Posts Tagged ‘airlines’
Last Weekend Before Classes Links!
* CFP: Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Gathering. MLA 2019 CFP: Stephen King at 45. Call for applications: The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.
* A special issue of Palimpsest on The Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.
* Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi. Parable of the Butler as an opera.
* Syllabus: Good Grief: Humor and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature.
* There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Very nice long read in the Guardian on what depression is and isn’t.
* Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance.
* Black Mirror did this one already: Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner’s mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.
* The 90s, World War II, and the War on Terror. Great little bit of cultural analysis in comic form, derived from a Chris Hayes essay from 2006.
* Tiny books of the resistance.
* Can the humanities be defended? Well, it depends.
* The Fierce Urgency of “How.”
* Trump’s offshore drilling plan defies ‘wishes of every coastal state, city and county.’ Insurance after climate change. Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, Ground Zero in the Fight for Climate Justice. Climate change and the global south. A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise.
* UBI already exists for the 1%. A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem.
* 5 things to know about Puerto Rico 100 days after Hurricane Maria.
* But the most notable difference in the table is political: no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance’s book.
* The woman behind the “Shitty Men in Media” list. How I Learned to Look Believable. Why Dan Harmon’s sexual-misconduct confession is actually worth listening to.
* “Every single neighbor I’ve had has died of cancer.” This Town Is So Toxic, They Want It Wiped off the Map.
* This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love. On Liking Women.
* Justice Department Announces Court Order Revoking Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue. Washington state AG sues Motel 6 over giving ICE info on 9,000 guests. 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection. Trump may deport thousands of Indian H-1B visa holders as they wait for green cards. To fulfill Trump’s vision on immigration, sheriffs are trampling over constitutional principles. The head of ICE is calling for mayors and local city councilmen to be arrested. Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor. ICE to move forward with deportation of paraplegic boy’s caregiver. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence. Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words. And of course.
* This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.
* If the President Is Uniquely Dangerous, Treat Him That Way.
* Child protective services and artificial intelligence.
* The end of computer security. An amazing coincidence.
* How students pay for graduate school.
* Bringing back indentured servitude. Let’s let kids mortgage their social security while they’re at it.
* We Finally Know Why People Are Left- Or Right-Handed.
* The case for (and against) the tiger living on LSU’s campus.
* College football has the money to pay players. The College Football Playoff proves it.
* North Carolina gerrymander ruled illegal, again.
* You Won’t Live to See the Final Blade Runner Movie.
* Uh Oh—CRISPR Might Not Work in Most People.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* Police departments nationwide agree: guns officially have more rights than people.
* Solo, oh no. Star Wars fatigue is real. Why So Many Men Hate The Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why. The Last Jedi and fandom. The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen. Poe Dameron apologetics.
* Teaching the controversy the Duke way.
* Marxism and Nintendo? I love my Switch, so anything that keeps me from not feeling too bad about owning it… Nintendo’s Resurgence Was the Best Tech Story of 2017. More at MetaFilter.
* Airline travel has become so safe even I’m barely afraid of it anymore.
* Southwest Flips on Big Three Airlines in Cartel Case.
* Boomeranging the boomerang effect.
* Web comic of the month: “Three Jumps.”
* The Handmaid’s Tale after Margaret Atwood.
* Flight of the Conchords forever.
* Stop speculating about Trump’s mental health.
* The end of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Era? We’ll see.
* Hamilton in London. Hamilton in Milwaukee. Next up: Saga, the Musical?
* As for the bots themselves, #R2DoubleD and #TripleCPU are indeed a very cool sight to behold but (in my opinion) don’t come close to anything ever approaching “arousing.”
* Carrie Fisher’s private philosophy coach.
* Updated rules for Settlers of Catan.
* Choose Your Own Adventure, in graph form. Interactive map of every Quantum Leap time jump.
* What happens to the mind under anesthesia?
* And you’ve already seen it, but just for the record. Almost been one year. Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven’t Even Imagined Yet. There’s no way out.
Weekend Links!
* Star Trek and Lovecraft. Via r/daystrominstitute.
* The worst threat to higher education is its administration.
* Judge Rules Against Marquette Professor Over Public Rebuke of TA.
* Police Officer Who Fatally Shot 15-Year-Old Texas Boy Is Charged With Murder.
* Delta boots family off red-eye flight, threatens kids with “foster care.”
* Thank your parents: GOP Health Bill Jeopardizes Out-of-Pocket Caps in Employer Plans. The New Study That Shows Trumpcare’s Damage. Senate won’t vote on House-passed healthcare bill.That makes it more likely they’ll be able to pass something, unfortunately. Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable. Mail me to the GOP. It just gets worse every day.
* It just gets worse, every day.
* A Principal Is Accused of Being a Communist, Rattling a Brooklyn School.
* Not even the dead will be safe if our enemy is victorious: You could soon be able to relive Hillary Clinton’s defeat every week on TV.
* Why would you bother doing Inhumans if you can’t do Medusa’s hair?
* HBO is developing 4 different Game Of Thrones spin-offs.
* The executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Seth Baum, and his colleagues describe what they call a double catastrophe scenario whereby an initial catastrophe, such as a major war between states that causes societal collapse, disrupts the regular injection of aerosols into the stratosphere, thereby causing a second catastrophe involving the climate. The latter event could induce widespread famines, social unrest, and economic meltdowns — or, at the extreme, it could precipitate a runaway greenhouse effect that turns Earth into an uninhabitable hellish cauldron like our planetary neighbor Venus. The result would be human extinction. In a phrase, once a stratospheric geoengineering program has been established by anyone, anywhere, it must not be interrupted for any reason, especially not abruptly. But one or more interruptions cannot be ruled out, hence the existential danger.
* The cold equations: Disney started over on Star Wars: Episode IX after Carrie Fisher’s death.
* It didn’t work. There’s only four types of people, and three of them are bad. True story. Don’t be nervous, they said. The three pillars of Canavanism. Another caption that works for any New Yorker cartoon. There will be no miracles here.
* And teach the controversy: how long ago and far away was it, really?
Wednesday Links!
* Great episode of I Was There Too today starring Ahmed “Jar Jar Binks” Best, a genuinely fascinating figure in the Star Wars culture industry. I link this great EW profile of Best every few years. They talk about the Aftermath scene I didn’t like, and Best gives a nice explanation of why the treatment of Jar Jar as a character is so regrettable from a storytelling perspective in the context of defending the otherwise execrable Darth Jar Jar Theory.
* There’s an unexpected bonus episode of the Hello from the Magic Tavern spinoff Offices and Bosses out today, too. Truly, nothing can stop me now.
* A nice writeup of Buffy at 20 from the Marquette Tribune.
* Also at Marquette Wire: Marquette’s Live Poets Society breaks the silence with their poems on mental illness and suicide.
* Strange Horizons on “Kirk Drift.”
* Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia.
* I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.
* How to tell if you’re a pervert.
* United’s stock falls 1.1%, wipes out $255 million off the airline’s market cap. Maybe they should have offered people $2000 to give up their ticket? Just a crazy thought. Now they’re sorry. Does The Fine Print In United’s Contract Prevent Kicked-Off Passenger From Suing Airline? The Corporation Does Not Always Have To Win. And from the archives: The black art of overbooking. The Landing: Fascists without Fascism.
* Jeff Sessions Prepares DOJ For Crackdown On Unauthorized Border-Crossers.
Sessions painted the matter in stark terms, saying that gangs and cartels “turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.”
“Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings,” Sessions said in prepared remarks. “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”
When he delivered the speech, Sessions did not use the word “filth,” saying only “where we first take our stand.”
Sounds like the rivers will be running red with the blood of the unclean soon. #MAGA!
* Another Day, Another Charter Scandal.
* The rule is you don’t talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can’t talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system’s inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave. Hiking the Appalachian Trial while Black.
We want a SuperRace because we want to eradicate absolutely everything that terrifies us. We want SuperHumans so we can transcend that thing we are: human. But a SuperHuman would lack that crack in everything through which, as Leonard Cohen sang, the light gets in. There’s something in our suffering that we need. We’ve known this for millennia, and we make it clear in the stories we keep telling. The Buddha gave up his palace and meditated beneath a tree for a week. Jesus of Nazareth said yes to a cross. Our ache is our unfortunate, undeniable doorway. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, says the copper lady with the torch. When we walk into our pain, we sometimes find ourselves on the other side, freed of what we once thought we needed to feel free.
* The ACLU filed a lawsuit Friday against the city of Maplewood, Missouri, over a policy that allegedly evicts domestic violence victims and banishes them from the St. Louis suburb if they call police for help more than twice in six months.
* Laurie Penny says The Expanse is perfect…ly fine. I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm a lot of other people seem to have for the series, though I liked the first season well enough; I haven’t even started the second season yet.
* The DC Cinematic Universe turns to the only hero who could possibly save it: The Rock. The Rock can make anything good, but there are limits. There are limits.
* Let’s scrape together The Shining epilogue that Stanley Kubrick destroyed.
* And Some Math Problems for English Majors.
An English major explains his career options to three mechanical engineers for fifteen minutes. How many beers will the English major drink in explaining that, really, he has it figured out as he’s applying to eighteen grad schools, and after the PhD, maybe become a professor, or go for a post-doc, maybe? What if he’s trying to impress someone? What if that someone’s also a mechanical engineer?
Sunday Links and Every Tab Is Closed, Forever and Ever Amen
* I’ve noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling’s readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author?
* Into the Black: Stories of People Getting Out of Debt. Via MeFi.
* The three student loan crises.
* Five years on Skid Row from University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart.
* Off to a great start: Rio officials had to open Olympic Stadium with bolt cutters after losing key. These Are the Actual Costs of the Rio Olympics. The ideology of the Olympics. A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics failed to report cases. With just days to go until the Rio Olympics begin, the AP—which has been testing viral levels since last year—reports water conditions are worse than ever. Inside the Gloria Marina, where the sailing races take place, adenoviruses per liter have jumped more than 42 percent since they first sampled it in March, 2015.
* Burn your money the higher education way.
* Elsewhere in obviously functional organizations: Recent construction of emergency exit near chancellor’s office for security reasons symbolizes closed-off nature of Dirks’ administration.
* “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
* “We call on the U.S. Department of Transportation to conduct a thorough examination into the prevailing practices of major American air carriers, including Delta Air Lines, and to develop policy guidelines on the objective factors that are to be considered when determining that a passenger may legally be removed from a flight,” CAIR-Cincinnati attorney Sana Hassan said.
* Clinton’s tuition plan and private colleges.
* “Free college” is a moralistic ruse, in other words, used to smuggle in a market logic where it has no place without addressing the core question of exploitative, exorbitant college costs. It treats education like anything else you’d buy in a store, and scolds those who feel otherwise by pretending they want to get something without working for it. There ain’t so such thing as a free lunch, of course: students and the public have amply paid for it already. They’re just not eating.
* Ira Steven Behr has been working on a Deep Space Nine documentary that apparently somehow includes a “notional season eight.” And while we’re at it: Oh, That’s Where Carol Marcus Was During Star Trek Beyond. Rumor of the Day: Star Trek: Discovery to take place before The Original Series?
* Roger Ailes Used Fox News Budget to Finance ‘Black Room’ Campaigns Against His Enemies. This story is just going to get more and more incredible as time goes on, I think.
* Seinfeld: “The Twin Towers.” An original spec script.
* Secrets of the Millennials Revealed: They’re Poor.
* But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry.
* This Joke Was Off-limits at Donald Trump’s Comedy Central Roast. Who Lies More? The Answer May Surprise You. You Always Hurt the Ones You Love. On Veterans. On Unlikely Voters. The Shrinking Electoral Map. Georgia as Battleground State. Bloodthirstier than Cheney. If President Trump decided to use nukes, he could do it easily. Congressman Proposes Law To Prevent Trump From Being Able To Launch Nukes On His Own. Only in America could proposals to bomb at least three nations and indefinitely occupy another be labeled “isolationism.” Senior GOP Officials Exploring Options if Trump Drops Out. What Happens If Trump Drops Out? If Trump Drops Out, The Result Will Be A Horrible Legal Quagmire. Premediating a Loss. Just 92 More Days in the Bunker. Here’s what an 8% Clinton Lead Looks Like. Trump, or Political Emotions. A Fable, by Teju Cole. Of course there’s more links after the chart.
* Anagha Uppal, an activist at the University of Tennessee, describes the meal plan rule as “an exercise in tyranny.” Ms. Uppal has not used her plan — “I don’t purchase from Aramark,” she said between bites of chicken salad in pita (cost: $5.74) at the Golden Roast Coffeehouse. On her laptop: a Food Recovery Network sticker; she’s a campus coordinator for the network, a national student group that fights food waste. It was Ms. Uppal who prodded officials to start the Big Orange Meal Share to let students donate swipes.
* Possibilia, or, Love in the Multiverse.
* Why Amish Children Rarely Get Asthma.
* When Exhaustion Became a Status Symbol.
* Travel reimbursement voucher, trip to Moon, July 16-24, 1969.
* Like the blog, my Tumblr has been languishing the last few weeks while I’ve been teaching, but every so often I throw up some gold. I don’t know what else I was expecting. I’m with Her(zog). You have every reason to go on living. The last week of my comics class.
* A Radioactive Cold War Military Base Will Soon Emerge From Greenland’s Melting Ice.
* Perhaps our billboards are the civic sludge, the highway litter, of America’s ambitions and aspirations — literally writ large.
* A Brief Publishing History of Game of Thrones.
* Tolkien: The Lost Recordings.
* Quantum Computing, Getting Closer.
* Crows Continue to Be Terrifyingly Intelligent.
* A new report from Zillow estimates that with a six-foot sea level rise, “almost 1.9 million homes (or roughly 2 percent of all U.S. homes) – worth a combined $882 billion – are at risk of being underwater by 2100.”
* What’s Wrong With the DC Comics Movie Franchise? Report: Warner Bros. Turned Suicide Squad Into a Mess in Its Panic Over BvS Criticism.
* …it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. The function of video game criticism.
* Men, am I right. Marriage, men, and alcohol.
* The “biological mystery” of the female orgasm.
* Last year, though, the National Institutes of Health banned funding of animal-human chimeras until it could figure out whether any of this work would bump against ethical boundaries. Like: Could brain scientists endow research animals with human cognitive abilities, or even consciousness, while transplanting human stem cells into the brain of a developing animal embryo? Would it be morally wrong to create animals with human feet, hands, or a face in order to study human morphology? Modern medicine thinks before it acts. SMASH CUT TO: After a nearly year-long ban…
* Life in the city without cops or firefighters would be unpleasant and, inevitably, tragic. But, she notes, “if sanitation workers aren’t out there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”
* Malcolm Harris reviews The Last Days of New Paris.
* Head shots of all of the ways US intelligence thought Hitler might try to disguise himself.
* In Super Mario Galaxy, whenever Mario drowns in a swamp, his hand reaches out from under the surface before being sucked in. However, since Mario’s head is so big, he cannot raise his hand above the surface without his head being still visible. To solve this, the game simply shrinks Mario’s head so it doesn’t interfere with the animation.
* How Bill Cosby Finally Landed in a Courtroom.
* The Blackest Superhero Story That Marvel Comics Ever Published.
* And Wisconsin, once again in the news.
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
All the Weekend Links, Existential Despair on the Side
* In case you missed it: the call for papers for SFFTV‘s special issue on the Mad Max franchise. And our Star Trek special issue is still open, too!
* Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.
* What that means is that in South Carolina, the Confederate flag abides by its own rules. While governors—as well as the president—can usually order that all state and national flags within their jurisdiction be flown at half-staff, this one is exempt. Instead, the Confederate flag’s location can be changed only by a two-thirds vote by both branches of the General Assembly. “In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag,” said a press secretary for Haley. “Only the General Assembly can do that.” Take down the flag.
* Confederate flag in Orlando to be burned in symbolic burial.
* Denmark Vesey, Forgotten Hero. A recent flashback.
* Meet Debbie Dills, Florist Who Called in Tip that Led to Dylann Roof’s Arrest.
* We still need to talk about white male pathology.
* The Treasury is going to put a woman on the $10. That’ll fix it!
* What Would Happen If We ALL Stopped Paying Our Student Loans, Together?
* California Says Uber Driver Is Employee, Not a Contractor.
* Tech isn’t really making a “sharing” economy. So what is it making? The Servitude Bubble.
* Reasonable Doubts About the Jury System.
* We Regret to Inform You That in 4 Days You and Your Family Will Be Deported to Haiti.
* Women’s soccer will only achieve greater growth when we have a FIFA not run by sexist men.
* Performance-Based Funding Can Be Fickle, One University’s Close Call Shows. Florida State would have lost $16.7 million if its median graduate had earned just $400 less.
* 7 Seriously Bad Ideas That Rule Higher Education.
* The sheep look up: don’t drink the water edition.
* Did abortion cause the drought? I say teach the controversy.
* It’s a weird, weird world: Obama is going to be on WTF. I’ll never accept this is real.
11. Enthusiasts have hitherto only loved the world in various ways; the point is to hate it (too).
* Maladministration killed Sweet Briar, says former board member.
* The Best And Worst Airlines, Airports And Flights, Summer 2015 Update.
* ‘Screen Time’ For Kids Is Probably Fine.
* Your Children Won’t Be Able To Live In Space, Without A Major Upgrade.
* Another pedagogy gimmick, but at least it’s cheap: roleplaying games.
* Science explains why you hate the word “moist.”
* There Have Only Been 9 Days This Year When Police Didn’t Kill Someone.
* Another piece on the trolley problem and the self-driving car.
* Vermont vs. the Affordable Care Act.
* Euthanasia and non-terminal illness.
* Harris Wittels’s sister remembers her brother.
* SethBling wrote a program made of neural networks and genetic algorithms called MarI/O that taught itself how to play Super Mario World. This six-minute video is a pretty easy-to-understand explanation of the concepts involved.
* Making the world safe from Marjane Satrapi.
* Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation.
* A people’s history of Singled Out.
* Everything you want, in the worst possible way: please god don’t ever let Captain Worf happen.
* No pricey pension plans, some argued. No promotions based solely on seniority. No set hours for a given workweek. No prohibitions against layoffs. Unions! Catch the fever!
* The arc of history is long, but Mitch Horwitz is doing a Netflix comedy series with Maria Bamford.
* Didn’t we do this one already? All six Star Wars films at once.
* And if you want to know why there’s no future for our civilization, just read this.
Monday Links!
* Somebody thinks 2015 could be a doozy: Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees.
* Trends We Can Work With: Higher Ed in 2015.
* Remembering the reason for the season: During Holiday Season, City Erects Cages To Keep Homeless People Off Benches.
* Christmas Eve Document Dump Reveals US Spy Agencies Broke The Law And Violated Privacy.
* But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? No. The opposite is true. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, “the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.”
* Ending excessive police force starts with new rules of engagement.
* What Does It Mean to Be Anti-Police?
* How to Survive a Cop Coup: What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From Ecuador.
* And whether or not people accept it, that new normal—public life and mass surveillance as a default—will become a component of the ever-widening socioeconomic divide. Privacy as we know it today will become a luxury commodity. Opting out will be for the rich.
* “Enhanced interrogation” is torture, American style. Exceptional torture. Torture that insists it is not torture. Post-torture? This uniquely American kind of torture has six defining characteristics.
* “The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled”: In praise of The Usual Suspects.
* Decades of Bill Cosby’s shadow ops.
* Justice Denied to Steven Salaita: A Critique of the University of Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure Report. This was my reaction as well.
* Anti-intellectualism is taking over the US.
* Are ideas to cool the planet realistic? Meanwhile: Pope Francis Could Be Climate’s Secret Weapon Next Year.
* The architecture of dissent.
* The red state economic miracle that wasn’t.
* Airlines want you to suffer.
* Games are ancient, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But their stock is not rising at the rate that their fans’ Twitter streams and Web forums might suggest. Instead of a ludic age, perhaps we have entered an era of shredded media. Some forms persist more than others, but more than any one medium, we are surrounded by the rough-edged bits and pieces of too many media to enumerate. Writing, images, aphorisms, formal abstraction, collage, travesty. Photography, cinema, books, music, dance, games, tacos, cats, car services. If anything, there has never been a weirder, more disorienting, and more lively time to be a creator and a fanatic of media in all their varieties. Why ruin the moment by being the one trying to get everyone to play a game while we’re letting the flowers blossom? A ludic century need not be a century of games. Instead, it can just be a century. With games in it.
* Death toll among Qatar’s 2022 World Cup workers revealed. Migrant World Cup workers in Qatar are reportedly dying at alarming rates.
* Enterprise, TOS, and “the scent of death” on the Federation.
* How Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
* I am no fan of the North Korean regime. However I believe that calling out a foreign nation over a cybercrime of this magnitude should never have been undertaken on such weak evidence.
* Longreads best crime reporting 2014.
* A Drone Flew Over A Pig Farm.
* The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living through it certainly don’t; the success of much lighter fare among the reading public in Africa proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
* I’m a pretty big fan of “Jean & Scott”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
* A profile of David Letterman from 1981.
* How Colonel Sanders Became Father Christmas in Japan.
The filmmakers’ cartoonishly evil vision of Saruman is unfortunate, as it deprives a fascinating narrative of its complexity, while also being untrue to Tolkien’s own vision. Jackson and his team seem incapable of imagining that a person can be wrong without also being evil. For example, the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit was greedy, but he was an elected official, generally well regarded by the community (at least until he absconds with the municipal funds, a fact revealed only on the last page of the book); in the film The Desolation of Smaug, he is a murderous tyrant who opposes even the idea of elections. An even worse example is the case of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who in the books has been driven mad by grief and despair, partly owing to the cruel machinations of Sauron himself; in the film (The Return of the King), he is made so irredeemably evil that Gandalf actually attacks him, while we the viewers are expected to cheer. If this is what Jackson does to weak and pitiable characters, what must he do to Saruman, who is a legitimate “bad guy” in The Lord of the Rings?
* Quiz: Find out how your salary stacks up against other American workers. You know, fun.
* L.A. studio to restore venerable ‘King’s Quest’ to its gaming throne.
* Is the anti-vax movement finally dying?
* You can’t beat the media at its own game.
* America’s own 7 Up: Johns Hopkins’s Beginning School Study.
* Sober People against New Year’s Eve SuperPAC.
* And of course you had me at Grant Morrson’s All-New Miracleman Annual #1.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* On April 10th-12th, 2015, UF will be hosting its 11th annual Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media.”
* The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize of $1,000 for the best paper on the subject of capital as power. Open to anyone who does not currently hold a Ph.D. (including current graduate students).
* Happy belated Labor Day: The True Story Of How One Man Shut Down American Commerce To Avoid Paying His Workers A Fair Wage. Labor Day against Work.
* Non-published, non-peer-reviewed study concludes that college football coaches must be worth the money because otherwise they wouldn’t be paid that much. Glad that’s sorted.
* So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde? According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991—when the Soviet Union fell. “The conservative movement replaced the ‘Red Scare’ with a new ‘Green Scare’ and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time,” argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.
* UIUC will forward Salaita’s appointment to the Board of Trustees after all. Sadly I suspect this is a CYA maneuver after realizing they were in material breach of their contract — though I suppose it’s for the lawyers to decide if they have take-backs on that issue or not.
* From the archives: How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps.
* The Darren Wilson fundraiser mystery.
* Guantanamo Defense Lawyer Resigns, Says U.S. Case Is ‘Stacked.’
* The terrifying true story of the garbage that could kill the whole human race.
* Man Nearly Dies In Ice Bucket Challenge After Plane Drops Water On Him.
* Are domestic airlines making money by fleecing consumers? No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!
* Archaeologists Confirm That Stonehenge Was Once A Complete Circle.
* The A.V. Club reviews David Mitchell’s latest, The Bone Clocks.
* I’ll give you this: Censoring the books your kid reads does seem pretty dystopian. “Divergent” and “Hunger Games” as capitalist agitprop. Utopia and Anti-Utopia.
* And Did Stan Lee Confirm a Black Panther Movie? Please?
Gerry Canavan 