Thursday Links!

* Marquette English’s course descriptions are up for Summer and Fall 2018! I’m teaching in both, including a new graduate course devoted to twenty-first-century literature…

* Palantir Has Been Secretly Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology.

* A trip to the hospital that leads to a prison suicide is just the tip of the iceberg of this sickening story about the richest country in human history.

* Your work is cut out for you, Ta-Nehisi.

Worshippers clutching AR-15 rifles and some wearing bullet crowns, participated in a commitment ceremony today at World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, in Newfoundland, Pa. The event led a nearby school to cancel classes for the day. Photos @jacquelinelarma pic.twitter.com/GXzrZeK41z

— AP Images (@AP_Images) February 28, 2018

* Wife of 7th Special Forces Group vet faces deportation under tighter immigration rules.

* After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s memory for a hundred years.” Operation Gunnerside: The Norwegian attack on heavy water that deprived the Nazis of the atomic bomb.

* The Strange and Twisted Life of Frankenstein.

* The Grim Box Office Fate Of ‘Annihilation’ Was An Inevitable Tragedy.

* “After watching my mother die, I read her notebooks.” Aaron Bady remembers his mom.

* Supreme Court Ruling Means Immigrants Could Continue To Be Detained Indefinitely. Don’t forget to thank Obama for appealing this decision in the first place.

* The sheer level of clownishness from this White House is impossible to keep track of. I mean honestly.

* Bias and algorithmic culture, search engines edition.

* “They aren’t really going to arm teachers. It’s just a distraction.” Inserting guns into classrooms with the stipulation that they be used for only one purpose and against only one (very rare) target — active school shooters — is delusional.

* Doesn’t this seem like an exemplary topic for a course? I’d love a smart, extended look at the history of impeachment and its application to the current situation. What’s outrageous to me is that SDSU openly sells credits in this absurd format.

* My next course is on a topic nearly as controversial: Are Groot and Baby Groot the same person?

* Bad news for Zefram Cochrane: Proxima Centauri probably a no-go.

* We thought George Lucas created Star Wars. The truth was more complicated.

* Profile of Ryan Coogler at 21. Unreal that this was just ten years ago.

* A hundred years ago, the United States adopted daylight savings time in order to extract more profit from labor. How would we organize time differently if we were free from the demands of capitalism? The latest from Mika Tokumitsu at Jacobin.

* I was bashing Ross Douthat on Twitter just yesterday, but I like this one: The Rise of Woke Capital.

But of course so long as this same Republican Party remains itself pro-corporate in its economic ideology — as the Trumpified G.O.P., despite his populist forays, has determinedly remained — the corporate interests themselves stand to lose little from these polarizing trends. Their wokeness buys them cover when liberalism is in power, and any backlash only helps prop up a G.O.P. that has their back when it comes time to write our tax laws.

* The Silence of Sherman Alexie.

* An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic is causing blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.

* And what happens if you give an AI control over a corporation? Exactly what happens when you put a person in charge, it looks like…

Wednesday Links: Cold War Modern Art, The Cutest Kitties, and More

* Modern art as weapon in the Cold War. And they say the humanities are worthless!

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

* We can’t buy this kind of motivation from the market. No tool or program can spark it. And the elites at the top of the current educational heap—who advanced their careers while the educational culture declined—have no clue.

* Judge rules that Fox Searchlight should have paid its interns. Fox today, literally every other media and publishing outfit in the country tomorrow…

* A judge responded to an assault victim by demanding sex in exchange for ‘legal favors’ in her divorce. She filed a complaint, and he sent cops to plant meth in her car. It’s the most atrocious abuse of power since this other story that was also published today.

* Imagining a Balkanized US.

* Former White House Chief of Staff mulling run for Illinois governor on bleed-the-teachers platform. You know, for the children.

* Meanwhile, from our governor: Scott Walker Endorses Mandating Transvaginal Ultrasounds And Shutting Down Abortion Clinics.

* Chinese century watch: Nicaragua gives Chinese firm contract to build alternative to Panama Canal.

* Massive ‘derecho’ storm poised to strike southern Wisconsin.

* Pipe break at Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant kills 8,000 small fish.

* Man of Steel sounds pretty middling, alas. And no after-credits sequence? Outrageous.

* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal simplifies the Voight-Kampff test.

Quick Links

* Hero watch: Bruce Springsteen Slams New Jersey Budget Cuts.

* Hero watch: This American Life is very good this week covering abuse of power in a drug court in rural Georgia.

* Updating this story, Homeland Security has announced it will continue to screw gay couples after all.

* A moving MetaFilter thread about bullying.

* When undocumented workers are taken out of the economy, the jobs they support through their labor, consumption, and tax payments disappear as well.

* What to do about sexual harassment in the academy?

* And in too-little too-late news: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University. Alas, Canavan! I’m ruined.

Friday Everything

* Ralph Nader has found an awesome new way to troll the nation: he will campaign to kill athletic scholarships.

* Fox has renewed Fringe. This is great news—but I still haven’t forgive them for Firefly.

* Vermont’s not green, it’s red: Vermot House passes single-payer health care bill. It’s also expected to pass the state senate, too, which means things are about to get very interesting.

* I haven’t put up anything about Fukushima in a while, but suffice it to say things still sound very bad. (UPDATE: More here.) Nuclear power advocates—who I seem to recall assuring me that nothing bad could possibly happen at Fukushima because of updated, failsafe reactor designs—have now begun assuring me that what happened at Fukushima could never happen again because of updated, failsafe reactor designs. Okay, that ship turned out to be sinkable. But this one…

* Great moments in abuse of power: A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters. Josh Marshall catches the most interesting angle: “the fact that he lists his 18 years of experience working in GOP politics as his experience for doing this sort of stuff.”

* Cheating scandal in the game of kings.

* Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language. It drives me crazy when people don’t speak it.

* And from Inside Higher Ed: Who’s in your fantasy research institute this season?