Posts Tagged ‘North Carolina’
Links from the Weekend!
* Wes Anderson bingo. Meanwhile, Moonrise Kingdom is setting records.
* Great television contrarianism watch: Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock. In which I analyze my allergy to Sherlock.
* David Harvey: The financial crisis is an urban crisis.
* Utopia and dystopia in quantum superposition: New parking meters text you when time’s running out.
* Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.
* Shaviro reviews Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. LRB reviews Embassytown. LARoB reviews Railsea. The New Yorker reviews Game of Thrones.
But there is something troubling about this sea of C.G.I.-perfect flesh, shaved and scentless and not especially medieval. It’s unsettling to recall that these are not merely pretty women; they are unknown actresses who must strip, front and back, then mimic graphic sex and sexual torture, a skill increasingly key to attaining employment on cable dramas. During the filming of the second season, an Irish actress walked off the set when her scene shifted to what she termed “soft porn.” Of course, not everyone strips: there are no truly explicit scenes of gay male sex, fewer lingering shots of male bodies, and the leading actresses stay mostly buttoned up. Artistically, “Game of Thrones” is in a different class from “House of Lies,” “Californication,” and “Entourage.” But it’s still part of another colorful patriarchal subculture, the one called Los Angeles.
* Terrible news, state by state:
* Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World’s Prison Capital. Via MeFi.
* The Institute for Southern Studies covers North Carolina’s answer to the Koch brothers, Art Pope.
* Detroit shuts off the lights.
* Kansas Republicans reinstitute feudalism, deliberately bankrupting the state.
* Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a distressing extent — a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, passive, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies and cultures, unwilling or unable to assert or even comprehend their nominal political sovereignty. Or, more simply, that America is a failure.
* The New Yorker‘s science fiction issue is live. If you wanted to get me to read New Yorker fiction for the first time in years, well, mission accomplished…
* And we’re still pouring college money down the for-profit drain. Because never learning from your mistakes is the most important thing we have to teach.
Friday Night!
* So Mark Zuckerberg made $20 billion dollars today. On Twitter I’ve proposed taxing this windfall at 99%, leaving him with a cool $200 million, more money than he or his children or grandchildren could ever need—but like any good liberal I’m open to negotiation. UPDATE: Man alive, the U.S. tax code is screwed up.
* Behold the glories of the free market: New Mexico gave Marvel Studios $22 million to make a movie that’s now grossed over a billion.
* Meanwhile, Curt Schilling rips off Rhode Island for a few million dollars. More.
* What We Don’t Know About Student Debt. More from Slate. Why the Right Hates English. And today’s postacademic rant: The American Corp-University Complex.
* Vulture Magazine tells Wes Anderson that they made a movie out of Battleship. He is… nonplussed.
* Obama basically confirms to Jaden Pinkett Smith the aliens are real.
* Arizona Secretary of State is threatening to leave Obama’s name off the ballot on birther grounds. Meanwhile, Breitbart.com has invented afterbirthism. Six months till November.
* Where are the campaigns spending money? #1 with a bullet: Greensboro, NC.
* Engineer: Star Trek’s Enterprise ship could be built in 20 years at a cost of $1 trillion. Well, if that’s all it costs we definitely should.
* Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men.
How, then, does any of this relate to the frankly incendiary notion that teaching equality hurts men?
Because of everyone, straight, white men are the least likely people to experience exclusion and inequality first-hand during their youth, and are therefore the most likely to disbelieve its existence later in life. Unless they seek out ‘feminine’ pastimes as children – and why would they, when so much of boy-culture tells them not to? – they will never be rebuked or excluded on the basis of gender. Unless someone actively takes the time to convince them otherwise, they will learn as teens that the world is an equal place – an assertion that gels absolutely with their personal experiences, such that even if women, LGBTQ individuals and/or POC are rarely or never visible in their world, they are nonetheless unlikely to stop and question it. They will likely study white-male-dominated curricula, laugh ironically at sexist, racist and homophobic jokes, and participate actively in a popular culture saturated with successful, varied, complex and interesting versions of themselves – and this will feel right and arouse no suspicion whatever, because this is what equality should feel like. They will experience no sexual or racial discrimination when it comes to getting a job and will, on average, earn more money than the women and POC around them – and if they stop to reflect on either of these things, they’ll do so in the knowledge that, as the world is equal, any perceived hierarchical differences are simply reflective of the meritocracy at work.
They will not see how the system supports their success above that of others, because they have been told that equality stripped them of their privileges long ago. Many will therefore react with bafflement and displeasure to the idea of positive discrimination, hiring quotas or any other such deliberate attempts at encouraging diversity – because not only will it seem to genuinely disadvantage them, but it will look like an effort to undermine equality by granting new privileges to specific groups. Never having experienced inequality, therefore, the majority of straight white men will be absolutely oblivious to their own advantages – not because they must necessarily be insensitive, sexist, racist, homophobic or unaware of the principles of equality; but because they have been told, over and over again, that there is no inequality left for them – or anyone else – to experience – and everything they have experienced up to that point will only have proved them right.
* Department of Actual Justice? DoJ has issued guidelines asserting the right of citizens to film police and for preventing prison rape.
* Theorizing bathrooms. Thanks, Melody!
* Today in science: The DNA of 10-year-olds who experienced violence in their young lives has been found to show wear and tear normally associated with aging, a Duke University study has found.
* Today in unintentional metaphors.
* A Crackdown in Crayon: Bahrain’s Children Draw Their Country’s Crisis.
* A little bit cheerier: Scenes from Brazil.
* And a primer they’ll be using in Brazil very soon: How to rig a soccer match.
Durham after the Amendment
Friday!
* There’s opposition research, and then there’s Chicago-style opposition research. This story prompted some interesting conversations and confessions with other bullying-concerned academics on my Twitter feed yesterday.
* Picture of the Day: North Carolina, Gay Marriage, and Education.
* I want to suggest that the readers of the Chronicle are almost entirely irrelevant to Riley’s purposes. Her post was not written for us. That it pissed us off is, more-or-less, gravy. Rather, Riley wrote her post to provide raw material for conservative pundits and editorialists, state legislators, and wealthy university trustees–the people who are publicly leading the charge to defund higher education. Riley’s piece wasn’t written to be read as much as it was written to be used. And a piece in a respected, serious publication like the Chronicle is really useful. Publishing an essay in the Chronicle is legitimizing, in a way that publishing the same essay in the National Review is not. In National Review, a call to defund African American Studies looks predictably reactionary; in the Chronicle, the same call looks like a topic that’s worthy of debate. Even as I write this sentence, I have no doubt that, using Riley’s post as an impetus, hack editorialists are working up their outrage, state senators are planning hearings, and trustees are calling university presidents to demand reports on African American Studies.
* In 2011, NYPD Made More Stops Of Young Black Men Than The Total Number Of Young Black Men In New York. And yet somehow crime persists! We need more stop-and-frisks!
* Facts are stupid things. We must be rid of them.
* Here’s a website that helps you visualize deep time.
* New York City Street Corners Then and Now.
* Joss Whedon apologizes to his fans for making something successful.
* How much would it cost to clean up after The Avengers?
* “Sextuple Jeopardy: The Groundhog Day of capital murder trials.”
* California eats its children seed corn.
* And our long national nightmare is delayed for six months: Community has been renewed for a fourth season. Still no word on the movie.
Everything Is Sad on Tuesday Night
* Oh, Carolina, you’re better than this. Durham County results: For 22359 (30%), Against 51591 (70%).
* But perhaps that’s not depressing enough for you tonight.
“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson says. “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.”
* My new city becomes ground zero for the Walker recall.
* Gay Teen Who Fired Stun Gun in the Air to Scare Away Menacing Bullies Expelled from School. True confession: When I was thirteen I hid a kitchen knife by the front door in case some other kids followed me home from the bus stop like they’d promised they would. I was hopeless, alone, and didn’t know what else to do.
Schools that defend bullies and punish their victims make me want to homeschool my kid.
* A Maurice Sendak profile. Spiegelman and Sendak.
* Atrios has your news from 2022.
The last time the an administration did the supposedly responsible thing, the fiscal “hawks” suddenly decided that the worst possible thing was no longer a deficit, but a surplus, and that therefore it was necessary to have massive tax cuts for rich people.
And they will, of course, do it again.
Nobody cares about the deficit. Those who claim to the most care the least.
* The Comics Crier: 36 Pages of Comics That Aren’t Comic.
* Hardt and Negri have a new electronic pamphlet out on occupation and encampment. So does Chomsky.
* When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger.
* The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends.
* “Spoiler,” a police procedural that takes place post-zombie apocalypse.
* And Paul F. Tompkins has a new web series on what appears to be the world’s worst website. Check it out anyway.
Tons of Weekend Links
* “Austerity is not inevitable”: France falls to the Red Menace.
* Podcast of the weekend: Global science fiction on WorldCanvass, with Brooks Landon, Rob Latham, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and others.
* Charlie Stross prophesies the death of science fiction.
But anyway, to summarize: my point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, “if you liked X you’ll love Y” cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on).
* Tom Hayden remembers the Port Huron Statement (or at least the compromise second draft).
* Joe Biden endorses marriage equality for about fifteen minutes.
* Black Studies Hitpiece Leads to Chronicle of Higher Ed Twitter Trainwreck. Why Is the Chronicle of Higher Education Publishing A Racist Hack? Grad Students Respond to Riley Post on African-American Studies. The Inferiority of Blackness as a Subject. Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu.
* When copyright term-extension meets infinite life-extension.
* A tribute to Disneyland’s secret restroom.
* Connecticut continues its recent spate of being decent its citizens, legalizes medical medicine.
* Stand for your ground: A Florida woman faces prison after firing a warning shot to scare off an abusive husband.
* Nerds assemble! Joss Whedon finally made something everybody likes. An interview. Another. Whedon on Batman. Whedon on Wonder Woman.
* The Avengers: Will superhero movies never end?
What I see in “The Avengers,” unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore. It’s a diminishment of Whedon’s talents, as he squeezes himself into an ill-fitting narrative straitjacket, and it’s a diminished form that has become formula, that depends entirely on minor technical innovations and leaves virtually no room for drama or tragedy or anything else that might make the story actually interesting. To praise the movie lavishly, as so many people have done and will continue to do, basically requires making endless allowances. It’s really good (for being a comic-book movie). It’s really good (for being almost exactly like dozens of other things). It’s really good (for being utterly inconsequential).
* Today’s single chart that explains everything.
* The football suicides. More players file concussion lawsuits against the NFL. Will the NFL still exist in 20 years?
* How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone.
* Save the Holocene! Why “the Anthropocene” might not be a useful construct.
* Do you remember Frank Kunkel? How about Frank Nowarczyk? John Marsh or Robert Erdman? Johann Zazka? Martin Jankowiak? Not even Michael Ruchalski? Do you remember the call “Eight hours for labor, eight hours for rest, eight hours for recreation?” The names are those of the seven of the nine people killed in 1886 in Bay View, Wisconsin for demanding eight hour work days.
* On Colorado’s policy of sending kids to adult court.
* Consider the case of Toby Groves.
* New Police Strategy in New York: Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protesters.
* North Carolina’s Ban on Gay Marriage Appears Likely to Pass.
* Since Mexico’s legislative body passed sweeping climate change legislation on April 19, Mexico joins the UK as the only two countries in the world with legally binding emissions goals to combat climate change.
* http://thebiblein100days.tumblr.com/
* American Airlines channels Darth Vader: We are altering the deal. Pray we do not alter it further.
* And Stephen Colbert’s employment of the comedic stylings of German Ambassador Hans Beinholtz continues to be my absolute favorite thing of all time.
More
* Today, we celebrate May Day, known the world over as the birthday of Wes Anderson.
* Basketball has 13 positions, not just 5.
* Obama leads Romney by 8 in a state Romney can’t possibly afford to lose.
* And Gawker celebrates the return of the king Joss Whedon.
Potpourri
* Jacob Remes explains May Day.
* My Joss Whedon zombie essay from PopMatters is out in Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion today. Last night I submitted my abstract for the upcoming Politics of Adaptation conference on Cabin in the Woods, drawing me ever closer to total Joss Whedon scholarly completism.
* Roundtable on Non-Western SF, at Locus.
* A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that “liking” a Facebook post is not free speech. To repeat my own Twitter quips, yeah, because it doesn’t cost money.
* New polling shows Amendment One will likely pass after all.
* al Qaeda’s discovered our only weakness: our insatiable love of porn.
On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.
Buried inside them was a pornographic video called “Kick Ass” — and a file marked “Sexy Tanja.”
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.
* Hungry for good nerd press, Netflix is teasing it might resurrect Jericho.
* Aetna, according to the report, cited exclusions and said it would not cover the claim because Scott developed breasts after she changed sexes. N.J. transgender woman wins battle with insurance company to have mammogram covered.
* And somebody page Nick Bostrom: Entire Observable Universe Modeled Using French Supercomputer.
Friday!
* This much is for sure: Keeping the cost of borrowed money a bit lower for one more year won’t cure the rising cost of higher education. It’s not even a bandage. It’s more like giving some comforting words to a critically injured patient. It might make a few people feel better, or win some votes, but it won’t do much to help our problems.
* Today’s insane Kafkaesque nightmare: Frank Rodriguez is a registered sex offender because he slept with his high school girlfriend (now wife) fifteen years ago, when he was 19 and she was 16.
Once he was labeled a sex offender, Frank faced a slew of restrictions. “I couldn’t talk to Nikki. I couldn’t go to restaurants, public swimming pools, football games — any places where there might be kids,” he says. “I couldn’t vote. I couldn’t leave the county without permission. My probation officer told me, ‘If you even look at a woman the wrong way, you could go to prison.’”
Frank did not have to go to jail. Instead, he was required to perform 350 hours of community service — picking up trash, mowing lawns — and to attend weekly counseling courses with convicted sex offenders and pedophiles. He also had to move out of his family home, since a 12-year-old girl lived there: his own sister.
…
Despite the unusual circumstances, Nikki and Frank’s connection grew stronger. “We didn’t have anything — but we didn’t need anything,” Frank says. “We were together.” Nikki finished school, then got a job in the county courthouse, where she works today; she and Frank married two years later. The couple’s first daughter was born about two years after that. Since Frank was still on probation, it was illegal for him to live in the same home as his baby girl. So he lived there against the law, becoming withdrawn and paranoid, constantly worrying about getting arrested. “My personality changed,” he says. “I used to be the life of the party. Now I didn’t want to leave the house.” A second daughter arrived a year later.
In 2003, Frank’s probation came to an end, and he could legally live with his daughters. Still, he needed to go to the police station every year on his birthday to register as a sex offender. Nikki lobbied officials in the courthouse — judges, district attorneys — to clear Frank’s name, to no avail. Frank simply fell outside the parameters of Texas law, which stipulated that the accused had to be within three years of age of his underage sexual partner to avoid registration. Frank is three years and two months older than Nikki. A further element of the law said that the accused could avoid registration if he was under 19 years old and his partner was over 13 years old when they had sex. Nikki was 15. But Frank lost again: He was 19.
Nikki and Frank connected with activists, and traveled to the state capital to participate in a public hearing. Still, Frank remained on the Texas registry, his crime listed as “sexual assault of a child.”
Via Longform.org.
* F*ck the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
* Sometimes Dumb Science Turns Out to be Pretty Smart.
* Rebekah Sheldon preps us for the upcoming C21 Nonhuman Turn conference with “Affect, Epistemology and the Nonhuman Turn.”
* And Amendment One opponents are trending towards a heartbreakingly narrow defeat.
Wednesday
* Doctor Who: 100% true. Fact.
* On the set of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. I would be very excited about this show if the protagonist weren’t yet another fantasyland Sorkin Republican.
* Connecticut has abolished the death penalty.
* Obama comes to Carolina, never mentions Amendment One.
* Most of what we think about Mexican immigration is wrong. (via)
* The end of the world and the impossibility of an alternative to financial capitalism are not just defining features of contemporary global imagination: they sustain one another. After all, if we might all be radioactive smudges on the tarmac come Tuesday, why not be out for as much as we can grab today? Why build a sustainable growth model if it might be underwater in thirty years? Unrestrained free-market capitalism requires that its vassals live in the moment, borrowing against their own futures, and for the past two generations of neoliberal policymaking, there have been logical reasons for us to do so.
* Obama v. Obama on the drug war.
* Vermont Continues Working Towards A Universal Health Care System.
* And some sad news: Rest in peace, Ernest Callenbach, father of Ecotopia.
Nuclear Carolinas
Local News
Friday Friday Friday
* Somebody awesomely trolled the New York state assessment exam.
* Concluding that racial bias played a significant factor in the sentencing of a man to death here 18 years ago, a judge on Friday ordered that the convict’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without parole, the first such decision under North Carolina’s controversial Racial Justice Act.
* Americans Elect can’t get it together either (and thank heaven for that).
* “Special Effects” is the first great Ze Frank video of the “A Show” era.
* Things Don’t Seem Wonderful If You’ve Seen Them All Your Life.
* H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions.
* Brian Wood teases The Massive.
* Abigail Nussbaum says The Cabin in the Woods wasted a perfectly good plot.
Once you know The Cabin in the Woods‘s twist it’s impossible not to think of the film like this, and to have used this rich vein of story for little more than a metafictional gag seems like a criminal waste.
* Science has finally perfected the sonic screwdriver.
* Zero-hour for high-speed rail in California.
* Mike Konczal and Aaron Bady talk The Wire at bloggingheads.tv.
* And there are struggles deeper than the struggle with God: The Stages of Grading.
Wednesday Night Links
* George Zimmerman in custody, charged with second degree murder.
* Dinosaur Times: probably a lot less fun than you think.
* Neal Kirby remembers his father, Jack.
* The Port Huron Statement at 50. Warning: this is primarily about the compromised second draft.
* The Fraiser theme song explained. Finally.
* Bad polling news for Romney in North Carolina, Colorado, and pretty much everywhere else. Who could have predicted that aggressively alienating 51% of the voting population would have turned out so badly?
* Tough primary season for God: Every candidate he encouraged to run has dropped out.
* Chris Christie lied about the Hudson Tunnel project he unilaterally canceled? Say it ain’t so!
* The headline reads, “National Review Fires Another Racist Writer.”
* Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America. Just heartwrenching. Below: A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company. In 1982, a fire killed 27 prisoners and an ensuing lawsuit against the authorities forced them to reduce their population to maintain an 8:1 inmate to staff ratio.
Links from a Crazy Pair of Days
* North Carolina invites you to tour beautiful Panem.
* What if Spider-Man fought in Vietnam?
* The case for ending medical research on chimps.
* Limiting principles. More limiting principles. A TPM reader says the endgame will be Roberts writing one. Reagan’s solicitor general: ‘Health care is interstate commerce. Is this a regulation of it? Yes. End of story.’ A study of SCOTUS oral arguments says the odds could still in the White House’s favor. Is The Right Getting Punk’d By SCOTUS On ‘Obamacare’? But some Democrats are already turning to their favorite consolation fantasy, winning by losing.
* Meanwhile, House Republicans just voted to end Medicare (in an election year).
