Wednesday Links!

* This is the only movie franchise Disney should produce from now on.

* On indigenous futurism.

* It’s not time to degree, it’s time from degree.

* Horrifying, tragic triple murder in Chapel Hill.

* Professors and other university employees wouldn’t be able to criticize or praise lawmakers, the governor or other elected officials in letters to the editor if they use their official titles, under a bill introduced in the Legislature. Having solved every other problem in existence, the Legislature now turns its eyes towards…

* The University of Wisconsin cuts as queen sacrifice.

* What University Administrators Gain from $300 Million in Cuts. Notes from the conspiracy against UW.

 * How our paths have diverged from that August afternoon in 1986. True story: it was freshman orientation just outside Memorial Union. We were two of a couple thousand new Marquette University freshman wistful about what our futures held. Four years later, I graduated from Marquette and later became Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year. You never graduated, and you became the Governor of the State of Wisconsin bent on dismantling public education. Ironic, isn’t it? Situational irony at its best. I’d laugh if its ramifications weren’t so utterly destructive for the state of Wisconsin.

* First Louisiana, then Wisconsin, now South Carolina ups the ante. Now they want to shut it down for two years. Would it shock you if I told you this was a historically black college? Would it completely blow your mind?

* What Even is African Literature Anyway.

SOFIA SAMATAR: Lately I have been thinking about African literature as the literature that becomes nothing.“African subjectivity…is constituted by a perennial lack: lacking souls, lacking civilization, lacking writing, lacking responsibility, lacking development, lacking human rights and lacking democracy. It is an unending discourse that invents particular ‘lacks’ suitable for particular historical epochs so as to justify perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations and to authorize various forms of external interventions into Africa.” (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality And African Subjectivity)This was kicked off when I read Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on lack. We know that all literary works are copies, but Africanliterature is a copy in a way that obliterates it (Ouologuem, Camara Laye, whatever, choose your plagiarism scandal). All literature is political, but African literature is political in a way that makes it cease to be literature (it’s “too political,” “didactic,” etc.). All literature is produced to suit a market, but African literature is produced to suit an illegitimate, inauthentic, outside market (it’s always in the wrong language). Its market also makes it nothing…

* Crumbs is a new feature-length film project from award-winning Addis Ababa-based Spanish director Miguel Llansó boldly touting itself as “the first ever Ethiopian post-apocalyptic, surreal, sci-fi feature length film.” Its cryptic official trailer, which we first spotted over on Shadow and Act, takes us deep into a bizarre universe inhabited by the beautiful Candy (played by Ethiopian actress Selam Tesfaye) and her diminutive scrap collecting partner Birdy (played by Ethiopian actor Daniel Tadesse Gagano), who sets out on a journey to uncover strange happenings in their otherwise desolate surroundings.

* In the high-stakes world of American education, Pearson makes money even when its results don’t measure up.

* Jon Stewart quits. Brian Williams suspended. Tough times in fake news.

* Another preview of Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.

* To all the young journalists asking for advice.

* I asked Mr. Trachtenberg if it was morally defensible to let students borrow tens of thousands of dollars for a service that he himself had compared to a luxury good. He is not, by nature, one for apologies and second-guessing. “I’m not embarrassed by what we did,” he said. “It’s not as if it’s some kind of a bait and switch here. It’s not as if the faculty weren’t good. It’s not as if the opportunities to get a good degree weren’t there. There’s no misrepresentation here.” He seemed unbowed but also aware that his legacy was bound up in the larger dramas and crises of American higher education.

* Whatever happened to the teenage entrepreneurs whom Peter Thiel paid to forgo college?

* Jesus Christ: The University of Oregon illegally pried through the medical records of a female student who was expected to file a sexual assault-related lawsuit against the school, a staff therapist claims.

* The salary gap at Berkeley.

* For centuries we the taxpayers have paid to maintain the nation’s treasures and institutions. It would be madness to hand over our archives now.

* I’m Autistic, And Believe Me, It’s A Lot Better Than Measles.

* Rosa Parks — because of her arrest, because of her activism — loses her job at the Montgomery Fair department store, where she was an assistant tailor. She wasn’t fired, they just let her go. And Raymond Parks also loses his job as well. And neither one of them is able to find sustainable employment in Montgomery after that — because of their activism, absolutely. They are basically boycotted. …

This is a 1955 tax return, and of course her arrest is in December of that year, and their combined income is $3,749. So they’re, you know, the working poor, but they’re holding their head above water. And here is their tax return in 1959 when they’re living in Detroit. Their combined income is $661. They have descended into deep, deep poverty.

* On June 30th, 1974, Alberta Williams King was gunned down while she played the organ for the “Lord’s Prayer” at Ebenezer Baptist Church. As a Christian civil rights activist, she was assassinated…just like her son, Martin Luther King, Jr.

* BREAKING: People with Stronger Writing Skills Are Better at Their Jobs, Get Paid More, Better Looking, Less B.O., Just Better Period.

* Five Dials has a special issue devoted to Richard McGuire’s amazing comic Here.

* Review: Jupiter Ascending Is The Worst Movie Ever Go See It Immediately.

* So what would have made Jupiter Ascending work?

* NASA’s latest budget calls for a mission to Europa. OK I think as long as we attempt no landings there.

* Milwaukee streetcar boondoggle project approved.

* Secret Teacher: exams have left my students incapable of thinking. “Incapable” is a bit strong, but elites have certainly turned education into a nightmare.

* TOS for Samsung’s exciting new 4o-inch telescreen.

* What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorneys file a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.

* 2013 record heatwave ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, Climate Council of Australia report says.

* Text adventure micro-game of the day: 9:05.

* Fantasy short of the day: “The Two of Us.”

* Sharing companies use their advertising to build a sort of anti-brand-community brand community.  Both sharing companies and brand communities mediate social relations and make them seem less risky. Actual community is full of friction and unresolvable competing agendas; sharing apps’ main function is to eradicate friction and render all parties’ agenda uniform: let’s make a deal. They are popular because they do what brand communities do: They allow people to extract value from strangers without the hassle of having to dealing with them as more than amiable robots.

* 38 Percent Of Women Earn More Than Their Husbands.

* The Worst Commutes In America.

* “I was keenly aware of my Jewishness when I enrolled at Hogwarts in that faraway fall of 1949.”

* The-price-is-too-high watch: Study says smelling farts may be good for your health.

* Black girls are suspended from school 6 times more often than white girls.

* From the archives: The New Yorker‘s 2013 profile of American Sniper Chris Kyle.

* Human sociality and the problem of trust: there’s an app for that.

* Adnan Syed is getting an appeal.

* Detroit needs Sun Ra more than ever.

* But Manson, 80, does not want to marry Burton and has no interest in spending eternity displayed in a glass coffin, Simone told The Post. “He’s finally realized that he’s been played for a fool,” Simone said. Poor guy.

* “This AI can create poetry indistinguishable from real poets.” Finally, we can get rid of all these poets!

* Peace in our time: Marvel and Sony have concluded a deal that will allow Spider-Man to appear in Avengers movies.

* Zoo Security Drills: When Animals Escape.

* Ming the clam, the world’s oldest animal, killed at 507 years old by scientists trying to tell how old it was. RIP.

* Jonathan Blow says The Witness, his followup to Braid, is finally almost done.

* The other Apollo speeches.

* The news gets worse, academics: Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s.

* And presenting the world’s most delicious diamond.

Thursday Links!

* 2015 CFP for the MRG: “Enthusiasm for Revolution.”

* Reminder: Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: Alternative Futurisms.

* Criminalizing parenting.

* The Long, Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz You Have to Read. By the great Taryne Taylor! From the same issue of Paradoxa that has my essay on Snowpiercer in it.

* Panel Conversation on Afrofutrism between Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar at the University of Texas.

* Ellen Craft, the Slave Who Posed as a Master and Made Herself Free.

* Having paddled so hard to avoid the Scylla of hyperprofessionalization in English studies, some promoters of alternative careers may not notice that they are in the grip of Charybdis’s hyperprofessionalization of everything else. The harder they paddle, the harder the whirlpool pulls us all down. Great piece from Marc Bousquet addressing a number of key issues in academic labor.

* Universities without Austerity.

* A History of the MLA Job List.

* The headline reads, “UMass Ends Use of Student Informants.”

* Arbitrator places adjunct on the tenure track.

* The Data Sublime.

* Loved Your Nanny Campus? Start-Up Pledges Similar Services for Grads.

* These Two States Will Revoke Your License If You Can’t Pay Back Your Student Loans.

* He put that cartoon up on the classroom whiteboard, and the teacher left it there all day as a lesson in free speech.

* These World Leaders Are a Worse Threat to Free Press Than Terrorism.

* Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Newspaper Edits Female World Leaders Out of Charlie Hebdo March.

* What’s Missing From the Debate on Obama’s Free Community-College Plan.

* The end of the university in Louisiana.

* Elvis vs. the Beatles.

* Malcolm Harris: The Small Miracle You Haven’t Heard About Amid the Carnage in Syria.

* Urick v. Koenig, part two.

* Report: Duke Ignored Warnings on Research Fraud.

* 53 Historians Weigh In on Barack Obama’s Legacy.

* Back to the Future, Time Travel, and the Secret History of the 1980s.

* To be clear, late-night votes might be a bit of a problem for Joseph Morrissey, the newly sworn-in Virginia House delegate who must report to his jail cell about 7:30 each evening.

* Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of military attacks on civilians, compared with members of other major religious groups Gallup has studied in the United States. Seventy-eight percent of Muslim Americans say military attacks on civilians are never justified.

* $1 Million Prize for Scientists Who Can Cure Human Aging. Sure, I’ll go in for a few bucks on that.

* Trial by Ebola.

* Too real:  Woman’s Parents Accepting Of Mixed-Attractiveness Relationship.

* What If We Could Live In A World Without War But Way More Famine?

* Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor.

* A Cybernetic Implant That Allows Paralyzed Rats To Walk Again.

* In 2014, Florida recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system, an all-time high for the state in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years. Hundreds of these deaths from 2014 and from previous years are now under investigation by the DOJ because of the almost unimaginable role law enforcement officers are playing in them.

* Last week: The City Is Reportedly Losing $10 Million a Week Because the NYPD Isn’t Writing Enough Tickets. This week: NYPD Slowdown Turns Into “Broken Windows” Crackdown.

* The point of a strike is to stop production to show the work you do is essential. The NYPD slowdown has proven the opposite.

* The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down.

* Every day, cops toss dangerous military-style grenades during raids, with little oversight and horrifying results.

* Albuquerque cop mistakenly guns down undercover narcotics officer during bungled $60 meth bust. Elsewhere in Albuquerque.

* 1 In 3 College Men In Survey Said They Would Rape A Woman If They Could Get Away With It.

* Danny Boyle Having “Serious” Conversations About 28 Months Later. I’m in as long as it’s the first step towards Years.

* Radically unnecessary Avatar sequels reportedly having script problems. What could explain it?

* Frozen in everything, forever and ever amen.

* Seems legit: NASCAR driver says his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin.

* This Computer Program Is ‘Incapable Of Losing’ At Poker.

* Scholar and activist Glen Coulthard on the connection between indigenous and anticapitalist struggles.

* This seems like glorified Avengers fan fiction but I’m on board. Meanwhile, in Fantastic Four news.

* Ah, there’s my problem: iPhone Separation Anxiety Makes You Dumber, Study Finds.

* I’m you, from the future! At the 16th most popular webcomic.

* They say time is the fire in which we burn.

* The Marquette Tribune is following the ongoing McAdams suspension at the university.

* Study says we prefer singers who look like big babies during good times. This research must be stopped. Some things mankind was never meant to know.

* “To her disappointment she found that the Purchased Products did not even feel different from her regular socks and tights.”

* Community get a premiere date.

* whothefuckismydndcharacter.com.

* And Cookie-Based Research Suggests Powerful People Are Sloppier Eaters. Of course the sloppy among us have always known this.

Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links

* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.

* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!

* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.

* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.

Got a pretty convincing argument today that the proper “academic job market as game” metaphor isn’t Scrabble but Cards Against Humanity. 1/2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 11, 2015

You have to play elements of your arbitrary hand against randomly drawn circumstances, plus participating at all makes you a bad person. 2/2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 11, 2015

* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.

* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.

* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.

Point of this plan is to “disrupt” higher ed by shifting resources to colleges w/ lower labor costs + worse working conditions. Start there.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2015

* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.

* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.

You cannot solve a systemic jobs crisis by new jobs training. The best you can do is help some people beat out other people.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2014

* The logic of the increment.

Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.

* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.

* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.

* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.

As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.

It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).

* Lessons from Vermont: What does Vermont’s failed single-payer plan tell us about future reform efforts?

* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.

* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.

* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.

* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.

* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.

* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.

* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.

* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.

* Run, Bernie, run?

* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).

* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.

* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.

* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.

* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.

* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.

* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.

* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”

* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.

* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.

* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.

* Every episode of Friends at the same time.

* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”

Friday Morning Links!

* The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research relating to H.P. Lovecraft, his associates, and literary heirs.

* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket

* Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s rare. ‘1 in 5’: how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault statistic. Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College. Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.

* University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.

* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.

* Yes we can! The measure, championed by Senate Democrats, would cut Pell Grants in order to free up money to pay companies that collect student loans on behalf of the Department of Education.

* Down and Out: The Democratic Party’s losses at the state level are almost unprecedented, and could cripple it for a long time to come.

* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.

* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial’s Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.

* Good news from Rome: “All Animals Go to Heaven.” I’m really glad we settled this.

* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.

* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.

* CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn’t work, but why aren’t the architects of torture in jail? Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who “went too far.” The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That’s why they did it.

* First, do no harm: Medical profession aided CIA torture.

* The Supreme Court Just Rejected A Wage Theft Suit Against Amazon. What Does It Mean For Other Workers?

* Capitalism’s gravediggers.

* “Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.” A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.

* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.

* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.

* Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology.

* Why we can’t have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.

* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.

* Elderly man nailed for clever identity theft scheme: prosecutors say he changed victim’s name to his own.

* Censorship (Pasadena, California).

* The nation’s millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.

* Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.

* Meet The Oldest Living Things in the World.

* And this used to be a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.