Posts Tagged ‘I grow old’
…And More
* I’ve said this before: let’s have an academic decathlon. You choose a team based on whatever pedagogical criteria you want. You can choose students from public school or private, unionized teachers or not, parochial or secular, from charter or magnet, from Montessori or KIPP or whatever else you want. However, I choose the demographics of the students on your team. For my team, the situation is reversed: you choose the pedagogical factors for my students, but I choose the demographics. You stock your team kids from whatever educational backgrounds you think work, and mine with whatever educational systems you think don’t work. Meanwhile, I give you all children from the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden inner city and impoverished rural districts where we see the most failure. I stock mine with upper-class children of privilege. I would bet the house on my team, and I bet if you’re being honest, you would too. Yet to accept that is to deny the basic assumption of the education reform movement, which is that student outcomes are a direct result of teacher quality.
* Stunning front-page from UNC’s Daily Tar Heel today.
* If you are a low-income prospective college student hoping a degree will help you move up in the world, you probably should not attend a moderately selective four-year research institution. The cards are stacked against you.
* Elderly Obama And Boehner Daughters Arrive In Time Machine To Demand Climate Action.
Who among us can forget Malia’s first words to a rapidly-growing crowd in this historical meeting between present and future, “People of 2009, we come from–” words that were immediately interrupted by her younger self, surrounded by Secret Service, saying, “It’s 2013,” which led future Malia to punch future Sasha, saying, “I told you not to mess with the controls.” Malia then continued, “2013, seriously? What’s the friggin’ point?”
* Academic jobs watch: Specialist Professor, Homeland Security.
* California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making. Krugman is optimistic that the Republicans’ stranglehold on the state seems to be abating; I’d note that in the arena of public education at least all the worst ideas are coming from the Democrats.
* When (and how) Brad DeLong trolled David Graeber for months. Jesus.
* That’s because these workers represent what’s happening to U.S. work in three critical ways. First, precarity: Workers lack job security, formal contracts, or guaranteed hours. Second, legal exclusion: Labeled as “independent contractors,” “domestic workers” or otherwise, they’re thrust beyond the reach of this country’s creaky, craven labor laws. And third, the mystification of employment: While a no-name contracted company signs your paycheck, your conditions are set by a major corporation with far away headquarters and legal impunity. Guest Workers as Bellweather.
* How to Get a Black Woman Fired.
* Overwhelming Student Debt Has Parents Getting Life Insurance Policies on Their Kids.
* But if Emanuel brought Byrd-Bennett in to work the same kind of charter magic in Chicago that she did in Detroit, he may be dismayed to encounter one important difference: Chicago is now in a good position to fight back. The school closings hearings were packed with engaged, motivated citizens, and the teachers union is more organized than it’s been in three decades. During its popular and successful strike, the union’s approval rating climbed while the mayor’s fell—public opinion polls showed that taxpayers blamed Emanuel for the ugliness that took place during negotiations. The CTU’s current leadership has built relationships with community leaders and organizations, forming a coalition to fight the slash-and-burn privatization pushed by the Board of Education and its corporate sponsors, and has even hosted civil disobedience trainings open to the public. This afternoon’s protest will serve as further evidence that Emanuel is indeed up against a new opponent, one strong enough that not even the best “cleaner” may be able to defeat it.
* Detroit Schools Emergency Manager Gets Accolades as Children Fall Further Behind.
* Nate Silver makes your Final Four book: Louisville Favored in Final Four, but Wichita State Could Become Unlikeliest Champion.
* Zero Dark Thirty is supposedly a film about freedom. A “freedom so threatening that there are those around the world willing to kill themselves and others to prevent us from enjoying it,” as the TV sound-bite in the background puts it. The odd thing is that this freedom is never once glimpsed within the film itself. Obviously, we are constantly reminded of the imprisonment and torture of the al Qaeda suspects, but it is never their freedom we are meant to be concerned with. More tellingly, it is the American spaces within the film that leave this freedom unseen. A strange becoming-prisoner takes hold of the spaces, and of the American body itself: not unfolding, in the end, either defeat or victory, but pulling together in a constricted space the impossibility of both.
* Gen X hits the nostalgia capitalism threshold.
* And dollar tracking site WheresGeorge suggests discrete commerce zones in the U.S.
Wednesday Morning Links
* I’ll be at SCMS 2013 in Chicago tomorrow, talking about War and Science Fiction in Battle: Los Angeles. I have to be back in Milwaukee that evening and Friday, but I’m hoping to meet up with some people while I’m there.
* How to Turn Higher Education into an Engine of Inequality.
* The Nation on the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. At FAIR. At the New Yorker (c. 2008).
* Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make. Trickle-Down Feminism.
* The technocrats are akin to conspiracists in that they both claim a monopoly on the sorts of political facts that should sway policy. Both groups come equipped with their own body of experts and studies to vouch for their prescriptions. And both Jones and Klein derive their legitimacy from having, through their supposed diligence and uniquely sharp analytical minds, privileged access to some set of truths of political significance. Both assume that answers to factual questions will make the necessary political action irrefutable. All that divides the conspiracist from the technocrat is the nature of the facts they fetishize.
* There’s no direct analog to statistical analysis in baseball. But where Congress and the White House are concerned, what if the press put much greater emphasis put on “the sausage” and much less on the sausage-making? What if we judged legislators on their votes, Obama on what legislation he signs and vetoes, and left it at that?
* Jeb Bush disagrees with own book released yesterday.
* A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013. The Atlantic responds. Some commentary.
* If People Talked About Seinfeld Like They Talk About Girls.
* Gawker is shitty, but Amy Poehler makes it all okay.
“Aw, I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff. “
* Civilization with a global warming focus. Climate change will open up surprising new Arctic shipping routes. Los Angeles Aims To Be Coal-Free In 12 Years.
* China experiments with arcologies.
* Ralph Macchio finally old enough for long-awaited Karate Kid sequel.
* 12-Year-Old Victim of Bullying Dead After Being Attacked At School.
* Breaking: men aren’t actually better at math than women. Gasp!
* Jon Stewart Is Taking the Summer Off to Make a Movie About Iran. John Oliver will guest host for 8 of the 12 weeks he’s gone; I hope Jessica Williams takes the other four.
* “If she had said elephants, I would have said elephants.” How does that make it better?
* This time, Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla asked all 12 to approach so she could shake their hands.
“I hope you continue your work in a law-abiding way,” said Padilla. “I must say you are the most affable group of defendants I’ve ever come across.” Jury acquits Occupy protesters.
* New Elevators Segregate Rich from Poor.
* Another new twist on the zombie genre: zombie rehab.
* And the only news around here that people really care about.
The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting
At xkcd. We only have about six years left before things start getting really ugly.
Monday Links
* From my lips to Moody’s ears: we need to eliminate the debt ceiling.
“We would reduce our assessment of event risk if the government changed its framework for managing government debt to lessen or eliminate that uncertainty,” Moody’s analyst Steven Hess wrote in the report, first reported by Reuters.
The congressional role in setting a limit on debt, creates “periodic uncertainty” over the government’s ability to meet its obligations, Moody’s said.
* The liquidation of Borders makes me feel like a old-man-in-training. I feel like I’ll still be talking about Borders in 30 years the way my father still talks about Two Guys.
* The evidence has been mounting for years that early humans and Neanderthals interbred, but now it’s pretty much a certainty. Part of the X chromosome found in people from outside Africa originally comes from our Neanderthal cousins. Look for this discovery to combine with stories like this and this to fuel racist pseudoscience for decades to come.
* Game of the night: Untris.
* I love Grant Morrison, but so far his plans for the Superman relaunch leave me a bit cold.
* Climate-Denying Oklahoma Governor Tells Residents To Pray For Rain.
Random Monday Links
* Today Jim Henson has been dead for 21 years. In other news, the world has been completely terrible for 21 years.
* American popular culture hits rock bottom: Seth MacFarlane will reboot The Flintstones.
* Pollutocrat Koch fueling far right academic centers at universities nationwide.
* Is there any governmental body more useless than the FEC? I mean really.
* I grow old: AIM is dead.
* From the too-bad-it-will-never-happen file: I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.
We Are Become Old
In 1995, The Simpsons aired a flashforward episode depicting Lisa’s far-off wedding day. It was today.
Wednesday Night
* The economics of the World Cup.
* The importance of the World Cup.
Life is too short to miss any games to be played this summer in South Africa. A sad fact of human existence is that an average life seldom contains more than 20 World Cups—our games are tragically numbered.
* Why did nearly all life on Earth die 250 million years ago?
* And if films retained their original casting. It’s a true shame we never got David Bowie as Captain Hook.
Goonies Never Say Die
io9 celebrates the 25th anniversary of The Goonies with a deleted scene so absurdly bad I can’t believe it was actually filmed.
Three for Wednesday
* The Hobbit, illustrated and in Russian.
* The New Yorker has your list of 20 writers under 40 to be jealous of. Only two are younger than I am, so at least I still have that.
* And the Department of Energy says we won’t be nuking the oil spill. Killjoys.
What Is It, Thursday?
* Via my once and future roommate Tim: 7 unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals.
* Meet the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch.
* But let’s be very clear: our legislative process–which allows parochial short-term interests and massive corporate lobbies to undermine the long-term common interests–has proven shockingly inadequate to the monumental task before us: the preservation of the conditions of life for much of the human species.
* Hard to believe we’re still trying to get whaling banned.
* To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! Future generations are reading your tweets.
* Words circled by David Foster Wallace in his American Heritage Dictionary.
* Joss Whedon to rewrite Captain America too? Marvel could definitely put worse people in charge of its film franchise.
* Roger Ebert declares Kick-Ass “morally reprehensible.” I’m pretty sure I have to see it now.
* Zonal Marking: a soccer blog. Highlights here.
* And In Living Color is twenty. I am become old. So old.
