It is hard to overstate: This country, in its current condition, has no other option but something close to full employment. Our pathetic social safety net, even absent the contracting effect of austerity measures, can't fill in the gaps caused by the demise of ubiquitous employment. Even the counterrevolution has no other idiom; the most common epithet directed toward Occupy protests, after all, was "Get a job!" That the near impossibility of getting a job was the point for many who were protesting was too destabilizing a notion to be understood. In the short term, I have no doubt that the unemployment rate will fall. The question is the long-term structural dependability of a social contract built on mass employment.
* Lincoln Memorial, 2013, Anon, latex emulsion.
Lincoln himself, no more than a marble titan cut in his image, does not feel the change. And yet there it is, crawling across him, slithering toward his magisterial tumescence. The artist's liquid hand is more than mere vestigiality; it is a spiritual kinship with the primitive, making its presence felt in the numinous historiography of neoclassicism, a soupçon of Jung melting into Kantian grandeur. But each is as lurid as the other in its own mythopoeia of the human mind.
* Supreme Court's Gutting of Voting Rights Act Unleashes GOP Feeding Frenzy. The focus here is on the truly atrocious bill the North Carolina General Assembly passed yesterday.
* Congrats to Forbes' Top 25 Best Public Colleges in 2013! Too bad one-fifth of them — including the very top three — are currently under fire for allegedly failing to report rape and generally sucking at dealing with sexual assault.
* Ken MacLeod remembers Iain M. Banks.
* A Pox on Optimists!
* The new Community syndication trailer understands that the show is really about hot girls with boobs.
* And is Arrested Development coming back again? Mitch Hurwitz says "Definitely."
Tagged with academia, America, Arrested Development, art, capitalism, class struggle, community, full employment, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, Lincoln Memorial, misogyny, North Carolina, optimism, politics, race, rape culture, science fiction, sexism, the social safety net is for closers, voter suppression, Voting Rights Act, welfare state, yellowism
And A Few More for Friday
* Ridley Scott Announces Blade Runnerer Will Be Terrible. I know what you're thinking: Green Lantern had a writer?
* Surprise! CBO report shows 50% of government tax expenditures go to top 20% of earners.
* Aspiring Marijuana Mogul, Former President Of Mexico Join Forces In Unlikely Roll-Out Of National Pot Brand.
* Wash. State Police Dogs Must Unlearn How To Smell Pot.
* And for old times' sake, a truly classic Fox News lie: Cut government because 'no one' died of starvation before welfare.
Tagged with actually existing media bias, Blade Runner, class struggle, film, Fox News, Green Lantern, lies and lying liars, marijuana, Mexico, politics, Ridley Scott, science fiction, taxes, ugh, war on drugs, Washington, welfare state
Wednesday Night Links: 8,000 Barrels, 0.000025%, 3,387 Men, $100 Bills, and More
* Over a longer time span, say a decade, we would expect about 19 spill incidents with an aggregate spill volume of about 8,000 barrels, enough to fill about half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We would expect about 1.3 of these spills to be "large," which means that on average we would expect a "large" spill to occur about once every 8 years or so. Clearly, based upon reported historical industry performance, spills in general and large spills in particular would not be a rare occurrence for the proposed pipeline.
* Elsevier's behavior is so egregious that it has provoked a boycott from academics who refuse to write or review papers for its journals. But to focus on one malefactor elides a larger question: Why should academic knowledge — largely produced by academics at public and nonprofit universities and often with government grants — be turned into private property and kept from public dissemination?
* Dartmouth College Cancels Classes After Sexual Assault Protesters Receive Rape Threats. More at Student Activism.
* Piranhas are a very tricky species: On Gift Horses and Trojan Horses: The Proposed Aquatics Center.
* Tumblr of the day: Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You.
* Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the "American Novelists" page and into the "American Women Novelists" category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly–except of course–when you google "American Novelists" the list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men).
* "I love to paint. It is — painting has changed my life in an unbelievably positive way," the unprosecuted war criminal said.
* Mad Men's Misery Problem And How TV Can Handle Characters Who Never Change.
* Right Wing Media Exploit Boston Bombings To Attack Government Assistance Programs. West Virginia Republican: Make Kids Work As Janitors For School Lunches.
* Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts. That's a crushing 0.000025% of the federal budget going to WASTE.
* Holding Corporations Responsible for Workplace Deaths. And then there's Matt "Proud Neoliberal" Yglesias.
* Rhode Island Becomes 10th State To Approve Marriage Equality.
* A Slavoj Žižek Text Adventure.
* Monster.com bans unpaid internships.
* You majored in STEM? And you thought you'd get a job after graduation? Why didn't you major in something useful?
* And the new $100 is awful. Good thing I'll never actually have one.
Tagged with $100 bills, academia, aquatics center, Bush, college, comics, corporations, Dartmouth, Elsevier, feminism, gay rights, How the University Works, Information wants to be free, internships, Keystone XL, Mad Men, marriage equality, misogyny, money, neoliberalism, Occupy Cal, oil, oil spills, Open Access, painting, parasites, publishing, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Rhode Island, school lunches, sexism, STEM, student movements, superheroes, sweatshops, television, text adventures, the budget, the debt, the deficit, Tumblr, war crimes, welfare, welfare state, West Virginia, Wikipedia, workplace safety, writing, Žižek