Posts Tagged ‘ADA’
Lockdown Megapost Part Two, Just the Bad News for Everyone Else
* The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Kim Stanley Robinson on His Next Novel, The Ministry for the Future. Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* I’ve been too busy to post, but Extrapolation 61.1-2 is here, a special double issue on Afrofuturism.
* Jaimee has a new poem in Blackbird: “Inheritance of Fire.”
* CFP: Futures of Cartoons Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series (Edited Collection). CFP: Science, Technology, and Literature During Plagues and Pandemics. CFP: The SFRA Review is seeking short papers on Sinofuturism. CFP: Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions. CFP: Historiographies of Game Studies. CFP: “The Ludic Outlaw: Medievalism, Games, Sport, and Play,” a special issue. CFP: Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird.
* Congratulations Marquette English Grads 2020! Congratulations Marquette Honors Grads 2020!
* We are living in an apocalypse. Oh honey. ‘The impossible has already happened’: what coronavirus can teach us about hope. Science fiction of the plague and why we need it. Science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers. I know I could use a little resiliency right now.
* The next phase of America’s coronavirus problem is a massive housing crisis. The Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals. Doctors without Patients. Restaurant and bar owners say social distancing could wipe out their industry. The Coronavirus Puts Restaurants at the Mercy of the Tech Industry. 2 months in, many nontraditional workers still waiting for unemployment. ‘I Cry Night and Day’: How It Took One Woman 8 Weeks to Get Unemployment. U.S. unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. 37% of unemployed Americans ran out of food in past month. Food lines a mile long. Nearly 27 million Americans may have lost job-based health insurance, study shows. Half world’s workers may see livelihood destroyed. At least a half billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year. Nouriel Roubini Sees a Bad Recovery, Then Inflation, Then a Depression. Twilight of the Airbnb hosts. AOC lobbies for burial costs. The Pandemic and the Global Economy. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under. Democrats’ $3 trillion opening bid for the next stimulus package, explained. 4 plans for sending Americans more money. We’re Failing to Rescue the Economy. We haven’t even begun to grasp how much damage the pandemic will do. The U.S. economic crisis is even worse than it appears. There is still no plan.
* In Georgia, coronavirus and environmental racism combine. COVID-19 and the color line. Pork Chops vs. People: Battling Coronavirus in an Iowa Meat Plant.
* With kids stuck at home, ER doctors see more severe cases of child abuse.
* What Seattle Did Right, and Where New York Went Wrong. Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California. Wisconsin: hold my beer. What do you mean starting? After the US.
* Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation. The Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker. The essential worker trap. Your Life or Your Livelihood: Americans Wrestle With Impossible Choice. “We Risk Our Lives Every Day”: Building Service Workers Strike. “People Will Die. People Do Die.” Wall Street Has Had Enough of the Lockdown. The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.
* A regimen for reëntry. Theaters Prepare to Reopen with TSA-Style Check-in, Temperature Screenings, and Plexiglass. Over one hundred kids across U.S. have developed rare, mysterious COVID-19-linked illness. What’s Scaring the Pediatricians. Surviving Covid-19 May Not Feel Like Recovery for Some. Virus Survivors Could Suffer Severe Health Effects for Years. The Future of Mass Disinfection. How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? It Will Probably Take Longer Than 12 to 18 Months to Get a Vaccine. A majority of vaccine skeptics plan to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine, a study suggests, and that could be a big problem. What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing. The psychological effects of quarantine. Coronavirus may never go away. Expert report predicts up to two more years of pandemic misery. Coronavirus Kills People an Average of a Decade Before Their Time, Studies Find.
* As the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proof. After the end of the world, we have to learn to fix our own Nintendo Switches.
* Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad for a Very Long Time. Commuting After Covid. Lyft, Uber and Airbnb depend on travel, vacations and gatherings. That’s a problem when much of the world is staying home. Manhattan Faces a Reckoning if Working From Home Becomes the Norm. The end of Souplantation. How does Disney reopen its parks?
* The Pandemic Is a Family Emergency.
* Ghost ships: Satellite Images Show Armadas Of Vacant Cruise Ships Huddling Together Out At Sea.
* The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one. How the Coronavirus Crisis May Hinder Efforts to Fight Wildfires. Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.
* Many Schools Are Not Providing Any Instruction Amid Closures. How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents. The challenge of distance learning for parents of children with special needs.
* Wealth, to scale. American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided. Financializing American inequality. Lessons of the Great Depression.
* “Become more evil with each passing generation” doesn’t feel like a strong moral stance.
* Four months as a private prison guard.
* Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files: Pollution changes are one reason for more tropical cyclones in Atlantic since 1980, NOAA says. Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations.
* This is good news, though: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts.
* The Most Consequential Decision of Biden’s 2020 Campaign. Elizabeth Warren is the favored VP pick among Democrats, poll shows. Biden’s virtual campaign is a disaster. Democrats Aren’t Stuck With Joe Biden. How Obama failed.
* This seems fine: Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.
* We Need to Rewrite the Constitution to Stop Voter Suppression.
* Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds. Another Real Estate Crash Is Coming.
* At least someone is getting paid these days: After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators. Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app.
* The inside story behind the Pentagon’s ill-fated quest for a real life ‘Iron Man’ suit.
* So we accidently ran an experiment where we did the most any individual can do to reduce carbon emissions and it’s not enough. The world is on lockdown. So where are all the carbon emissions coming from?
* The end of the world could mean merely that “the world”—our mutually constituted sense of the collective now—is changing into something else. Beginning with the End. Billions projected to suffer nearly unlivable heat in 2070. Welcome to the End of the ‘Human Climate Niche.’ The Arctic Is Unraveling as a Massive Heat Wave Grips the Region. Climate change has already transformed everything about contemporary art. Mother Nature.
* Real mixed feelings about the neural net I trained to feel sad about climate change.
* Disney announces new attempt to loot the grave of the Muppets.
* Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism.
* The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom.
* Your opposition party, ladies and gentlemen.
* When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery.
* Calvin and Hobbes and Quarantine.
* Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need. Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing. Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* How we got to Sesame Street.
* Gargoyles was nearly the center of a vast Disney Cinematic Universe.
* CBS All-Access gonna try again.
* Ethan Hawke is out for blood as abolitionist John Brown in Good Lord Bird trailer.
* It’s a basic thing but of course they’re training the drug dogs to make cops happy, not to find drugs.
* The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
* Sopranos-themes coronavirus bits.
* All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks.
* Did I forget to mention the murder hornets?
* Seagulls in Rome take to killing rats and pigeons as lockdown deprives them of food scraps.
* The Atlantic visits scenic Wisconsin.
* No one knows what a g looks like.
* Today in sports conspiracies I actually believe.
* onion headlines but make them lord of the rings: a thread
* society if dads went to therapy
* made a Rube Goldberg machine
* Someone beat Hemingway’s challenge by a single word.
* And NASA is still hyping that sweet, sweet backwards universe.
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Wednesday Links, Supplemental
* Dubious distinction watch: Marquette is once again one of FIRE’s top ten worst colleges for free speech.
* The “bunnies” survey from Mount St. Mary’s is apparently up at Scribd. It’s truly incredible to me that university lawyers signed off on this scheme, on the level of either theory or implementation, if indeed they did.
* What is a university, that faculty are not employees who can be fired in this way? What is a university, that students are not customers who can be dismissed when serving them is judged bad for the bottom line? What is a university, that administrators aren’t bosses to whom faculty and students have to answer? What is a university, that faculty—and their students—are the university, and not just those who work, and pay tuition, on its behalf?
* Dystopia now: Bosses Harness Big Data to Predict Which Workers Might Get Sick. Or Pregnant, But Who’s Counting.
* Elsewhere on the dystopia beat: A Hospital Paralyzed by Hackers. UC Says You Can’t Put a Price on Spying on Your Workers for No Reason. And just as the Founders intended: The FBI Is Using a 1789 Law to Force Apple to Unlock the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone.
* Could it be that imposing unelected kleptocrats on cities has a dark side?
* Interesting stuff via @reclaimUC: Public Research Universities: Understanding the Financial Model.
* The Lovecraftian sublime: What Happens When You Zoom in Too Much on Google Maps. Elsewhere in the mathematical sublime: What different novels look like with everything removed but punctuation.
* timezones are a lie good timezone truth
* Black and Latino Voters Sway From Clinton to Sanders. Sanders, Clinton in dead heat nationwide. But will Elbowsgate bring down Bernie? What he’s accomplished is genuinely incredible, even if I still can’t envision any scenario in which they would ever allow him to actually be the nominee.
* “Socialist snow on the streets / Socialist talk in the Maverick Bookstore / Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops.” When Allen Ginsberg Wrote a Poem about Bernie Sanders.
* Dream job alert:UMaine announces Stephen King professorship. But I think you’ll find the post comes with… certain unusual requirements.
* And the kids are all right: Lake Superior State University has eliminated 8 AM classes.
Gerry Canavan 