Posts Tagged ‘12 Monkeys’
Sunday Links
* CFP: Far Eastern Worlds: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction.
* Great research opportunity for people working in SF studies: 2014-15 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Teachers refuse to administer standardized tests.
* The despair of solitary confinement.
* The Afterlife of the Humanities.
* Transgender Children in Antebellum America.
* The Impossible Dream of Jodorowsky’s Dune.
* The Impossible Dream of a Second Season of The Comeback.
* Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body.
* Great moments in Big Data: Math proves Hollywood shouldn’t be sexist.
* ESPN profiles the cheerleader at the heart of the Raiders wage theft case.
* Scenes from the heroin crisis in Vermont.
* The end of journalism in New Jersey.
* Anadarko Agrees To Record $5 Billion Fine For ’85 Years Of Poisoning The Earth.’ Anadarko’s revenues are 14 billion annually, with assets of 52 billion, so it seems clear the fine doesn’t go nearly far enough.
* How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space.
* We’ve Found A Hidden Ocean On Enceladus That May Harbor Life.
* Radically unnecessary TV adaptation of perfect film goes to series.
* If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have.
* Never say die: Goonies Director Teases Sequel Featuring Original Cast.
* Kazuo Ishiguro Readies First Novel in 10 Years.
* The world is now largely a population of scared confused people ruled by atavistic sociopaths with no sense of history, ethics, science, beauty, or truth. But then you already knew that.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine being vaguely disappointed by one Marvel Cinematic Universe film a year, forever.
* And Marquette will send a team to the only sporting event that really matters, the Robot World Cup.
All the Wednesday Links!
* “Universities do not seem to care if staff and faculty are parents unless legally obligated to do so,” said my colleague Richard King, a professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University. “Do the work. Have kids on your own time. Any conflict is your responsibility to manage so long as you prioritize us over them.”
* What Do 2,358 College Administrators Do? More at reclaimUC.
The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself. While budget cuts at the state level are an important piece of the crisis of higher education, the administrative bureaucracy at both campus and system level is by no means an innocent actor. It is the UC administration that must be held responsible for expanding, intensifying, and accelerating the processes of privatization.
- [USC student Tucker] Reed, the lead complainant, said USC dismissed her claim that her ex-boyfriend had raped her, despite her providing audio recordings of him admitting to it. At one point, Reed said, a USC official told her the goal was to offer an “educative” process, not to “punish” the assailant.
- When a student went to the DPS to report a sexual assault at a frat, an officer told her and a friend, also a sexual assault survivor who had accompanied her, that women should not “go out, get drunk and expect not to get raped.”
- A DPS detective told one student that the campus police determined that no rape occurred in her case because her alleged assailant did not orgasm.
A university is not a bubble to which you invite the best faculty members and the best students from all over the world and expect to share and produce cutting-edge knowledge. A university that is cut off from its immediate environment, that has no links with neighboring institutions of higher learning, that does not engage with the social, economic and political problems of the society in which it is embedded does not deserve the title of “university.” Sadly, I believe that most U.S. universities working in the Gulf suffer from these fatal problems: They are hermetically sealed establishments that have little or no contact with the societies they are in. The latest episode of censorship belies this philosophy. It is as if the UAE government is saying “You can have the most impressive campuses, with cutting edge scientific labs, libraries and sports facilities, but you have no right to discuss the pressing political and cultural issues of the society just beyond the campus gates.”
* Shock! Horror! Emails show Detroit’s emergency managers always intended to declare bankruptcy.
* America Has a Stadium Problem: Despite every number suggesting they shouldn’t, why do American cities keep building sports stadiums funded with public money? They’re even promising to save the stadiums even as they let the rest of Detroit go under.
* The NCAA’s History With Concussions: A Timeline.
* Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes and contends that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people. Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health. Key words: anxiety; decline of play; depression; feelings of helplessness; free play; narcissism; psychopathology in children; suicide
* They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners. The true finding of game theory is that the most sociopathic people in society become economics theorists.
* Full faith and credit: Ohio Officials Ordered To Recognize Gay Couple’s Marriage.
* When we say we want to critique privilege, we mean that we want to critique the privilege of ordinariness. How awkward that sounds. Even impossible. But it is what we mean. More concisely, we want to critique the experience of “ordinariness” that permits daily life, permits civic engagement, even permits civil disobedience. And it becomes difficult to critique the experience of “ordinariness” because it is a moving target: ordinariness experienced in one location is not the same as ordinariness in another. My ordinariness in Nairobi is not the same as my ordinariness in Baltimore, although both depend on the presence of majority black populations.
* SyFy is destroying America: the only thing worse than a pointless 12 Monkeys TV series would be Warriors of Oz.
* North Carolina not even bothering to pretend post-VRA-evisceration.
* Hollywood Actress Has Played a 17-Year-Old for Over 17 Years.
* Francis Ford Coppola’s potential cast list for The Godfather.
* I know I link to it a lot, but Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal consistently has the best SF going.
* And we’re gonna need a bigger moral panic: science demonstrates poverty is much worse for babies than crack cocaine.
Wednesday Night Whoa!
* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don’t break your heart you have no soul.
* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.
* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.
* More on the Olbermann/O’Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.
* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.
Also, was 12 Monkeys really left off that list of good sci-fi? That’s simply an inexcusable omission.
* The Best Time Travel Site on the Web takes on 12 Monkeys
* 12 Monkeys FAQ
* 12 Monkeys Trivia at IMDB
* Interview with Terry Gilliam
* “Bruce Willis as the Messiah: Human Effort, Salvation and Apocalypticism in Twelve Monkeys”
* Original Trailer
The French New Wave film that inspired Gilliam:
* La Jetée Part 1
* La Jetée Part 2
* La Jetée Part 3