A Few for Friday

* It is hard to overstate: This country, in its current condition, has no other option but something close to full employment. Our pathetic social safety net, even absent the contracting effect of austerity measures, can’t fill in the gaps caused by the demise of ubiquitous employment. Even the counterrevolution has no other idiom; the most common epithet directed toward Occupy protests, after all, was “Get a job!” That the near impossibility of getting a job was the point for many who were protesting was too destabilizing a notion to be understood. In the short term, I have no doubt that the unemployment rate will fall. The question is the long-term structural dependability of a social contract built on mass employment.

* Lincoln Memorial, 2013, Anon, latex emulsion.

Lincoln himself, no more than a marble titan cut in his image, does not feel the change. And yet there it is, crawling across him, slithering toward his magisterial tumescence. The artist’s liquid hand is more than mere vestigiality; it is a spiritual kinship with the primitive, making its presence felt in the numinous historiography of neoclassicism, a soupçon of Jung melting into Kantian grandeur. But each is as lurid as the other in its own mythopoeia of the human mind.

* Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Act Unleashes GOP Feeding Frenzy. The focus here is on the truly atrocious bill the North Carolina General Assembly passed yesterday.

* Congrats to Forbes’ Top 25 Best Public Colleges in 2013! Too bad one-fifth of them — including the very top three — are currently under fire for allegedly failing to report rape and generally sucking at dealing with sexual assault.

* Ken MacLeod remembers Iain M. Banks.

* A Pox on Optimists!

* The new Community syndication trailer understands that the show is really about hot girls with boobs.

* And is Arrested Development coming back again? Mitch Hurwitz says “Definitely.”