Posts Tagged ‘Batman’
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
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.
Weekend Links!
The link post yesterday went up only partially finished by mistake, so here’s the other half and then quite a bit more…
* Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 is out, with articles on First on the Moon, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Orphan Black/Extant, and even a review of Kingsman: The Secret Service by yours truly.
* The crew of the Enterprise going back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination? Check. Some “mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff”? Check. Time travel that results in Spock being the reason that Vulcans turn to logic? Check! Jesus? Check. Elsewhere on the Star Trek beat: Being Simon Pegg. Sulu Is Gay in Star Trek Beyond and It’s Not a Big Deal, unless you’re George Takei.
* Why is Hollywood ignoring this incredible black science fiction writer? They certainly haven’t had any problem ripping her off without attribution.
* The Only Good Tarzan Is a Bad Tarzan.
* The Many Faces of Strangelove, or, The Grand Incineration.
* The Night Of will turn your love of Serial against you.
* The Moon Is An Even Harsher CEO.
* Farewell to Pnin: The End of the Comp Lit Era.
* Dialectics of the Clinton Tuition-Free-College Plan. Meanwhile, I predict this will be framed by the right as an illegitimate direct payout to her constituents, regardless of the merits.
* “Please accept our condolences on your loss,” a letter from that agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said. “After careful consideration of the information you provided, the authority has determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will continue to be sent to you.”
* Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. San Diego. Dallas. A truly terrible few days in America.
* Alongside the tragedy in Dallas, new debates: Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing.
* The Future of Archaeology Is ‘Spacejunk.’
* Nailing it: “Psychologists recommend children be bored in the summer.”
* This Man Keeps Getting Killed in Terrorist Attacks. Dibs on the screenplay but in my version it’s a glitch in the Matrix.
* Clinton’s emails today, Clinton’s emails tomorrow, Clinton’s emails forever.
* George Saunders: Who Are All These Trump Supporters? Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector.
* Syllabus as Terms of Service, Syllabus as Manifesto.
* Ah, the pure knowledge of the sciences.
* The Myth of the English Major Barista?
* When we accept as commonplace the idea that the study of art, especially art that appeals to the masses — television, video games, comics — is less important than the study of much-fetishized STEM subjects, when we claim that the objective and the concrete requires expertise but the subjective and the abstract do not, then we are making a dangerous assumption. We are assuming that because something is made for everyone, and accessible to everyone, that its existence is somehow simple and straightforward — a vehicle for testing out theories without an aura of its own. But, art, especially art that seems to require the least amount of scholarly attention — reality TV, video games, comics — is precisely the art that most needs history, context, and deep study. Media matters and media has consequences.
* What Game of Thrones characters look like in the books. Game of Thrones Season Seven May Be Delayed Due to Inclement Weather.
* Corey Feldman has some bad news about that supposed Goonies sequel.
* Pottermore problems: Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowling’s North American magic.
* Underwritten Female Character: The Movie.
* Return of the Great Lakes Avengers. A 15-Year-Old Black Girl Is Going to Replace Tony Stark As Iron Man.
* The Center for Communal Studies promotes the study of historic and contemporary communal groups, intentional communities and utopias. Established in 1976 at the University of Southern Indiana, the Center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarships, publications, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad.
* The Strange Perils of Running a Novelty Item Empire.
* New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape story.
* Neoliberalism and the end of roads. Judge Orders Macy’s to Quit Fining, Detaining Suspected Shoplifters in In-Store Jail.
* 400 athletes vie for US Paralympics Team spots.
* African Union launches an all-Africa passport. Against globalization, for internationalism.
* Here’s How That Wild Lawsuit Accusing Trump of Raping a 13-Year-Old Girl Hit The Headlines. Sounds like most major media outlets are staying away from the story for a reason. When your campaign should share images from social media: A flowchart. Only 75 times. “Trump Campaign Departures Suggest That Perhaps This Is a Highly Dysfunctional Enterprise.” A White, Male Reporter Goes to a Trump Rally.
* So in the short-term, Britain is likely to be an increasingly nasty and hateful place to live, thanks in no small part to Farage’s accomplishments as a politician; in the long-term, Farage was very much a product of his moment, that spasm of backlash on the part of declining socio-demographic layers still steeped in a colonial culture, which is unlikely to be repeated. With Farage at its helm, Ukip operated adroitly on the accumulating dysfunctions and crises of British politics, finally convoking a popular bulwark that pulled Britain further to the right than it has been since the 1970s. And in the next few years, the reactionaries will seek to use their victory to achieve maximum damage, maximum reversal on all fronts. And there will be other sources of reaction in the coming decades. Yet, Farage’s resignation signals the looming end of this end of the pier show. Even if Britain survives as such, this Britain is finished.
* This is a genuinely scary time: The newly elected Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, urged a crowd of about 500 people on Thursday to kill drug addicts, according to the Guardian.
* Hardly Any Former Felons Have Registered to Vote in Virginia Since It Was Made Legal.
* Why 13-year-olds can no longer marry in Virginia.
* Why Title IX Has Failed Everyone On Campus Rape.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Crowdfund Your Wheelchair.
* Condoms Don’t Necessarily Help Teen Girls Avoid Pregnancy.
* Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds. Shock finding.
* Great white sharks congregate every year to party in the middle of the Pacific. This new camera tag might help us understand why.
* A new theory seeks two explain childhood disintegrative disorder.
* Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb.
* Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport. As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying the Price. Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People.
* Sometimes the world really can get together and avert a major ecological catastrophe before it’s too late. Case in point: A new study in Science finds evidence that the Earth’s protective ozone layer is finally healing — all thanks to global efforts in the 1980s to phase out CFCs and other destructive chemicals.
* That’s a hell of an act: “As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.”
* Real talk: should I be more worried about snails?
* Nice try, US Navy, but Batman had shark-repellent technology decades ago.
* A watched pot never boils. Self-driving car ethics. Why humanity is doomed.
* Is there life after capitalism?
* The $80M Bomb Detector Scam.
* This answers a lot of questions for me actually.
* And I could watch this GIF forever.
Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!
* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.
* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!
* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.
* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.
* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).
* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.
* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?
“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”
* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.
* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.
* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.
* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.
* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.
* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.
* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’
* Behind the Scenes at the Met.
* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.
* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.
* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.
* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.
* A(other) New Map for America.
* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!
* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.
* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!
* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.
* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.
* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!
* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.
* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.
* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.
* I was a men’s rights activist.
* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.
* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.
* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.
* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.
* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.
* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.
* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.
* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.
* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.
* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.
* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.
* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.
* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.
* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.
* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.
* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.
* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?
* And they said culture was dead!
* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.
* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.
* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.
* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.
* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?
* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.
Tuesday Is Soylent Green Day Links
* Exciting news! My book, Octavia E. Butler (the latest in the University of Illinois’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction series) has a November 1 publication date and a pre-order page on Amazon!
* Some upcoming events at Marquette English this month: “Resume Doctor and Interview Bootcamp” and a Pop Culture and Pizza Night on Hamilton: An American Musical. There’s also MuHuCon this weekend and the Marquette/UWM joint conference next weekend.
* And speaking of Hamilton: Google Hamilton truth! A little more from LGM and William Hogeland.
* Though the rumors are that they may actually have learned something from their mistake.
* Kim Stanley Robinson’s Next Book, New York 2140, Will Feature a Half-Submerged Manhattan.
* This Church Believes Humans Can Live Forever on Earth. Sold!
* We’re running out of water, and the world’s powers are very worried.
* University of Kansas Acquires 1,000 Zines from a Defunct Radical Library.
* This Is What Really Happens to Your Brain When You’re Tripping on LSD.
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college course work for recruits.
* The Creative Writing of the Internet’s Premier White Supremacist Forum.
* Welcome to Night Vale: Two percent of humans can hear the Hum, a mysterious, low rumble in the distance. It might exist. It might be imaginary. It might be both.
* Diabetes watch: Are full-fat dairy foods better for you after all?
* Can this election get stranger? How Gen. James Mattis could become the unlikeliest U.S. president in history. I don’t know anything about Mattis, and doubt that he’s the guy, but I still think sabotaging the Electoral College by running one or more regional candidates in order to throw the election to the House is the only GOP strategy left that has any chance of success.
* No matter how you measure it, Bernie Sanders isn’t winning the Democratic primary.
* Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life.’
* Louis C.K. Has Millions in Debt Thanks to “Horace and Pete.”
* Attawapiskat declares state of emergency over spate of suicide attempts.
* The most and least meaningful jobs.
* This Is How Long Sex Should Actually Last. Science.
* The finding that launched a thousand sexist jokes: Men May Be Able to Avoid Dementia by Marrying Intelligent Women, Researchers Say.
* “I think that porn has the power to do what Bruce Springsteen can’t”: Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws.
* No one knows why they remained healthy, Friend said. But DNA from such people could one day provide insight into ways to prevent or treat such catastrophic disorders. “Instead of looking at people with disease, you need to look at people who should have gotten sick,” said Friend.
* There’s an insanely well-hidden Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Easter egg.
* How precious is a longtime family dog? As valuable as an heirloom vase or family photographs? A Wisconsin appeals court says no.
* Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others: After 50 years of animal-welfare legislation, rats and mice are still left out in the cold.
* A major perk of the job for New York State corrections officers may soon be off the table: The ability to be as brutal as they’d like with prisoners without having to worry about facing any serious consequences.
* Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were.
* Why Hollywood studios are taking a stand against an anti-revenge-porn bill.
* I want to believe: The Warriors Have A 93 Percent Chance Of Hitting 73 Wins.
* Huge, if true: Planet X to really cause mass extinction this month?
* And I know I say this a lot, but sometimes a thing really is ideology at its purest.
Monday Morning Links Has Tied the Record for Most Wins in a Single Season
* Ecotopia 2121: Visions of Our Future Green Utopia.
* Kids Can Sue Over Climate Negligence, Judge Says.
* This is all to say that it would be very surprising, not to mention ill-advised, for DC/WB to go forward with the franchise without making significant adjustments. Every other studio has either scrapped a franchise or made significant changes to movies that had far higher multipliers than BvS. Also, people should be careful not to simply look at the total gross of a movie to gauge its success, particularly franchise movies. For instance, although BvS will have a similar gross to Guardians of the Galaxy and be in the ball park of Deadpool, the high multipliers for those movies indicate that fans crave sequels or are eager to watch similar movies. BvS’s low multiplier suggest that people were curious to check out the movie and/or were lured in with the heavy marketing, but ultimately decided that the movie was not for them.
* Inside the New DC Fan Schism.
The feminist critique of comics has made “not asking” a lot harder. That, in itself, is a victory. The point is not to change the thinking of the active sexist. (Highly unlikely.) The point is to force the passive sexist to take responsibility for his own thoughts.
* Huge, if true: They Don’t Just Hide Their Money. Economist Says Most of Billionaire Wealth is Unearned.
* The Coming Left-Wing Majority.
* Faculty Salaries Show Strong Recovery From Recession. NO COMMENT
* What We’re (Really) Talking About When We Talk About “Time to Read.”
* Every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000. Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
* Rejected Princesses. The backstory.
* Unraveled: The Mystery Of The Secret Street Artist In Boston.
* Scenes from the Dem primary: Bernie Sanders, socialist mayor (1985). Past cases suggest Hillary won’t be indicted.
* The U.S. Is Failing Miserably on Six of 10 Markers of Gender Equality.
* What could possibly go wrong? Gun Company Turns Real Handgun Into Clone Of The Nintendo ‘Duck Hunt’ Zapper.
* For the First Time In A Century, Wild Tiger Populations Are Beginning to Rebound.
* The Wire Creator Eyes Series on Spanish Civil War.
* At HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure.” One day this happened to a friend of mine. She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her.
* Consider this: for almost 2,000 years and counting the entirety of Western culture has been brainwashed. The fields of biology, economics, religion, and psychology are built on a lie. Even those who self-consciously reject this falsehood are subconsciously shaped by it. It’s unavoidable and all pervasive. It’s made us who we are. Indeed, it’s turning us into monsters. What is this lie exactly? It’s the assumption that humans are born bad.
* I called Sweden’s new national number to talk to a random Swedish person.
* What Are The Demographics Of Heaven?
* The criminal justice system encourages prosecutors to get guilty verdicts by any means necessary—and to stand by even the most questionable convictions. Can one crusading court stop the lying and cheating?
* And getting ready for Wednesday: a people’s history of the Crying Jordan meme.
Every Last Weekend Link
* Food for Marquette English’s Hamilton event later this month: A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems. And another: Hamilton, Inc.
Broadway can be a very poor investment, but when shows hit, they really hit. The most successful of them dwarf the revenues of even the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. “Hamilton” could easily run on Broadway for a decade or more. In September, the first road production will open in Chicago, and it will be a “sit down” show, meaning it is intended to stay there for a year or more. Ultimately, there may be as many as seven “Hamilton” companies, in addition to the one on Broadway, performing at the same time in multiple American and international cities. Ticket revenues, over time, could reach into the billions of dollars. If it hits sales of a mere $1 billion, which “Hamilton” could surpass in New York alone, the show will have generated roughly $300 million in profit on the $12.5 million put up by investors. (There are many eye-popping numbers to contemplate, but maybe the most striking one is this: The show is averaging more than $500,000 in profit every week.)
* Call for Papers: Faulkner and Hemingway conference at the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. I was just down there to give a talk and had a fantastic time.
* New digital journal, thresholds, co-edited by Fran McDonald and Whitney Trettian. Here’s the CFP for the debut issue:
The debut issue of thresholds will focus on the theme of the extraneous. We seek manuscripts that deal with the extra, the foreign, or the strange from any angle. We welcome contributions that combine the creative and critical in their approach, and are eager to consider work that is experimental in both content and form. Final submissions will be comprised of a short piece (a maximum of 7000 words) accompanied by a series of fragments. Please submit 400-word abstracts and a brief bio to thresholdsjournal@gmail.com no later than May 15, 2016. Final essays will be due July 31, 2016.
* Elsewhere on the Duke alum beat: Huge congrats to Ainehi Edoro and Brittle Paper, which is now part of the Guardian!
* Protest and Power at Duke. Duke Students End Sit-In in President’s Office. A Lawsuit, Unmet Demands, and Coloring Books: Inside Duke’s Sit-In. A Guide to the Allen Building Takeover Collection, 1969-2002.
* The point is to implement an authority structure that can control public universities under permanent austerity and in the absence of a growing and rising middle-class. Culture wars are good for discrediting particular sources of sociocultural knowledge like ethnic studies, feminist studies, or Middle Eastern Studies. Budget cuts are good for taking the whole public university sector down a few notches. But to reengineer a static enterprise, after decades in which their boards failed to maintain the state revenues on which the system was built, public university governors need the audit and assessment practices that Europeans have long called New Public Management (NPM).
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college coursework for recruits.
* Jacob Brogan reviews the first issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther. And here’s not the only one!
* If you’re not, you should really be reading The Vision.
* Can you imagine, just for a moment, being a Chancellor of a university—a position with an enormous amount of responsibility to an incredibly wide range of stakeholders—and have someone interrupt you with a ‘No Whining!’ sound effect while you are trying to describe how many staff members you’ve had to lay off and what programs you’ll be cutting, with no end in sight? Would you have an existential moment of crisis where your inner voice conceded, “Oh my god, I’m an adult”? Well, I guess the ‘flexibility’ everyone wants for Chancellors doesn’t apply to their actually speaking without permission and an approved message.
* Questions for the #4c16 crowd.
* To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of lines for male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
* Incredible narrative about a professor allowed to return to their job at UCLA after egregious sexual harassment. And it’s not even the most unbelievable story of an unrepentant predator allowed to walk free with no significant punishment I’ve read this week.
* Yes, apparently Zack Snyder has the same carte blanche to make Justice League, even after turning the first-ever movie starring three of the biggest, most popular superheroes in the world into a film that analysts believe won’t even make a billion dollars worldwide. Maybe that still sounds like a lot of money, but you know what actually made a billion bucks? Tim Burton’s needless 2010Alice in Wonderland film. If you put Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman together in a live-action movie for the first time ever, don’t you think that movie should probably outgross Iron Man 3?
* My sense is that militarized drones, those machines for remote seeing and killing known in military jargon as “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” should be understood to signify an end of empire in two senses. First, an end as in conclusion, or terminus. Hannah Arendt argued that proliferating death is not a sign of an emerging or persisting hegemony but its waning: “rule by sheer violence,” she notes, “comes into play where power is being lost.” This means that the assassinations proliferating in the name of the American phase of accumulation are the sign not of its strength but its incipient weakness; never mind autumn, we could say that drone war is a sign of the coming winter. Second, I mean an end in the Aristotelian sense of telos, or purpose. If we take seriously the fact that empire is best understood not as a culture or as a discourse but as the monopoly on putatively legitimate violence—the stretching of the state’s power over life and death past the boundaries of its “own” populace—then the power of sovereign decision crystallized in globally operated, remote assassination machines is the very essence of empire: its telos, or end. President Obama’s now-infamous “kill list meetings” sharpen to an obscene purity the American state’s power of judgment over life and death beyond its own citizenry and constitute the distillation of imperium as such.
* Never say never again: ‘Speedy Gonzales’ Eyed As Animated Feature At Warner Bros.
* New Jersey University Was Fake, but Visa Fraud Arrests Are Real. Fake New Jersey University Established by Cops to Catch Visa Fraud Has Pretty Good Job Placement. Fake, real, real, fake, let’s not quibble — are they hiring?
* The ideology of the future: Kiplinger’s presents 20 Amazing Ways Life Will Be Different in 2030.
* The Future Happened 56 Million Years Ago.
* Plants Taking Over New York City Is What Will Happen When the World Ends.
* At this Florida jail, the inmates are also zookeepers.
* How to Write a History of Video Game Warfare.
* Prestige TV is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake: Dexter return to television confirmed.
* My next screenplay: Radioactive boars are running wild and breeding uncontrollably in the northern region of Japan contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
* Bernie Sanders Is Even Less Competitive Than He Appears.
* Bruce Springsteen Cancels North Carolina Concert in Protest of Anti-LGBT Bathroom Bill.
* Our prayers answered, Paul F. Tompkins was finally on Harmontown. I’ve also really been loving the back catalogue of Hello, from the Magic Tavern and (at long last) Welcome to Night Vale after a sojourn through It’s That Episode. Non-podcast news after the link!
* Now more than ever, it’s time for Animaniacs.
* * So does this: The Warriors Are Now Long Shots To Win 73 Games.
* Saddest of all: The New Jersey Swamp Dragons? It almost happened.
* Not for me, but maybe for you: LARB has a Grantland-style sports spinoff.
* Grant Morrison was right! Science Says Superman Should Be Black.
* This seems pretty plausible, honestly.
* And I don’t need to tell you what’s coming. Every Cool Detail We Spotted in the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer.
