Friday Linkfest

* The Portal 2s that could have been. I do, I happily admit, want to play all of these.

* Drop everything! My brilliant friend and colleague Melody Jue is now blogging at Philosophy of Water.

* At right is your photo of the day: An aurora over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.

* Joss Whedon explains how to write a sequel.

* Steal $80 million in a Ponzi scheme, get 18 months. Steal $4,367 in food stamps, get 3 years.

* “A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth,” Ohio oil and gas regulators said today.

* The year without a winter. Things are going to get weirder. But don’t worry: God told James Inhofe global warming is a hoax.

* “I have not heard of another hug”: Janet Bell, Derrick Bell’s widow, speaks out.

* Pat Robertson gets one right: he says we ought to legalize it.

* The Seuss book no one’s bought us (yet): The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.

* Jacob Burak crunches the odds on Russian Roulette. But he’s completely failed to account for the quantum immortality factor.

* Science quantifies the Tina Fey effect.

“When all other variables in the model are held at their mean, those who watched the SNL clip had a 45.4 percent probability of saying that Palin’s nomination made them less likely to vote for McCain,” they write. “This same probability drops to 34 percent among those who saw coverage of the debate through other media. Exposure to the clip had no significant effect on the likelihood of voting for Obama.”

* When Terry Kneiss wins a Showcase Showdown, son, he wins it.

* On chess, gender, and Laszlo Polgar’s Grandmaster Experiment.

* For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. I’m shocked, shocked! Followup to this This American Life story.

* The headline reads, “Breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment stops brain damage in mice.”

* And TPM has today’s sci-fi architecture porn.

Information Wants to Be Free, But You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required. Stop me if this sounds a bit familiar.

And So It Goes

Charles Shields has been blogging his experience as Kurt Vonnegut’s biographer at writingkurtvonnegut.com.

‘The Very Fact That People Are Willing to Work for Free at the Beginning of Their Career Erodes the Need for People in Those Cushy Jobs at the End of the Career’

First, a strike has been called by legitimate unions. You might disagree with tactics, or even, as Yglesias claims, think that it’s counterproductive to the interests of the unpaid bloggers, but scabbing a picket line (even a virtual one) is a serious deal. Unless you have damn good reasons, you should always trust the workers who have called a strike. I don’t see how anyone can call themselves on the Left if they proudly cross a picket line.* And its one thing to do that in private, or because you were unaware of the picket line. Its another to publically advocate scabbing while taking money and publically representing a (supposedly) progressive organization like the Center for American Progress.

Second, It’s easy to overthink the complexity of an issue like this. Stepping back it is, like every other strike, a matter of class loyalties. Do you side with unpaid information-age workers, or AOL, one of the biggest information conglomerates in the world? There is no way that poorly paid information workers will ever get a fair deal unless they organize and fight. You either side with them (like Erik Loomis does) or you side with the faceless multinational corporation (like Yglesias does, whether he intends to our not). There’s no neutral ground in cyberspace.

Wiz at Ph.D. Octopus, building off a pair of widely circulated posts from Eric Loomis, calls out Matt Yglesias and the progressive blogosphere more generally for failing to support information laborers during the union-called HuffPo strike. Thanks to the incomparable @zunguzungu for the pointer.

Could They Beat Up China Miéville?

Your blog of the day. You may begin to notice a theme.

Goodbye Is Too Good a Word, Babe

OpenLeft shuts its doors.

No One Cares What We Think

I long ago had to come to terms with a political era and a political machine that is not my own and never likely to please me. I do wonder what a critique like this one might accomplish, were it to penetrate the greater bloggy consciousness. It would take someone with publicity and access to bring it into the conversation, and as I’ve said, very, very few of genuinely left-wing socialist policy preferences are ever allowed into the Club. Even if it got there– even if, somehow, a critique like this one could puncture the carefully constructed bubble of blogospheric consciousness, the one which limits debate and sets the boundaries of “acceptable” discourse so narrowly– I can predict a sad response. Many would set out to deny the possibility that political blogs contain anything less than the full panoply of human political opinion, and would do so with exactly the mechanism I’m describing here: the existence of a nominal left-wing that represents merely a slightly different flavor of neoliberal doctrine would provide cover for those not even nominally left-wing. The Matt Yglesiases, the Ezra Kleins, the Jon Chaits, the Kevin Drums– they would likely support the neoliberal orthodoxy that has captured the debate by denying that any such dynamic could exist. That would give an out to the conservatives and libertarians to say “see, even the Liberal Ezra Klein says….” Every time there is agreement between, say, Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Will Wilkinson, this is taken as a sign that of a lack of disagreement to their position, rather than as an indicator of the narrow confines of blogger opinion. Once again, the idea that there is some sort of genuine ideological disagreement within the space would paper over the fact that little such disagreement exists.

Freddie deBoer has a must-read post on neoliberalism and the progressive blogosphere. Of course, when people happily take up the criticism as a badge of honor, there’s just not much left to say…

UPDATE: Contrary to my own pronouncements, I had a little bit more to say about all this on HASTAC.

The Emperor Has No Objects – 2

Even if you don’t care about all that you may get a kick out of the Speculative Realism blog generator. The best I got was “Dwindling Motifs.”

Good Writing from Other People

I have a few projects I’m desperately behind on at the moment, so here in lieu of actual content is good writing from people who aren’t me:

* My friend Lisa on the intellectual proletariat.

* Aaron Bady on Franzen’s Freedom and the project of unfinished realism. (Having actually read Freedom [it's all right, even pretty good] instead of done the things I was supposed to do I may post about it someday soon myself.)

* Socialism and/or Barbarism on Swamp Thing, scarcity, and “green politics.”

* Easily Distracted on what it might mean to really take responsibility.

* And Crooked Timber, against Malcolm Gladwell, on blogs, bullets, and bullshit.

A Bunch of Links for Thursday

* In the future, you can make telephone calls from inside your email. Also, in the future Google knows everything there is to know about you.

* Oh, crap: My adjunct story starts with the highly self-indulgent decision to pursue a PhD in comparative literature. To me, this meant I’d get to study great writers who happened to express themselves in different languages. To hiring committees, it meant I had GENERALIST tattooed on my forehead—the academic equivalent of a scarlet A.

* Vimeo has a sneak preview of The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

* Happy 35th birthday, global warming. Personally, like the first commenter, I count from Arrhenius.

* How the Pirates make more money losing. Via the MetaFilter thread on accounting tricks in Major League Baseball.

* Surviving and Thriving in Durham: a Tumblr blog.

* Slayage has a special double issue on Dollhouse.

* Pynchon on plagiarism.

* Sarah Palin, kingmaker.

* There’s a new Grow game, Grow Valley. (Here’s the walkthrough.) You may also Metagun, which Rock Paper Shotgun describes as “a game about a man who fires a gun that fires men who fire guns. At you.”

* The eleven most scandalous stories about Saved By The Bell from Dustin “Screech” Diamond’s autobiography. Not a hoax, not an imaginary story. Via MetaFilter.

* And you had me at “Rod Serling action figure.”

Wednesday

* Via everywhere: “A Letter to My Students” from Michael O’Hare.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

* But the news isn’t all bad: Nike has filed a patent on the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future, Part II.

* Should blogs count toward tenure? Cathy Davidson says yes, but as service work, not publication. More from Chutry, who approves.

* New Jersey in the news! The state lost $400 million in federal education funding for not following directions.

* Trailer for AMC’s The Walking Dead. I’m cautiously optimistic, even if some of this (particularly the washed-out, poorly acted opening scenes) seems really amateurish.

* John Krasinski’s adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men can be watched on Hulu until September 5. Speaking as a hideous man, I thought it was worth watching.

* “Competitive balance an issue in EPL.” Four 6-0 games in two weeks—you think?

* What’s in the Avatar special edition?

* And presenting the Next Generation that never (but almost) was, starring Wesley Snipes as Geordi La Forge.

Monday Night

* Adjunct faculty have unionized at Central Michigan University.

* A federal judge has suspended federal funding for all stem cell research. Let’s just burn our scientists at the stake and get it over with.

* Nothing says “superpower” like when your public schools can’t afford toilet paper.

* Philadelphia wants you to pay your blog tax.

* And Postmodern Barney catches Superman boxing an angel. It ends just about exactly as you’d expect.

You Are Not So Smart

You Are Not So Smart is a blog slowly making its way through all your cognitive biases, with good posts on memory, Dunbar’s Number, Dunning-Kruger, and fines. Via Kottke.

Only One Week Left

With the World Cup less than a week away, MetaFilter has your must-read soccer blogs.

Friday Night

* Let a thousand Arizonas bloom: Puerto Rican Eduardo Caraballo was threatened with deportation from Illinois because he looks Mexican. Via MeFi.

* A bunch of neurotic, selfish, childish, insensitive and unimaginative, vicious bunch of jerks! Robert Heinlein v. fandom. Starship Troopers: no joke. Also via.

* Skepticism v. denialism. Also also.

* Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal that intends to take seriously the brazenly unserious shock pop phenomenon and fame monster known as Lady Gaga. You know what I’m gonna say.

* Pseudoscience and airport security.

* Can dolphins commit suicide?