Archive for May 2014
Friday!
* ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The power of #YesAllWomen. Media monsters gotta monster.
* Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF.
* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive.
* American jails have become the new mental asylums – and you’re paying the bill.
* “It was pretty much slave labor,” she says, “but there was nothing I could do about that. I needed stamps to write to my child. I needed hygiene products.” Modern-Day Slavery in America’s Prison Workforce.
* Scenes from the school reform scam in Newark.
In fact, not a cent of Zuckerberg’s money has gone toward hiring counselors, social workers or nurses. Meanwhile, “there have been DRAMATIC cuts to wraparound services,” wrote Mike Maillaro, Newark Teachers Union’s director of communication and research, in an e-mail. Last year, every attendance counselor in the district was eliminated.
Hawthorne Avenue reports losing eight support staff members since 2011, including a guidance counselor and two instructional coaches. The school has neither a music teacher nor a librarian.
Zuckerberg’s money would instead “create systemic education reform in Newark.” In 2011, it was reported that a full third of the foundation’s cash had found the pockets of consultants. As Dale Russakoff recently reported in a lengthy New Yorker article, that total now sits at about $20 million.
Though a smattering of grants have benefitted local causes—after-school yoga ($31,000), book drives ($1.2 million), new district schools ($2.1 million) and sundry others—over 40 percent of the money granted to organizations has left the state. Outside talent and recruitment agencies, for instance, raked in over $4 million to align district staffing with Anderson’s politics.
* In New Orleans, major school district closes traditional public schools for good.
* Black legislators in North Carolina are blasting a provision in the State Senate’s budget bill that they say is an attempt to force the closure of Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution, WRAL News reported.
* The Intractability of Op-Ed Habits.
* Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say. Even Middle-Class Students Have Poor Odds of Graduating From College. 2 Years On, Two-Thirds of This Graduating Class Aren’t Financially Self-Sufficient. How to end the college class war.
* Making Olin’s problems worse, the school’s only subject, engineering, is very expensive to teach. Unlike other schools with a broader array of programs, Olin cannot subsidize engineering students by charging their classmates the same tuition for cheaper majors such as English and sociology. At many schools — although they may not know it — liberal arts majors are in effect helping to underwrite the high cost of science and technical education.
* All This: Mad Men and the Persistence of the Old Regime. As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. Mad Men‘s Robert Morse on Dancing Into the Sunset. Mad Men’s Trudy Campbell is a KGB Spy. The Matt Weiner Interview. As fun as this show is, it’s about some pretty grimy shit.
* In an attempt to emphasize heterosexuality, fear or hatred of homosexuals and misogynist language developed. The bro, in short, is a culture-wide defense mechanism against the gay.
* Back to the top of the order: Let’s Debunk Scientific Racism, Again.
* Most Doctors Would Refuse Their Own Aggressive End-Of-life Treatments.
* Judge Orders Antitrust Suit Against NCAA to Go to Trial Next Month.
* BREAKING: The rule of law is a joke.
* Government files reveal official campaign of spying against Occupy Wall Street.
* Nobody Wants To Host The 2022 Olympics.
* So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. A Pushback on Green Power. What Will Climate Change Deniers Say…?
* The religious right, who liked to call themselves the “moral majority” at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn’t Roe v. Wadethat woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from “segregation academies”—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.
* Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (2014). Just clap your hands if you believe in job training!
* It doesn’t get better: Sorry, nerds: Fraternity brothers have more fulfilling lives later on.
* Incoming Title IX Mess: Duke Student Sues For Diploma After He’s Expelled for Sexual Assault.
* Angus Johnston’s Content Warnings.
* Two great tastes! NCAA Teams Up With Defense Dept. on $30-Million Concussion Study.
* Cruel optimism watch: Hulu In Talks To Pick Up New Season Of Community.
* And nothing good will happen anymore: Alfonso Cuarón says he won’t be directing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Memorial Day
It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
Sunday Super Sunshine Hit Links
* “The professional backgrounds of many of the defendants is troubling,” said James T. Hayes Jr., a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations. “We can no longer assume that the only people who would stoop to prey on children are unemployed drifters.” WHY WERE YOU ASSUMING THAT?
* Adjuncts are not considered “full time” or “part time” mostly because no one still bothers to accurately keep track of hours. It’s a choice; not an impossibility.
* Breaking: Alt-Ac Isn’t the Answer.
* The Unpaid Intern Economy Rides on the Backs of Young Women.
* The Art of Screenwriting: Matthew Weiner.
* Boston Public Schools to Eliminate History & Social Science Departments. But there’s money for a laptop for every student and computer coding in the curriculum.
* The Case for Reparations. Reparations: What the Education Gospel Cannot Fix. On Whose Shoulders The Research Stands.
* For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Down Syndrome. From Michael Bérubé.
I knew Jamie would not grow up to be a marine biologist. And I know that there are millions of non-disabled Americans out of work or underemployed, whose lives are less happy than Jamie’s. I don’t imagine that he has a “right” to a job that supersedes their needs. But I look sometimes at the things he writes in his ubiquitous legal pads when he is bored or trying to amuse himself — like the page festooned with the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, written in alphabetical order — and I think, isn’t there any place in the economy for a bright, gregarious, effervescent, diligent, conscientious and punctual young man with intellectual disabilities, a love of animals and an amazing cataloguing memory and insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world?
* They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
* Pope Francis and climate change.
* 10 Years of Pollution, $2 Million in Penalties. As always, that’s barely noticeable on Citgo’s balance sheet.
* This 9/11 Cheese Plate May Be The 9/11 Museum’s Most Tasteless Souvenir. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark.
* Buzzfeed’s list of underrated towns includes both Milwaukee and Burlington.
* “For reasons that I really don’t understand Durham is an outlier,” said Baumgartner. “Where we found a 77 percent disparity across the state between blacks and whites and their likelihood of being searched, in Durham, it’s about 260 percent. So that is truly astounding.”
* Richard Dawkins: “I am a secular Christian.” Oh, New Atheism, what have you become!
* Moral panics, chess edition.
* Jessie White, a 99-year-old woman from Belfast, Maine, was finally granted her college degree from Bangor’s Beal College after the college’s president stepped up and paid the $5 transcript fee she’d not been able to afford in 1939.
* Today in free speech: This Drug Defendant Spoke Her Mind, Then A Judge Told Her She’d Stay In Jail Until She Retracted Her Statements To The Media. Meanwhile, Utah Man Facing Hate Crime Charges Says Threatening Black Child Was ‘Just My Opinion.’
* Today in the competency and wisdom of our armed forces.
* Congress Reluctant To Cut Funding For Tank That Just Spins Around And Self-Destructs.
* Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine.
* Cruel optimism watch: Could Scott Walker lose in November?
* David Wittenberg reviews a whole lot of time travel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* A Brief History of The Shawshank Redemption.
* A Brief History of “All Good Things…”
* Zombie properties in Milwaukee.
* Quentin Tarantino wants to recutDjango Unchained as a miniseries.
* And Marvel has made its first DC-level big mistake. What a bummer.
SFRA/WisCon Talk This Friday on Octavia Butler’s Lost Parables
For people who’ll be in the area, this Friday at 2:30 PM I’m presenting in the SFRA academic track at WisCon in Madison, giving a short talk titled “‘There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables.” The talk comes out of the research I did last December in the Butler archive at the Huntington Library, which I’ll be following up with a second trip this coming November. I mostly talk about the many, many versions of Parable of the Trickster in this one, though I also talk a bit about God of Clay, the failed Parables book Butler started before Sower featuring a much more sinister Olamina as a middle-aged power broker (who actually orders the assassination of a local politician who crosses her). It’s great stuff! The only reason I’m not saying more here is that I have a piece on the subject circulating that I’m trying to place in a mainstream outlet, which I hope will happen soon.
If you’re at SFRA/WisCon, hope to see you!
Commencement Weekend Links!
* Commencement speech bingo. More links below!
* Pro-tip: apparently it only counts as free speech if you’re already powerful.
* ICYMI: My guest post at SF Signal on dystopia, anti-utopia, and the end of the world.
* College is a promise the economy does not keep.
* Of Course Women Are Getting Sexually Harassed by Drones.
* CFP: Into the Pensieve: The Harry Potter Generation in Retrospect.
* Rethinking Monopoly for neofeudal capitalism.
* Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries. Well, yes, I’m definitely worried. That’s madness.
* “Hood disease.” My God, don’t call it that.
* It places the United States in the top spot, ahead of Sweden and Canada, which come in at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Yet when the scores are adjusted for national levels of income, the United States drops to 15th place, behind such developing countries as China and Serbia.
* If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears.
* The proposed rule would cut off student aid to career-focused programs at for-profit and nonprofit colleges if the program’s student-loan default rate reached 30 percent or if half of its graduates failed two student-loan debt standards.
* Kansas and the death of academic freedom.
* The NCAA will allow Boise State to help its homeless player.
* MRA city councilman files Title IX complaint on behalf of U Oregon players arbitrarily kicked off team after DA slow-walks the process to protect their eligibility for March Madness and then declines to bring charges, thereby completing the circle of shitshow.
* According to faculty accounts, deans received an email from the administration on the evening of May 5, alerting them to a meeting the next day about staffing issues. At that meeting, deans in certain colleges were told they needed to cut a prescribed number of full-time faculty positions. Of 16 total cuts, 11 were to come from the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty members said. Deans were given two days – until Thursday – to consult with their department chairs about which faculty members to terminate. Affected instructors were notified that day.
* Kate Hayles and Mark Kruse have developed a model for humanities/STEM cooperative teaching.
* U.S. Cities Under 12 feet of Sea Level Rise.
* The best way to think of the dilemma is keeping in mind the three things Obama wants his regulations to accomplish: He wants them to effectively reduce carbon pollution, he wants them not to cost consumers too much, and he wants to be sure they can survive legal challenge. The trouble is that he can only pick two of these. And the primary question weighing on administration regulators as they make their decision will be how to read the mind of Anthony Kennedy.
* To turn the US-Mexico border into “The Border,” America had to erase its Caribbean history.
* Meanwhile the New York Times is a complete mess.
* The Rise of the Voluntariat.
The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.
But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.
* Will roads made out of solar panels save us?
* Playing football is even worse for players’ brains than we thought.
* An Oral History of The West Wing.
* Medical nightmare of the week: Morgellons disease.
* Speculative genetic explanations for social phenomena have an old and undistinguished history, some of which Wade reviews superficially, presumably to demonstrate his skill at reviewing topics superficially. The common thread, though, is that such explanations have always been (1) put forward to establish a bio-political point, to draw imaginary limits around the social progress of certain human groups; (2) accompanied by the dissimulation that they are not political statements, but merely value-neutral science; and (3) false.
* The Bay Area author of an upcoming book shatters the image of California’s historic missions as idyllic sites where Franciscan friars and Indians lived in harmony. Speaking before about 100 people Saturday at the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, Elias Castillo, author of “A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions,” said in reality the missions were “death camps.”
* Save your research in the cloud, they said.
* Viggo vs. Lord of the Rings.
* The New York Pizza Project, Documenting New York City’s Pizza Shops in Photos and Interviews.
* He also had a theory about colonizing the solar system using nuclear bombs. We could terraform other planets, he argued, by pulverizing them and then moving them closer or further from the sun. What could possibly go wrong?
* So maybe it’s for the best that Russia’s just evicted us from space.
Bad Monkeys, Fallen, Wicked Souls
What is the political charge of an eco-apocalypse like climate change, or ocean acidification, or Peak Oil? How are we to understand these visions of bad futures as they come to us from scientific projections and risk calculation spreadsheets? Is the coming catastrophe the dystopian clarion that warns us we must change-or is it the anti-utopian proof that we will refuse to change, even at the cost of civilization, or the planet itself?
I have a not-exactly-an-excerpt from Green Planets over at SF Signal, pontificating on the distinctions between utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, and anti-dystopia…
Wednesday!
* A bounce house flew away with three children inside. Unreal.
* Also unreal: Homeless Football Player Can’t Receive Fans’ Aid Due To Criminal Cartel’s Insane, Abusive Rules. Here are the salaries the administrative staff of Boise State athletics will be making while their unpaid employee is homeless.
* Think of the NCAA as a cheering squad, that gets all up into your personal life. Former Oklahoma center Gabe Ikard is a courtside fixture at Thunder games with his girlfriend. He stated in a radio interview with WWLS’ the Morning Animals that Oklahoma’s Compliance Dept. made his girlfriend sign an affidavit their relationship was legitimate and was not a ruse to provide extra benefits to an Oklahoma football player. Ikard was one of the players embroiled in “Pastagate,” where Oklahoma self-reported a secondary violation and ordered him to pay $3.83 to charity for excessive pasta consumption.
* I didn’t realize until I spoke to Rebecca Schuman about her Amherst-banning-frats piece how misguided it was. Without explicit exceptions for emergencies and assault-reporting this kind of blanket ban is obviously unworkable, and almost certainly not Title IX compliant.
* Hey, fellow educators! It’s your cousin, Gerry. You know that consolation you’ve been taking that at least your life’s work is meaningful? Well, listen to this!
* Vigilante feminism at Columbia.
* The Washington Post assigns five reporters to chase down a lie Karl Rove just made up on the spot.
* Sandy Hook ‘Truther’ Tells Victim’s Mother Her Daughter Never Existed.
* Arguing that school closures in cities across the country disproportionately affect African American students, community activists filed three federal civil rights complaints Tuesday challenging closures in Newark, New Orleans and Chicago and called on the Obama administration to halt similar efforts elsewhere.
* Boosting school funding 20 percent erased the graduation gap between rich and poor students.
* Cell Phone Video Shows Police Choking, Kicking 6th Graders.
* Fox greenlights “last man on Earth” premise it must know will get canceled immediately. They must know.
* io9: The Strange, Post-Soviet Architecture of Astana, Kazakhstan.
* “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.“
* “You mention in your book that Snowden’s moral universe was first informed by video games.”
* Today in academic journals: Board Game Studies.
* Spurious Correlations. The truth is out there!
* Back to the top of the order: How artificial intelligence is about to disrupt higher education.
* And the Pope gets deep into my wheelhouse, says the Church would baptize aliens.
Speaking during the homily at his daily morning Mass at the Casa Santa Marta inside Vatican City where he lives on Monday, he told his mostly clerical audience that they should keep an open mind to anyone—or anything—seeking God. “If—for example—tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here… Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them… And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?” he asked parishioners. “When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let’s do it this way…’”
Tuesday Links!
* The bottom line of the neoliberal assault on the universities is the increasing power of management and the undermining of faculty self-governance. The real story behind MOOCs may be the ways in which they assist management restructuring efforts of core university practices, under the smiley-faced banner of “open access” and assisted in some cases by their “superstar”, camera-ready professors.
* We Kill People Based on Metadata.
* Preparing for the apocalypse: Last November, after five years of remarkable negotiations that unfolded far from the Delta, representatives from the U.S. and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. Adjusting to the Apocalypse.
* NASA Discovers This Planet, Planet Earth, Just Might Be What It’s Been Searching For All Along.
* Aeon has an essay trying to think up some way we could include the people of the future in the politics of the present without just resolving to be morally decent to them.
* How The Zero Weeks Of Paid Maternity Leave In The U.S. Compare Globally. Norway Has Found a Solution to the Gender Wage Gap That America Needs to Try.
* No-one-could-have-predicted watch: Employers Eye Moving Sickest Workers To Insurance Exchanges.
* But two decades since the schools began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money, including one that became glaringly public in New York State this spring, have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict. And some charter schools have veered so sharply from the traditional model — with longer school years, armies of nonunion workers and flashy enrichment opportunities like trips to the Galápagos Islands — that their ideas are viewed as unworkable in regular schools. Charter Schools’ False Promise. Neoliberal reform in Newark.
* Race, Disability and the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
* The fauxtopias of suburban Detroit.
* How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance.
* Europe’s Highest Court Tells Google People Have The “Right To Be Forgotten.”
* I’m back on top: Red wine’s “magic ingredient” resveratrol has no health benefits.
* But not for long: Being a bully may be good for your health, study finds.
* According to Cass Sunstein, studies in psychology and behavioral economics show that 80% of the population is “unrealistically optimistic.” When it comes to their own actions and life prospects, people tend to have unwarranted expectations that things will work out well for them. The other 20%? The realists? They “include a number of people who are clinically depressed.
* The five-second rule: It’s still good.
* Tomorrow’s pro-life placards today: rare mono-mono twins born holding hands at birth.
* Kim Stanley Robinson introduces the very best of Gene Wolfe.
* The Freakonomics boys declare that trial by ordeal must have worked because something something game theory.
* 25 hedge fund managers earned more than double every kindergarten teacher combined.
* As long as it is something that you would do even if it were unpaid, it is increasingly becoming something you have to do for free or for very little. On the other hand, you can be paid to do the kind of jobs that no one would do if managers did not invent them.
* I don’t care what you say: I choose to believe in China’s high-speed undersea Pacific train.
* Epic fails of the startup world.
* Did they just find the Santa Maria?
* The kids aren’t all right: Reading Report Shows American Children Lack Proficiency, Interest.
* When creeper dads ruin prom.
* And some lovely watercolor superheroes.
Nothing Good Will Happen Any More
The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.
The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.
“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”
My daughter just turned two. My son will be born next month. We are leaving them a broken world. And the final obscenity is the people responsible for this disaster will make the innocent pay for their crimes, while they slink off safely into death, fat, old, and happy. There’s no hell for the people who destroyed the planet, just the hell they’re leaving for our kids.
Happy Monday
* Secret origins of gonzo journalism: “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” by Hunter S. Thompson.
* What’s so frustrating about really upper class kids who go on to become elite pundits and write stupid stuff about this topic is that, had they any self-awareness whatsoever, they should know all about intergenerational class entrenchment. In most cases, their parents have done everything they can to make sure social mobility remains a myth.
* When a campus building is named for a famous white supremacist. Oh, hi, Duke!
* The Melancholy, Crumbling Remains Of Great Socialist Murals.
* The failures of Title IX. How a Title IX Complaint Is Processed.
* Which states have the highest levels of student debt?
* How Athletic Departments (And The Media) Fudge The Cost Of Scholarships.
* Partisan politics, segregation, and Milwaukee.
* I worry a bit that giving the 1% the option to become literal vampires might not work out great.
* Samuel R. Delany reviews Star Wars.
* A collision of greed, neglect, and mismanagement is endangering young people in America’s college capital while enriching some absentee investors — landlords who maximize profits by packing students into properties — and universities that admit many more students than they can house.
Where the show has faltered — and where it comes up against its contradictions — is when it attempts to look at those who are no longer living in the Before. So effective in detailing the quiet terrors of the old order, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way.
* Today in the rule of law: The Harris prohibition has resulted in law enforcement agencies using the stingrays without obtaining a court warrant, because the agencies have interpreted the contract to mean they cannot even tell a judge about their intent to use the devices.
* Milwaukee officer shoots man after struggle at Red Arrow Park. Drunk NYPD Officer Allegedly Shot a Stranger 6 Times.
* Meanwhile people are just straight-up setting up murder traps now in Stand Your Ground states.
* The Incidental State: Coercion in the Age of Big Data.
* But it turns out that if you consider the facts reported; he wasn’t a genius. His violations of anti-trust law were obvious crimes. Instead, his key characteristic was the one we always emphasize is critical about the most fraudulent CEOs – audacity. Jobs had gotten away with committing so many crimes that he came to believe he was immune from prosecution.
* On crafting a nonwhite Spider-Man. Spider-Man execs kill our dreams of seeing Miles Morales on the big screen. They must really hate money.
* To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand.
* Want to Go to Mars? It’s Not That Expensive.
* Vulture: Is television art yet?
* Path to student loan debt relief for adjuncts just got a little easier–but still a long way to go.
* Ross Douthat hates your loose libertine morals so much he’ll even become a communist to oppose them.
* Gun That Can Only Be Fired By Owner Exists but No One Will Sell It Because of New Jersey.
* How Much Source Material Does HBO’s Game of Thrones Have Left to Work With? The worst news is: it seems like it’s all Jon Snow stuff…
* For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role.
* The secret history of White Coke.
* Louis C.K. versus the Common Core.
* The Ocean Floor Is Littered with Humanity’s Garbage.
* “Let It Go” was inspired by Prince, who also contributed its most memorable line.
* Should we be teaching him civics at such a young age?
* The oldest man on earth lives on the Upper West Side. Take that, Okinawa!
* Fanwanking a reason why there doesn’t seem to be many women in the Star Wars universe.
* Presenting the Wes Anderson cruise.
* And Slate celebrates the world’s best statues.
Gerry Canavan 