Thursday Links

* North Carolina update: holy smokes. I mean really. I mean really.

* This is quite incredible. Even if a college uses all of its extra tuition revenue to increase the financial aid it awards, that money is not, on average, being used for low-income students. Instead, it’s used to attract other students the college wants.

* Between 2004 and 2012, NYU added 25 more administrators than faculty. Amateurs.

* Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress.

* MOOC learning styles.

* Alas, LucasArts.

* Alas, Iain Banks. Just terrible. A tribute at Salon. And another at the Guardian.

* Exxon’s Duck-Killing Pipeline Won’t Pay Taxes To Oil Spill Cleanup Fund.

* A first-time narcotics offender, father to three, sold pain pills to a friend. His punishment: 25 years in prison. It’s just the latest evidence that U.S. drug policy is madness.

* In New York City, nearly 90 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession are blacks and Latinos. In Chicago in recent years, only five percent of the people arrested for possession were whites. In many cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, police have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at three to four times the rate of whites. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, where 90 percent of the residents are blacks and Latinos, the marijuana arrest rate is 150 times higher than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Mayor Bloomberg lives where the 90 percent of residents are white.

* Presenting the absolute worst person in the world.

* What could possibly go wrong? Nonprofit that ‘Empowers Neighborhoods’ By Handing Out Free Guns is Coming to Dallas.

* Good news everyone! The LAPD is researching precrime.

* May 26th shall forever be known as Arrested Development Day.

* Robot finds accidental haiku in the New York TImes.

* And your historic grassroots insurgency successfully managed to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming president…for eight years. Mission accomplished.

Thursday Night Links

* The New York Times has a pretty devastating retort to Tesla’s critique of their reporting.

* Low-Income Students Should Be Able to Graduate Debt-Free, Report Says.

* Why Employers Won’t Fire People If We Raise The Minimum Wage To $9. But the picture isn’t all rosy:

1. Improving efficiency. An increase in the minimum wage may lead employers to encourage employees to work harder, since they’re now being paid more. Such an adjustment may be preferable to “cutting employment (or hours) because employer actions that reduce employment can ‘hurt morale and engender retaliation.’” A review of 81 fast-food restaurants in Georgia and Alabama found that “90 percent of managers indicated that they planned to respond to the minimum-wage increase with increased performance standards such as ‘requiring a better attendance and on-time record, faster and more proficient performance of job duties, taking on additional tasks, and faster termination of poor performers.’”

Only the brutal immiseration of low-wage workers can save us now!

* Netanyahu said Iran was 3-5 years away from nuclear capability– back in ’95!

* Facebook Paid No Corporate Income Tax Last Year, After Making More Than $1 Billion In Profits. I know, I know: Facebook makes money?

* FreedomWorks outdoes itself. Wow.

* And via @zunguzungu: The future of higher education. It simply couldn’t be clearer.

Weekend Links

* CFP: My friend Alexis Lothian is planning a special issue of Ada on feminist science fiction.

* Sunday map-reading: an index of maps from fantasy novels.

* Study: The U.S. has had one mass shooting per month since 2009.

* reclaimUC vs. administrative bloat.

The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself.

* Relatedly: MOOCs and university management troubles.

* So basically every college is lying to U.S. News, I guess?

* Proponents of the current craze ought to think carefully about the human costs of technology before enthusiastically proclaiming the end of a system that could leave hundreds of thousands of people without work, students cheated out of a quality education, and that would further contribute to the creation of a world where virtualization is always and everywhere, without qualification or questioning, heralded as an unequivocal good.

* Ban double majors! That’ll solve it.

* Year-by-Year Comparison of College and University Endowments, 2007-12. Results of the 2012 Faculty Salary Survey.

* Obama administration vs. fair use? My god, why?

* In short, I am tempted to declare the transition from the Cold War to the War on Terror the greatest example of “first as tragedy, then as farce” in world history.

* When they almost domed Winooski, Vermont.

* Film and television news! Is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood the greatest television show ever made? Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhog Day Retrospective. The “gentleman’s F” and the scourge of deliberate mediocrity.

* Animal news! How owls swivel their heads. Depressed Groundhog Sees Shadow Of Rodent He Once Was. Burger King admits it has been selling beef burgers and Whoppers containing horsemeat.

* All about the North Dakota energy boom. Via Kottke, here it is visible from space.

* Hillary Clinton currently leads the three named Republicans (Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and by eight points, Texas Gov. Rick Perry) in a 2016 presidential test heat. In Texas.

* Oregon Is The Only State Left That Hasn’t Imposed Any Restrictions On Abortion.

* Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson’s Worlds.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Of course, on the Cornell box angle, Jaimee was there first.

* Great animated short from Disney: Paperman.

* U.S. carbon emissions drop to lowest level since 1994. In part because at this pace the U.S. won’t get back to full employment until 2022.

* Some iPad and iPhone puzzle game recommendations. I’ve been obsessed with Flow and Hundreds lately myself.

* And tempered glass can just randomly explode for no reason. The more you know!

Some Monday Links

* Tumblr has been perfected; you can all go home. Troy and Abed in Engineering.

* Hi, I’m Maria Bamford; ask me anything.

* Newt Gingrich thinks Republicans couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. I agree! I also think there’s no one in the Democratic Party who could beat her for the nomination. As far as I can tell the presidency is hers if she wants it.

* It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. This is how people played “Zombie Apocalypse” before that was a thing.

* Mark Johnston, the acting assistant housing secretary for community planning and development, estimated that homelessness could be effectively eradicated in the United States at an annual cost of about $20 billion. The housing department’s budget for addressing homelessness is currently about $1.9 billion. But that’s an impossibly large sum we certainly can’t afford — the cost of almost three months in Iraq!

* It’s painful for Nicholas Kristoff as a liberal to admit, but the poor are wicked and deserve their lot. Even disabled kids? Especially disabled kids.

* Also on the are-there-no-workhouses beat: Are graduate students living cheaply enough? The Chronicle of Higher Education is on it!

Tuesday Morning Links

* Second Fire In Five Weeks Burns Missouri Mosque.

* Mitt Romney confirms he would end US wind power subsidies. I swear, sometimes it feels as if I’m being personally trolled by the GOP.

* A republic, if you can keep it: The Most Important Voting Rights Law In American History Turned 47 yesterday.

* The federal prison population has gone up 800% in 30 years. 800%. Staggering.

* Hillary Clinton Literally Chased Out of Malawi By Bees.

* A Malay, who we know as Enrique of Malacca but whose real name is unrecorded, would have his life defined by these European schemes. He is, it turns out, the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.

* And an Indiana Jones Easter egg that I think is new to me: R2-D2 and C-3PO in the Well of Souls.

But the Real Action Is in 2024

Already bored with 2012, David Leonhardt looks ahead to general election 2016. Rich Yeselson at Washington Monthly adds Sherrod Brown to the list of possible candidates.

Quick Hits

* “Proposed new calendar would make time rational.”

According to Richard Conn Henry’s calendar, eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added.

The upshot: Years would proceed with clockwork regularity, with no annual re-jiggering of schedules required. Each day would occupy the same position as it had the previous year and would in the next. Were this 364-day calendar, known officially as the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, adopted on the first day of 2012, both Christmas and New Year’s Day would forever fall on Sunday.

If the bonus week can be a work-free jubilee, I’m in.

* And then climate change ate all our peanuts.

* And then Rick Perry annexed Canada.

* The SSA said 50 percent of workers made less than $26,364 last year — and most Americans have fewer job opportunities available to them. But the wealthiest Americans are relatively unscathed, with those earning $1 million or more jumping 18 percent from 2009. More here.

* Charles Taylor asks, “Is there any other living novelist who calls for a perpetual re-evaluation as much as Stephen King?” I’m not exactly a fan (though there’s quite a bit I like), but he’s definitely someone I’d like to teach a class on at some point.

* Death of cinema watch: Bridesmaids is the only top fifteen film this year that is neither a sequel, a reboot, or an adaptation.

* Bad news everyone: Clean paper towels are filthy. Your only hope now is to finally build that cleanroom.

* Why you’re fat and will always be fat. Via MeFi.

* Robert Reich predicts Obama-Clinton 2012. The Clinton-Biden switch has seemed like the only possible option for ’12 since at least 2008; it’s a huge unforced error if they don’t.

* And TEDxBrussels predicts 2061. No word on if there will still be peanuts.

Late Night Monday

* While my cousin was visiting last weekend we saw both Toy Story 3 and Exit Through the Gift Shop, both of which I endorse for entirely different reasons. What I find most interesting about Exit is the possibility that large swaths of the documentary, perhaps even the whole thing, are a high-concept Banksy prank; what I like best about Toy Story 3 is how bravely it faces down the themes of mortality and obsolescence that have always been the subtext of the series. That the toys (spoiler alert) receive their inevitable reprieve is ultimately a small consolation; in the end, we must admit Lotso had it right.

* This short but intriguing post from Crooked Timber compares the Toy Story franchise to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, concluding (as we must) that Stinky Pete is the existential hero of the series, the only character who is genuinely free.

* World Cup supervillain Koman Coulibaly apparently fired.

* Steve Benen and Ezra Klein look at how a utilities-only compromise on cap and trade might work. Here too is Brad Plumer on what EPA regulation can and cannot accomplish.

* If I’m reading this correctly, Matt Yglesias wants to turn Detroit into District 9. More on Detroit and this week’s U.S. Social Forum here and here.

* Speaking of District 9: Will Neill Blomkamp direct The Hobbit?

* There’s something about this piece on spiked anti-rape protection in South Africa that gets people talking. I can’t count how many times it’s shown up in my Facebook feed.

* One day late for Father’s Day: “Daddy, could we have our planet back now?”

* Pandagon highlights a study linking sexual aggression and heavy porn use.

* Why the Right is fantasizing about a 2012 primary challenge.

It’s easy to see why conservatives would be salivating at the thought of a Hillary primary challenge. Presidents who face serious primary challenges—Ford, Carter, Bush I—almost always lose. The last president who lost re-election without a serious primary challenge, by contrast, was Herbert Hoover. But in truth, the chances that Obama will face a primary challenge are vanishingly slim, and the chances that he will lose re-election only slightly higher. No wonder conservatives are fantasizing about Hillary Clinton taking down Barack Obama. If she doesn’t, it’s unlikely they will.

* And so it’s come to this.

Whatchu Talkin’ ’bout, Everyone?

* Rest in peace, Gary Coleman. Alongside his more famous appearances not enough has been said about his appearance on The Simpsons.

* My friend Traxus is blogging again, this time about apocalypse culture.

* Hillary Clinton is the most popular politician in America. VP in 2012, President in 2016? She’d be 69, which would make her older than everyone but Reagan. But of course women live longer than men.

* Weird collisions between the content of my summer course and links I find on Gravity Lens: A Brief History of Batman-Themed Pornography. Not safe for work.

* Great posts from Crooks and Liars and Digby about how the facts don’t matter when it comes to media pseudo-scandals like the Sestak controversy.

* This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation. Relativity, climate change, and the right.

* And if math class were like English class (and the other way around). Via the Valve. I have to admit I like both versions better our way.

Monday Night

* Sorry, Hillary; my current SCOTUS bet is Leah Ward Sears, who would be the first African-American woman on the court. She feels like a smart pick that the GOP would have trouble moving against after the Sotomayor debacle. She’d also fulfill the crucially important non-Ivy criterion. I think she’s the one.

* I just hope someone in the White House is reading Scott Lemieux.

* The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There’s a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. Via MetaFilter.

* Probably the end of my Conanblogging: Conan signs a deal with TBS. Here’s some insider details involving George Lopez.

* People with Williams Syndrome lack 26 genes found in a typical human genome. As a result they are inordinately friendly, and experience no social anxiety. Now a new study reveals that they may also be free of racial bias.

* And contra Krugman: Is climate economics a mirage? Via Kevin Drum.

Now, if the economy is going to be a bit more than three times larger, but we are only going to emit 17% of the current level of carbon emissions, then the carbon intensity of the economy – that is the ratio of carbon emitted per dollar of goods and services created, is going to have to be only 5% of the current value. Next you have to figure that there are certain things in an industrial society that are very hard to do without liquid fuel – construction and agricultural machinery come to mind, along with aviation. Relying heavily on biofuels is a very dubious prospect in a world that also needs to feed 9 billion (assumed wealthier) people from its limited agricultural land. So you can probably figure that the residual 5% of carbon emission intensity is all going to go on these kind of specialized uses that are hard to substitute.

Therefore, these goals basically imply that the ordinary living and working of most citizens would be essentially carbon free by 2050. That is in 40 years time…

Monday Night Linkdump #1

* Spider-Man 4 has apparently completely imploded; Raimi has quit and the next film will be a reboot instead.

* The New Jersey legislature has approved a medical marijuana bill. I learned this from—who else?—@jonhurwitz.

* Because I don’t just assume everything I don’t like is unconstitutional, I suspect Thomas Geoghegan is probably wrong and the filibuster is probably constitutional. But I’d be very happy to turn out to be wrong.

* Paul Krugman defends Europe.

* Feingold says Nebraska’s long-cherished right to permanent Medicaid reimbursement will probably be stripped out of the final health care bill.

* The New Yorker slums it at the Jersey shore.

* And Jonathan Chait has your daily dose of things that could have been phrased better.

Six for Wednesday Night

More regular and substantive blogging returns January 2. For now, a few links:

* A chart at Pharyngula ranks the states by religiosity. Congratulations, New Hampshire & Vermont!

* Hero Complex interviews Neill Blomkamp.

* Boing Boing has your census of the dead.

* Barack Obama is far and away the most admired man in America. For admired women, Hillary Clinton only manages to beat out Sarah Palin by a meager 1%.

* The 9th Circuit says you can sue the police for improper Tasering.

* How to make a soccer ball.

Other Midday Links

Other midday links.

* Apropos of what I was saying yesterday about Andrew Sullivan, here’s Ben Smith on Sullivan, his continued outsized influence, and the first-mover advantage in the blogosphere.

* There have been a lot of assertions from both left and right that Obama “isn’t doing enough” to support the protesters in Iran. It’s not clear to me what exactly these people have in mind; any U.S. involvement is likely to be entirely counterproductive, as Obama himself has noted. So it’s worth noting that the Obama administration has quietly taken action to support the protesters in a way that is not counterproductive; according to NBC News, the State Dept. has leaned on Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance because of the way the site is currently being used in Iran.

* Also from Iran: Gary Sick lays out an important challenge to that much-discussed pre-election poll showing Ahmadinejad ahead that I hadn’t seen discussed anywhere else—it’s from over a month before the election.

Thursday! Again!

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor’s office might actually kill this; very glad it didn’t.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media’s continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It’s important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards’s (and later Hillary Clinton’s) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

Yes We Did

Al Giordano reminds us that one year ago today Barack Obama got his ass handed to him in New Hampshire.

The pressure was now on Obama. How could he possibly retake the initiative after the New Hampshire primary shocker? That same January 8 night, he took the stage in Nashua:

And with three words – “yes, we can,” introduced for the first time as a call and response line in his speeches – Obama parlayed his defeat into a victory. In temperament, with confidence and calm – and with the assist of a raucous crowd that was determined not to let the setback get it down – he kept himself in the game.

I remember that speech well, and I bet you do too: it was a much-needed call back to arms on what had seemed, at the time, to be a devastatingly and perhaps determinatively bad night. “Maybe I’m doomed to always back the wrong horse,” I wrote in the post introducing the speech. “But maybe not.”

In a week and a half, he’ll be president.