Thursday Night Links

* I saw this movie: Brains of rats connected allowing them to share information via internet.

* It bears repeating: The candidate’s adviser sent us a letter on which both “department of history” and “faculty of arts and sciences” were misspelled.

* Advice From Tenure-Track Faculty To Those Entering The Profession.

* Beyond the MOOC: While other universities move quickly to offer courses online for free, Carnegie Mellon University is instead starting for-profit efforts designed to capture segments of the education market. I’ll promote this a bit more as the date gets closer, but I’ll be speaking at a “What’s the Matter with MOOCs?” event at UWM in mid-March.

* Boots on Campus: Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia.

* Student Debt Nearly Tripled In 8 Years, New York Federal Reserve Reports.

* The Dan Harmon backlash, at the AV Club and TNR (of all things).

* Justice, American style: The city’s complaint in federal court claims that if Ms. Truong is entitled to damages for the nearly three years she spent in jail awaiting trial, then Mr. Ryan is as much to blame as the city because he took too long to get the coerced confession tossed out of court by the judge.

* What is happening with Bob Woodward? Seriously, WTF Is Up With Bob Woodward?

* Will a Republican friend-of-the-court brief tip the Supreme Court in favor of gay marriage? I’m pretty sure it’ll have more luck than Obama’s.

* These numbers are unprecedented: by 2014 President Obama will have deported over 2 million people – more in six years than all people deported before 1997. That “before 1997″ actually means since 1892.

* AFL-CIO Executive Council Endorses Comprehensive Doomsday Policy for Working Families.

“We need union jobs today, not tomorrow,” said Rich Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO.  “The resolution balances our desire to protect the fragile ecosystem of the earth, while acknowledging the economic benefits of a high-road strategy to develop the doomsday technologies of the future.”

* Never forget: The entire staff of the West Wing died on Voyager.

* How Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the EmpireTurned Star Wars into Science Fiction.

* Women Work Harder Than Men, Study Says.

* The Turn against Nabokov.

* When the White House was completely gutted.

The social events of the 1948 holiday season had to be canceled. And with good reason: Experts called the third floor of the White House “an outstanding example of a firetrap.” The result of a federally commissioned report found the mansion’s plumbing “makeshift and unsanitary,” while “the structural deterioration [was] in ‘appalling degree,’ and threatening complete collapse.” The congressional commission on the matter was considering the option of abandoning the structure altogether in favor of a built-from-scratch mansion, but President Truman lobbied for the restoration.

* When Martin Luther King played pool.

* “Preserved” plushies in jars.

* Help wanted: must be infallible.

* They’re making a movie out of The Drowned World.

* Shale Gas Fracking Will Be Around For a Long, Long Time.

* And American history, Breitbart style: Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. We all saw it!

Recorded at a Secret Faculty Meeting

Really clever PhD Comics.

Some Scattered and Limited Advice for Going On the Academic Job Market from Someone Who Is Emphatically Not an Expert

The following is adapted from a short reflective piece I wrote last spring for graduate students in the Literature Program at Duke, based on my experience going on the job market as an ABD. I’ve had to remove some of the more personal details—such as my hit rate, specific details of my interviews, and so forth—but otherwise I’ve tried to retain the usefulness of the piece as best I could.

To be honest I feel some amount of trepidation posting this at all, simply because I feel as though the mere existence of the “job market advice” genre legitimates the fantasy that the academic job market is a meritocracy, which it emphatically is not. There are no magic bullets; in the final analysis there is nothing you can do to game the system. Even the advice here won’t apply to all schools—much of it doesn’t square with my experience of being hired at Marquette, for instance, to take but one particular case very close to my heart.

Still, there are some practical things you can do to help your candidacy, and with the Job Information List coming out this Friday it seems like a worthwhile time to write this all down. If you’re going on the market this year, good luck, and may whatever God you believe in have mercy on your soul.

Gerry Canavan (searched 2011-2012 while ABD)
Primary teaching field: Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
Primary research field: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (mostly U.S. and British)

I was one of the first people to go on the job market with the benefit of the new Lit department job site and sample materials, which I found to be extremely useful. I also took some of the advice in this thread I posted on AskMetaFilter:

http://ask.metafilter.com/183987/so-long-suckers

including setting up a fairly crude professional webpage (http://gerrycanavan.com) with links to my C.V., syllabi and articles and an account on academia.edu, and optimistically getting my cross-country flight to MLA during the summer when tickets were still at their cheapest.

I’ve tried to include some general thoughts about my experience of going on the job market, while attempting to focus on the stuff that I had to learn or improvise along the way.

• Know in advance that the process is extremely time-consuming, with each individual step along the way almost completely unrewarding in itself. I went in with the mindset that because it was my first time on the market, and because I was still ABD, I was going to be “selective” and only apply to jobs I really wanted. In practice, however, this didn’t happen: I applied to more or less every tenure-track job I seemed remotely qualified for that wasn’t a 4/4, and every postdoc it seemed like I had any chance to get. I think this is how you have to do it.

I kept two Excel spreadsheets, one detailing job openings and the other postdoc openings, and used the strikethrough feature whenever I finished one. Sadly, crossing something off your list is essentially the only positive reinforcement you receive for almost all of the process. Dossier requests don’t come until mid-November, and are becoming rarer; with digital submission, I found most schools are just asking for everything up front. Generally MLA interviews aren’t scheduled until early-to-mid December, and some come really last minute; rejections don’t arrive for months, if ever. (Some schools will send you a delivery confirmation, and nearly every job will send you an optional Equal Opportunity survey to fill out, which I always did—but from many places that’s the only communication you actually get back.)

As we all know, the line between a “successful” search and an “unsuccessful” search can be pretty razor-thin. It’s worth it to put the time in going all-out in your applications to maximize your chances of getting something in the end.

• That said, most of the really painful work is up-front. Once you have your generic job letter written, it’s really not that hard to customize for each individual posting. The process has a rhythm: (1) change the date (2) change the address (3) change the salutation (4) change the first paragraph (5) change the last paragraph (6) change the one place in the middle where I say “I am eager to bring courses in this subject to UNIVERSITYNAME” (7) add something specific about the posting or about the campus if applicable. By the end I could do four applications in an afternoon, even taking my tendencies towards neurotic over-proofreading into account.

What took longest, after the initial setup, was tweaking my generic materials to suit the sometimes esoteric requests of individual postings. This is especially, infuriatingly true of postdocs.

The timeline on the Lit website is pretty accurate—you should begin gathering your materials in August (or sooner) so you can hit the ground running with the very early institutional postdocs that are due at the end of September: Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago. These are well-paying, low-load, high-prestige jobs with very generous timelines (contracts as long as four or five years), which means several years of guaranteed income and health insurance before you have to start panicking again; they’re definitely worth the hassle of having to do everything early.

Be prepared to significantly revise your interest letter at least three or four times before it feels “ready.” Share it with your advisor and your department’s Job Czar early; workshop it with other grad students.

To be minimally prepared for a job search, you need:

* generic interest letter template
* current C.V.
* two-to-three-page dissertation abstract
* at least one writing sample, preferably a tear sheet from a published article, or if not that an article “under consideration” somewhere—I had three different ones I targeted for different sorts of jobs
* at least one completed, very polished chapter you feel confident about sending out immediately if it is requested
* a statement of teaching philosophy
* your teaching evals, including the statistical analysis your college provides if available
* a “research agenda” specifying your plans to revise your dissertation into a book and describing your initial plans for a second project
* at least two to three sample syllabi—I actually wound up with many more than this. Include courses taught, courses you’d like to teach, intro/survey courses in your field, special topics courses for juniors and seminars, and grad courses
* transcripts from undergrad and from all grad schools
* recommendation letters, including (definitely) someone familiar with your teaching and (possibly) one or two letters from people not on your committee / outside your university
* an endorsement from your DGS that you will finish by the spring (if ABD)

Not every school will ask for every document, but you’ll likely be asked for each these documents at least once.

If you’re ABD, you also need an advisor who you are existentially certain is willing to say you will finish your dissertation within the year.

You should contact your recommenders as soon as you’re sure you’re really going to go on the market and follow up with them by mid-September at the very latest. What you want to do is open up an Interfolio account and solicit two generic letters from your recommenders, one for TT jobs and one for postdocs. (I actually created two separate Interfolio accounts so neither I nor they would mix the letters up; this might have been overkill, but at least the plan worked.)

I applied to jobs in lit, film, and American Studies and used basically the same letters for all jobs. Generally speaking I don’t think you need specific rec letters tailored to different disciplines, must less tailored to specific job postings or postdocs. Attempting to do this in any systematic way would drive your letter writers completely crazy, and probably you too.

Interfolio will be your best friend; using Interfolio you can even upload letters into university-specific online applications or at other sites like Academic Jobs Online. See FAQ here: http://help.interfolio.com/entries/166320-applying-to-an-online-application.

I had seven letters in my dossier: one letter from each member of my committee and then two people from other universities who are relatively well-known in their fields and know my work. (If you know someone like this, it’d be a very good idea to have a letter from them.) Opinions differ, I think, but I was advised by one of my chairs to send all seven recommendation letters every time regardless of how many letters the search committee actually asked for. This is what I almost always did.

• The process is significantly more expensive than you might anticipate. All told it will probably cost a person between $1000 and $2000 to go on the market for the first time. I spent several hundred dollars in postage and Interfolio dossier send-outs (minimum $6 a pop, commonly $12 or more), including some last-minute FedExing when I didn’t have my act together in time. Some postdocs even have application fees. I had to buy some interview clothes, including new suits, ties, and shirts, as years of being a grad student had left me with nothing acceptably nice; these wound up being a birthday present from my father. My year, MLA was in Seattle, which meant a costly cross-continental flight, and four nights in a hotel at my own expense; luckily, my dad came through again with airline miles to help me out with the flight, and I shared a hotel room with a friend in Seattle. Plan ahead for the expenses where you can.

• Tailoring your letters to the job/campus seems to help, but don’t go overboard. For the UT Austin postdoc, just for instance, I added a few lines about how doing a postdoc in Austin would allow me to access the new David Foster Wallace archive in the Henry Ransom Center. For the Marquette 21C job I ultimately accepted I added a line about how I tend to teach “very contemporary literature that speaks in a direct way to my students’ life experiences,” language that not only happened to be true but which I wound up liking enough to keep in most of the letters I sent afterwards.

• Networking really helps. I would recommend you decide now to be as cynical as possible about this and exploit every advantage you have. With a market as brutal as ours every little bit helps.

I saw the same thing happening over and over again: people were getting interviews and visits at places where their advisors and recommenders had connections. Again, the iron rule: the academic job market is emphatically not a meritocracy. 

Keep your advisors, your department’s Job Czar, and other profs in the department up to date on your job search, both where you’re applying and where you’re getting dossier request, interviews, and visits. You never know who might have an unexpected connection someplace that helps grease the wheel.

• On being “interdisciplinary.” It was obvious from my and others’ experience that some schools know what sort of program Duke Literature is; that other schools believed it was a traditional comparative literature program; and that still other schools thought “Literature” is what Duke calls its English department. While this brand confusion could be read as a potential disadvantage, it also presents an opportunity for us to present ourselves and our academic history in whatever light is most favorable.

To take my own situation: my work in graduate school was unfocused interdisciplinary. My dissertation spanned the entire twentieth century rather than focusing on a particular period or decade, with just enough in the 1800s to justify applying for 19C+20C jobs too. I wound up using material from both Britain and the U.S., as well as writers from Canada and Haiti. I use literature, film, television, comics, and theory simultaneously and somewhat interchangeably, organized around genre rather than medium or period.

With this background, or despite it, I ultimately seemed to be most competitive in English departments. The American Studies jobs I applied for seemed to have very little interest in me, despite my personal feeling that I was a reasonably good candidate for these jobs; it seems as though American Studies departments show a very strong preference for people with American Studies degrees, with History a second choice and English/Lit a somewhat distant third. I think I could have been more competitive for film and media jobs if I’d organized my work somewhat differently earlier in grad school, but in the end I just decided not to apply to most film jobs; I felt my work didn’t speak sufficiently well to film history and theory for a film department.

I applied to mostly 20C and 21C American literature jobs and had all my success there (specifically, in postwar jobs; the job I eventually took here at Marquette was a posting in contemporary American lit, of which there were a few precious listings but not very many). Because of the sorts of texts I focus on, I really wasn’t an especially good candidate for full-20C or 19C+20C jobs, but I applied for these anyway on the grounds that maybe lightning would strike. It didn’t, really.

• On being “elite.” People from Duke Lit definitely have trouble getting attention at “non-elite” schools and “teaching schools,” who assume (perhaps with some justification) either that we won’t actually come, or that we’ll be looking to move on as soon as we get there. Generally speaking, these schools paid no attention to me, and I’m not sure what I really could have done differently to get more attention from them than I did.

• On being “political.” The politics of my work, and of the department generally, didn’t seem to be a strike against me, despite my fears about this before the process started—though of course it’s impossible to ever know why you got an interview and why you didn’t. In any event this is more or less already baked into the cake; don’t try to hide who you are.

To this day I have no sense of whether this blog and my Twitter profile helped me or hurt me, much less at what specific institutions they did or didn’t.

• Really—and please know I hate this language as much as you do—much of your preparation for the job market is about how to sell yourself. You do need to take some time to read the letters from previous applicants in your department and figure out how to position yourself with respect to your chosen disciplinary field. Who is getting jobs? At what sorts of schools are they getting them? What are they doing right that you can steal? Where do people seem to be going wrong?

If you’re applying in English, at a minimum you need to be able to make the case that your project speaks to the concerns of a fairly traditional English curriculum, as nearly all the jobs that are available are in departments that are much more traditional and canon-focused than the work grad students are typically doing in their dissertations (especially at a place like Duke Lit).

You also need to show you bring something new to the table—secondary and even tertiary desirable specialties beyond what the job ad nominally requires. (If you have any remotely plausible case to claim your work is “digital humanities,” do so.)

You also need to show you can teach in your field generally, not just in your chosen subfield. It was very common, even with postwar or contemporary jobs, that I’d be expected to teach introductory and survey classes in 20C American Literature, some extending as far back as the Civil War; be ready to show you can do this. If you haven’t taught much yet, prep good syllabuses.

It was my sense that the “generalism” of Duke Lit, which in previous cycles had been something of a black mark against our candidacies, had transformed in the post-2008-crash environment into something of an advantage. This was true not just of my own experience but across Lit, and indeed across all the people I know who got lucky last year. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many departments and chairs are now viewing each tenure line as potentially their last. Much more so than in the past, departments are looking for people who can solve multiple problems for them at once. (Again, if you have any remotely plausible case to claim your work is “digital humanities,” do so.)

Don’t assume you know where you will be competitive. There are so many different factors at work in these things that you can’t possibly predict in advance which departments will be interested in you and which won’t. You just have to apply everywhere.

• What was a waste of time: One thing I definitely wasted my time on was looking for jobs at the Chronicle of Higher Education, HERC, and other sites like that. Everything you need is on the MLA Job Information List and the Wiki.

• What was worth doing: I’m very glad I did all the workshops available in the department: letter-writing/CV workshop, mock interview, mock job talk. Definitely do these.

My mock interview actually went somewhat terribly, I felt: I knew what I wanted to say, but hadn’t prepped very effectively, and got bogged down in details and my own anxieties about my hireability. In the 30 minute debrief after my mock interview I learned a lot about what I was doing wrong, all the way down to what they were really asking when they asked question X or Y.

I initially approached my mock interview as if it were a second comprehensive exam, which is definitely how it feels, especially when the members of your exam committee are staring at you across the table—but that’s completely the wrong attitude. An interview is nothing like an exam and is much more like a weird, multiple-person first date. In other words, they’re not probing your expertise so much as your demeanor and your competence as an educator, scholar, and potential colleague. I think I needed to do one badly to see how to actually do it correctly, and bombing at home was a lot better than bombing at MLA when it actually mattered.

The mock job talk was also quite helpful, though I felt a lot more confident in that mode than in the interview. (If your experience is like mine, your friends and professors will actually be much harder on you than the department you’re visiting will; my mock job talk was much more intense than the real thing, and the questions significantly tougher.) It’s very illuminating to see what sorts of questions your talk prompts; there was a lot of overlap between the mock questions and the actual questions I received, which meant I already had some good talking points for the Q&A at the real thing.

• Academic Jobs Wiki. Opinions differ here, but I found it absolutely indispensible. Just don’t let it drive you crazy. 

• Know that you will be unhappy most of the time you’re on the market, but try not to be. I was stressed out continuously from August to February—first just trying to get the apps out, then while waiting for replies, then while prepping for the MLA interview, then while prepping for my campus visits, then for two weeks of waiting after the campus visits while they interviewed the other candidate. It obviously didn’t help that I had reached the end of my funding, that I had made the decision not to apply for any dissertation completion fellowships so as not to split my energy, and that the baby was due in April.

Almost all of this stress was completely wasted emotional energy. It’s incredibly difficult, but try to remember you can’t actually control any aspect of this very arbitrary process, and that nothing that happens reflects either on the quality of your work or on you personally.

• Lean on each other. A very nice thing about our department is that generally speaking we’re not all competing for all the same jobs. That’s not true everywhere—but even if it’s not, try to live as if it were. I got a lot of help on my apps from other students in the department, and tried to reciprocate / pay it forward as best I could. Be excellent to each other, if only because the hiring committees won’t.

• Really, good luck!

Thursday!

* Let’s Talk about Debt: The Real World Economy versus the Grad School Economy. The Catch 22 of Grad School Economics. Debt & Regret. The Golden Handcuffs of Employment (aka “Public Service”).

* Also making the rounds: The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program. This story is very sad, and a large part of what makes it sad extends beyond academia specifically to the failure of the social safety net more generally.

* Sarah Lawrence, With Guns: Teaching English at West Point.

* The decisive objection to the quest for original meaning, even when the quest is conducted in good faith, is that judicial historiography rarely dispels ambiguity. Judges are not competent historians. Even real historiography is frequently indeterminate, as real historians acknowledge. To put to a judge a question that he cannot answer is to evoke “motivated thinking,” the form of cognitive delusion that consists of credulously accepting the evidence that supports a preconception and of peremptorily rejecting the evidence that contradicts it. Posner v. Scalia.

* Taibbi v. Bain Capital.

Now your troubled firm – let’s say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company’s bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level…

Also in Rolling Stone: The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney.

* What It’s Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time.

* And we all know the rules:

Every president is in the best physical and mental condition they were ever in throughout the course of their presidency. Fatal maladies have been cured, but any lifelong conditions or chronic illnesses (e.g. FDR’s polio) remain.

The presidents are fighting in an ovular arena 287 feet long and 180 feet wide (the dimensions of the [1] Roman Colosseum). The floor is concrete. Assume that weather is not a factor.

Each president has been given one standard-issue [2] Gerber LHR Combat Knife , the knife [3] presented to each graduate of the United States Army Special Forces Qualification Course. Assume the presidents have no training outside any combat experiences they may have had in their own lives.

There is no penalty for avoiding combat for an extended period of time. Hiding and/or playing dead could be valid strategies, but there can be only one winner. The melee will go on as long as it needs to.

FDR has been outfitted with a [4] Bound Plus H-Frame Power Wheelchair, and can travel at a maximum speed of around 11.5 MPH. The wheelchair has been customized so that he is holding his knife with his dominant hand. This is to compensate for his almost certain and immediate defeat in the face of an overwhelming disadvantage.
Each president will be deposited in the arena regardless of their own will to fight, however, personal ethics, leadership ability, tactical expertise etc., should all be taken into account. Alliances are allowed.

Saturday Night!

* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.

* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.

* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”

* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?

* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?

* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.

* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!

Academia Roundup

* Ph.D.s on food stamps. The issue is important (undeniably) but the framing here (as is so common with these sorts of profiles) slides at times into the deserving vs. undeserving binary; the scandal is not that some people are being unhappily slotted into the wrong social classes but the existence of this sort of poverty as such.

* But hey, let’s adjunctify research, too! That’ll solve it.

* Rutgers Charges Students Nearly $1,000 Each for Football.

* And UNC releases its report on its recent NCAA fraud scandal.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

* Inside Pantone HQ.

* Muppet Fairy Tales. Why isn’t this a book or long-running television series yet?

* Presenting the Rust Belt Justice League.

* Being Samuel L. Jackson.

* The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

* To explain the behavior of “the left,” Bergen offers this theory: “From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.” In other words, progressives are slavishly supportive of “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades” because they have deluded themselves into denying this reality and continue to pretend he’s some sort of anti-war figure.

* Faith-based retirement. (via)

* 16 years, $185,000 in debt, ABD. Sad story. (via)

* Stephen King talks to Neil Gaiman.

* The secret art of Dr. Seuss.

* And the truth is out there: Seattle Attorney Andrew Basiago Claims U.S. Sent Him On Time Travels. I want to believe!

A Well-Considered Policy Unlikely to Have Any Negative Consequences

Starting July 1, students loans will accrue interest while you’re still in grad school.

When Grad Students Get Sick

Guha thought he was being proactive. After arriving at Arizona State University in 2009 as a doctoral student in the School of Sustainability, he enrolled in the university’s insurance plan through Aetna Insurance and paid more than $400 each month to add his wife to the plan.

The plan wasn’t known for its generosity – it didn’t cover prescription drugs – but Guha thought he’d at least be covered if tragedy struck.

And last January, tragedy did strike. Just after his 30th birthday, he received the cancer diagnosis and started an intensive chemotherapy regimen two hours away in Tucson. Back in Tempe, his Arizona State professors allowed him to Skype into class discussions when he wasn’t feeling well.

But late last month, the cost of his treatment eclipsed $300,000, the lifetime maximum benefit on Arizona State’s Aetna plan. Guha found himself uninsured.

‘The Opportunity Costs Are at Least a Million Dollars’

Larry Cebula has the latest in the never-ending series of articles and blog posts telling people not to go to graduate school in the humanities: Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot Be a Professor. Erik Loomis replies that no, you can, just not if you go to Duke. Now he tells me!*

* N.B.: I was actually given this advice almost word-for-word by my advisor at UNCG when I was choosing between Duke and Chapel Hill. Obviously I just don’t listen.**

** I regret nothing! Duke has been truly great for me. I’d stay forever if they’d let me.***

*** And now back to job apps.

Closing All My Tabs Links

* For all my brothers and sisters: “What did you do the summer before you went on the academic job market? What do you wish you had done?” Duke Lit’s Job Market Resources page has been ramped up considerably in the last year, which helps.

* To immerse yourself in literary theory as an impressionable young person is a little like squinting at a piece of toast until the face of Jesus materializes. It’s a slight perceptual shift (all you have to do is unfocus your eyes) but risky, because there’s no going back to plain toast after Jesus. Similarly, once you have engaged in enough feminist readings of “The Iliad” or performed close textual analyses of “Alf” or written papers limning the intertextual relationship between “Videodrome” and “Madame Bovary” — once, in other words, you’ve glimpsed the social, political, historical and ideological underpinnings of every text ever constructed — you’ll never again see stories the same way again. They’ll shed their innocence and expose their dirty secrets and reveal the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it once seemed. (Thanks, Lindsey Fiona!!)

* Recent college grads facing mal-employment, while incoming Duke students are rightly anxious about debt. Not anxious enough, frankly.

* Affirmative action for white kids: Asian-Americans and diversity today.

* D.I.Y. Detroit: How the Alternative Press shaped the art of a city left for dead.

* At Mother Jones: The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science. Related: Kate Shepard explains the Climategate fraud. Also: Confessions of a Climate Change Convert.

* This CIA press release about their eco-friendly document destruction processes has got to be an Earth Day prank.

* Rule of law watch: Gov. Chris Christie Considers Defying Court Order.

* Debunking Trig Trutherism once and for all.

* A gaffe is when you accidentally say what you actually think: Minnesota state House Speaker Kurt Zellers (R), who is strongly pushing for passage of a voter ID law, has now backed away from comments he made in a radio appearance on Wednesday — when he said of the act of voting: “I think it’s a privilege, it’s not a right.”

* The great thing about neoliberalism is that it’s the answer to every question. The answer is the same regardless of whether your public institutions have too little money, or too much. More on how austerity works from Glenn Greenwald.

* Ideal and actual representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

* Inside Obama ’12. John Judis explores one area in which this will be a tough sell.

Obama has tried to carve a liberal niche within this retrograde political framework by charging that the Republican plan to cut the deficit would get rid of Medicare and would keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s all well and good, but Obama is still playing on Republican turf. And it might not work. The last Democratic presidential candidate who based his campaign on deficits was Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale probably would have lost to Ronald Reagan in any case, but he would have won more than Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The other Democratic candidate who tried to make deficits an issue was Al Gore in 2000, and he lost to a candidate he should have defeated easily. And you can be sure that Bill Clinton in 1992 didn’t focus on deficits in running against George H.W. Bush.

Via digby.

* I’d never heard of either Kiki Kannibal or StickyDrama, but I read this Rolling Stone article on her weird, tragic adolescence from beginning to end (a rarity for anything they publish not written by Matt Taibbi).

* Parallel worlds are still the hottest trope in SF: Here’s a trailer for indie drama Another Earth, and a description of SyFy’s next new terrible show.

* Portal 2 news! The story is much more complicated and interesting than I noticed while I was playing.

* And mission (creep) accomplished: Unmanned drones now flying missions in Libya.

Welcome to Your Future

That’s Really Shitty

Really shitty: A British university has apologized to a Ph.D. student for throwing away his treasured, seven-year collection of lizard dung. Daniel Bennett has told Times Higher Education magazine that he had collected the dung in the Philippines while studying the rare butaan lizard, a relative of the Komodo dragon. The material was to be studied as part of his doctoral research. The worst part? They tried to buy him off with just $750.