Posts Tagged ‘affect’
Sunday Links
* CFP: Far Eastern Worlds: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction.
* Great research opportunity for people working in SF studies: 2014-15 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Teachers refuse to administer standardized tests.
* The despair of solitary confinement.
* The Afterlife of the Humanities.
* Transgender Children in Antebellum America.
* The Impossible Dream of Jodorowsky’s Dune.
* The Impossible Dream of a Second Season of The Comeback.
* Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body.
* Great moments in Big Data: Math proves Hollywood shouldn’t be sexist.
* ESPN profiles the cheerleader at the heart of the Raiders wage theft case.
* Scenes from the heroin crisis in Vermont.
* The end of journalism in New Jersey.
* Anadarko Agrees To Record $5 Billion Fine For ’85 Years Of Poisoning The Earth.’ Anadarko’s revenues are 14 billion annually, with assets of 52 billion, so it seems clear the fine doesn’t go nearly far enough.
* How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space.
* We’ve Found A Hidden Ocean On Enceladus That May Harbor Life.
* Radically unnecessary TV adaptation of perfect film goes to series.
* If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have.
* Never say die: Goonies Director Teases Sequel Featuring Original Cast.
* Kazuo Ishiguro Readies First Novel in 10 Years.
* The world is now largely a population of scared confused people ruled by atavistic sociopaths with no sense of history, ethics, science, beauty, or truth. But then you already knew that.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine being vaguely disappointed by one Marvel Cinematic Universe film a year, forever.
* And Marquette will send a team to the only sporting event that really matters, the Robot World Cup.
Saturday Afternoon!
* I was going to offer this post from Matt Yglesias on Weber’s “Politics as Vocation” as a potential intervention in the argument Vu and I have been having over the last few comment threads. But upon reflection I don’t think “compromise vs. compromised” is quite what we disagree about after all; it’s really a much smaller dispute about the efficacy of adopting an aggressive negotiating posture when you’re playing Chicken with sociopathically indifferent ideologues. The bad actors will always win such a fight, because we care about outcomes and they don’t. What we we need to do, therefore, is direct our attention away from mere political affect toward structural reform, wherever possible, of the various political institutions that give these bad actors final say.
* The Wonk Room compares the original health care bill to the (presumably final) manager’s amendment, with more on the new CBO score from Steve, Ezra, and TPM. I have to say this post from mcjoan on making sure doctors don’t take away our precious guns made me smile, as did the follow-up on mandates from the comments. So did Benen’s Botax/Boeh-tax bit.
* Stupak launches another desperate bid to be thrown out of the Democratic caucus.
* More ‘Flopenhagen’ analysis from Mother Jones, MNN, Wonk Room, Kevin Drum, and immanance. One’s level of happiness/sadness and optimism/pessimism on Copenhagen continues to strongly correlate with the extent to which one thought a genuinely successful agreement was ever possible at Copenhagen in the first place.
* ‘In the Shadow of Goldman Sachs’: Trickle-down economics on Wall Street. Via PClem.
* Jack Bauer interrogates Santa Claus. Via Julia.
* Captain Picard to become Sir Captain Picard.
* And very sad news: Influential film theorist Robin Wood has died.