Posts Tagged ‘Batman’
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
NYE Links!
* Finally, my moment has arrived: Smuggling LEGO is the new smuggling diamonds.
* The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.
* On Optimism: Looking Ahead to 2015.
* From climate denialism to climate cashing-in with nothing in between. Are We Approaching the End of Human History?
* Thanks to energy drilling operations, northern New Mexico is now covered by “a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud.”
* Serial, episode thirteen: 1, 2, 3 coming today or tomorrow I think. A sort-of out-there blog post on what it could all mean: The Serial Podcast: The Possible Legal Implications of Jay’s Interview for Jay & Adnan.
* UI Chancellor Responds To Salaita Report. This is actually a fairly significant walk-back of Wise’s position — I think she’s actually more progressive on academic freedom than Cary Nelson now — though since she’s still pretending Salaita wasn’t actually hired it doesn’t do much good for him.
* Professors are teaching less while administrators proliferate. Let’s find out how all that tuition is being spent. Colleges Need a Business Productivity Audit. Of course the actual text of the article zeroes in on instruction first, which is not the source of the problem…
* It’s the original sin of college football, and you’ll never guess what it is. In Harbaugh hire, excessive pay would send wrong message. How one former coach perpetuated a cheating scheme that benefited hundreds of college athletes. Shut down middling college football programs and shift the money back to instruction.
* The arc of history is long, but: New Michigan Law Bars College Athletes From Unionizing.
* Another angle on the growing Title IX mess: Mothers of accused college rapists fight back.
* Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play At Hard Work.
* Brent Bellamy reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization.
* 538 profiles the best damn board game on the planet, Twilight Struggle.
* Really interesting idea from Bleeding Cool about what might be happening with Marvel’s sliding timescale. I could honestly see them doing this, or something like it, at least until they start getting some rights back.
* Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America.
* Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.
* Is Wisconsin destined to be a Rust Belt backwater?
* Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond.
* Seriously, though, sometimes you can’t just switch the skin tones and have the story turn out the same.
* Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence.
.* BREAKING: Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.
* Counterpoint: Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri.
* To Discipline and Punish: Milwaukee Police Make Late Night Visits.
* I say teach the controversy: Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination.
* High School Basketball Team Banned From Tournament Over ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirts.
* This Deadspin piece has really made me regret softening my anti-Vox stance in recent months.
* Sounds like the Afghanistan war has ended again. This is #3 or #4 at least, right?
* How to destroy a city: just build a highway.
* The CDC is saying we’re all going to get the flu.
* And as if the IMF wasn’t bad enough.
* “Why should the legality of a sale of secrecy depend entirely upon who initiates the transaction? Why is bribery legal but blackmail not?”
* Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.
* No Charges for Police Chief Who Used Badge to Try and Intimidate Teen into Posing Nude.
* …but believe it or not it is possible for a cop to get fired over a fatal shooting.
* LAPD Launches Investigation Into ‘Dead, Dead Michael Brown’ Song Sung at Retired Cop’s Party.
* The labor movement should rally against police violence, whether police unions like it or not. I think we should let this whole work stoppage thing play out personally.
* Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine de Blasio. The headline actually undersells the severity of a story where they talk about planting drugs on his daughter.
* Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.
* Elsewhere in the richest city in the richest nation ever in the history of the world.
* Military Turns To Prison Labor For $100 Million In Uniforms — At $2-Per-Hour Wages.
* What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition.
* North Dakota to eliminate taxes because fracking fracking fracking forever fracking. What could go wrong?
* Real life Alien vs. Predator: Cuomo vs. the New York State Legislature.
But Cuomo has insisted he would agree to a pay hike only if the Legislature addressed a long series of criminal and ethical charges against many of its members by passing several reforms, such as a limit on outside incomes earned by lawmakers and a system of publicly financed campaigns.
The legislative leaders, however, responded that Cuomo was making demands he knew were unacceptable in a politically motivated effort to appear as a reformer because he’s under federal investigation for dismantling his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel.
* “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing.”
* Streetcars, maybe not so great?
* Heartbreaking story of a trans teen’s suicide, based on a suicide note that went viral. Now go hug your kid.
* Exciting new pioneers in research:
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors
ALLEN C. GOODMAN (Wayne State University)
JOSHUA GOODMAN (Harvard University)
LUCAS GOODMAN (University of Maryland)
SARENA GOODMAN (Federal Reserve Board)We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
* Bat-Kierkegaard: The Dark Knight of Faith.
* Want to feel old? This Is What the Cast of Doug Looks Like Now.
* For its first Star Wars spinoff Disney has selected the impossible task of recasting Harrison Ford. They chose… poorly.
* Austerity in everything: Science proves once-in-a-lifetime moments will just make you more depressed.
* And there’s more! You’re more likely to die on your birthday.
* Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide.
* “Deputies said the shooting appears accidental”: Idaho toddler shoots and kills his mother inside Walmart.
* Wake up, sheeple! Back to the Future predicted 9/11.
* From io9: Physics students at the University of Leicester claim to have calculated the amount of energy required to transform water into wine.
* Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses.
* And I guess I always knew I’d die on a roller coaster.
A Very Special Second Helping of Friday Links
* A new Kelly Link story at McSweeney’s. It’s a very Merry Christmas indeed.
* Serial decided when it would end, so it could continue. What’s the Verdict? Racism and the Case against Serial. More on That Later: The Truth about Serial. I don’t want to brag guys but I solved this whole thing yesterday in just one tweet:
* Silent Spring: Autism linked to 3rd trimester pollution exposure.
* Why Many Inner City Schools Function Like Prisons. School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson.
* Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.
* Your Waitress, Your Professor.
My perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and “intelligent” work.
* The best thing on the Internet today: Pulp Nintendo 1, 2, 3.
* You’ll never get me into one of those things: the transporter is real.
* John Protevi has another good post on the situation at Marquette for those following this story on which I am not commenting (am not commenting, AM not commenting, am NOT commenting…):
As to Marquette’s current course of action, I find it troubling, but I would hazard a guess at to their motivations, based on a presumption that university administrations use a risk management rationality: MU may think that their risk of losing a Title IX suit or OCR complaint claiming that they did nothing when a student was subject to the creation of a hostile work or education environment was greater than the risk of their losing a wrongful discipline case by McAdams, as well as the cost to their reputation if people cast this as an academic freedom issue and the cost to their donor base by alums who take McAdams’s side.
The above is an explanation, not a justification. The university’s risk management calculations might converge with normative values if one feels that a claim of academic freedom does not excuse the creation of a hostile environment for a student.
* Gritty Realism, Snowpiercer, and the Tedious Trauma of the Real. I’m just glad we’ve finally found a scenario where rotating enslavement of children is the progressive solution.
* Who do you think would win if Batman fought Superman?
* And Merry Christmas, just kidding: Santa’s real workshop: the town in China that makes the world’s Christmas decorations.
Tuesday Shazbat
* The world is awash in Robin Williams remembrances today, but for my money I’d recommend his recent appearances on WTF and Harmontown. Louie. Longreads has also collected four essays and his appearance on Charlie Rose. Robin Williams’s Best Bad Movie. Suicide contagion and social media. How to report a suicide. The MetaFilter thread.
* It’s primary day in Wisconsin. Endorsements from Shepherd-Express.
* Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend’s death. Police Reportedly Refused Offer to Interview Man Who Was With Michael Brown During Shooting. Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard. Ferguson Police Cite Safety Risk in Decision Not to Name Officer in Shooting. Ferguson, MO, is 67 percent black, and its police force is 94 percent white. The FBI steps in to investigate ultimately sign off on everything’s that happened. Dystopia as how-to manual.
* Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. Jon Burge, Torture, and the Militarization of the Police. American Gulag.
* Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be predicated on “peace, progress, and prosperity,” with “peace” defined as “forever war.”
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* CFP: Mean Girls.
* Nnedi Okorafor’s syllabus for ENGL 254: Science Fiction.
* On the greatness of Metroid.
* What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.
* Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger, Part I.
* The City and the City watch: a proposal that Israel and Palestine become grosstopic, overlapping states.
* Cary Nelson keeps digging: Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment. Corey Robin has been coordinating some boycott campaigning for English and Political Science / Philosophy, though personally I think the English statement’s extension to tenure review cases is just too self-undermining to commit to.
* Announcing The Daily Show Podcast, without Jon Stewart.
* Marquette will give John Lewis an honorary degree at the new student convocation on August 20.
* California debates ‘yes means yes’ sex assault law.
Legislation passed by California’s state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called “affirmative consent standard” that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party to engage in sexual activity.
Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it’s also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep.
For some reason that escapes me, this is hugely controversial.
* The time Bruce Wayne had an affair with Barbara Gordon while she was dating Dick Grayson, impregnated her, before prompting her to head out and have a miscarriage while crimefighting. You know, for kids.
* Uber vs. Lyft: whoever wins, we lose.
* Apple’s workforce after 30 years of operation is still 70% male. And that’s better than most of the tech sector.
* Hoarders are the new Luddites.
Help a hoarder consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
* Activision is making a new King’s Quest. Space Quest and Quest for Glory next!
* How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.
* And because everything is a bummer today: Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey.
My question would be: can we not foresee a continuation of that ridiculousness for the foreseeable future, where you have one fiction built on another fiction, one crisis to the next?
Yes. I raise that question a bit in the book by saying there are these fictitious forms of capital that can continue to circulate and feed off each other, and they’re all Ponzi schemes, which can sometimes go on for a long time. Yes, there may be some possibility we’re moving into this era of fictitious capital formation and circulation, which is then managed by the central banks because they can just add zeros to the money supply at the drop of a hat, and have been doing so. First off, it seems to me increasingly senseless, and I suspect that people will start to say, well what’s the point of all of this? Secondly, I think the internal contradictions of that are that there’s going to be crashes, but then there have been financial crashes popping off all over the place for the last 20 years and capital has survived. For instance, there’s one in Indonesia, one in Argentina and then there’s one somewhere else. Dubai World goes bankrupt, somebody else goes bankrupt, there are all these asset bubbles popping up all over the place, and maybe we can continue in that vein for a while. But at some point, I think the possibilities will run out.
An Especially Worthy Entry in Our Ongoing Series of Wednesday Links
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* ‘Well, Here’s What Won’t Pass,’ Obama Says Before Listing 35 Proposals.
* Aaron Bady’s amazing “African Writers in a New World” interview series at Post 45 continues with Teju Cole.
* Daniel Maguire on the McAdams Case at Marquette. Really hard to believe they’ve somehow managed to create a situation where McAdams has the better side of the argument.
* Ashon Crawley on Ferguson and utopia.
* Cruel optimism and the NFL (or, Life in the Factory of Sadness).
* Meanwhile: Patriots Black Ops Division Kills Opposing Team Leaders In Three States; “All in the Game,” Says Belichick.
* The NCAA, Last Seen Claiming It Has No Jurisdiction Over Decades-Long Academic Fraud at UNC, Says It’s Investigating Academic Fraud at 20 Colleges.
* …or live long enough to become the villain: The Vagina Monologues is now reactionary.
* Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stint as an Advice Columnist for Ebony Magazine. Happy Robert E. Lee Day! …anytime the same state and culture invites you to worship a human being they tried to kill, we should be suspicious of the ways they want us to remember.
* I think I rediscover this fact with the same surprise every couple of years: In 1991, a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had indeed plagiarized parts of his dissertation, but found that it was “impractical to reach, on the available evidence, any conclusions about Dr. King’s reasons for failing to attribute some, but not all, of his sources.” That is, it could have been anything from malicious intent to simple forgetfulness—no one can determine for sure today. They did not recommend a posthumous revocation of his degree, but instead suggested that a letter be attached to the dissertation in the university library noting the passages lacked quotations and citations.
* Neoliberalism and the Degradation of Education (Alternative Routes, Vol. 26). A ton of good links here.
* Teach or perish. Teach and perish.
* 80 rich people now have as much as 50% of the rest of humanity combined. Let’s meet our overlords!
* Science Fiction Under Totalitarian Regimes, Part 2: Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Here was Part 1: Germany.
* Coming soon: Keywords for Radicals.
* On the failure to reclaim the word “slut.”
* When the trains stopped coming down the track, Tryon, NC began to crumble, and since then something disappears each day.
* Groundbreaking Artwork Reimagines Disney Princesses As Office Supplies.
* ‘Cultural Marxism': a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim. This is a term you see in the comment threads no one is supposed to be reading more and more.
* ‘Overworked’ drone pilots are baling out. Chomsky: Obama’s Drone Program ‘The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times.’
* Lonesome Alito Declares Marriage Only Between A Man And The Sea.
* True crime watch: Milwaukee man says stabbing sister, father was ‘right thing to do.’ Spoiler alert: no.
* I want to believe! Russia Orders Obama: Tell World About Aliens, Or We Will.
* It’s already working! U.S. Air Force Releases Thousands of Pages Of Declassified UFO Files.
* 10 Rules For Making Better Fantasy Maps.
* Trustees Refuse to Reconsider Salaita’s Firing: “That Decision Is Final.”
* Scenes from the class struggle at the University of California.
* How Did We Get Here? The AAUP’s evolving emphasis on collective bargaining.
* The twilight of a particular organizational form should not be confused with the end of worker organization itself. Institutions are not permanent, but workers’ interest in organization is. And besides, the current model is disappearing whether we like it or not.
* Can you name these cities just by looking at their subway maps?
* Broken clock watch: Cuomo wants a train to La Guardia.
* Star Wars considering casting Tatiana Maslany for every role, one assumes.
* Pay Attention, 007! On the Usability of James Bond’s Gadgets.
* Majestic Animals That Could Go Extinct This Century.
* A lifetime of being paranoid about this confirmed.
* The trouble with Harley Quinn. Via io9.
* Sid Meier’s next: Starships.
* And doctors, who have already taken everything from us, want our pizza too. The line must be drawn here!
Written by gerrycanavan
January 21, 2015 at 7:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic fraud, academic freedom, advice, aliens, America, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Barack Obama, Batman, Bill Belichick, Boston University, broken clocks, cities, civilization, class struggle, college sports, comics, cruel optimism, cultural marxism, cultural preservation, die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, Disney, dissertations, doctors, don't read the comments, drones, dying towns, ecology, empire, fantasy, FBI, feminism, Ferguson, football, gadgets, games, gender, Harley Quinn, history, How the University Works, I want to believe, income inequality, interviews, Israel, James Bond, La Guardia, labor, maps, Marquette, marriage equality, mass extinction, medicine, memory, Milwaukee, misogyny, MLK, murder, NCAA, neoliberalism, New England Patriots, New York, NFL, Noam Chomsky, North Carolina, office supplies, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, pizza, plagiarism, politics, princesses, protest, radicals, resistance, revolution, Robert E. Lee, Samuel Alito, science fiction, Sid Meier, Star Wars, State of the Union, Steven Salaita, subways, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, Teju Cole, tenure, terrorism, the line must be drawn here, the rich are different, the truth is out there, totalitarianism, trans issues, true crime, UFOs, UIUC, UNC, unions, University of California, Utopia, Vagina Monologues, war on education, war on terror, words, writing, zunguzungu