Posts Tagged ‘The Wire’
Sunday Afternoon Links: Marx at 193, The Kids Aren’t All Right, The Sixth Season of the Wire, and More
* ‘Employers have feasted on despair’: The War Against Youth.
In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.
There’s some boilerplate tenure bashing in there too, but one can’t have everything.
It’s hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism. Three aspects which particularly stand out here are the tribute he pays to the productive capacity of capitalism, which far exceeds that of any other political-economic system we’ve ever seen; the remaking of social order which accompanies that; and capitalism’s inherent tendency for crisis, for cycles of boom and bust.
* The bomb in the garden: Matthew Butterick on the slow death of the Web.
Someone’s already tweeting—“Butterick is an idiot. He doesn’t know that information wants to be free.” You know, I have heard that. But I also know that 99.99% of people who mention this line forget to talk about the first and last parts of it.
“What? There’s a first and last part?” Yeah, yeah. The whole line goes like this:
“Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable … On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower … So you have these two fighting against each other.”
* Seconding @BCApplebaum: Washington Post publishes sixth season of The Wire. There really should have been a season devoted to the prison-industrial complex. There’s still time, Simon!
* And a trailer for the indie film version of Mario Brothers. I think I might have linked to this before, but either way I’d watch the hell out of this.
‘Mr. Andrews Killed the Man but Was Haunted by His Question’
Mr. Andrews was known for drug dealing and audacious robberies in West Baltimore in the 1970s and early ’80s. In September 1986, he agreed to kill a drug dealer for a rival to support his heroin habit. It was his first murder.
“My gun jammed,” Mr. Andrews told The New York Times in 2007. “So the guy was lying on the ground, and it gave him a chance to look me in the eye, and he said, ‘Why?’ ”
New York Times obituary for Donnie Andrews, the inspiration for The Wire‘s Omar Little.
The Upper Middlebrow
UPDATE: A Twitter conversation spawned by the article, minus the @_machinic_ quotes that aren’t public that make the stupid thing readable: Twitter v. The Wire v. Climate Change.
The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook. Like Midcult, it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within the bounds of what we already believe, affirms the enlightened opinions we absorb every day in the quality media, the educated bromides we trade on Facebook. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb—the definition of a true avant-garde—our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world.
Last Night Wednesday
* We move more earth and stone than all the world’s rivers. We are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere all life breathes. We are on pace to eat to death half of the other life currently sharing the planet with us. There is nothing on Earth untouched by man — whether it be the soot from fossil fuels darkening polar snows or the very molecules incorporated into a tree trunk. Humanity has become a global force whose exploits will be written in rock for millennia. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
* Via @zunguzungu, who has been all over the UVA story: Wendy Brown on online education.
High quality liberal arts on-line education is not cheap: where it has been modestly successful in providing a decent education, as at the UK’s Open University, it does not break even–far from it. Why? Open University courses are built by teams of researchers, are annually refreshed, and are intensively staffed by high-level academics. OU is an expensive tax-supported operation, designed from the beginning for workers and other students unable to leave homes or jobs to obtain a college education.
* “Julian Assange” is a bit, right? It’s got to be a bit. He wouldn’t be the first person to live for decades in an embassy.
* Why is spam so terrible? A new paper argues it’s a way of weeding out people too smart to fall for spam.
* Poll: Former Supreme Court clerks think the mandate is done for.
* LEGO anatomy. Via Kottke.
* Infinite Jest! Live! On Stage! One Entire Day Only!
* And I must admit, I’m a little verklempt: Life in Hell has finished.
Tuesday Night Links
* It’s no surprise to see Buffy is the most-studied pop culture text, with The Wire closing fast—but I’m a bit surprised the Alien franchise clocks in at #2 after all this time.
* Additional legal protections for self-defense killings — including the controversial “stand your ground” laws (the subject of new a U.S. Civil Rights Commission Inquiry) — do not deter crime, according to a new study from Texas A&M University examining laws that “widen the scope for the justified use of deadly force in self-defense.” In fact, according to the study’s authors, the laws do the opposite, increasing the chances of murder or manslaughter “by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force,” according to the study. “[W]e find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted” such laws, the authors wrote, noting that those could be cases “driven by the escalation of violence in situations that otherwise would not have ended in serious injury for either party.”
* A new analysis of climate data shows that Wisconsin is among a group of states that have warmed faster than other parts of the country over the past four decades.
* Getting out just in time: Romney Retakes The Lead In North Carolina.
* How capitalism impoverishes society, health insurance edition: When Erika Royer’s lupus led to kidney failure four years ago, her father, Radburn, was able to give her an extraordinary gift: a kidney. Ms. Royer, now 31, regained her kidney function, no longer needs dialysis and has been able to return to work. But because of his donation, her father, a physically active 53-year-old, has been unable to obtain private health insurance.
* A little Dad humor: Ten Bets You Will Never Lose.
* And from the I’d-watch-it files: Pixar’s Justice League. In particular the artist really nails Superman; that’s exactly how Pixar’s Superman would look.
Tuesday Morning
* Well, it certainly doesn’t sound very jubilant: A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.
* The Watchmen sequel gets meta right off the bat.
* André & Maria Jacquemetton talk to Slate about “Commissions & Fees,” while Jared Harris talks to the New York Times. Big spoilers for the most recent episode, naturally.
* My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
* Adam Kotsko reviews one of the next books in my increasingly long “free time” reading queue, Red Plenty.
* From the too-good-to-check files:
A Dutch company has launched a reality television-type project to establish a human settlement on Mars by 2023.
Mars One, as the project is called, aims to bring a total of 40 astronauts to Mars between 2023 and 2033. Organizers say the astronauts will be expected to remain there permanently – “living and working on Mars the rest of their lives.”
Where do we sign up?
* Which Wisconsin? Lorrie Moore in the NYRoB.
* A new study shows “Women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn—if you control for life choices.” The whole idea of “life choices” is itself essentially an argument-from-privilege, taking male experiences as neutral and unmarked and female experiences as a deviation from the norm—but women earn ten percent less even when you buy that line.
* ‘No surprise at all: ‘stand your ground’ defendants more likely to prevail if the victim is black.’ No one could have predicted!
* Pittsburgh, before smoke control.
* “Right of conscience” watch: NJ Doctor Would Reportedly Rather Let Patient Die Than Treat Him For ‘Gay Disease.’
* Special pleading watch: I can’t wait to find out why Minnesota’s big shift towards marriage equality doesn’t count as evidence for the bully pulpit, either.
* What happens when psychiatric hospitals disappear.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal takes an old-school sci-fi glimpse at the future of human evolution.
More Thursday
* Fringe will get a fifth season.
* How much of the Moon’s surface did the Apollo 11 astronauts actually explore?
* Aside from the slave labor, why manufacture in China? Because that’s where the rare earth minerals are.
* Parks and Recreation creators preposterously claim The Wire as an influence.
* Science proves being bad at math makes you religious. I think I have that right.
* And tomorrow at Duke: the inaugural Novel conference, with Rebecca Walkowitz, Amitav Ghosh, Jacques Rancière, and more.
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.
‘Why We Love Sociopaths’
Kotsko has an extended excerpt from his sociopaths book up at The New Inquiry. I read the book while we were in the hospital post-Zoey; it’s a truly great take on the last decade’s Second Golden Age of Television. Check it out!
