Easter Thursday and the Living’s Easy Links
* BREAKING: The NCAA has approved unlimited snacks. Can we please stop all this silly union talk now?
* Unintentional metaphor watch: In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
* Extremism and the college classroom.
* Unpaid Interns Gain the Right to Sue. What a country!
* Women, confidence, and institutional sexism.
* “I’m sorry, that sounds horrible,” he continued. “I would have put my own wife or daughters there, and I would have been screaming bloody murder to watch them die. I would gone next, I would have been the next one to be killed. I’m not afraid to die here. I’m willing to die here.”
* Accreditors ask City College to voluntarily terminate its own accreditation. Tempting, but….
* Rare Video Of People Actually Riding Action Park’s Infamous Water Slide.
* A new study which statistically analyzed temperature data over the pre-industrial period and the industrial period has rejected the hypothesis that global warming is due to natural variability at confidence levels greater than 99%.
* North Dakota Finds Itself Unprepared To Handle The Radioactive Burden Of Its Fracking Boom.
* Informed awareness is the worst, part one: A Mrs. Doubtfire sequel is in the works. Because you demanded it!
* Informed awareness is the worst, part two: Why are they even calling this show 12 Monkeys?
* Democracy is a shell game: Cities in Oklahoma are prohibited from establishing mandatory minimum wage or vacation and sick-day requirements under a bill that has been signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.
* When Google Tried to Build a Space Elevator.
* Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom.
* The Secret “Ronbledore” Pages of Harry Potter Revealed By Court Order. I always knew.
* 1648: The first emoticon.
* What’s on Captain America’s to-do list in other countries that aren’t America.
* And your periodic reminder that child poverty is a policy choice. Maybe it’s time we just turn things over to the rats.
Saturday Night Links!
* Chris Ware: The Story of a Penny.
* There’s nothing sweet in life: Daytime Napping Linked to Increased Risk of Death.
* So it’s come to this: the University of California is now arresting striking workers, their leaders and supporters for legally sanctioned labor activity.
* On the gender gap in academia.
* America’s total newsroom workforce dropped 17,000, from 55,000 in 2006 to 38,000 in 2012, according to the Pew Research Journalism Project.
* “D.C.’s homeless children deserve a great play space. Let’s build one.” End homelessness.
* Tasers out of schools, out of everywhere.
* The NSA has exploited Heartbleed bug for years, Bloomberg reports. The NSA denies it.
* EFF seeks student activists for campus network.
* Great moments in arbitrary government nonsense.
Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to a parent, the children’s money can be taken, no matter how long ago any overpayment occurred.
* And then, as always, there’s the LAPD.
* Albuquerque police have ‘pattern’ of excessive, deadly force, report says.
* Blogs to watch: http://carceralfeminism.wordpress.com/
* PETA unable to make cannibal Dahmer’s home a vegan restaurant.
* “May I play devil’s advocate?”
* Go on….
* Special bonus Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!
* Climate Change Drying Out Southwest Now, With Worse To Come For A Third Of The Planet. Extreme Weather Has Driven A Ten-Fold Increase In Power Outages Over The Last Two Decades. If We Don’t Stop Now, We’ll Surpass 2°C Global Warming.
* Jed Whedon explains why Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been so bad all this time.
* Kickstarter of the night: Geek Theater: Anthology of Science Fiction & Fantasy Plays.
* And of course you had me at “Game of Thrones in Space.”
All the Thursday Links
* Shocking police overreach haunts Southern city: Racial profiling, quotas and secret “conviction bonuses.” Yes, of course it’s Durham.
* Nazis! Me no like those guys. Neo-Nazis Are Using Cookie Monster to Recruit German Children.
* The charter school scam in action.
* Congratulations, University of Connecticut.
* BREAKING: Governing boards don’t care about adjuncts.
* All of which is just to say that it’s a handy thing, should you ever get elected to anything, to think a little about who’ll replace you when your term is done. Because you should leave. It’s good for your brain, and it’s good for the university. It’s also good for the soul to know that you’re not irreplaceable.
* Voices from the Student Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement.
* Rethinking carceral feminism.
* Now the head women’s basketball coach is out at Marquette. Second-highest-paid employee on campus.
* New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators.
* Northwestern University fights back against NCAA football unionization.
* Drone art: Drone Operators Now Have a “Bug Splat” Staring Them in The Face.
* Former Taco Bell interns claim they invented Doritos tacos in 1995.
* The Legend of Vera Nabokov. The old days, guys, am I right?
* Meanwhile, everything old is new again: Adam Terry, McAllister’s chief of staff, said Peacock was taken off of the payroll during the past 24 hours.
* “Duke Collective” now Internet-famous for wage-sharing idea that if you knew the institutional context you’d realize isn’t really oh forget it.
* I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.
* St. Michael’s in Vermont plans to survive by shrinking.
* Student Social Network Use Declines as Social Apps Move to Take Their Place.
* More Khaleesis were born in 2012 than Betsys or Nadines.
* Superficially plausible readings of fuzzy demographic signifiers: The Muppets and Generation X.
* The Vermont solution: single-payer. I don’t have a ton of hope in the American system, but I think this plan could actually work.
* Battlestar Galactica Is Getting Rebooted As A ZZZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzzzzzz
* Jon Stewart cursed me out: I dared question a “Daily Show” warm-up comic’s racist jokes.
* The birth of Thanaticism. As neologisms to describe our era go, I prefer necrocapitalism.
* Milwaukee Art Museum unveils design for building addition.
* What has been seen can never be unseen.
* Tolkien, Martin, and politics.
* Carbon Dioxide Levels Just Hit Their Highest Point In 800,000 Years.
* And I still think this is more a heat map of imperial ideology (don’t kill people in Europe!) than of “knowledge” per se. I think you’d see the opposite effect about a country in the Global South.
Upcoming Events I’m Involved With to Varying Degrees, All in the Midwest
* Today at Marquette: Today (Tuesday the 8th) from 5-6 PM in Lalumiere 208 we’ll be having our last Pop Culture Lunch Dinner of the semester, on music’s British Invasions. There will be pizza! Come out!
* Tomorrow at Marquette: Tomorrow (Wednesday the 9th) is Marquette English’s annual celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, which this year takes the form of a “Sonnet Slam.”
* This Weekend in Milwaukee: All weekend the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is hosting a very exciting conference on “Anthropocene Feminism.”
* 4/22 in Cleveland: On April 22 I’ll be giving a talk at my beloved alma mater, Case Western, titled “Science Fiction and/as Philosophy.” More details to come!
* 4/26 at Marquette: The weekend of April 26th Marquette graduate students are hosting a conference on “Representing the Natural,” which also promises to be excellent.
* 5/2 in Chicago: I’ll also be giving a brief talk and participating in a roundtable at the Joss Whedon celebration at DePaul, reprising my role as snake-in-the-garden perfected at last year’s Doctor Who celebration.
* And, finally, 5/23 in Madison: I’ll be giving a paper at SFRA/WisCon on the great stuff I found in the Octavia Butler archives, especially the various unfinished drafts of Parable of the Trickster.
See you at all of these!
Monday Night Links!
* Dr. Nancy E. Snow, professor of philosophy in Marquette University’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of a $2.6 million grant that will fund interdisciplinary research on virtue, character and the development of the moral self.
* How do professors spend their time? Additional facts.
* The American Association of University Professors is out with its latest annual report on the economic health of its members’ profession. Executive summary: It’s pretty weak. But this year, the AAUP has added a fun little wrinkle by comparing the growth of academic and sports spending. Fun! The AAUP report. The Chronicle’s interactive graph. Meanwhile, associate professors see their earning power drop compared with their colleagues above and below.
* UConn Star: College Athletes ‘Have Hungry Nights That We Don’t Have Enough Money To Get Food.’ UConn basketball’s dirty secret.
* Community colleges rely on part-time, “contingent” instructors to teach 58 percent of their courses, according to a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. Part-time faculty teach more than half (53 percent) of students at two-year institutions.
* Mass expulsions from jobs, houses, farms, pensions, health care, citizenship, the welfare state, large-scale disappearances of species, arable land, clean water, open ocean—it’s a shrinking world. On the brighter side, as Sassen also documents, corporate profits in the last few decades have soared.
* Only 15% of US firms offer paid paternity leave to their employees.
* Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Debacle. Scenes from Mississippi’s new state-run civil rights museum (the first state-run civil rights museum in the country).
* Archaeology, Human Dignity, and the Fascination of Death.
* Death used to be a spiritual ordeal; now it’s a technological flailing.
* For years, the state had greeted visitors with billboards that said “Wild Wonderful West Virginia.” In 2006, it adopted a new slogan: “Open for Business.”
* By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD. Millions of those boys will be prescribed a powerful stimulant to “normalize” them. A great many of those boys will suffer serious side effects from those drugs. The shocking truth is that many of those diagnoses are wrong, and that most of those boys are being drugged for no good reason—simply for being boys. It’s time we recognize this as a crisis. The Drugging of the American Boy.
* The Game I Played When I Was Scared To Death of Being Deported. White House defends soaring number of deportations for minor crimes.
* “When You Meet a Lesbian: Hints for the Heterosexual Women.” Struck again by way white supremacy is willing, even eager, to argue white people are inferior — just as long as African Americans are worse.
* Affirmative-Action Foe Plans Campaigns Against 3 Universities.
* State Department Not Totally Sure Where it Spent Six Billion Dollars. I’m sure it’ll turn up.
* Linking to this sickening story, someone on Twitter reminded me that they would sell postcards of lynchings.
* Chicago decriminalized marijuana possession—but not for everyone.
* This is weird: Al Sharpton Was Previously FBI Informant.
* Vox is SEO as journalism. When Ezra Klein left the Washington Post.
* Better than straight-up bald-faced lies as journalism I guess.
* Has Any President Done More to Damage HBCUs Than Barack Obama?
* The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance.
* TNI has put up the egg donation story I was touting a few linkdumps back.
* Recession Spurred Enrollments in STEM Fields, Study Finds.
* I worry sometimes my classes are the literature version of this comic.
* And the Milwaukee Art Museum, as it was always meant to be seen: in LEGOs.
