Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘ADHD

Wednesday Night Links!

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* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.

* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!

* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.

* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.

* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.

* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.

* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.

* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.

* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?

* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.

* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.

* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.

* Gymnastics, fresh from its nightmarish decades-long rape scandal, wants to make it so being one of the greatest gymnasts of all time doesn’t get you any points.

* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.

* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.

* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.

* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.

* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.

* The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive populism, not by the fascist right.

* Crisis at the AP.

* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.

* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.

* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.

* After 150 years of technological innovation, the problems facing the United States Postal Service are only getting harder.

* ‘No One’s Ever Talked to Me About This Before’: Social media creators are helping women and people of color identify possible symptoms of A.D.H.D., a disorder most often diagnosed in white boys.

* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.

* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.

* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?

* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.

* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.

* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.

* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.

* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.

* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?

* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.

* RIP, Eric Carle.

* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.

* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.

* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.

* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.

* Oh, you think?

* It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become.

* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.

* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.

* This Mommy Blogger Is Under Fire For Refusing To Stop Writing About Her 9-Year-Old After The Girl Begged Her To.

* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.

* ‘Greater Idaho’ took one step closer to being a real thing as 5 more counties voted to explore leaving liberal Oregon for conservative Idaho.

* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!

* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.

* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.

* The world’s riskiest project.

* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…

* The Oral History of A Different World.

* Spanish Civil War ends.

* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.

Written by gerrycanavan

June 2, 2021 at 4:06 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Friday Night Links!

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* Don’t miss the descriptions for the upcoming English courses at Marquette (including my new courses on “Utopia in America” and Moore and Gibbons’s “Watchmen”).

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear. Coronavirus Reappears in Discharged Patients, Raising Questions in Containment Fight. Coronavirus and the election. The pandemic must be revenue neutral. This week’s stock market meltdown, explained. You’re only as healthy as the least-insured person in society. Okay, now I’m worried.

By the way, the wall-to-wall coronavirus coverage is what coverage of climate collapse would look like if giant corporations didn’t stand to lose financially from drastic action to protect the climate and save our lives.

Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders. Democrats float Sherrod Brown as ‘white knight’ 2020 nominee, Michelle Obama as vice president. I’m sure he has our best interests at heart. The obvious folly of a white knight convention candidate. Get excited.

* Truly disgusting smear job on Andrew Walz, the only candidate who can beat Trump.

Graduate Student Strikes Are Spreading in California. Not over yet at UCSC.

The Lies Graduate Programs Tell Themselves.

Heathrow airport expansion ruled unlawful on climate change grounds.

The typical US worker can no longer afford a family on a year’s salary, showing the dire state of America’s middle class.

Deputies in Orange County wrote false reports about their collection and booking of evidence, according to internal audits kept secret for months.

* Since chronic restriction of sleep to 6 h or less per night produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation, it appears that even relatively moderate sleep restriction can seriously impair waking neurobehavioral functions in healthy adults. Sleepiness ratings suggest that subjects were largely unaware of these increasing cognitive deficits, which may explain why the impact of chronic sleep restriction on waking cognitive functions is often assumed to be benign.

New study says student evaluations of teaching are still deeply flawed measures of teaching effectiveness, even when we assume they are unbiased and reliable.

Fast-and-loose culture of esports is upending once staid world of chess.

* Teach the controversy.

* I have questions. A lot of questions.

A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it.

Video-game therapy may help treat ADHD, study finds.

* ugh x-men is bad again

* …and then there was no one left to speak for me.

Sunday Night Links!

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* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.

* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.

* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.

* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.

* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?

Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success.  We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career.  It is not.

* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.

Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.

* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.

Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.

For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds.

* Why Sci-Hub Will Win.

“Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.

Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.

We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed.  In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.

How one California university faked students’ scores, skated by immigration authorities — and made a fortune in the process.

* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.

America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’

It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.

Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.

* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.

* The Ethics of Hodor.

* Ecotopia 2121.

The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.

Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.

* six months tops

* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.

What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

* Where is Wakanda?

* Super-antics.

“Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.

Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.

A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.

The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.

Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.

* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.

Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.

* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.

* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.

Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.

The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.

* Pure class.

How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.

12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.

* The Gingrich Century.

Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.

* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.

How to Plug In Your Brain.

Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.

* Algorithmic injustice.

Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.

The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.

* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.

“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.

* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.

* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.

In winter breeding grounds like Hawai‘i and Mexico, migrating humpback whales arrived later, left earlier, and showed up in fewer numbers than normal.

* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.

* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.

* The end of Salon.

New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.

Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.

Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.

* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?

I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.

Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.

* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.

* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.

The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.

* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.

* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.

* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.

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Written by gerrycanavan

May 29, 2016 at 5:13 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Sunday Morning Links!

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* One might, it’s true, wonder how cultural capital has survived the last half century’s apotheosis of pop, the rollback of the old patrician-bourgeois culture of the West, postmodernism’s putative muddling of low and high. But the sociologists have gone and checked, and the answers are not hard to find: Fancy people are now more likely to consume culture indiscriminately, that is, to congratulate themselves on the expansiveness of their tastes; indistinction has become distinction. They are more likely to prefer foreign culture to their own, at least in some who-wants-takeout? kind of way. And they are more likely to enjoy culture analytically and ironically, belligerently positing a naïve consumer whose imagined immersion in the object will set off everything in their own approach that is suavely arms-length and slaunchwise. Such, point for point, is the ethos of the new-model English department: of cultural studies, new media, the expanded canon, of theory-courses-without-objects. To bring new types of artifacts into literature departments is not to destroy cultural capital. It is merely to allow new things to start functioning as wealth. Even here, the claim to novelty can be overstated, since it is enough to read Bourdieu to know that the claim to interpret and demystify has always been an especially heady form of symbolic power. The ingenious reading confers distinction, as do sundry bids to fix the meanings of the social. Critical theory is cultural capital. Citing Judith Butler is one of the ways in which professional people outside the academy understand and justify their own elevation. Bickering recreationally about the politics of zombie movies is just what lawyers and engineers now do.

* The Kindle edition of The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson is (still) on sale for $1.99. Here’s the LARoB review!

* Meanwhile, LARoB also reviews Paradoxa 26, which has my essay on Snowpiercer in it.

* Extrapolation 56.1 is now available.

Sherryl Vint, “Skin Deep: Alienation in Under the Skin
Isiah Lavender, “Reframing Heart of Darkness as Science Fiction”
Sharon DeGraw, “Tobias S. Buckell’s Galactic Caribbean Future”
Karen May and David Upton, “‘Ser Piggy’: Identifying an Intertextual Relationship between William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones
Lee Braver, “Coin-Operated Doors and God: A Gnostic Reading of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik”

Nepal After the Earthquake.

* Baltimore after Freddie Gray.

* The good inequality. Policy debate in the age of neoliberalism.

* Gene Wolfe, sci-fi’s difficult genius.

* The slow apocalypse and fiction.

* Can you fix the NBA draft?

In the meantime, we will all have to cope with the fact that education technology has just become weaponized. Arizona State is now the first predator university. They are willing to re-define what education is so that they can get more students from anywhere. If they don’t kill other universities by taking all their students with a cheap freshmen year, they’ll just steal their fish food by underselling 25% of the education that those schools provide and leaving them a quarter malnourished. The result is that schools which stick to reasonable standards with respect to the frequency and possibility of teacher/student interaction now have to fear for their very existence.

Contingency and Gender.

The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education.’

The obvious corollary is that, in order to stem the tide of tuition increases, we should seek to stabilize or increase state funding and curb the power of administrators.

Why They Hate Cornel West.

* I’m seeing it mostly mocked and dismissed, but I think the Columbia case (K.C. Johnson summary at Minding the Campus) will be important flashpoint in Title IX law. My sense is that the wind on this is really changing strongly against the feminist left; we’re going to see many of the received truths of campus anti-rape policies coming under serious challenge. It’s going to be difficult, and it’s going to require some unpleasant reconsideration of the way we talk about this issue.

New Simulation Shows How The Pacific Islands May Have Been Colonized.

Incredibly, the percentage of parents throughout the state who engaged in the civil disobedience of refusing the test for their kids is higher than the 15 percent of eligible voters who cast a ballot for Andrew Cuomo in the low-turnout election last year.

* All of the juniors at Nathan Hale High School refused to show up for state testing this week.

* Against the creative economy.

* What if Man of Steel was in color?

* Gasp! The Apple Watch May Have a Human Rights Problem.

Microsoft Word Spells the Names of Game of Thrones Characters Better Than You Can.

Nine Months After He Filmed Eric Garner’s Killing, the Cops Are Trying to Put Ramsey Orta Behind Bars.

“We must disband the police: Body cameras aren’t enough — only radical change will stop cops who kill.”

* Meanwhile.

* Yes please: Telltale is making some kind of Marvel game.

The Feds Say One Schmuck Trading From His Parents’ House Caused a Market Crash. Here’s the Problem.

* See, Dad? I knew you could survive on girl scout cookies.

* There’s always money in the banana stand: The Fed’s Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse.

* Won’t you give? What you can? Today? Poetry is going extinct, government data show.

* I believe any crazy story with China in the headline. That’s my policy.

* Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything.

It’s Time To Stop Treating Childhood as a Disease.

* And you thought The Dark Knight Strikes Back was bad.

Commencement Weekend Links!

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* Commencement speech bingo. More links below!

ut_bingo_f* 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 Forever Drought.

* 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.

An article about secrecy and the death penalty in Missouri got the May edition of St. Louis Magazine banned from the Missouri Department of Corrections.

* 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.

Monday Night Links!

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Dr. Nancy E. Snow, professor of philosophy in Marquette University’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of a $2.6 million grant that will fund interdisciplinary research on virtue, character and the development of the moral self.

* How do professors spend their time? Additional facts.

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* The American Association of University Professors is out with its latest annual report on the economic health of its members’ profession. Executive summary: It’s pretty weak. But this year, the AAUP has added a fun little wrinkle by comparing the growth of academic and sports spending. Fun! The AAUP report. The Chronicle’s interactive graph. Meanwhile, associate professors see their earning power drop compared with their colleagues above and below.

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UConn Star: College Athletes ‘Have Hungry Nights That We Don’t Have Enough Money To Get Food.’ UConn basketball’s dirty secret.

Community colleges rely on part-time, “contingent” instructors to teach 58 percent of their courses, according to a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. Part-time faculty teach more than half (53 percent) of students at two-year institutions.

* Mass expulsions from jobs, houses, farms, pensions, health care, citizenship, the welfare state, large-scale disappearances of species, arable land, clean water, open ocean—it’s a shrinking world. On the brighter side, as Sassen also documents, corporate profits in the last few decades have soared.

* Only 15% of US firms offer paid paternity leave to their employees.

* Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Debacle. Scenes from Mississippi’s new state-run civil rights museum (the first state-run civil rights museum in the country).

* Archaeology, Human Dignity, and the Fascination of Death.

Death used to be a spiritual ordeal; now it’s a technological flailing.

 

* For years, the state had greeted visitors with billboards that said “Wild Wonderful West Virginia.” In 2006, it adopted a new slogan: “Open for Business.”

* By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD. Millions of those boys will be prescribed a powerful stimulant to “normalize” them. A great many of those boys will suffer serious side effects from those drugs. The shocking truth is that many of those diagnoses are wrong, and that most of those boys are being drugged for no good reason—simply for being boys. It’s time we recognize this as a crisis. The Drugging of the American Boy.

The Game I Played When I Was Scared To Death of Being Deported. White House defends soaring number of deportations for minor crimes.

“When You Meet a Lesbian: Hints for the Heterosexual Women.” Struck again by way white supremacy is willing, even eager, to argue white people are inferior — just as long as African Americans are worse.

* Affirmative-Action Foe Plans Campaigns Against 3 Universities.

State Department Not Totally Sure Where it Spent Six Billion Dollars. I’m sure it’ll turn up.

* Linking to this sickening story, someone on Twitter reminded me that they would sell postcards of lynchings.

* Chicago decriminalized marijuana possession—but not for everyone.

* This is weird: Al Sharpton Was Previously FBI Informant.

* Vox is SEO as journalism. When Ezra Klein left the Washington Post.

* Better than straight-up bald-faced lies as journalism I guess.

* Has Any President Done More to Damage HBCUs Than Barack Obama?

* The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance.

* TNI has put up the egg donation story I was touting a few linkdumps back.

* Recession Spurred Enrollments in STEM Fields, Study Finds.

* Could Westeros build a car?

* I worry sometimes my classes are the literature version of this comic.

* And the Milwaukee Art Museum, as it was always meant to be seen: in LEGOs.

Thank God It’s Thanksgiving Week Links – 2

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* For the propaganda vault: Why English Majors are the Hot New Hires.

* I’ve already asked on Facebook and Twitter, but does anyone know what “Psychological Test: BC” means on Kennedy’s Harvard application? I assume it means “extremely deluded narcissist, do not give any power,” but I’m curious about the precise scale involved. PS: Stick around for a bold “letter of recommendation from my dad” choice at the end.

Tensions rise at Kean U. as officials recommend denying tenure to 2/3 of eligible professors.

* The wisdom of markets: Eight months ago, Snapchat was valued at $70 million. Today, it is valued at $4 billion, even though it has zero revenue. Six months ago, Pinterest was valued at $2.5 billion. Today, it is valued at $3.8 billion — and no revenue there, either. And last week news broke that Dropbox was said to be seeking a new round of funding that would value the company at $8 billion, up from $4 billion a year ago.

* Great line from Boing Boing on this Washington Post elite zip code article: “what money looks like from space.”

My Idea for Higher Ed Reform: Do Nothing.

* In oh-sure-I-guess-that-show-is-still-on-the-air news: Family Guy kills off Brian for what looks like an episode and a half or so.

* I’m no expert, but I bet you could get better results innovating new schooling forms than medicating so many kids.

* Meanwhile: What happens if enough New York parents say they don’t want their kids to take tests?

* And the kids are all right.

Even More Tuesday Links (Collect Them All!)

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Wisconsin, unfortunately, has become a case study in the failure of austerity economics at the state level.

* The NCAA wants you to know that its unpaid workers absolutely definitely have health insurance.

* Contingency Plan: Outsourcing Education.

As Maisto puts it: “The most vulnerable students tend to get taught by the least supported faculty. And if that doesn’t bother people, it should.”

Stick around for some eye-popping rationalizations from senior administrators.

The myth of the lecturer.

* Of those students who place into remedial math at CUNY, 20 percent have progressed to a for-credit course two years later. After six years, just one in four have managed to earn any degree. A national research report published last year called remediation a “bridge to nowhere.” System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education.

“If you start in remediation,” says Tom Sugar of Complete College America, the think tank that published the “bridge to nowhere” report, “there’s virtually no chance you’re going to end up with a college degree.”

* A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise.

“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”

* Tough times in the U.K.: the Queen got a mere $5 million dollar raise this year.

* The Associated Press announced today that it will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”

* New journal: The Journal of Popular Television, Volume 1, Number 1.

* And your Tumblr of the minute: Mean Girls + Mad Men = Mean Mad Men. So good I don’t even care if I’ve done this one before.