Posts Tagged ‘food’
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,
* And David Simon comes to his senses. UPDATE: Nope. See comments.
Sunday Links
(some shamelessly borrowed from you-know-who)
* Britain paid reparations for slavery? That’s fantast–oh god.
The true scale of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade has been laid bare in documents revealing how the country’s wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished.
* Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.
* The Ambition Gap: When researchers have studied the ambition gap, they’ve discovered something peculiar: It’s not there. Women do ask for more. They just aren’t rewarded for it. Via Feminéma.
* 7 Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature. Joyce! Twain! Woolf! Eliot! Shelley! Tolstoy! Wilde! 7 (More) Obscure Children’s Books by Famous “Adult” Lit Authors. Huxley! Stein! Thurber! Sandburg! Rushdie! Fleming! Hughes!
* Actually existing media bias: Glenn Greenwald on what’s become of MSNBC.
I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?
* Mentoring and cruel optimism.
* Rehabilitating Zero Dark Thirty.
Susan Sontag once wrote that every mass art form is practiced and experienced as “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Zero Dark Thirty’s critics, unwilling to understand themselves as the film’s intended audience, instead imagined that “real Americans” were being made tools of power through one of their most important social rites: moviegoing. What these critics did not confront was their own need to fend off anxiety. For Maya, as for many Americans, the anxiety has to do with the inadequacy of Osama bin Laden’s death as consolation for all of the disasters that preceded it. How else to explain the manic focus on proving that torture did not contribute to the search for bin Laden? It suggests a kind of desperation, a desire to hold up just this one episode as separate and different from the rest of the war. This desire is Zero Dark Thirty’s true subject, as well as the object of its critique.
* ‘Welcome to Dystopia’: We Are ‘Entering A Long-Term And Politically Dangerous Food Crisis.’
* The Princess and the Trolls: The Heartrending Legend of Adalia Rose, the Most Reviled Six-Year-Old Girl on the Internet. People are the worst. Jesus Christ.
* Texts from Pride and Prejudice. Texts from Don Quixote.
* George Saunders, lapsed Catholic.
Perhaps the classic expression of this idea belongs to none other than the outgoing pope, Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was asked on Bavarian television in 1997 if the Holy Spirit is responsible for who gets elected. This was his response:
I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. … I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.
Then the clincher:
There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!
* Hayley Schafer chose her dream job at the age of 5. Three years later, her grandmother told her that if she wrote it down, the dream would come true. So she found a piece of blue construction paper and scrawled on it with a pencil: “Veterianian.” “No one told me how to spell it,” she remembers. “They just said, ‘Sound it out.’ ”
At the age of 30, she still has the sign, which is framed on her desk at the Caring Hearts Animal Clinic in Gilbert, Ariz., where she works as a vet. She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.
* A brief history of the car cup holder.
* Oscar voters overwhelmingly white, male.
* Oscar Pistorius and the Media. The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp’s boyfriend. Inspiration porn and compulsory able bodiedness.
* Stay Free or Die Tryin’: Scenes from the student protests at Cooper Union.
* Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history.
Tuesday MOOCs, and More!
* Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching. The details on this are fascinating:
Gary Matkin, the dean for distance education at Irvine, said the problem had stemmed from Mr. McKenzie’s reluctance to loosen his grip on students who he thought were not learning well in the course.“
In Professor McKenzie’s view, for instance, uninformed or superfluous responses to the questions posed in the discussion forums hobbled the serious students in their learning,” said Mr. Matkin in an e-mail.
Irvine officials, however, “felt that the course was very strong and well designed,” he said, “and that it would, indeed, meet the learning objectives of the large audience, including both those interested only in dipping into the subject and those who were seriously committed” to completing the course.
Twitter user @cjprender has a slightly different take.
* MOOCs: What if the cure is worse than the disease?
Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but I think the real root of MOOC-mania is an edifice complex on the part of university presidents and trustees. The last time I checked, the average university president in this country served for about four years before moving on to greener pastures. It used to be that the easiest way to leave a legacy on campus would be to build something. With bond financing nearly impossible to come by these days, the easiest (but not necessarily least expensive) way to build something is to create a virtual campus.
* ’8 College Degrees with the Worst Return on Investment.’ Stupid vital careers necessary for the smooth operation and reproduction of social goods! Why don’t you get paid, son?
* Bérubé: The Humanities, Unraveled.
* These serene Chinese landscapes are actually photographs of landfills.
* Don’t Panic, But Thousands of Dolphins Were Spotted Swimming Away Off the Coast of San Diego.
* Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
* Alligator OK to eat on Lenten Fridays, archbishop clarifies.
* Forthcoming Film Is Defense of For-Profit Colleges, Critics Say.
The narration for one of the film’s early promotional trailers includes references to the “attack” on the proprietary sector by policy makers, politicians, unions, and other critics who “protect the flawed status quo.”
“Many politicians continue to manipulate the truth and serve the interests of the unions in order to keep the private sector from serving adult learners, creating a virtual, permanent underclass,” says the narrator in one clip that was on the Web site of Fractured Atlas but was replaced afterThe Chronicle inquired about it.
Unions! I hate those guys.
Wednesday Morning Links
* Confirmed: US planned to nuke the moon. Not a Mr. Show link, not an imaginary story…
* Backward Design for a Backwards History Survey.
Questions like “how did things get the way they are?” or “how far back do we have to go to find the roots of this problem?” are usually more interesting—and more recognizable as historical problems—than questions like “what happened next?”
* Why are we still so bad at talking about video games?
* This guide provides an introduction to a handful of the strange spatial typologies found within the “cold chain,” that linked network of atmospheric regulation on which our entire way of life depends.
* In “North by Northwest” and other movies, Grant — for all his good looks — represented the triumph of the sexual meritocracy — a sex appeal won by experience and savoir-faire, not delts and pecs and other such things that any kid can have. Oh man. How did this ever see print?
* Last Year’s Debt Ceiling Debacle Cost Taxpayers $18.9 Billion. We can beat that.
* We’ve all been there: Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument. But this story buries the lede: what book were they arguing about?
* And You Are Most Likely to Die at 11 a.m. If you’re in the Midwest, that’s about forty-five minutes from now, so you’d better get moving…
Wednesday Night Links
The Wrap have spoken to Dale Pollock, author of an unauthorized George Lucas biography. He has apparently read outlines for twelve Star Wars movies but was obliged to sign an NDA.
Still, he’s doing a little bit of disclosing. He said:
“The three most exciting stories were 7, 8 and 9. They had propulsive action, really interesting new worlds, new characters. I remember thinking, ‘I want to see these 3 movies.”
* Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy. The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy; depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future. But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandra’s warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored. That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless.
* Nation Suddenly Realizes This Just Going To Be A Thing That Happens From Now On. Also at the Onion: Report: Only Way Nation Will Pay Attention To Climate Change Is If Julia Roberts Dies In Hurricane.
* Cuomo is very, very far from an ideal Democrat, but my friend Angus Johnson is right that his climate realism makes him a very strong contender for 2016 if Hillary Clinton decides she doesn’t want it.
* Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos.
* The man who gets paid to jump on mattresses says you can stop laughing now. There is nothing funny about jumping on mattresses day after day. Mattress after mattress. People refuse to understand.
“It’s work,” said professional mattress jumper Reuben Reynoso. “It’s not for everybody. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it.”
Saturday Links
* A new Flight of the Conchords mini-episode is here to make everything okay.
* The Minority Report touchless interface is here, and it’s amazing.
* The Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t obtain life insurance. Here’s what they did instead.
* The Longform Guide to the Death of Football.
* Voter suppression efforts take another hit as a federal judge restores early voting in Ohio. I caught a tiny bit of Rachel Maddow last night and she was hammering the sensible point that opposition to early voting doesn’t even have the fig leaf of supposedly preventing non-existent “voter fraud” to legitimate it; it’s just voter suppression, in the raw, plain and simple.
By my count GOP efforts to manipulate the vote have now failed in Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin. I think Pennsylvania’s still up next.
* This story has everything: Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse.
The theft was discovered during a routine inventory check last week at the St-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse, where the syrup is being held temporarily. The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which is responsible for the global strategic maple syrup reserve, initially kept the news quiet, hoping it would help police solve the crime quickly.
* Now I want Doctor Who to do a whole bowling episode.
* You can now get your entire genome sequences for just $1000.
* The New Inquiry troubles Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites.
We must dismantle not just the existing spheres of influence and also their reason for being. The effort is impossible but simple: dismantle all the relationships that causes us to hand out and to seek favor, erase the notion of what is owed, render farcical the very idea of acknowledgments. An idealistic notion, yes, but I am just cynical enough to point out that this book of elite-bashing contains a pages-long acknowledgments section where Hayes pays due deference to a murderer’s row of wealthy, connected elitists. With each person he thanks, I can see the invisible lattice of patronage and nepotism, so archly dissected in the main text, spiral out and off the page.
* And rest in peace, Shulamith Firestone.
Firestone applied Marxist analysis to the status of women and argued that true liberation would come only when women were freed from childbearing. In Firestone’s utopian future, babies would be gestated outside the womb and raised by both sexes.
“The tyranny of the biological family would be broken,” she wrote.
More Wednesday Links
* Instead of agreeing with graduate students that what they learn in seven years of intense study is of no earthly use outside of academia (do we really think that what we do is so useless?), we need to articulate forcefully that doctoral education serves social purposes beyond university walls. Look, I love the sentiment, but all the same it seems clear to me that seven (plus) years of intense study are pretty obviously of no earthly use outside a career in academia. That’s not at all to say that what we do is useless, or that graduate programs should shrink, or anything like that—just that graduate school is preparation for a career in academia, not self-enrichment, and certainly not worthwhile preparation for any other sort of career.
* No dystopia left behind: “The next wave of standardized testing is here, measuring your kids in art, music, and phys ed.”
* Detroit’s Unemployment Rate Is Nearly 50%, According to the Detroit News.
* Last week, in the corners of the Internet devoted to outer space, things started to get a little, well, hot. Voyager 1, the man-made object farthest away from Earth, was encountering a sharp uptick in the number of a certain kind of energetic particles around it. Had the spacecraft become the first human creation to “officially” leave the solar system?
Lots of Monday Links
* Thanks for the kidney, and you’re fired.
* Someone in the New York Times is stealing my ideas: How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death.
* In the comments on Friday my friend b scolded me for being flip about New York’s genuinely terrible state assessment exams. Today Gawker has more.
* 53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed.
* It’s great to see Harvard pushing open-access academic publishing, but there’s something deeply absurd about them crying poverty to do it.
* I’m already deeply nostalgic for Cavendish bananas. The Goldfingers look terrible.
* Academic freedom watch: Jammie Price, a tenured professor of sociology at Appalachian State University, was suspended last month after showing a documentary about pornography in her introductory sociology class.
Price said the film, which she checked out from the university library, was graphic at times but academically relevant to that week’s topic of gender and sexuality. A Wheelock College professor who helped make the movie said it was “ludicrous” to discipline an instructor for showing the documentary, noting that interviews with gender studies scholars figure prominently in the film, which is critical of the porn industry but also includes brief explicit scenes of porn.
* Actually existing media bias: The Liberal Media has consistently given more positive coverage to likely Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney compared to President Barack Obama, according to a new survey of media coverage from the Pew Research Center’s Excellence in Journalism Project.
* Elizabeth Drew games out 2012 in the New York Review of Books.
* Alas, Wisconsin: Wisconsin Saw The Largest Decrease In Employment In The Last 12 Months.
* 33 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies that Could Rock Your Summer. Spoiler alert: more like five.
* mightygodking: Why the Silver Age Was Better.
* What better way to fulfill Brando’s legacy and promote Native American rights than with a $250 million Lone Ranger remake/reboot about mystical werewolves murdering people? I really can’t on any level believe this is actually being made.
* Joss Whedon, John Hughes, and Torture Porn.
* A brief history of the late, unlamented revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up.
* Salk wept: American Airlines to air anti-vaccination programming in-flight.
* The regime for the poor and those within the criminal justice system is both policed and punitive and–in accordance with behavior that exists outside natural, market ordered society–heavily regulated and ordered by the state. Welfare and aid programs become a disciplinary mechanism for the working poor, with government monitoring and sanctioning taking an increasing role in guiding behavior. According to law professor William Stuntz, the courtroom has become a factory for processing; 95 percent of criminal convictions now come from a guilty plea, avoiding a trial. Arrests have risen almost sevenfold with only 60 percent more prosecutors needed. Meanwhile, prosecutors have been able to pull off the impressive trick of increasing the number of plea bargains while also raising the average length of imprisonment during this time period. The lived experience of prisons is also more punitive. Our current prison system is characterized by severe overcrowding, inadequate medical care, infection rates for HIV, Hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and staph far higher than on the outside world, the degradation of the custodial experience, high costs of keeping social ties intact, punitive long-term isolation, and the ever-present threat of violence and rape.
The extensive government regulation of behavior extends after the prison. As UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich argues in “Creating the Permanent Prisoner,” those leaving prison enter into a dense web of government management, simultaneously punitive and neglectful. People who leave prison face “[b]ans on entry into public housing, restrictions on public-sector employment, limits on access to federal loans for higher education, and restrictions on the receipt of public assistance… The American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section recently embarked on a project to catalogue all state and federal statutes and regulations that impose legal consequences on the fact of a felony conviction. As of May 2011, the project had catalogued over 38,000 such provisions, and project advisers estimate that the final number could reach or exceed 50,000.” Together, these create a new kind of subject, someone who exists permanently on the outside of our civilization, never meant or able to reintegrate back into our social spaces.
* And In Focus has your pictures of Earth from above.
Honestly, Meat Is Gross
Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.”
‘Between 8,000 and 10,000 Years Ago, Humans Took a Leafy Green Plant and, by Selecting for Different Characteristics, Began to Transform It into Several Different Products’
Slate’s Explainer: “Did people eat fruits and vegetables in prehistoric times?” Via Facebook.
Wednesday Night Links
* Gingrich’s support is plateauing just when he finally won my heart. Who will bomb Cuba now?
* With all this insane cash it’s making, you’d almost think Apple doesn’t actually need to use slave labor.
* Now you can see global warming at work in your very own garden.
* Actually existing media bias: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Featured Twice As Many Republicans As Dems Last Year.
* Little known fact about Sweden, that supposed bastion of liberal idealism: If a Swedish transgender person wants to legally update their gender on official ID papers, a 1972 law requires them to get both divorced and sterilized first.
* Worst idea ever? NBC plans to spin Dwight off The Office.
* The Daily Show really let Mitt Romney have it last night. This Colbert interview with Maurice “Where the Wild Things Are” Sendak is great too.
* More Romney tax follies: If you count things that aren’t taxes as if they were taxes, his tax rate is actually much higher. And his kids got $100 million tax-free.
* Kottke: President John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive!!
* And all I can say is: What took so long?
Saturday Night Fever
* We had a fine time at the South End Art Hop in Burlington this afternoon and bought some tiny pieces from Moe O’Hara, John Brickels, and Nicholas Heilig (the last of whom was making this great anti-Christmas print as we passed through his studio). I bought a couple of Heilig’s Live Art prints for my office at school, but alas—the Swedish Chef was all sold out.
* Scenes from the class struggle in Iowa: Mitt Romney offers Rick Perry a $10,000 bet. Now #What10KBuys is trending on Twitter, and the best is all anyone is talking about. I’m closer than I’ve ever been to being the smartest man in politics. I almost can taste it.
* Scenes from the class struggle everywhere: The Walmart Heirs Have The Same Net Worth As The Bottom 30 Percent Of Americans.
* The Boston Review had an interesting back-and-forth recently on ethical consumption.
* North Carolina is still trying to figure out what to do about its postwar eugenics program.
* On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. Via you-know-where.
* And it looks like Monday will be another big day for #Occupy.
Monday Night Links
with one comment
* 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.
* 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.
* 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?
Written by gerrycanavan
June 3, 2013 at 9:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, America, austerity, Ben and Jerry, capitalism, carbon, charts, climate change, comics, community, copyright, CUNY, Dan Harmon, disability, disaster, Disneyland, ecology, fertility, Florida, food, Google, How the University Works, ice cream, idelogy, intergenerational warfare, Julian Assange, kids today, Marvelman, Miracleman, MOOCs, neoliberalism, No Child Left Behind, no confidence, NYU, Pablo Neruda, poetry, remedial courses, Republicans, San Jose State, shared governance, Soylent Green, student debt, television, the CIA, the kids are all right, the kids aren't all right, the richest nation in the history of the world, the Senate, true crime, women's health, world-historical director's commentaries