Wednesday Links: Cold War Modern Art, The Cutest Kitties, and More

* Modern art as weapon in the Cold War. And they say the humanities are worthless!

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

* We can’t buy this kind of motivation from the market. No tool or program can spark it. And the elites at the top of the current educational heap—who advanced their careers while the educational culture declined—have no clue.

* Judge rules that Fox Searchlight should have paid its interns. Fox today, literally every other media and publishing outfit in the country tomorrow…

* A judge responded to an assault victim by demanding sex in exchange for ‘legal favors’ in her divorce. She filed a complaint, and he sent cops to plant meth in her car. It’s the most atrocious abuse of power since this other story that was also published today.

* Imagining a Balkanized US.

* Former White House Chief of Staff mulling run for Illinois governor on bleed-the-teachers platform. You know, for the children.

* Meanwhile, from our governor: Scott Walker Endorses Mandating Transvaginal Ultrasounds And Shutting Down Abortion Clinics.

* Chinese century watch: Nicaragua gives Chinese firm contract to build alternative to Panama Canal.

* Massive ‘derecho’ storm poised to strike southern Wisconsin.

* Pipe break at Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant kills 8,000 small fish.

* Man of Steel sounds pretty middling, alas. And no after-credits sequence? Outrageous.

* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal simplifies the Voight-Kampff test.

Monday Links

* I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?

The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.

* “Families bring their children in bright and early because they want them to learn,” she said, “not because they want them to be test dummies.” Related: How Michelle Rhee Misled Education Reform.

Rhee simply isn’t interested in reasoning forward from evidence to conclusions: conclusions are where she starts, which means that her book cannot be trusted as an analysis of what is wrong with public schools, when and why it went wrong, and what might improve the situation. The only topics worth discussing for Rhee are abolishing teacher tenure, establishing charter schools, and imposing pay-for-performance regimes based on student test scores. We are asked to understand these measures as the only possible means of addressing a crisis of decline that is existentially threatening the United States as a nation and denying civil rights to poor black people.

* Two recent reports by a prominent researcher purport to challenge Academically Adrift’s underlying conclusions about students’ critical thinking gains in college, and especially the extent to which others have seized on those findings to suggest that too little learning takes place in college. The studies by the Council for Aid to Education show that students taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment made an average gain of 0.73 of a standard deviation in their critical thinking scores, significantly more than that found by the authors of Academically Adrift.

* The flying monkeys of Burlington, Vermont.

* Getting everyone high is a great, if potentially lazy, plot device to exploit narrative inconsistency. There are no metaphors needed here: These characters—and by extension, this episode—is literally on speed. Did we, as viewers, complain that Weiner’s show felt like it was dragging on, or growing recursive? Did we whine that nothing really ever happened, or that Don was being glorified beyond his due? “The Crash” not only brought its awareness of such complaints to the fore, but it brought them at a speed usually reserved for those little explosions (slapstick, campy, or abject) that only interrupted the visually austere or pristine environment that defined “Mad Men.”

* Rare, amazing original prospectus for Disneyland.

* LARoB on the lawyer bubble.

* TV show rankings, science style.

* Some cosmetics companies that were cruelty-free for many years have changed their policies on animal testing so that they may market to China where animal testing is required.

* Ignoring the memory of the over 1,100 factory workers that passed away at the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh last month, at least 14 major North American retailers have declined to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, an agreement that would have entailed a five year commitment from all participating retailers to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and pay up to $500,000 per year towards safety improvements.

* Proposal gives Scott Walker administration more power to sell state property.

Proceeds would be used to chip away at the state’s $8 billion debt, but the state entities that formerly owned the properties might not see any benefit from the sales. So, a dorm built with student fees could potentially be sold to pay down the debt for a highway expansion, or vice versa.

* What’s Next For Kaitlyn Hunt, The Teen Charged With A Felony For Same-Sex Relationship With Classmate.

* VA GOP’s Attorney General Nominee Wanted Women To Report Miscarriages To Police Or Face Jail Time.

* And winter is coming: HBO May Reveal Game of Thrones Ending Before the Books Can.

Even More Tuesday Links (Collect Them All!)

* Wisconsin, unfortunately, has become a case study in the failure of austerity economics at the state level.

* The NCAA wants you to know that its unpaid workers absolutely definitely have health insurance.

* Contingency Plan: Outsourcing Education.

As Maisto puts it: “The most vulnerable students tend to get taught by the least supported faculty. And if that doesn’t bother people, it should.”

Stick around for some eye-popping rationalizations from senior administrators.

* The myth of the lecturer.

* Of those students who place into remedial math at CUNY, 20 percent have progressed to a for-credit course two years later. After six years, just one in four have managed to earn any degree. A national research report published last year called remediation a “bridge to nowhere.” System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education.

“If you start in remediation,” says Tom Sugar of Complete College America, the think tank that published the “bridge to nowhere” report, “there’s virtually no chance you’re going to end up with a college degree.”

* A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise.

“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”

* Tough times in the U.K.: the Queen got a mere $5 million dollar raise this year.

* The Associated Press announced today that it will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”

* New journal: The Journal of Popular Television, Volume 1, Number 1.

* And your Tumblr of the minute: Mean Girls + Mad Men = Mean Mad Men. So good I don’t even care if I’ve done this one before.

Tuesday!

* C21′s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.

* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.

* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.

* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.

Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.

Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.

* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.

* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.

* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….

* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.

* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”

* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.

* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.

* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.

* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today:  Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?

* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.

* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.

MOOC as Right-Wing Plot?

Salon goes there.

After some reflection, it’s become clear to me that there is a crucial difference in how the Internet’s remaking of higher education is qualitatively different than what we’ve seen with recorded music and newspapers. There’s a political context to the transformation. Higher education is in crisis because costs are rising at the same time that public funding support is falling. That decline in public support is no accident. Conservatives don’t like big government and they don’t like taxes, and increasingly, they don’t even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States.

It’s absolutely no accident that in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, three of the most conservative governors in the country are leading the push to incorporate MOOCs in university curricula. And it seems well worth asking whether the apostles of disruption who have been warning academics that everything is about to change have paid enough attention to how the intersection of politics and MOOCs is affecting the speed and intensity of that change. Imagine if Napster had had the backing of the Heritage Foundation and House Republicans? It’s hard enough to survive chaotic disruption when it is a pure consequence of technological change. But when technological change suits the purposes of enemies looking to put a knife in your back, it’s almost impossible.

Tuesday Night Links

* Local news! Marquette has named Dr. Richard Holz its new dean of the Klinger College of Arts and Sciences.

* More local news! Students at The Marquette Tribune strike back against proposed budget cuts.

* Now, the United States has reached “mass incarceration”—“a level of imprisonment so vast that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group,” Western writes. He has found that 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts in the United States will go to prison before age 35. The deterrent effect of incarceration is lessened if it becomes so common that it no longer carries any stigma. “The American prison boom is as much a story about race and class,” he writes, “as it is about crime control.”

* Adam Kotsko explains neoliberalism. Exactly so.

* Scott Walker vs. the unions, round two.

* Harry Potter pulls one over on the paparazzi.

* Missouri Bill Makes It A Felony For Lawmakers To Propose Gun Safety Legislation. I mean really.

* What’s remarkable about this rejected 1998 proposal to revamp Superman from Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer is how many of the ideas wound up being used in other superhero comics like All-Star Superman and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

* Florida Atlantic University names its football stadium after a for-profit prison company.

* Climate change to bring alligators to DC.

* And 40% Of Americans Now Make Less Than 1968′s Minimum Wage. Freddie deBoer: Absolutely nothing can be done to address this country’s problems until people are willing to admit that our economy has become a machine for siphoning more and more resources to those at the top. 

And Some Links

* The theme for MLA 2014 is “Vulnerable Times.”

* NCAA Reform Gone Wrong.

A decade has passed since the National Collegiate Athletic Association rolled out its academic reform package. In that time, there is strong evidence that the reforms designed to open access to higher education to more athletes and punishing coaches and institutions failing at academics came at the expense of the integrity of the academy.  The landscape of the NCAA’s program is scorched with scandals surrounding admissions, academic fraud, major clustering and clever gaming of the system for the wealthiest institutions to avoid penalties. We conclude that it has significantly damaged higher education.

* Kennesaw State to add football. I’m shocked any Board of Trustees would volunteer to take on this kind of liability, knowing what we know…

* Tesla catches the New York Times deliberately tanking its review of its Model S electric car, while at the same time revealing the truly staggering amount of data they can log while you’re driving.

* Apocalypse now:  “Think of carbon as a global pollutant that affects the ocean everywhere it touches the sky,” explains Stanford University marine science professor and Hopkins Marine Station director Steve Palumbi. What does ocean acidification mean for sea life?

* Sad coda to the Oscar Pistorius story: Olympic Hero Oscar Pistorius Charged With Murder in Shooting Death of Girlfriend.

* Abolish the states watch: Scott Walker edition.

Yesterday Scott Walker finally announced his much-awaited decision about how to deal with the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. And he managed to come up with a “solution” that simultaneously lets him express solidarity with his nullification-minded soul-mates in the Deep South while increasing federal involvement in health insurance in his state and also costing Wisconsin taxpayers some serious money! Quite the triple-gainer, eh?

* Woman Says She’s Had the Same Song Stuck in Her Head for Three Years.

* New Atlanta Braves Logo Features Gruesome Depiction Of Trail Of Tears.

* Can the Republicans be Saved From Obsolescence?

* And some love poetry at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Literally Every Weekend Link There Is

* It’s official: J.J. Abrams will ruin Star Wars (more).

* More drone fiction, please. Tweets not bombs. Lip-syncing the poetry of empire.

* Žižek vs. Zero Dark Thirty.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

* Anti-war activism at the University of Wisconsin, c. 1940.

* Stunning read on living as a victim of child abuse from the New York Times: The Price of a Stolen Childhood.

* David Foster Wallace and depression, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

* Steve Benen and Maddowblog has been all over the Republican vote-rigging scheme, even going so low as to cite one of my tweets. What The 2012 Election Would Look Like Under The Republicans’ Vote-Rigging Plan. Scott Walker, of course, is rigging-curious. And a delicious little bit of schadenfreude.

* It is a sin against the new world of mediocrity to be distinct or distinguished.  We are in the chain-store, neon-lighted era.  Almost every city looks the same.  The same people all dress the same – kids as Hopalong Cassidy, men with loud sportshirts and Truman suits, women in slacks.  Sometimes you can tell whether a trousered individual is a man or a woman only by the width of the buttocks.  Only a few cities have individuality.  They are the seaports, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.  Boston reeks of decay, and is not genteel.  The rest are all Cleveland.

* Today in legal hyperformalism.

Would you believe me if I told you that President Obama is in constitutional trouble—with hundreds of decisions of the National Labor Relations Board from the last year now potentially invalid—over the meaning of the word the?

* When The Shining had an optimistic ending.

* So we’re going to destroy the world: Australian shale oil discovery could be larger than Canada’s oilsands.

* The trouble with English.

None of these past challenges compares with the one under way now. While other humanities disciplines—philosophy, linguistics, and modern languages, for example—have relied upon a range of foundational practices at the modern mass university, many English professors have depended on literature (narrowly defined), written discourse, and the printed book as the primary elements in teaching and scholarship. But hidebound faculty members who continue to assign and study only pre-computer-based media will quickly be on their way toward becoming themselves a “historical” presence at the university.

That’s why I specialized in iPad-2-era Twitter-based fan-fiction, and frankly I’ve never looked back.

* Mainstreaming MOOCs.

* Open, New, Experimental, Aspirational: Ian Bogost vs. ”The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age.”

* New research indicates tuition has little correlation with educational outcomes.

* If markets are efficient and if markets make things better, then there is no explanation for why we have the worst media in the world rather than the best. The problem is that markets don’t really make things better or more efficient. They make things cheaper and they’re responsive. That’s why we get the news we want rather than the news we need.

* Child labour uncovered in Apple’s supply chain.

* n+1 visits MLA.

* Defending freedom: A St. Paul man who recently purchased an assault rifle out of fear of an impending gun ban threatened his teenage daughter with it because she was getting two B’s in school rather than straight A’s, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday.

* For The Sixth Time In One Week, Man Shot At Gun Show.

* Adam Mansbach: My fake college college syllabus.

* Copy Of The Scarlet Letter Can’t Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In Margins.

* Debunkng the “the Soviets used a pencil” gag. The more you know!

* Occam’s Razor suggests it must be Cory Booker who is putting these people and animals in danger in the first place.

* More on the Arizona “loyalty oaths” issue, with a religious freedom focus.

* New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence.’ Republicans, honestly, we have to talk.

* Seriously, though, I could fix the whole damn system if they’d listen to me.

* Even the Pentagon doesn’t know what the the point of the draft is supposed to be.

* Xavier and Magneto Heading to Broadway for Waiting For Godot.

* And a little something just for the Harmenians: “I wanted a memorable Harmontown show in Kansas City, and for my sins they gave me one.” Dan Harmon predicts pain.

Tuesday Night Links

* “If you carry a penny in your coin tray, how long would it take for that penny to cost you more than a cent in extra gas?”

* Having been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 15 years, I follow the news from the state closely, and was very disappointed to read about Governor Scott Walker’s plan to make significant changes to state funding for education.

* Why online education won’t save any money.

* DC Cursed to Destroy Justice League.

* A People’s History of Lost.

* What Happened When NYU Students Discovered They Could Email 40,000 People At Once.

* All the Mistakes Four Ohio College Kids Made Trying to Set Up Their Campus Ecstasy Lab.

* St. Dorothy Day?

* And it’s tough all over: Navy lays off its dolphins.

Destroy Higher Education the Wisconsin Way

“What we’re going to do is not just put money in … we’re going to make investments that are driven off of performance,” Walker said.

“We’re going to tie our funding in our technical colleges and our University of Wisconsin System into performance and say if you want money, we need you to perform, and particularly in higher education, we need you to perform not just in how many people you have in the classroom.

“In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?”

Sounds a lot like destroying higher education the Florida way.

Seesaw

Most of Scott Walker’s anti-union bill has been thrown out again.

Wednesday Night Links

* David Graeber in the Baffler: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.

* Brian Thill: “Drone-Strike the Jobless.”

It would be foolish indeed to have invested so much in these technologies only to watch them molder as mere weapons of war-force and terror. Like all modern technological artifacts, at rest they are value-neutral; it is only the uses to which they are put that defines them. In sum, to strike the jobless from the common ledger is, in its way, to aim for benevolence. The enormous costs to build, upgrade, and maintain ready fleets of drones of all manner and variety will be more than offset by the broad economic health benefits to be derived by purging the state of significant portions of its jobless population. In fact, if we might be permitted a moment of utopian thought, the likely growth in demand for these services (offered perhaps to interested parties along subsidized or graduated rate scales) will necessitate a process of vigorous hiring and training for remote-pilot operators, which may in appropriate instances be drawn from the ranks of the jobless themselves, thereby solving the problem of joblessness even more swiftly and decisively. Rather than a salaried position, however, these hires might best be negotiated as much needed ‘work experience’ and accordingly organized as internships of various types. This internment might even provide a stepping-stone toward their being struck themselves in turn more quickly. Remote piloting centers that will happen to have fallen victim to inflated overhead or health care costs, or the vagaries of local real estate crises, might themselves be recast as new targets for drones whose home bases are elsewhere.

* Wisconsin postmortems from Josh Eidelson, Doug Henwood, and LGM,

* Earth Is Headed for Disaster, Interdisciplinary Scientific Review Concludes. NB: That’s the actual headline. More climate apocalypticism via MetaFilter.

* Three Ways Climate Change Could Impact The Game Of Baseball. NB: Each of these will tend to increase people’s enjoyment of baseball. Forget I said anything!

* Voter Fraud Extremely Rare In Florida: ‘More Likely To Get Hit By A Bolt Of Lightning.’

* Florida Governor Rick Scott Officially Defies Justice Department, Vows to Continue Voter Purge. Someone should really tell him there’s actually no crisis!

* The last days of MF Global.

* Michael Hardt on WUNC’s The State of Things.

* Mom Locked Up For Cheering Too Loudly at High School Graduation.

* The trailer for Tarantino’s Django Unchained is out. The film itself looks fine, but that final tag—”Django is off the chain”—is simply unforgivable.

* And In Focus catches Transit-of-Venus mania (and there’s only one cure).

The Fetish for Procedure

Why we can’t have nice things: Some 60 percent of Wisconsin voters said a recall was only appropriate when a public official was accused of some kind of official misconduct.

Wisconsin Post-Mortem

Josh Marshall has your depressing defeat report with slight silver lining.

Tuesday Midday

* I missed my calling: space law. Or possibly space theology: the many asteroids are like unto the fish in the sea…

* Wisconsin (especially Milwaukee!) has voting fever and there’s only one cure. Start building up those expectations now, kids! This thing is a lock. #falsehope

* Elsewhere in Rust Belt News: “Reverse Gentrification” in Detroit and my beloved Cleveland. Via LGM.

* We “can’t afford” to spend money building space telescopes anymore, but luckily our spy agencies just happen to have a couple spares lying around.

* On teaching the Unabomber.

* And now you too can own a life-sized replica of the throne from Game of Thrones. I say anyone who seeks to claim the replica throne doesn’t deserve to sit on it.