Thursday Night Links: Liars, Scoundrels, Star Trek, and More

* Transcript from the September 19 meeting of the Cooper Union Board of Trustees. Even putting aside that their short-sighted and obviously bad decisions caused the problem in the first place, the enthusiasm with which these supposed trustees speak about the possibility of closing the school is just unreal.

* All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem. All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.

* “Since it won’t reform itself, Starfleet needs to be destroyed.” Star Trek into Darkness Hostile to Star Trek, Intelligence.

Remember how Kirk was going to nobly take Khan to Earth to stand trial? Did this actually happen? Is it possible to imagine such a trial ending with a court imposing the punishment of cryogenic stasis? How could a court not demand the other 72 be brought back to life? Wouldn’t such a trial inevitably entail Marcus’s cimes — leading to the exposure of his massive corruption and a public outcry to structurally reform Starfleet?

* Bridge collapse in Washington State, sending vehicles and people into the water. 

* Scenes from the fight over Obama’s judicial appointments. Obama won one battle today.

* The Wisconsin State Legislature is trying to defund United Council, the oldest state student association in the country.

* The best headline ever? The FBI Investigated the Song ‘Louie Louie’ for Two Years.

* Wikipedia’s emergency.

* Diane Kendig’s letter of resignation from her adjunct position at Kent State.

* Senate Accepts Deal to Kick Formerly Incarcerated Off Food Benefits.

* The kids are all right: Teens hate Facebook.

* Historian Helen Fry, who has written a book called The M Room: Secret Listeners who bugged the Nazis, says the information gleaned by the eavesdropping of the German generals was vitally important to the war effort – so much so that it was given an unlimited budget by the government. She believes what was learned by the M room operations was as significant as the code-breaking work being done at Bletchley Park.

* The Boy Scouts inch forward.

* And This Incredible Full Scale Lego X-Wing Is the Largest Model In History. I’ll allow it.

Wednesday Links

* I’ve seen dumber things than a mayor offering to spend $173 million in tax money on a building for a private college that already has its pick of several arenas to play in—but not much dumber…. I can’t for the life of me imagine what Emanuel thinks Chicago is likely to get out of this deal, unless he really thinks that convention planners are just waiting for a 12,000-seat arena to hold their plenary sessions in, at which point they’ll start throwing wadded-up hundred-dollar bills at any Chicagoan they can find. At the very least it’s something to think about as the mayor’s appointees say they have no choice but to close the schools. Common sense on school closings.

* Good news for Gerrys: Pope Francis says even atheists go to heaven. That’s a load off.

* Amazon tries to monetize fan fiction.

* Precious bodily fluids: Portland, Ore., rejects adding fluoride to drinking water.

* Best Cities for Working Women in the U.S. Congratulations, Durham!

* “In Colorado, a moderate Governor temporarily halts an execution, raising huge questions about capital punishment.”

* Just stealing it from LGM outright: ESPN is a great corporation. It is ungodly profitable. It creates a mere 43% of Disney’s total operating income. Think about that. All of Disney, including Disneyland and everything else it owns. 43%. But you see, ESPN has recently acquired some lucrative properties, like more SEC football games. In order to show us more Vanderbilt-Kentucky football and build a crazy expensive new set, ESPN has decided to lay off 300-400 employees. This a mere 2 weeks after Disney’s stock reached an all-time high.

* And Octavia Butler reminds us introspection is kind of a pain.

Another Tuesday Night Linkdump

* Cooper Union’s shameless trustees.

* How to Tell if College Presidents Are Overpaid. They’re breathing. Their lips are moving.

* Unknown mathematician makes historical breakthrough in prime theory.

* Are you a liberal imperialist? Top ten warning signs.

*  Pages currently appearing on Facebook include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, Raping your Girlfriend and many, many more.  Images appearing on Facebook include photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up” and “Next time don’t get pregnant.”

* There Was a Time When Ending Hunger Was a National Goal for Republicans and Democrats.

* This Michael Kinsley column on marriage equality is probably the single worst thing I’ve ever read on any of the subjects it attempts to discuss. Just totally incoherent on every level. Bonus points for the part at the end where he claims to have personally invented the very idea of gay marriage in the first place.

* Iain Banks says he wrote mainstream fiction to subsidize his science fiction habit.

* And this DVD looks and smells like pizza when it’s finished playing. But don’t get too excited; it smells like Domino’s.

T Minus 300 Years

Congratulations to my friend Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of a 2012 Nebula for 2312! I reviewed it for Los Angeles Review of Books last summer.

Saturday Links!

* Does the BBC want Moffat off Who? Well, then, I guess that’s pretty much everyone.

* The AV Club argues the American Office, to the end, was a great television show about how terrible love can be.

* So you survived the apocalypse. Here’s what would it take to rebuild the world.

* How to Avoid Toxic Chemicals.

* But it’s not only the Globe. This failure is repeated across the mainstream media landscape — the product of a mindset in which climate change is simply another environmental problem, albeit a particularly complex one for which we’ll eventually find a technical fix, mainly by doing more or less the same things we’re doing now, only more efficiently and with better technology. It’s nothing to get too excited about. It’s certainly not anything to sacrifice your career over.

* Mark Fisher on affective labor. Warning: The ultimate imagistic reference is pornographic, if that’s unpleasant for you.

Being exploited is no longer enough. The nature of labour now is such that almost anyone, no matter how menial their position, is required to be seen (over)investing in their work. What we are forced into is not merely work, in the old sense of undertaking an activity we don’t want to perform; no, now we are forced to act as if we want to work. Even if we want to work in a burger franchise, we have to prove that, like reality TV contestants, we really want it. The notorious shift towards affective labour in the Global North means that it is no longer possible to just turn up at work and be miserable. Your misery has to be concealed – who wants to listen to a depressed call centre worker, to be served by a sad waiter, or be taught by an unhappy lecturer?

Yet that’s not quite right. The subjugatory libidinal forces that draw enjoyment from the current cult of work don’t want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work? In his sequel to Blade Runner, The Edge of Human, K W Jeter provides an insight into the libidinal economics of work and suffering. One of the novel’s characters answers the question of why, in Blade Runner‘s future world, the Tyrell Corporation bothered developing replicants (androids constructed so that only experts can distinguish them from humans). “Why should the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It’s simple. Machines don’t suffer. They aren’t capable of it.  A machine doesn’t know when it’s being raped. There’s no power relationship between you and a machine. … For the replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions. … . The replicant’s emotions aren’t a design flaw. The Tyrell Corporation put them there. Because that’s what our customers wanted.”

* And the only way to win is not to play: In part, this is how all solitaire games work. The solitaire aesthetic in general is about taking rational content and form — apparent in the effort to model the range of a T-37 turret gun in the game’s structure — and giving it metaphysical expression and feeling in a game-play design. It is a constructed channel of experience, with clearly defined player operations, yet completely undefined in terms of how the player experiences it. Even though you are rolling a die and consulting a results table, you see the battle in terms beyond paper and dice; your mind creates a narrative in which the enemy is repulsed or surges forth, where a battle-scarred unit makes the break-through or where defeat is quickly assured when a leader is cut down in the opening hellfire of bullets. A string of successful rolls translates into cosmic kismet, failed rolls into a series of punches putting you on the ropes.

Thursday!

* At last we have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem’s oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.

* Compassion and Hubris: The Dalai Lama Speaks to the Wisconsin Legislature.

According to one observer, “the ones who fell asleep (or at least appeared to be asleep) [were] Tranel, Marklein, Pridemore, Tittl, Hutton, Bies, Nass, Tiffany, and Knodl. It was hard to tell with some of them, but Tranel was definitely asleep. Nerison, who sits next to him, shook him awake at one point.”

* Tressie McMillan Cottom on MOOCs.

I think we have to accept that traditional colleges like ours have benefited from inequality. That’s biting us in the ass now because it’s being used to say we’re elitist as if we weren’t designed to do precisely what we’re doing. I mean c’mon. So let’s accept that part of our own story and say yeah we’ve got other stories too.

Jonathan Rees has been pounding the MOOC beat for weeks; here’s his latest roundup.

* Yale fined $165,000 for underreporting sex offenses. Is that a lot of money? You might very well think so.

* The Freud Museum announced earlier this week that it needed £5000 to restore Freud’s couch, the centerpiece of a study crammed with other relics, a cluttered cabinet of antique curiosities that Freud called his ‘old and dirty gods’.

* Jennie Runk: My life as a ‘plus-size’ model.

* Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note.

* And the headline reads, “Venezuela Has Run Out of Toilet Paper.”

Tuesday Night Links

What is Earth like in STAR TREK’S CENTURY? For one thing, we’ll never take a story back there and therefore don’t expect to get into subjects which would create great problems, technical and otherwise. The “U.S.S.” on our ship designation stands for “United Space Ship” – indicating (without troublesome specifics) that mankind has found some unity on Earth, perhaps at long last even peace. If you require a statement such as one that Earth cities of the future are splendidly planned with fifty-mile parkland strips around them, fine. But television today simply will not let us get into details of Earth’s politics of STAR TREK,’S century; for example, which socio-economic system ultimately worked out best.

* Via Slate’s Vault:  Original Series Star Trek Writers/Directors Guide. Gems on every page!

SULU — Ship’s Helmsman, played by actor George Takei. Mixed oriental in ancestry, Japanese predominating, Sulu is contemporary American in speech and manner. In fact, his attitude toward Asians is that they seem to him rather “inscrutable”.

* An interactive visualization of running gags on Arrested Development.

* App of the day: Buycott.

* Why So Few Violent Games?

* Now a full trailer for Joss Whedon’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

* Petworth’s Qualia Coffee Seeking Roasting Interns.

* And the headline reads, “Columbia University seeks to change ‘Caucasians only’ requirement for fellowship.”

Monday Night Links!

* Northrop Frye by way of Adam Roberts: The basis of critical knowledge is the direct experience of literature, certainly, but experience as such is never adequate. We are always reading Paradise Lostwith a hangover or seeing King Lear with an incompetent Cordelia or disliking a novel because some scene in it connects with something suppressed in our memories, and our most deeply satisfying responses are often made in childhood, to be seen later as immature over-reacting… As a structure of knowledge, then, criticism, like other structures of knowledge, is in one sense a monument to a failure of experience, a tower of Babel or one of the “ruins of time” which, in Blake’s phrase, “build mansions in eternity.” Adam makes the same connection to SF I make:

I think this resonates so strongly with me partly because science fiction was something I fell in love with as a child-reader. I still love it; still write it and write about it. But I’m increasingly conscious of the ways in which the exercise is based upon a kind of structural hermeneutic inadequacy. ‘Our most deeply satisfying responses are often made in childhood, to be seen later as immature over-reacting’ is almost a too perfect thumbnail of the adult apprehension of SF; and SF criticism always a kind of running-to-catch-up uttering various post-facto justifications. What’s neat about this Frye quotation is the sense it conveys that, actually, all criticism is in the business of doing this.

* “Industrial-era education” as rhetorical whipping boy.

* Lukewarm Obama scandals coming day-by-day now. Hello, second term!

* “Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history…

* Lili Loofbourow covers the struggle against privatization of higher ed in Chile for Boston Review.

* NPR profiles Duke’s Own Fred Moten.

* So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman.

* Peter Frase has more on Universal Basic Income as utopia.

* Why all babies say “mama.”

* Kurt Vonnegut’s final exam prank.

* And let this be our culture’s epitaph. We could do worse.

Sunday Night Links

* The Founder of Mother’s Day Later Fought to Have It Abolished.

* Science fiction for economists. Even more science fiction for economists.

* Local news: U.S. officials in Milwaukee have arrested a cancer researcher from China, Huajun Zhao, 42, on charges of “economic espionage” after a colleague at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCOW) reported that vials of a research compound were missing.

* A secret history of the Doritos Locos taco.

* What if people told European history like they told Native American history?

* Sarah Kendzior sings the song of St. Louis.

* Nightmares ever-ending: 12 Hurt at New Orleans Mother’s Day Parade Shooting.

* And a data visualization of Game of Thrones. Spoilers through the most recent book, naturally!

Utopia in Unembarrassed, Unironic Mode

Adam Roberts has been reading the Culture novels backwards, and it’s a very good thing: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Thursday Night Links

* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.

* Dialectics of Joe Biden.

* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.

* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’

* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.

* At least 912 people are now known to have died in last month’s collapse of a building near the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, officials say.

* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).

* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.

* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.

* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.

* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.

* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.

Just a Few Wednesday Links

* The University of Pennsylvania is working on new guidelines to limit its professors’ freelance work for online education companies.

* The researchers note that either no debt or minimal debt appears to be the norm for white and Asian Ph.D. recipients, but not other groups. Black Ph.D. recipients in STEM fields are more than twice as likely as are white and Asian Ph.D. recipients to accrue more than $30,000 in debt in graduate school.

* Universities Exist Primarily to Enrich Football Coaches.

* It is starting to look as if the po-po are not going to be celebrating for long, as this crazymaking USA Today story lists neighbor after neighbor saying, “Oh, those girls? The ones trapped in that house for a decade? Yeah, we called the cops the first time we saw them being walked naked on a leash. F*ckers never came.” (Direct quote, probably.)

* What Lovecraft created was a specifically twentieth century idea: the universe as an empty, materialist one, in which there is no spiritual meaning to any actions and in which human existence is not significant in any way.

* All Europeans are related if you go back just 1,000 years, scientists say.

* And of course you had me at Vintage Science Ads from the 1950s-1960s.

Thursday Reading™

* It is very hard to accept this — the wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will. From the streets of Cicero on up, the point was to imprison black people in the black belt and then exploit them. The goal was pursued through public policy, private action, and open terrorism. The goal was accomplished.

* Even college presidents don’t believe in MOOCs.

* “An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel From the Philosophy Department at San Jose State U.” A writeup at the Chronicle.

* Science Fiction in China: A Conversation with Fei Dao.

FD: Chinese sci fi has about a hundred years of history. When it started, in the late Qing dynasty around 1902, it was chiefly concerned with the problem of bringing ancient China into modernity. At that time, Liang Qichao [translated sci fi] because he thought it would be beneficial for China’s future … as something that could popularize scientific knowledge. And Lu Xun thought that if you gave ordinary people scientific literature to read, they would fall asleep. But if you blended scientific knowledge into stories with a plot, it would be more interesting. [He thought that] in this way, the people could become more modern.

* Chris Beckett wins Arthur C. Clarke award for Dark Eden. Probably the first book I’ll read once the semester is over, thanks to @shaviro’s great paper on it at ICFA.

* The Pope against capitalism.

* Obama against labor.

* Obama against legal weed dispensaries, despite like a dozen promises not to do this anymore.

* See no evil, hear no evil: Republicans propose abolishing the unemployment rate.

* Previously on The Walking Dead.

* Profit Still Rare, Expenses Still Rising at Athletic Programs.

* One Woman’s Crusade Against Revenge Porn.

* Administrators are maniacs: School Conducts Surprise Shooting Drill with Real Gunmen Firing Blanks.

* Rumor: Koch Brothers to buy 8 major newspapers, including LA Times.

* And a staggering 44% of Republicans believe armed revolution against the government may soon be necessary.

Stuff I’m Doing This Weekend

* On Friday I’ll be moderating the panel on drones at C21′s Dark Side of the Digital conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

* And on Saturday I’ll be on the Doctor Who and Philosophy panel at DePaul’s Celebration of Doctor Who in Chicago.

Weekend Links!

* Big fair use decision: specific commentary on the original work is not required for a fair use defense.

* Finding common ground with Senator Coburn: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude major professional sports leagues from qualifying as tax-exempt organizations.

* Gasp! Many students stay away from online courses in subjects they deem especially difficult or interesting, according to a study released this month by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The finding comes just as many highly selective colleges are embracing online learning and as massive open online courses are gaining popularity and standing.

* “What we’re saying is that bargain-basement (clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters,” John Hilary, executive director at British charity War on Want, told Reuters.

* Bad Robot will adapt 11/22/63.

* Canada gets it right: “The legal test for a true volunteer arrangement looks at several factors, but merely agreeing to work without pay does not in itself make you a volunteer,” Ministry of Labour spokesperson Jonathon Rose wrote in an email. See also Natalia Cecire:

Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for “fun,” the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. “I can get you a twenty-year-old!” is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.

* Whitewashing and manwashing cinema.

* Mother Jones profiles the great Tig Notaro.

* What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill.

* And 66 behind-the-scenes photos from the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.