Monday Morning Links

* The baby from Salt of the Earth works at Wal-Mart.

* Some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all, according to a new Fidelity Investments study of higher education faculty. While 69 percent of those surveyed cited financial concerns, an even higher percentage of professors said love of their careers factored into their decision.

* “Studies show that about 30 percent of the cost increases in higher education over the past twenty-five years have been the result of administrative growth,” Ginsberg noted. He suggested that MOOA can reverse this spending growth.  “Currently, hundreds, even thousands, of vice provosts and assistant deans attend the same meetings and undertake the same activities on campuses around the U.S. every day,” he said.  “Imagine the cost savings if one vice provost could make these decisions for hundreds of campuses.”

* Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself.

* Philadelphia Closes 23 Schools, Lays Off Thousands, Builds Huge Prison.

* The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.

* Life for a 31-year-old after fifteen years in jail.

* These Photos Of NYC’s Subway Project Are Astonishing.

* I think I’ve done this one before, but hey, it’s summertime: 30 Beautiful Abandoned Places.

* GPS maps reveal where cats go all day.

* Six Fairy Tales for the Modern Woman,

* Imagine there’s no bees.

* And David Simon comes to his senses. UPDATE: Nope. See comments.

Friday Night Links

* Thickness of the ice sheets at various locations 21,000 years ago compared with modern skylines.

* Ian Bogost has a great piece on MOOCs in an otherwise totally skippable LARoB feature on the subject.

MOOCs are a financial policy for higher education. They exemplify what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism”: policy guilefully initiated in the wake of upheaval.  The need to teach more students with fewer resources is a complex situation. It’s partly caused by hubris, especially the blind search for higher institutional status through research programs, and it’s exacerbated by the tax base crises of the ongoing and seemingly permanent Great Recession. MOOCs offer the next logical step in this process of “cost containment.” But those who would call current funding models “unviable” and offer MOOCs as a convenient alternative fail to admit that the very need for an alternative presumes that we want to abandon public education in favor of a corporate-owned infrastructure in the first place.

MOOCs are an academic labor policy. As a consequence of the financial policy just described, MOOCs are amplifying the precarity long experienced by adjuncts and graduate student assistants, and helping to extend that precarity to the professoriate. MOOCs encourage an ad-hoc “freelancing” work regime among tenured faculty, many of whom will find the financial incentives for MOOC creation and deployment difficult to resist. This is particularly true of public institution faculty who have gone years without raises. Many institutions offer tens of thousands of dollars of direct compensation for MOOC development and teaching. And, in some cases, MOOCs offer direct access to student tuition and direct competition among faculty for those new resources, extending the “entrepreneurial” institutional politics of professional schools (and corporate life more generally) to all disciplines.

MOOCs are speculative financial instruments. The purpose of an educational institution is to educate, but the purpose of a startup is to convert itself into a financial instrument.The two major MOOC providers, Udacity and Coursera, are venture capital-funded startups, and therefore they are beholden to high leverage, rapid growth with an interest in a fast flip to a larger technology company or the financial market. The concepts of “disruption” and “innovation,” so commonly applied to MOOCs, come from the world of business. As for EdX, the MOOC consortium started by Harvard and MIT, it’s a non-profit operating under the logic of speculation rather than as a public service. If anything, it will help the for-profits succeed even more by evangelizing their vision as compatible with elite non-profit educational ideals.

* It is telling that elite professors and universities who design MOOCs aren’t using them for their own students. Those of us who value education and its role in fostering both literacy and democracy should pass on them too.

* Patton Oswalt: A Closed Letter to Myself about Thievery, Heckling, and Rape Jokes.

* Sarah Kendzior vs. the prestige economy. Good interview.

* Obama wants you to believe he’s really truly going to get serious about the climate next month. Really! Meanwhile, they’ve found another methane time bomb in the permafrost.

* There are nearly six times as many showings of Man Of Steel alone as there are of all the films about women put together.

* The Seinfeld theme slowed down by 1,200 percent is horrifying.

* High-ranking SS commander found living in Minnesota.

* John Oliver really is a much better host of the Daily Show than Stewart’s been since the Bush years.

* The investigation was ongoing, but Undersheriff James Szczesniak said there was no evidence yet that Martino “had any ill intent.” There could be a dozen perfectly legitimate reasons why he’d have 30 to 40 pipe bombs in his apartment.

*  Transgender People Can Now Change Their Social Security Record’s Gender Identity.

* What’s more important: a college degree or being born rich? The answer will totally not surprise you!

* And the time has come at last to raid Detroit’s pensions in the name of bankers’ profits.

Wednesday Links: Cold War Modern Art, The Cutest Kitties, and More

* Modern art as weapon in the Cold War. And they say the humanities are worthless!

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

* We can’t buy this kind of motivation from the market. No tool or program can spark it. And the elites at the top of the current educational heap—who advanced their careers while the educational culture declined—have no clue.

* Judge rules that Fox Searchlight should have paid its interns. Fox today, literally every other media and publishing outfit in the country tomorrow…

* A judge responded to an assault victim by demanding sex in exchange for ‘legal favors’ in her divorce. She filed a complaint, and he sent cops to plant meth in her car. It’s the most atrocious abuse of power since this other story that was also published today.

* Imagining a Balkanized US.

* Former White House Chief of Staff mulling run for Illinois governor on bleed-the-teachers platform. You know, for the children.

* Meanwhile, from our governor: Scott Walker Endorses Mandating Transvaginal Ultrasounds And Shutting Down Abortion Clinics.

* Chinese century watch: Nicaragua gives Chinese firm contract to build alternative to Panama Canal.

* Massive ‘derecho’ storm poised to strike southern Wisconsin.

* Pipe break at Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant kills 8,000 small fish.

* Man of Steel sounds pretty middling, alas. And no after-credits sequence? Outrageous.

* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal simplifies the Voight-Kampff test.

Late Night Tuesday

* Duke’s Jedediah Purdy: Why I Got Arrested in Raleigh: The States Are the New Front Line.

* Authoritarianism from the inside. More from Corey Robin. The Vain Media Cynics of the NSA Story.

* Under the provisions of his Tax-Free NY scheme, most of the 64 campuses of the State University of New York (SUNY), some private colleges, and zones adjacent to SUNY campuses would be thrown open to private businesses — businesses that would be exempted from state taxes on sales, property, the income of their owners, and the income of their employees for a period of ten years. According to the governor, this creation of tax havens for private, profit-making companies is designed to create economic development and jobs, especially in upstate New York. It gets worse:

Accompanied by businessmen, politicians, and top SUNY administrators on a tour of the state, Cuomo has embarked on a full court press for his plan. “There are winners and there are losers,” he declared. “And the point of this is to be a winner.” Tax-Free NY, he announced, was “a game-changing initiative that will transform SUNY campuses and university communities across the state.” Conceding that these tax-free zones wouldn’t work without a dramatic “culture shift” in the SUNY system, Cuomo argued that faculty would have to “get interested and participate in entrepreneurial activities.” As he declared in mid-May, the situation was “delicate, because academics are academics. … But you can be a great academic and you can be entrepreneurial, and I would argue you’d be a better academic if you were actually entrepreneurial.”

* It turns out Booz Allen is also big into disruption in higher ed.

* By 2050, Nearly A Million New Yorkers Will Live In A Floodplain.

* And science proves LEGO faces are getting angrier. Hey, they’re just like us!

Monday Links

* The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks.

* Steven Chu waves the white flag on the tar sands. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… If only Obama had won!

* Colorado to split into two states over gun control? America has become a bad fan fiction of itself.

* The Constitutional Amnesia of the NSA Snooping Scandal: John Judis remembers the 60s and 70s.

* Leak, Memory.

* Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom.

* And Dan Harmon says he won’t retcon season four. Of course, he hasn’t seen it yet…

A Few More Friday Links

* We shouldn’t be assessing the health of the humanities by market-share metrics that are far more about demographics and the changing face of higher ed than they are about the intellectual shifts at the heart of actual humanities practice. Besides, the actual numbers show long-term stability post 1980:

The interpretation: The chart never quite reinforces the point that something terrible is going on in the humanities right now. Anyone looking at it closely will notice, as Michael Bérubé has, that the real collapse of humanities enrollments happened in the 1970s. The Great Recession has been less ruinous to enrollments than were the mid-1990s. Sure, a few Harvard majors have switched from history to government in the last decade: is that really a story?

But it does succeed in making the humanities appear massively out of date. And that’s a compelling story for all sorts of people. It makes humanists feel as though they deserve a larger share of the university, and that their sense of being under seige is due to the some pathology in the culture at large; it makes traditionalist critics of the humanities feel secure in pointing out that something has gone very wrong in the field.

* Malcolm Harris has a followup on his previous excellent student loan piece from Boston Review.

* Obama: PRISM Doesn’t Apply To U.S. Citizens. I don’t see how this could mean why Obama seems to be implying. Surely he’s saying that they’re collecting all data but only using data from noncitizens? How could they discriminate between citizen bandwidth and noncitizen bandwidth at the point of recording?

* But the real question: is Glenn Greenwald working for the ChiComs?

* Obama says go ahead kill all the wolves.

* And still another outrage of the day, as if your docket weren’t full: Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists.

Monday Night Links

* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.

* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.

“I get this call from San Jose State: ‘Uh, we have a problem,’” recalled Mark Ryan, superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute, a public school set up on a military model.

It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach.

To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.

* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.

* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.

* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.

* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.

* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?

* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.

* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).

* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?

* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.

Perhaps the most intriguing news: “Sony said they’re very interested in recording me watching it as a commentary track” for the Season 4 DVD set, he said. His co-host for the evening, Rob Schrab, asked if the DVD commentary could also include a visual in the corner of the screen of Harmon’s facial expressions as he watches the season he was aced out of.

* Assange v. Google.

* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.

* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.

* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?

Welcome to the Anthropocene

‘On Average, Humanity Has Built One Large Dam Every Day for the Last 130 Years.’

400 PPM

Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Hits 400 PPM for First Time in Human History. From the New York Times writeup:

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Thursday Night Links

* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.

* Dialectics of Joe Biden.

* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.

* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’

* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.

* At least 912 people are now known to have died in last month’s collapse of a building near the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, officials say.

* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).

* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.

* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.

* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.

* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.

* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.

Friday Morning

* Harvard Law Review on what Obama can do to fight climate change without Congress.

* Sarah Kendzior reports on unpaid internships.

* Our Radical Future: Cults, Utopias and Rebellions of the 1890s.

* Algorithm for how to play (one version of) Tetris forever.

* The quest for Shadow of the Colossus‘ last big secret. Very interesting piece about game fandom and community.

* …the 401(k) is a way for both your government and your employer to disown you, and to leave your life savings to be raided by the financial-services industry and its plethora of hidden and invidious fees.

* United States Lags Other Countries On Preschool Investment, Enrollment.

* On being Jewish in state prison, at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Corruption and bribery from America’s prison guards.

* Why Many in China Hate Iron Man 3‘s Chinese Version.

* Remembering the Great Stand-up Sitcom Boom.

Sunday! Night! Links!

* …these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.

* Ask yourself this: Do you know the name of any one of the victims killed in the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company disaster? Do you know how many of them there were? Their ages, aspirations, what they looked like, whether they left behind children or what messages they last posted on Facebook? Do you know if there is an explanation yet for what caused the explosion? Or if investigators are still searching for one?

* Inside a mile-deep open-pit copper mine after a catastrophic landslide.

* How the hyperkinetic media is breeding a new generation of terrorists.

* You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist, and other facts.

* Sympathy as social performance.

* Privacy is ‘off the table’ in a ‘post-9/11 world,’ says New York City police chief.

“You’re never going to know where all of our cameras are,” Bloomberg said. “And that’s one of the ways you deter people; they just don’t know whether the person sitting next to you is just somebody sitting there or a detective watching.”

* From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

* Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst Selects Author of Tennessee’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill as ‘Reformer of the Year.’

* Parents are confining sons and daughters to their homes, even if it means keeping them away from friends. Schools are canceling outdoor activities and field trips. Parents with means are choosing schools based on air-filtration systems, and some international schools have built gigantic, futuristic-looking domes over sports fields to ensure healthy breathing. In China, Breathing Becomes a Childhood Risk.

* EPA: More than half of U.S. rivers unsuitable for aquatic life.

* What is Causing Iran’s Spike in MS Cases?
 Vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight could be an unexpected long-term consequence of the Iranian revolution
.

* Alyson Provax’s Time-Wasting Experiment.

* When the US tried to weaponize the weather.

* The “electrosensitive” are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?

Tuesday Morning

* #AltAc megapost: Humanities Unbound: Careers & Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track.

* Decadence watch: Flights Delayed Across Country Amid Budget-Cut Furloughs of Air Controllers.

* Reddit wants you to know it is sorry. Time to focus on its core competencies of creepshots and porn.

* World’s energy nearly as dirty today as it was 20 years ago.

* France Legalizes Gay Marriage After Harsh Debate.

France legalized gay marriage on Tuesday after a wrenching national debate and protests that flooded the streets of Paris. Legions of officers and water cannon stood ready near France’s National Assembly ahead of the final vote, bracing for possible violence on an issue that galvanized the country’s faltering conservative movement.

The measure passed easily in the Socialist-majority Assembly, 331-225, just minutes after the president of the legislative body expelled a disruptive protester in pink, the color adopted by French opponents of gay marriage.

I have a lot of questions.

* REPORT: Hundreds Of Immigrants Are Being Deported From Their Hospital Beds.

* Tumblr of the day:
http://100percentmen.tumblr.com.

* Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr stated in letters to the Michigan Employee Relations Commission (MERC) that it is within his power to end collective bargaining in the city. Specifically, Orr claimed he is under no legal obligation to participate in bargaining or compulsory arbitration with public safety employees, including police, firefighters and emergency medical responders.

Set to a Backdrop of Bright Japanese Pop, Katamari Damacy Cheerfully Depicts a Kind of Snowballing Addiction to Acquisition That Literally Uproots the Earth Itself

Katamari Damacy as ecological fiction.

This Week at Marquette

* Thursday, April 18, 11:30 AM, in Lalumiere 114 – “Madman with a Box: Doctor Who.” The third and final (and much-anticipated) Pop Culture Lunch of the semester. We’re still taking suggestions for next year but it looks as if we’ll start with Game of Thrones, followed perhaps by Glee and Sherlock.

* Friday, April 19, all day – “Conversations across the Humanities,” an all-day interdisciplinary symposium. I’ll be speaking at 1 PM on the “Ab Ultra: Space Across Disciplines” panel with a talk titled  ”Science Fiction in the Anthropocene.”