May Day Links, Not All of Them about May Day Exactly

* Is today the day Marty McFly arrives when he travels to the future?

* Jacob Remes on May Day from a year ago.

* Lost generation: on unemployment in Spain.

* A May Day Manifesto: Seven Principles for Adjuncts.

1. Increase the starting salary for a three-credit semester course to a minimum of $5,000 for all instructors in higher education.
2. Ensure academic freedom by providing progressively longer contracts for all contingent instructors who have proven themselves during an initial probationary period.
3. Provide health insurance for all instructors, either through their college’s health insurance system or through the Affordable Care Act.
4. Support the quality education of our students by providing their instructors with necessary office space, individual development support, telephones, email accounts and mail boxes.
5. Guarantee fair and equitable access to unemployment benefits when college instructors are not working.
6. Guarantee eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to all college instructors who have taught for ten years, during which they were repaying their student loans.
7. With or without a time-in service requirement, allow all college teachers to vote and hold office in institutional governance, including faculty senates and academic departments.

* A very strange thing happened to the California single payer health care bill this year. It disappeared.

* There were a few radical writers like Tom Paine who did use the word “democracy” from early on, but the first official use was by Jefferson and Madison when they founded the “Democratic Republican” party — which is clearly just some sort of PR trick, since Jefferson himself never uses the word “democracy” at all in his own writings. But the person who really transformed the language was Andrew Jackson. He ran as a “democrat” and it was so effective that over the course of the 1830s, everyone started calling themselves that. So basically the Republican system that was set up to contain democracy itself got renamed “Democracy.” Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America.

* After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto.

* Washington Post editorial urges the closing of Guantánamo.

For the prison to close, lawmakers would have to lift a ban on transferring prisoners to the United States. But it was good that Mr. Obama also pledged to “examine every option that we have administratively” — because there are steps he could take without Congress.

* US soldier not found alive after 44 years in Vietnam. Via the comments.

* Japan and Russia want to finally end World War II.

* Interesting interactive chart from the Guardian about violence in recent best-selling video games.

* Interactive infographic at the New York Times shows long-term Democratic hegemony (at least at the presidential level) given most demographic assumptions.

* Coursera Eyes Teacher Training With New MOOC Partners.

* And so you want to win a Pulitzer.