Posts Tagged ‘AOL’
Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic, But the Other Way
* An awakening anatomy of the average life’s two years of boredom, 6 months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy. 14 minutes of joy seems low even for a single day. What are you people doing with yourselves?
* The Voyager records, as art.
* I’m With™ Clinton’s ‘Innovation Agenda’ for Higher Ed.
* Republicans seem pretty obviously right about this one. I don’t see how there’s any case for its propriety, but here’s a try.
* The Humiliating Practice of Sex-Testing Female Athletes.
* Estimate of U.S. Transgender Population Doubles to 1.4 Million Adults.
* For 20 years, the center has blocked off female-only hours to accommodate the area’s large Hasidic population. The pool has no male-only hours, and some Hasidic men swim during the hours that are open to all genders. An anonymous complaint was lodged recently with the city’s Human Rights Commission, which sent a notice to the parks department this spring saying that the policy might violate a city law barring gender discrimination in public accommodations.
* Using the budget usually reserved for the committee, they created a program called Dudes Understanding Diversity and Ending Stereotypes, or DUDES.
* He said he’s glad colleges have found the research useful, but he is cautious about the institutions that are taking it as an absolute. Mr. Sue said his goal had always been to educate people, not punish or shame them, if they engage in microaggressions.
* Boris Johnson and the Cuckoo Nest Plot. Now even Gove says he won’t Brexit before the end of the year. Sanders and Corbyn: The Survivors. Brexit Might Never Happen. Brexit: a disaster decades in the making. So you want to con a country. Based on a close reading of Frank Bruni’s Brexit commentary, “A Bachelor Named Britain, Looking for Love” (reproduced below the question), please describe the bearing of the New York Times op-ed staff on the collapse of serious political argument in American establishment institutions in the early 21st century.
* How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front. Bonus Tolkien! How To Tell If You Are In A J.R.R. Tolkien Book.
A wizard has roped you into a quest because one of your ancestors invented golf.
* Westeros Is Poorly Designed. A Followup: It’s Okay That Westeros Is Poorly Designed. Some more nerdery on the subject.
When asked how fast the ships in Babylon 5 travel, creator J. Michael Straczynski replied that they travel “at the speed of plot.”
How big is Westeros? “Plot-sized.” How many people live there? “Plot thousand.” How do they make their living? “Tilling the plot.”
* Game of Thrones season 6 was good TV that shows why the series will never be great.
* Why did the Stars Wars and Star Trek worlds turn out so differently? Please Stop Marrying Fictional Characters to People They Met as Children, It’s Creepy. I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run.
* How to Get Tenure. Counterpoint: You Probably Won’t Get Tenure.
* How to Give a Conference Paper.
* Elsewhere on the academic beat: Study Finds First-Year Students Who Take 15 Credits Succeed. Why Can’t My New Employees Write? The New McCarthyism. Right-Wing Elites Love Your Abigail Fisher Hot Take.
* Rationalia has already garnered some powerful enemies.
* Amazing, awful: Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions.
* Unprecedented’: Scientists declare ‘global climate emergency’ after jet stream crosses equator. The Window for Avoiding a Dangerous Climate Change Has Closed. The Day After Tomorrow Happened 30,000 Years Ago. Geoengineering at the CIA.
* Physicists just confirmed a pear-shaped nucleus, and it could ruin time travel forever. Not if I undiscover it yesterday!
* America is lying about its involvement in Africa: AFRICOM’s reports simply don’t add up.
* Secret History of the AOL Disc Campaign.
* More from the twilight of the law schools.
* “This is the single greatest panel ever published in a Transformers comic.”
* Trumpocalypse watch! Another boondoggle. And another. And another. And another. This one is probably the best yet. 4 Ways Cleveland’s Colleges Are Bracing for the Republican Convention. Who will win the presidency? Why not play along at home! And if you want a vision of the future: imagine Trump’s vice-presidential candidates stomping on a human face, forever.
Monday! Morning! Links!
* Jaimee’s lesson on the letter L, “Lo Lee Ta,” is up at Red Paint Hill.
* How to prepare your campuses for a queen sacrifice: a handy guide from Connecticut.
From Inside Higher Ed and excellent reporting by Colleen Flaherty, we start with a series of proposals to cut back faculty autonomy and increase administrative power over instructors. The central, multi-campus administration can fire tenured profs more easily, and also move them to other campuses in the system:
tenured faculty members may be moved to another regional university without their consent, without the guarantee of tenure there. Tenured faculty members could be terminated, not just in cases of financial exigency, as is now the case, but if the administration “believes economic or programmatic conditions exist” for retrenchment. And tenured faculty members also could be fired without the chance to appeal for breaking any local, state or national law, ethical standard or policy statement…
Moreover, “faculty members would have to be ‘professional’ and ‘collegial,’” i.e.,, more easily disciplined. Additionally, a significant union-managed faculty grant program would end, making professors more dependent on the administration.
* On Campus, Older Faculty Keep On Keepin’ On. Far out man.
* Maryland Debacle Shows Why We Must Get Football Out Of Our Universities.
* Cheat-Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design.
* The Voice Trap: On the Perils of Authorial Parochialism.
* Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.
* Profiting from the “cop cloud.” From TNI‘s “Cops 2” issue.
* Inside the Intense, Insular World of AOL Disc Collecting.
* See the Sketches J.R.R. Tolkien Used to Build Middle-Earth.
* Pretty vacant: the glory of abandoned spaces. Bonus: photos of empty Chinese amusement parks.
* There is a long tradition in the West of dancing on the Soviet grave in order to celebrate Western values, and so it comes as no surprise that the focus on Soviet historical artifacts is a focus entirely on the dead and decaying.
* Bring on the climate trials.
* But don’t worry, a bioethics professor at NYU has the solution: stunt child growth to use fewer resources. Got it in one.
* BREAKING: Slavery in America was much worse than you probably imagined.
* Designing the space suit to explore Mars.
* We’re flushing all these antidepressants into our water. How big is the problem?
* Masculinity Is an Anxiety Disorder.
* Donald Trump Reviews The Lord of the Rings.
* Happy Columbus Day everybody. Here’s your roundup.
* Oh, I don’t know that I’d say that I’m a genius.
* I’ll allow it, but you’re on thin ice: Wes Anderson’s Next Project Is a Stop-Motion Movie About Dogs.
* And the last alphabet you’ll ever need.
Easter Thursday and the Living’s Easy Links
* BREAKING: The NCAA has approved unlimited snacks. Can we please stop all this silly union talk now?
* Unintentional metaphor watch: In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
* Extremism and the college classroom.
* Unpaid Interns Gain the Right to Sue. What a country!
* Women, confidence, and institutional sexism.
* “I’m sorry, that sounds horrible,” he continued. “I would have put my own wife or daughters there, and I would have been screaming bloody murder to watch them die. I would gone next, I would have been the next one to be killed. I’m not afraid to die here. I’m willing to die here.”
* Accreditors ask City College to voluntarily terminate its own accreditation. Tempting, but….
* Rare Video Of People Actually Riding Action Park’s Infamous Water Slide.
* A new study which statistically analyzed temperature data over the pre-industrial period and the industrial period has rejected the hypothesis that global warming is due to natural variability at confidence levels greater than 99%.
* North Dakota Finds Itself Unprepared To Handle The Radioactive Burden Of Its Fracking Boom.
* Informed awareness is the worst, part one: A Mrs. Doubtfire sequel is in the works. Because you demanded it!
* Informed awareness is the worst, part two: Why are they even calling this show 12 Monkeys?
* Democracy is a shell game: Cities in Oklahoma are prohibited from establishing mandatory minimum wage or vacation and sick-day requirements under a bill that has been signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.
* When Google Tried to Build a Space Elevator.
* Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom.
* The Secret “Ronbledore” Pages of Harry Potter Revealed By Court Order. I always knew.
* 1648: The first emoticon.
* What’s on Captain America’s to-do list in other countries that aren’t America.
* And your periodic reminder that child poverty is a policy choice. Maybe it’s time we just turn things over to the rats.
Friday Morning Links
* 10 Forgotten Photos of The Civil Rights Struggle.
* The world’s ten oldest trees.
* Putin’s $50-billion Olympic Games. White Snow, Brown Rage. Primetime TV schedule.
* On Occupy, climate justice, and climate democracy.
* River Contaminated With High Levels Of Lead, Arsenic, Mercury After NC Coal Ash Spill.
* Fracking Is Stressing Water Supplies In Areas Already Wracked By Drought.
* AOL’s Miserly New 401k Policy Will Ruin It For the Rest of Us. Why have these sick babies betrayed us?
* FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List. Just ten years and $4 million later, though, it’s all resolved.
* And a little something for the sports nerds: a new basketball stat.
Sunday Links
* Two articles I read on the plane: “The Brain on Trial” and Aleksander Hemon’s account of his young daughter’s illness. The latter is only available offline, which (trust me) is for the best. By the end I was nearly bawling. For your own happiness do not read this article.
* The growing controversy over President Obama’s illegal waging of war in Libya got much bigger last night with Charlie Savage’s New York Times scoop. He reveals that top administration lawyers — Attorney General Eric Holder, OLC Chief Caroline Krass, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson — all told Obama that his latest, widely panned excuse for waging war without Congressional approval (that it does not rise to the level of “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution (WPR)) was invalid and that such authorization was legally required after 60 days: itself a generous intepretation of the President’s war powers. But Obama rejected those views and (with the support of administration lawyers in lesser positions: his White House counsel and long-time political operative Robert Bauer and State Department “legal adviser” Harold Koh) publicly claimed that the WPR does not apply to Libya.
* Rick Perry vetoes no-texting-while-driving bill because of freedom.
“I support measures that make our roads safer for everyone, but House Bill 242 is a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults,” Perry wrote in his explanation of one of his vetoes.
Perry said in his veto statement that the key to stopping people from texting while driving is “information and education.”
Freedom!
* Mightygodking highlights ethical interpretation with twenty-five movies distilled to a one-sentence moral.
* And Love These Pics takes us on another trip to the New Orleans Six Flags Theme Park abandoned after Hurricane Katrina.
You Have Five Seconds
As if you needed any other reason to switch to GMail, it now features an “Undo Send” option, something I have longed for ever since I stopped using AOL ten years ago. GMail! Catch the fever.
Gerry Canavan 