Posts Tagged ‘Apollo 11’
All Your Weekend Links
* Waywiser Press has two new MP3s of Jaimee reading from her first book, How to Avoid Speaking: “Derrida Eats a Dorito” and “On Beauty.”
* New SF from Cixin Liu: “The Weight of Memories.”
* Duke Lit is hiring. And Georgetown has a cluster hire in African American studies.
* Automatically preordered: Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, New York 2140. China Miéville’s October: A History of the Russian Revolution. The Miéville- and Le-Guin-fronted new edition of More’s Utopia. Box Brown’s graphic history of Tetris.
* I love this Oulipoesque writing game from Steve Shaviro, on writing like a pundit.
- Every sentence must be a cliche.
- There must be no logical or narrative connection among the sentences. Each one must be a complete non sequitur.
* Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom.
* Reevaluating Teaching Evaluations.
* Can grad students unionize? Academia awaits major labor board ruling.
* Univision buys Gawker for $135m, shuts Gawker itself down.
* Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.
* Relatedly: Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons. Some immediate effects.
* The new Star Trek distribution model in a global context.
* 15 Technologies That Were Supposed to Change Education Forever.
* Foundation 124 is out, with a special focus on More’s Utopia.
* I feel this now about a lot of things I read: Why Scott Snyder Doesn’t Write Damian Wayne Much.
* Unfortunately, Landis — the director who co-wrote and executive produced Clue — and the studios were completely wrong about there being any box office appeal for a film with three endings. As Lynn explained, “The audience decided they didn’t know which ending to go to, so they didn’t go at all.”
* Meanwhile, from the death of culture.
* It was the deadliest massacre of disabled people since World War II. How do we honor the victims if we don’t even know their names? Remembering the Sagamihara 19.
* Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing.’
* Something unexpected I learned recently: the practice of giving presidential candidates classified intelligence briefings began in the 1950s with President Truman, who didn’t want his successors coming into office without knowing crucial information (the way he hadn’t known about the Manhattan Project).
* Donald Trump is assembling gathering the Legion of Doom. (The ubiquitous Twitter joke was calling it “the hospice stage.”) Trumpism: first as tragedy, then as farce. The Presidential Debates Will Almost Definitely Exclude Third Parties. Finding Someone Who Can Imitate Donald Trump. Battleground Texas? The short, unhappy life of the Naked Trump statue. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots.
* The GOP’s Chances Of Holding The Senate Are Following Trump Downhill.
* A digital exhibit from the Milwaukee Public Library on the history of race and class in Milwaukee. Milwaukee by the numbers.
* Frodo’s trip to Mordor as a Google Map. Via Boing Boing.
* Aetna to pull out of the Obamacare markets, apparently for revenge. EpiPen Price Hike Has Parents of Kids With Allergies Scrambling Ahead of School Year.
* Diagnoses of 9/11-linked cancers have tripled in less than 3 years.
* Why gifted kindergarten is 70 percent white. How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success.
* “Clickbait”-esque titles work for academic papers too.
* Why aren’t there more women in Congress?
* What crime is the robbing of a neighborhood, compared to policing it?
* These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk. In a panic, they try to pull the plug…
* The Original Plan for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four Sounds Completely Amazing.
In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great…well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.
By coincidence, we watched the actual Trank Fantastic Four tonight and I was utterly shocked to see that there was almost a decent movie lurking in there somewhere.
* Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered.
* The spectacle of mixed gender racing unravels fascistic models of sex/gender difference and sex/gender purity. Every woman runner competes with the lie that men are faster than women. That fiction can only be maintained by ensuring that men and women never run with each other — when men and women run with each other, they scale down each other’s understanding of their differences. The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion. Capturing Semenya.
* The Forgotten Tale of How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village Into a Prison.
* That time NASA accidentally sold a piece of irreplaceable Apollo history for less than $1,000.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Heidelberg Project is coming down.
* Allow me to recommend the Julia Louis-Dreyfus portion of this episode of the Katie Couric Podcast, where she talks Veep, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The Al Franken episode is pretty good too.
* This episode of Criminal, on the founder of The Leaky Cauldron’s experience of being cyber-stalked for eight years, is also a really fascinating listen.
* I’m sad about this, but it’s probably time: Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman Announces End of Long-Running Superhero Comic Invincible.
* Perhaps, once at a summer barbecue, when both were still alive, Maude grabbed Marge’s hand under the table and held tight.
* Meritocracy and system dysfunction. Meritocracy and system dysfunction and free tuition at public colleges.
* One of the biggest crime waves in America isn’t what you think it is: wage theft.
* The race of the police officer doesn’t matter. The race of the mayorimplementing the policy doesn’t matter. What matters is who enjoys a “right to the city” — and who gets thrown up against a wall and patted down.
* New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
* Elsewhere at Jacobin: Jacobin vs. Scientology.
* Scenes From the Terrifying, Already Forgotten JFK Airport Shooting That Wasn’t.
* Stranger Things, Parallel Universes, and the State of String Theory. And an interesting proposition from Chuck Rybak: Is the ubiquity of cell phones driving the nostalgia craze in film and TV?
* Please don’t mess this up: Marvel And Hulu Announce Runaways TV Series.
* Or this one either: Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar return for animated Batman movie.
* What killed The Nightly Show?
* When Nixon almost implemented universal basic income.
* Understanding the Harambe meme. Understanding the bees are dying at an alarming rate meme.
* A list of 150+ SF Writers of Asian Descent.
* Terraforming Mars without Nukes.
* Gins often said that the reason she and Arakawa made art and architecture was to “construct optimism.” Their whole philosophy began there, in the desire to embrace being alive and to shift their focus away from the certainty of death. Gins made the choice to believe that art, and her work, were strong enough to do that. It was her version of faith, and her work made that faith solid, physical. Her life, like all our lives, was often filled with sadness and difficulty. There were periods of depression, anxiety, sick parents, financial problems, her husband’s illness and death. Through it all, she insisted not just on continuing to live, but on living forever. Trying to build a world where fewer people suffered made her own suffering bearable. A year and a half after Arakawa’s death, Gins recalled in a letter to a friend her struggle to move forward. “Despite my shattered state,” she wrote, “in spite of the gaping hole that had been punched into my optimism, I asserted that nothing is of more interest than to be alive.”
* J.K. Rowling announces new Harry Potter short story collections.
* Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In the 136 years scientists have been tracking global temperatures, there has never been a warmer month than this July, according a new NASA report.
* Arctic Cruises for the Wealthy Could Fuel a Climate Change ‘Feedback Loop’.
* RIP John McLaughlin, who I watched with my father every week for a decade. Bye-bye.
* Dune, as it was always meant to be experienced.
* Feet of clay: Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland vs. the unions.
* Exercise we can believe in: Watching horror films burns nearly 200 calories a time.
* And physicists may have discovered a fifth fundamental force of nature. This is the one that gives people superpowers, I know it.
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.
Closing Every Tab Because My Computer Will Barely Work Right Now Links
Sorry I’ve been so quiet! Between summer teaching and wrapping up a few big projects it’s been a very busy couple of weeks. Here’s every tab I had open!
* CFP: Hamilton: A Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre.
* 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalists and Shirley Jackson Award Winners.
* Graduate students in literary studies may often feel despair, even deadness and meanness, but an excess of cool seems like an especially implausible explanation. Far more damaging are bad mentoring, crippling overwork, social and geographic isolation, and the absence of opportunities to join the profession after spending a decade training. For too many graduate students, whether critical or postcritical, earning a PhD is the end — not the beginning — of a promising academic career. The skepticism that threatens graduate students and young faculty members results, therefore, not from the skepticism of academic theorists but from the skepticism of legislatures, administrators, donors, austerity-loving think tanks, and taxpayers. The Hangman of Critique.
* Jeff Vandermeer: Hauntings in the Anthropocene.
* The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF.
* The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Have Been Determined.
* The Best of Science Fiction (1946) and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016).
* Cleveland Police Are Gearing Up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention. Case Western in the News: Changes to campus operations during RNC. What’s a University For? Meet the Student Fighting Case Western U. for Shutting Down Campus to House 1,900 Police Officers.
* At least the convention went great.
* “Secretary Clinton Is A Different Person Than Donald Trump,” Says Bernie Sanders in Ringing Endorsement. GOP Establishment Relieved After Conventionally Abhorrent Beliefs Make Way Onto Presidential Ticket.
* Clinton has 945 Ways to Win. Trump Has 72.
* A Brief History of Turkey and Military Coups. The view from inside the bunker. Turkey ‘suspends 15,000 state education employees’ after attempted coup, including 1,577 deans at all universities.
* US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters.’
* Bleeding the poor with fees and fines, Virginia edition.
* The end of Roger Ailes. The Drudge Era.
* Now, Baton Rouge. A 538 Special on Gun Deaths in America. The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear. “One group is responsible for America’s culture of violence, and it isn’t cops, black Americans, Muslims or rednecks.” No lives matter. And from the archives: A Manifesto from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.
* Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth. Donald Trump Heads Into The Convention With Barely Any Campaign At All: Many of the numbers listed for his state offices don’t even work. Did you ever have to make up your mind? Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets. “Trump’s campaign logo mocked on Twitter.” He’s Really Pretty Bad at This. Being Honest about Trump. Jeb! We Play the Trump Board Game So You Don’t Have To. Republicans Keeping Their Dignity. Teach the controversy: Is Trump Working for Russia? Understanding Trump Supporters: The Machine of Morbius. Back to the Future in Cleveland. The Last GOP President?
* Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? Confessions of Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter.
* Donald Trump Said Hillary Clinton Would ‘Make a Good President’ in 2008. Donald Trump should talk about Hillary Clinton’s email all the time. Here’s why. Pollster Frank Luntz: GOP has ‘lost’ the millennial generation.
* There are about 20 households where she now lives. Like Susie, most of the residents in Snowflake have what they call “environmental illness”, a controversial diagnosis that attributes otherwise unexplained symptoms to pollution.
* Newborn Ducklings Judge Shape and Color.
* Small Arms, Long Reach: America’s Rifle Abroad.
* Education Department’s proposed rule for student debt forgiveness could threaten traditional colleges as well as for-profits, particularly over its broad view of what counts as misrepresentation. College and the Class Divide. Wicked Liberalism.
* As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis.
*Dying in America, Without Insurance.
* When Not to Get Married: Some 19th Century Advice.
* The Ontology of Calvin and Hobbes.
* The Fight Between Berkeley’s Academics And Its Football Team Is Getting Ugly.
* A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.
* Black Dishwasher at Yale University Loses Job After Shattering “Racist, Very Degrading” Stained-Glass Panel. Yale Rehires. Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor.
* Ghostbusters (2016) and The Fan. Fake Controversy, Terrible Comedy. Ghostbusters‘ nostalgia problem. And from the archives!
Ghostbusters more than any other film highlights the growing devaluation of public-sector jobs at the hands of privatized for-profit entities operating for mercenary reasons. The protagonists of this movie spend their time removing unwanted, unpaying residents from spaces they occupied their whole lives (and longer) and placing them into a form of prison at the behest of the current owners who can get more rent from more affluent persons and don’t like the neighborhood being ‘brought down’ by those now-undesirable who lived there first. Not only that, but budget cuts have forced the New York Public Library to retain the dead as current employees, cutting into what should have been their final retirement, and the entire crux of the film comes from belittling and mocking elected officials’ uselessness in the face of corporations who can solve the city’s problems for cash and without all the useless regulation tying up the mayor, firefighters and police. Ghostbusters is essentially Blackwater for the dead, cleaning up the town of its unwanted past, making life safe for the corporate oligarchies.
* A Zero Star Review of The Secret Life of Pets.
* ‘Pokémon Go’ and the Persistent Myth of Stranger Danger. If Pokémon Go could resemble the best of childhood, it might have some value. What it actually does is very different.
* Did Wes Anderson Design North Korea?
* How Sexual Harassment Halts Science.
* Why rich parents are terrified their kids will fall into the “middle class.”
* Prepare to cry: Appleton teen makes heartbreaking decision to die.
* To recap, the idea behind the Reverse Turing Test is that instead of thinking about the ways in which machines can be human-like we should also think about the ways in which humans can be machine-like.
* “He noted that further research is needed”: Women Wearing Low-Cut Tops In Application Photos Are 19 Times More Likely to Land a Job Interview.
* Penn State Football really should have gotten the NCAA death penalty.
* Am I a man, dreaming he is a Pokémon, or am I a Pokémon dreaming he is a man? Here’s All the Data Pokémon (Was) Leeching From Your Phone. Resist Pokémon Go. And as Adorno said: To catch Pokémon after Auschwitz is barbaric.
* OK, just take my money: Nintendo’s next assault on nostalgia is a mini-NES with 30 built-in games.
* Canon Police: Sulu’s Sexuality. But, you know, let’s not lose our heads. J.J. Abrams Won’t Re-Cast Anton Yelchin’s Role in ‘Star Trek’ Movies. For Some Baffling Reason, This Star Trek Beyond TV Spot Spoils the Big Twist. But the next one will be good, we swear.
* That piece I’m writing on Star Wars and canonicity will just never, ever be finished: Grand Admiral Thrawn Joins Rebels and the New Star Wars Canon.
* The headline reads, “Gonorrhea may soon be unbeatable.”
* Cancer, or, death by immortality.
* Hacking the brain in Silicon Valley.
* This blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22.
* Comic Books Are More Popular Now Than They’ve Been in 20 Years.
* Presenting the Apollo 11 Code.
* 67 Years of LEGO — by the numbers.
* Darwin’s Kids Doodled All Over His “Origin of Species” Manuscript.
* Neanderthals Ate Each Other and Used Their Bones as Tools.
* The Films Rian Johnson had the Episode 8 Cast Watch.
* This sizzle reel from Rogue One is the best.
* Treaty loophole might let someone claim ownership of the Moon.
* Should You Quit Your Job To Go Make Video Games?
* A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories of consciousness.
* And Mightygodking pitches the dark, gritty Sesame Street reinterpretation you didn’t know you needed.
Wednesday Links!
* This is the only movie franchise Disney should produce from now on.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Jonathan Blow says The Witness, his followup to Braid, is finally almost done.
* The news gets worse, academics: Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s.
* And presenting the world’s most delicious diamond.
Tuesday Links!
* Ian Bogost on moralism and academic politics: The Opposite of Good Fortune is Bad Fortune.
* This week on Studio 360: Will Sci-Fi Save Us?
* The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program.
* They say there are no heroes anymore, but I’ve decided not to promote any of the truly horrible things people have been saying about Gaza. You’re welcome.
* Lazer-guided metaphors about America in 2014: FEMA Wants to House Migrant Children in Empty Big Box Stores.
* Or this one: Luxury Condo’s “Poor Door” Is Now City-Approved.
* The Globe and Mail has a powerful piece about Huntington’s disease and the right to die.
* UC Regents approve pay increase for university executives. Top UC coaches earn twice as much money as top UC brain surgeons. Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?
* In recent years, a handful of community colleges in that state have outsourced the recruitment and hiring of adjunct instructors – who make up the overwhelming majority of the community college teaching force – to an educational staffing company. Just last week, the faculty union at a sixth institution, Jackson College, signed a collective bargaining agreement allowing EDUStaff to take over adjunct hiring and payroll duties.
* Segregation and Milwaukee, at PBS.
* A recent random spot check of hundreds of arraignments by the Police Reform Organizing Project showed that in many courts around the boroughs, 100% of those appearing for minor legal violations — things like taking two seats on a train or smoking in a train station — are people of color.
* The nation’s top gun-enforcement agency overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations, a USA TODAY investigation shows.
* Sun Ra Teaches at UC Berkeley, 1971.
* There’s a place in Cornwall where LEGO washes in with the tide.
* Historical Slang Terms For Having Sex, From 1351 Through Today.
* Five Former Players Sue NFL Players Union Over Concussions.
* In praise of UNC’s anti-grade-inflation scheme.
* Holy NDA, Batman! One of the nation’s largest government contractors requires employees seeking to report fraud to sign internal confidentiality statements barring them from speaking to anyone about their allegations, including government investigators and prosecutors, according to a complaint filed Wednesday and corporate documents obtained by The Washington Post.
* First a LEGO episode, now a Futurama crossover: The Simpsons really wants me back. It’s been fifteen years, dudes, just let me go…
* How does squatters’ rights fit into Airbnb’s business plan?
* This Woman Has Been Confronting Her Catcallers — And Secretly Filming Their Reactions.
* Art Pope vs. North Carolina.
* Red Klotz, who led basketball’s biggest losers, the Washington Generals, dies at 93. A Statistical Appreciation of the Washington Generals And Harlem Globetrotters.
* “So, what have you learned in your many years of toddler torture?” “They hate it.”
* Dan Harmon on Paul F. Tompkins’s Speakeasy, with beloved Milwaukee institutions like the Safe House and the Marquette University English Department warranting mentions. Now, for PFT to finally appear on Harmontown….
* Now, please hold all my calls: the next episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead comes out today…
Saturday Links
* A new Flight of the Conchords mini-episode is here to make everything okay.
* The Minority Report touchless interface is here, and it’s amazing.
* The Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t obtain life insurance. Here’s what they did instead.
* The Longform Guide to the Death of Football.
* Voter suppression efforts take another hit as a federal judge restores early voting in Ohio. I caught a tiny bit of Rachel Maddow last night and she was hammering the sensible point that opposition to early voting doesn’t even have the fig leaf of supposedly preventing non-existent “voter fraud” to legitimate it; it’s just voter suppression, in the raw, plain and simple.
By my count GOP efforts to manipulate the vote have now failed in Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin. I think Pennsylvania’s still up next.
* This story has everything: Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse.
The theft was discovered during a routine inventory check last week at the St-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse, where the syrup is being held temporarily. The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which is responsible for the global strategic maple syrup reserve, initially kept the news quiet, hoping it would help police solve the crime quickly.
* Now I want Doctor Who to do a whole bowling episode.
* You can now get your entire genome sequences for just $1000.
* The New Inquiry troubles Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites.
We must dismantle not just the existing spheres of influence and also their reason for being. The effort is impossible but simple: dismantle all the relationships that causes us to hand out and to seek favor, erase the notion of what is owed, render farcical the very idea of acknowledgments. An idealistic notion, yes, but I am just cynical enough to point out that this book of elite-bashing contains a pages-long acknowledgments section where Hayes pays due deference to a murderer’s row of wealthy, connected elitists. With each person he thanks, I can see the invisible lattice of patronage and nepotism, so archly dissected in the main text, spiral out and off the page.
* And rest in peace, Shulamith Firestone.
Firestone applied Marxist analysis to the status of women and argued that true liberation would come only when women were freed from childbearing. In Firestone’s utopian future, babies would be gestated outside the womb and raised by both sexes.
“The tyranny of the biological family would be broken,” she wrote.
More Thursday
* Fringe will get a fifth season.
* How much of the Moon’s surface did the Apollo 11 astronauts actually explore?
* Aside from the slave labor, why manufacture in China? Because that’s where the rare earth minerals are.
* Parks and Recreation creators preposterously claim The Wire as an influence.
* Science proves being bad at math makes you religious. I think I have that right.
* And tomorrow at Duke: the inaugural Novel conference, with Rebecca Walkowitz, Amitav Ghosh, Jacques Rancière, and more.
Project Apollo Archive
Celebrate NASA’s 50th the right way with this huge archive of space-program photographs at Project Apollo Archive. Via Cynical-C.
Eco-Optimism
When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.
Here’s the full text of the Al Gore “Moonshot” speech from earlier today.
That’s why I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
Between this and the similar T. Boone Pickens ad campaign I must confess to a little bit of eco-optimism lately. Maybe we won’t just drill ourselves into oblivion; maybe we’ll actually try to solve these problems while we still can.
There’s more commentary around the blogs, including Climate Progress, Huffington Post, and a nice annotated version of the speech at Dot Earth.
This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I’m asking you – each of you – to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org. We need you. And we need you now. We’re committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.
On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.
I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket’s engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.
We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.
The Eagle Has Touched Down
The eagle has touched down: the Apollo 11 landing site mapped onto a football field. Or, if you prefer, a baseball diamond.
Strange Maps continues to be one of the best blogs on the ‘net. They hardly ever post something I don’t want to link to…
Gerry Canavan 
