Tuesday Links!
* This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. The Year We Broke the Internet.
* A lengthy think-piece on the place of rhetoric and composition in the modern university.
* But who gets to write in The New York Times — and to whom is The New York Times accessible? If we’re talking about accessibility and insularity, it’s worth looking at The New York Times’s own content generation cycle and the relationship between press junkets and patronage.
* Lately, some people have suggested that doctoral programs should take somemodest steps in order to keep track of what happens to their Ph.D.s after graduation. It’s a good idea, and these suggestions are made with the best of intentions, even if they’re coming about 50 years too late. They are, unfortunately, looking in the wrong place as far as you are concerned. You can’t just count up how many of a program’s graduates end up as professors—otherwise, the best qualification you could get in grad school is marrying a professor of engineering or accountancy who can swing a spousal hire for you. Instead, there is just one thing you should be looking at: What percentage of a program’s graduates are hired for tenure-track jobs through competitive searches?
* Rutgers Boosts Athletic Subsidies to Nearly $50 Million.
Rutgers University, already the most prolific subsidizer of sports of all Division I public institutions, gave its athletics department nearly $47 million in 2012-13, USA Today reported, a 67.9 percent increase over the 2011-12 subsidy of $27.9 million. Rutgers athletics is $79 million in the red, but officials say that the university’s move to the Big Ten Conference will generate close to $200 million over its first 12 years as a member. The most recent subsidies make up 59.9 percent of the athletics department’s total allocations, and total more than the entire operating revenues at all but 53 of Division I’s 228 public sports programs.
* State-by-state misery index. Wisconsin’s doing pretty all right, and that’s counting the existence of Wiscsonin winters…
* Meanwhile, Arizona is once again officially the absolute worst.
* The latest on adjuncts and the ACA.
* A New York and Chicago Mom Discover What Standardized Rigor Really Means for Their Children.
* RIP Harold Ramis. A New Yorker profile from 2004.
* American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga.
* How Slavery Made the Modern World.
* Down an unremarkable side street in Southwark, London, is a fenced lot filled with broken concrete slabs, patches of overgrown grass and the odd piece of abandoned construction equipment. Its dark history and iron gates separate this sad little patch from the outside world. Lengths of ribbon, handwritten messages and tokens weave a tight pattern through the bars of the rusty gates … all tributes to the 15,000 Outcast Dead of London. Thanks, Liz!
* Geronrockandrolltocracy: On average, the Rolling Stones are older than the Supreme Court.
* Is Venezula burning? Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong.
* The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals. What the hell is Barack Obama’s presidency for?
* Having a Gun in the House Doesn’t Make a Woman Safer.
* The financially strapped University of California system is losing about $6 million each year due to risky bets on interest rates under deals pushed by Wall Street banks.
* Here’s why you shouldn’t buy a US-to-Europe flight more than two months in advance.
* @Millicentsomer announces her plan to be supremely disappointed in House of Cards season three.
* Suburban soccer club has so much money no one notices two separate officers embezzling over $80,000.
* Another Day, Another Oil Spill Shuts Down 65 Miles Of The Mississippi River.
* Department of Mixed Feelings: Marquette likely to get its own police force.
* BREAKING: Bitcoin is a huge scam. Charlie Stross schadenfreudes.
* Gawker Can’t Stop Watching This Live Feed of Porn Site Searches.
* New state of matter discovered in chicken’s eye gunk.
* Your one-stop-shop for Harry Potter overthinking.
* And Ralph Nader still thinks only the super-rich can save us now.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 25, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adjuncts, airplanes, Arizona, austerity, Barack Obama, bias, Bitcoin, books, California, Charlie Stross, Chicago, chickens, cigarettes, citizenship, class struggle, clickbait, college football, college sports, comedy, comics, cultural preservation, ecology, embezzlement, fan fiction, fellowships, Gawker, general election 2016, gerontocracy, Ghostbusters, graveyards, Groundhog Day, guns, Harold Ramis, Harry Potter, health care, House of Cards, How the University Works, journalism, liberalism, London, maps, Marquette, matter, Milwaukee, misery index, misogyny, Mississippi River, nationalism, neoliberalism, New York, Occupy Cal, oil, oil spills, only the super-rich can save us now, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police, politics, pollution, pornography, prostitution, Ralph Nader, Reagan, rhetoric and composition, rock and roll, Rolling Stones, Rutgets, scholarships, science, slavery, soccer, standardized testing, Supreme Court, television, tenure, the Internet, the Left, true crime, Ukraine, University of California, unmarked graves, Venezula, Wall Street, war on education, water, Wisconsin, writing
One Response
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Gerry Canavan 
The hoaxes are hardly the worst part of the Gawker/Buzzfeed model. The content is.
Alex Greenberg
February 25, 2014 at 12:34 pm