Posts Tagged ‘BBC’
Friday Links!
The death of the academic job market really makes the MLA a kind of Children of Men situation.
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) January 5, 2017
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
Every event feels like potential Reichstag fire. The OSU attack, this Chicago kidnapping, the situation in Whitefish, MT. On the precipice.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 5, 2017
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
in the future, every superpower will be ruled by an unhinged narcissist for fifteen minutes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 6, 2017
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 6, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2016?, 2017, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, animal intelligence, animals, Arnold Schwarzenegger, austerity, bankruptcy, BBC, Canada, Carrie Fischer, celebrity culture, Chicago, chickens, Children of Men, CIA, college football, college majors, computers, David Foster Wallace, decadence, democracy, Donald Trump, drugs, energy, Episode 9, faculty senates, film, Five Thirty Eight, Four Futures, Freddie deBoer, futurity, games, general election 2016, George Lucas, Go, hate crimes, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, Infinite Jest, James Joyce, Jesuits, Lake Huron, Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lord of the Rings, masculinity, math, math gremlins, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, MLA, Monty Hall problem, moral panic, mortgage interest deduction, museums, Nate Silver, national security, Nazis, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, oil, originality, pastiche, pedagogy, Peter Frase, pollution, power-pairing, Princess Leia, probability, race, racism, reality television, Rebekah Sheldon, Reichstag fire, reproductive futurity, rhetoric and composition, Rogue One, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Schumer, science fiction, Seinfeld, Sherlock, social capture, Soviet Union, sports, Star Wars, subprime mortgages, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, The Apprentice, the audacity of narcissism, the Left, Tolkien, tournaments, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, UVM, voting, white guilt, white privilege, white supremacists, white supremacy, whiteness, winter, Wisconsin, women, writing, zeitgeist
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.
whymynotcaringmuchabouttheolympicsprovesmymoralsuperiority.Salon.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 6, 2016
I was never an Olympian because I reject the false promises of nationalism. That is the only reason.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 7, 2016
* 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?
I wasn’t super-enthused about STAR TREK: DISCOVERY being set b/w TOS and TNG, but prospect it will be set before TOS fills me with despair.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 3, 2016
* 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.
At this point Zack Snyder and his deranged artistic vision has cost Warner Brothers, what, 2 billion dollars at least?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 7, 2016
* …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.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 7, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic writing, administrative blight, air travel, airlines, airplanes, alcohol, America, animal intelligence, Apollo 11, asthma, babies, BBC, Berkeley, Bill Cosby, billboards, biological clocks, birds, books, Brazil, Buzz Aldrin, Captain America, Catholicism, Cheney, children, China Miéville, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comics, consumer culture, criticism, crows, DC Comics, debt, Deep Space Nine, Delta, documentary, Donald Trump, donations, donor class, ecology, editing, Electoral College, emergency exits, endowments, everything is not fine, exhaustion, fables, female orgasm, Florida, flossing, Fox News, Game of Thones, games, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, Georgia, graft, Green Bay, Greenland, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, highways, Hillary Clinton, Hitler, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human-animal hybrids, I'm with Her(zog), ice sheet collapse, ideology, immigration, isolationism, J.K. Rowling, Japan, jokes, journals, Kelly Link, kids today, La Jetée, lies and lying liars, life, love, mad science, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marvel, masculinity, meal plans, medicine, men, military-industrial complex, millennials, moral superiority, nationalism, neoliberalism, NIH, Nintendo, nuclear war, nuclearity, nuns, Olympics, parenting, pigoons, play, politics, polls, poverty, private colleges, protest, quantum computing, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Rio, roasts, Roger Ailes, romance, room and board, Salon, sanitation, science fiction, sea level rise, secret exits, Seinfeld, sex, sociology, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, student debt, student loans, student movements, Suicide Squad, Super Mario, Teju Cole, the Amish, The Last Days of New Paris, the Moon, time travel, Tolkien, tsunamis, tuition, unlikely voters, veterans, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Wisconsin, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, World War II, writing, Zack Snyder
Don’t Look a Day Over 240 Links
* SFRA Awards 2016. Congrats all!
* The Student Loan Suicides. New Jersey’s Student Loan Program is ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking.’
* There is money available in the digital humanities in a way that there has never been money in English departments, ever. With very limited exceptions, the idea that one could get a six-figure grant for doing something in English is just unheard of. The only types of grants people typically got — with the exception of major career-capping grants like Guggenheims — were salary replacement for a year to write a book. That was the best we could hope for. So the idea that all of a sudden there was some part of English where someone could get $300,000 to $400,000 grants was both politically striking and disturbing. It wasn’t like the leading figures in English were saying we have to have this large pot of money for DH. It was external people, especially Mellon and the NEH — under the influence of some of the big DH people, whose animus for the rest of English was palpable and explicit — who decided to do this. This has had a tremendously deforming effect.
* So the problem isn’t that we can’t win reformist victories for workers. History has shown that we can. The problem is what comes after victory, and we need a theory of socialism and social democracy that prepares our movements for that phase.
* Is it better to hope or to despair? Do you want to create better art, or do you want a better world in which to create? Are you an artist or an activist? Yes.
* Life after the end of the world: California Heat Wave Spells Doom For Avocados.
* The richest, most powerful, most prosperous nation in human history.
* Guy Leaves Fake Animal Facts All Over Los Angeles Zoo.
* Brain-drain as social justice.
* Butler and Trump (though I should say she was really thinking of Reagan, who used the same slogan).
* The greying of the homeless.
* Teen who urged boyfriend to kill himself will stand trial.
* A Look at the Use of Drones During the Obama Administration.
* Stereogum reports five years of hard paperwork for Apple has finally paid off, and the company has obtained a patent on technology that will disable your phone’s camera when it detects a specific infrared signal. In the time it took you to read that sentence, you probably also had the three seconds of reflection time it would take a reasonable person to think, “Oh, that sounds extremely problematic.”
* 2 weeks out, and Trump’s convention is a total mess. Sad! TPM continues to pound the Trump fundraising saga. Tracing Donald Trump’s Social Media Ties to White Supremacists. The latest example.
* Still one of my favorite images on the web ever: Richmond Golf Club, Temporary Rules (1940).
* You just can’t win: Closing apps to save your battery only makes things worse.
* The things you learn from Lazy Doctor Who: the original series one did an (now lost) Dalek episode without the Doctor or Companions.
* New Study Busts the Myth That Knights Couldn’t Move Well in Armor.
* We can either spend our time thinking and funding tentacle porn or we can spend our time thinking and funding civilization. I know what I’d pick…
Written by gerrycanavan
July 7, 2016 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, activism, aging, anti-Semitism, Apple, armor, art, avocados, Barack Obama, batteries, BBC, brain drain, bullying, California, China Miéville, Chris Christie, civilization, class struggle, climate change, copyright, corpocracy, daleks, debt, democracy, digital humanities, Doctor Who, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, drones, Dungeons & Dragons, dystopia, English departments, entrepreneurs, fantasy, Fermi paradox, futurity, general election 2016, golf, grants, guns, harassment, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, infrastructure, iPhones, knights, Make America Great Again, medieval times, medievalism, Mellon grants, meritocracy, money, Nazis, NEH, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, police state, politics, revolution, roads, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, science fiction studies, SFRA, shrapnel, social media, socialism, student debt, student loans, suicide, surveillance society, television, tentacle porn, texting, the Left, the Singularity, transgender issues, true crime, true facts, Twitter, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on terror, white supremacy, World War II, zoos
Thursday Links!
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) November 4, 2015
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Written by gerrycanavan
November 5, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Aaron Sorkin, Ark of the Covenant, astronauts, atheism, Barack Obama, BBC, Ben Carson, Bush, Cheney, class struggle, Democrats, dinosaurs, Elmo, football, gender, globalization, His Dark Materials, How did we survive the 1990s?, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Iraq, Kate Hayles, McKenzie Wark, military-industrial-academic complex, NASA, neoliberalism, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, patriotism, Philip Pullman, Pixar, Player Piano, politics, propaganda, stories, teach the controversy, technology, the Anthropocene, the dark side of the digital, the digital, the pyramids, time travel, Uber, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, writing
Tuesday Night Links!
* In case you missed it, last night I put up my syllabi for the fall, on J.R.R. Tolkien and American Literature after the American Century.
* Mark your calendars, East Coasters: Jaimee Hills reads from her award-winning book How to Avoid Speaking at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC on October 26. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that preorders are available now at Amazon and Waywiser Press.
* The world’s most popular academic article: “Fuck Nuance.”
That is the kudzu of nuance. It makes us shy away from the riskier aspects of abstraction and theory-building generally, especially if it is the rst and most frequent response we hear. Instead of pushing some abstraction or argument along for a while to see where it goes, there is a tendency to start hedging theory with particulars. People complain that you’re leaving some level or dimension out, and tell you to bring it back in. Crucially, “accounting for”, “addressing”, or “dealing” with the missing item is an unconstrained process. at is, the question is not how a theory can handle this or that issue internally, but rather the suggestion to expand it with this new term or terms. Class, Institutions, Emotions, Structure, Culture, Interaction—all of them are taken generically to “matter”, and you must acknowledge that they matter by incorporating them. Incorporation is the reintroduction of particularizing elements, even though those particulars were what you had to throw away in order to make your concept a theoretically useful abstraction in the first place.
See also: nuance trolling as academic filibuster.
* More ACLA CFPs: Utopia Renewed: Locating a New Utopian Praxis. Innovation, Creativity, and Capitalist Culture.
* Trying to figure out what percentage of instructors are adjuncts is the world’s most dangerous game.
* But Thrun and other MOOC founders seem less than concerned about living up to their earlier, lofty rhetoric or continuing that tradition of bringing education to an underserved population. True, they haven’t entirely abandoned their rhetoric about equal access to educational opportunities. But they’ve shifted to what’s becoming a more familiar Silicon Valley narrative about the future of employability: a cheap and precarious labor force. That’s the unfortunate reality of “Uber for Education.”
* Artisanal college. Cruelty free, cage free, farm-fresh.
* From Corporate Leader to Flagship President?
* Reform Higher Ed? Treat Badmin Like Bankers.
* Literary magazines for socialists funded by the CIA, ranked.
* The strategic value of summer.
* Forty years of Born to Run. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
* Meanwhile, in today’s exciting new anti-academic moral panic: UNC’s The Literature of 9/11.
* As Murray Pomerance points out, plagiarism is a form of theft, and we don’t steal our own work. On the contrary, we expand its reach, and build on it, thereby making it more relevant as the contexts that produce it change.
* UT Knoxville encourages students to use ‘gender-neutral pronouns.’ Washington State University disavows syllabus with ban on certain words.
* The Largest-Ever U.S. Gallery Of Jack Kirby’s Comic Art Heads To California.
* And no one talks about it: Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins. More here. I’m an outlier on the progressive side of the fence insofar as I think Clinton might really have to pull out of the race over the emails — so it’s even worse than it seems.
* The cartoon bodies of Mad Max: Fury Road.
* How Many Men Did The Golden Girls Sleep With, Exactly?
* The FBI’s surveillance of Ray Bradbury. And the Sad Puppies.
* Cold Opening: The Publicity Campaign for Go Set a Watchman.
* The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina serves as a reminder that resilience is a function of the strength of a community. Gentrification’s Ground Zero: In the ten years since Katrina, New Orleans has been remade into a neoliberal playground for young entrepreneurs. The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover.
* Incredible essay by Lili Loofbourrow on her sister’s death by suicide this summer.
* Whatever happened to DC Comics?
* The free encyclopedia anyone can edit.
* Another Samuel Delany interview.
* Janelle Monáe Vows To ‘Speak Up’ On #BlackLivesMatter.
* I love dumb stuff like this, when the corrupt screw up and lose: Business owners try to remove all voters from business district, but they forgot one college student.
* Cancer cells programmed back to normal by US scientists.
* British Library declines Taliban archive over terror law fears.
* Upstate New York Secessionists Demand Freedom From City They Mooch Off Of.
* I told you that if there were something beyond the grave, I would contact you.
* Inside Wisconsin’s Slender Man stabbing.
* I confess I am totally stunned by the Jared Fogle case. I thought I was cynical enough.
* The arc of history is long, but at least that Coach reboot has already been cancelled.
* The Racial Politics of Disney Animals.
* Why Dolphins Are Deep Thinkers.
* Fall In Love with Your Job, Get Ripped Off by Your Boss. Related: workers shouldn’t work for free.
* Firstborn Girls Are the Best at Life. Any Zoey could have told you that!
* Militarized drones are now legal in North Dakota.
* Future Jails May Look and Function More Like Colleges. And, you know, vice versa…
* Never say “unfilmable”: The BBC is going to try to make a show out of The City and the City.
* Declare victory and go home to your panic room: America Has Lost The War Against Guns.
* And some things mankind was just never meant to know: See how easily a rat can wriggle up your toilet.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 1, 2015 at 7:38 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 9/11, academia, ACLA, adjunctification, adjuncts, afterlife, Alison Bechdel, America, American literature, animal personhood, animals, art, artisanal college, austerity, Barack Obama, BBC, Born to Run, Boston Market, cancer, canons, CFPs, charter schools, China Miéville, CIA, Coach, college, comics, corruption, daughters, DC Comics, death, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, Denali, disaster, Disney, disruptive innovation, do what you love, dolphins, drones, Duke, Exxon, filibusters, Fun Home, Fury Road, games, gender, Golden Girls, guns, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Katrina, innovation, Jack Kirby, Janelle Monae, Jared Fogle, libraries, literary magazines, Mad Max, Marquette, Mars, MOOCs, moral panic, Mt. McKinley, music, my scholarly empire, NBC, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, no thank you, North Dakota, nuance, oil spills, Oliver Sacks, plagiarism, police state, police violence, precarity, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, psychology, race, racism, rats, Ray Bradbury, Sad Puppies, Samuel R. Delany, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, secession, self-plagiarism, servility, sex, Slender Man, Springsteen, Stephen Colbert, Subway, suicide, summer, syllabi, Taliban, television, the Anthropocene, the archives, The City and the City, the courts, the law, theory, Tinder, toilets, Tolkien, trigger warnings, true crime, UNC, University of Iowa, Utopia, voting, what it is I think I'm doing, Wikipedia, Wisconsin, words, work, Zoey, Zygmunt Bauman, Žižek
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 19, 2015 at 7:30 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, altac, Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Jackson, animal personhood, animal rights, Apple, ASLE, Atlanta, Auschwitz, austerity, autism, bankers, banks, Batman, BBC, Bechdel test, body cameras, books, capitalism, cash, Catholicism, CFPs, charter schools, Chevron, class struggle, college basketball, college sports, comics, Commissioner Gordon, Cooper Union, cultural preservation, David Chase, DC Comics, Department of Justice, desegregation, disability, Disney, dolphins, dystopia, ecology, English, entrepreneurs, environmentalism, Episode 7, Eric Harris, Expanded Universe, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, film, Game of Thrones, Gawker, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, graduate school, graduate student unions, Green Planets, Harry Potter, hate-watching, HBO, history, Hitler, homelessness, homeschooling, hope-watching, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ideology, Illinois, intelligence, Israel, Italy, Jesus, job creators, kids today, Los Angeles, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, misogyny, money, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, NCAA, negative interest rates, neoliberalism, New York, nightmares, North Carolina, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, nuns, Obi-Wan, Occupy Cal, oil, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, PhDs, photography, Poland, police, police corruption, police state, police violence, politics, pop culture, Princess Leia, Princeton, prison-industrial complex, privatization, privatize everything, privilege, race, racism, radio, religion, rendementsdenken, Return to Oz, RFK Jr., Robert Heinlein, run it like a sandwich, Sad Puppies, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Sea World, SETI, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, Sopranos, standardized testing, Star Wars, student debt, SUNY, Superman, Sweet Briar, television, terror, the Amazon, the contemporary, the courts, the Force, The Force Awakens, the Holocaust, The Joker, the law, The Left Hand of Darkness, the past is another country, the Pope, they, toilets, trailers, tuition, UC Davis, unions, University of Amsterdam, University of Oregon, Ursula K. Le Guin, war on drugs, war on education, white people, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, worrying, Yoda
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird
Bask in the Warm Glow of Martin Luther King’s Dream with These Exciting Sunday Links
* CFP: Modernism’s Child (Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, April 20, 2015).
* CFP: Obsidian Call for Submissions: Speculating on the Future: Black Imagination & the Arts.
* Martin Luther King’s other dream: disarmament.
* Our most cherished MLK Day ritual: remembering there is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.
* 13 Words of the Year from Other Countries. Another set of possible candidates.
5. DAGOBERTDUCKTAKS, NETHERLANDS
In the Netherlands, the Van Dale dictionary group chose dagobertducktaks, “Scrooge McDuck tax,” a tax on the super rich. The “youth language” category choice wasaanmodderfakker (someone with no ambition in life, from a blend of aanmodderen, “muddle,” and motherf***er). The “lifestyle” category choice was vergeetverzoek, “forget request,” a request to a search engine that sensitive information be removed.
* For-Profit College Investor Now Owns Controlling Share of Leading Education Trade Publication. IHE’s ownership statement says that editors retain full editorial independence.
* Aaron Bady told me “Trust Us Justice: 24, Popular Culture and the Law” was a great talk forever ago, but I didn’t have time to get to it until this week. But it was indeed great, and something that will be useful in my classroom to boot.
* Comics studies is not a busman’s holiday. Great rant. This goes for science fiction studies too! It’s hard and miserable work and you should leave it all to us!
* Photomediations Machine: Exploring the Anthropocene.
* Lili Loofbourow in the New York Times: “TV’s New Girls’ Club.”
Above all, promiscuous protagonism is interested in truths that are collectively produced. Its greatness stems not from a single show runner’s bleak and brilliant outlook but from a collaborative vision of art that admits a spectrum of shades. The central question driving this movement forward is no longer “How did these mad men come to be?” but rather “How did these women get so good at staying sane?”
* If anything I think Matt Reed’s concerns about the inevitable cuts to #FreeCommunityCollege don’t go far enough.
“…Meets the Next Recession” frame still assumes the purpose of the plan is basically beneficent and that the Dems are trying to do good.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 17, 2015
But under the Canavan Reading™ of the plan, cuts to #FreeCommunityCollege are inevitable Phase 2 once you’ve used it to gut the four years.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 17, 2015
In some sense for a post-Great-Society neoliberal reform, the rollback of the plan IS the plan. Enjoy those Obamacare subsidies kids.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 17, 2015
* Behold, Phase 2! That was quick.
* Free Community College Is Nothing to Celebrate, or What Piketty Means for Education.
* And from the leading light of the anti-schooling left: The hidden costs of free community college.
One of the ways we talk about the value of education is in terms of a student’s future “competitiveness.” It sounds like it should correlate directly with wages, but they’re competing against other workers like them. And from a worker’s perspective, a rising educational tide keeps wages under control for all boats. More schooling doesn’t necessarily mean better jobs, it means more competition for the same set of jobs. The so-called “skills gap” is a myth; if employers needed educated labor so badly, they would pay like it. Instead, the costs of training more productive workers have been passed to the kids who want to be them, while the profits go to employers and shareholders. The state assuming some of those costs for some of those students doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Rather, it’s another boon for the ownership class.
* Philly’s adjuncts seek to rewrite their futures.
* New talk of splitting off Madison from the rest of the UW system.
Mikalsen said the most persistent rumbling of late is that the universities would operate as a public authority, with the state playing a much reduced role in overseeing hiring practices, construction bids and other internal matters that university officials have long said could be done more efficiently and cheaply with more autonomy. The trade-off would come in reduced state aid, Mikalsen said.
* And it sounds like UNC is next.
* 1970s Film: Vintage Marquette University. More links below the video!
* It’s a bit of a weird way to be selling the world’s biggest sporting event—and we’re gonna build a super-cool stadium and then tear it down again because everyone knows stadiums suck—but points for honesty, at least.
* The second interesting thing about the Packers, or football, I’ve ever heard. Here of course was the first. Go Pack, times two!
* Nobody Expects the Facebook Inquisition. Also from Burke: An Ethic of Care.
Perhaps that means “check your privilege” is a phrase to retire because it invites that kind of ease, a lack of awareness about what that statement hopes for and requires. If it’s not an expression of an ethic of care, trying to radar-ping the world around it to find out who else shares or might share in that ethic, and not a threat with power behind it, then what it usually leads to is the moral evacuation of a conversation and the production of a sort of performative austerity, of everyone in a community pretending to virtue they do not authentically embrace and avoiding the positive or generative use of the forms of social power they might actually have genuinely privileged access to.
* Eric Holder ends the scandal of civil asset forfeiture, at least for now.
* Florida police use images of black men for target practice.
“Our policies were not violated. There is no discipline that’s forthcoming from the individuals regarding this,” Dennis said.
* While the ire of environmental activists remains fixed on the Keystone XL pipeline, a potentially greater threat looms in the proposed expansion of Line 61, a pipeline running the length of Wisconsin carrying tar sands crude. The pipeline is owned by Enbridge, a $40 billion Canadian company, which has been responsible for several hundred spills in the past decade, including one in 2010 near Marshall, Mich., reportedly the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history.
* The stark disparities of paid leave: The rich get to heal. The poor get fired.
* Few New Parents Get Paid Time Off.
* “Carry bolt cutters everywhere”: life advice from Werner Herzog.
* Last night “The Daily Show’s” Jessica Williams delved into a baffling Alabama law: HB 494. The law takes state funds — funds that are scarce in the Alabama justice system — to appoint lawyers for fetuses.
* How Gothic Architecture Took Over the American College Campus.
* Solar Is Adding Jobs 10 Times Faster Than the Overall Economy.
* “Zero Stroke Was A Mental Illness That Affected An Entire Country.”
* Love, marriage, and mental illness.
* The $4 billion worth of subsidies represents a record high outlay at the very time Christie says budget shortfalls are preventing him from making actuarially required pension payments. What could explain it this incomprehensible paradox? It’s been thirty-five years and the media is simply incapable of admitting that when Republicans claim to care about deficits they are lying.
* Some bad news, y’all, overparenting doesn’t work either.
* Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone.
* I’ll never punish my daughter for saying no.
* Group projects and the secretary effect.
* Making the school day longer will definitely fix it. I suppose every generation feels this way but I really feel like the 1980s and 1990s were the last good time to be a kid.
* Teach the controversy: Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists. Meanwhile, everything in the ocean is dying.
* But it’s not all bad news: Ron Howard recording new narration for recut of Arrested Development season four.
The biggest downside to a Walmart opening up in your community is that after all the protests, the negotiations, and, almost inevitably, the acceptance, the retail giant might just break its lease, pack up shop, and move a mile down the road. The process starts all over again, and Walmart’s giant, hard-won original behemoth of a structure sits abandoned, looming over its increasingly frustrated neighbours.
* Duke University announced it would broadcast the Muslim call to prayer from its iconic chapel, then backed down after threats of violence.
* Kepler has given many gifts to humanity, but we should be careful throwing around words like “habitable” when talking about worlds 1,000 light years away, about which we only know sizes and orbits. It’s not my intention to put a damper on things, or to take the wonder and imagination out of astronomy. Science requires both imagination and creativity, but also analytical thought and respect for observational evidence. And after only 20 years of exoplanet discoveries, the observational evidence is rich, beautiful, and stands on its own. We don’t know the odds that life will arise on other worlds, but we’ve got a few tens of billions of rolls of the cosmological dice.
* Kotsko shrugged: The perpetual adolescence of the right. Along the similar lines, but thinking of ethics instead of intellectualism, I always think of David Graeber’s “Army of Altruists” from Harper’s, almost a decade-old now, on the way elites have cordoned off all meaningful work for themselves and their children alone.
* Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty. But wait! Let’s quibble about the numbers!
* Hidden laborers of the information age.
* Just this once, everybody lives: Netflix Renews Deal for ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Luther,’ More BBC Series.
* Around the mid 2000s it became popular in Sweden for teenage boys to wear rubber bands around their legs on top of their jeans. The more rubber bands you had and variety in colors the more alpha you became to the other teenage boys.
* Like Uber, but for veillance. Of course the university is at the cutting edge:
We’ve got an early warning system [called Stoplight] in place on our campus that allows instructors to see what a student’s risk level is for completing a class. You don’t come in and start demonstrating what kind of a student you are. The instructor already knows that. The profile shows a red light, a green light, or a yellow light based on things like have you attempted to take the class before, what’s your overall level of performance, and do you fit any of the demographic categories related to risk. These profiles tend to follow students around, even after folks change how they approach school. The profile says they took three attempts to pass a basic math course and that suggests they’re going to be pretty shaky in advanced calculus.
* #FeministSexualPositions. (NSFW, obviously.)
* I guess I just don’t see why you’d bring your baby to work.
* Top 10 Biggest Design Flaws In The U.S.S. Enterprise. I can’t believe “elevated warp nascelles perched on extended towers are super vulnerable to attack” didn’t even make the top ten.
* Dave Goelz explains how to Gonzo.
* Apocalypse zen: photos of stairs in abandoned buildings.
* And I guess that settles it. Little Boy Who Claimed to Die and Visit Heaven Admits He Made It Up.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 18, 2015 at 3:23 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 24, abortion, academia, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, afterlife, Alabama, altruism, apocalypse, architecture, Arrested Development, art, attachment parenting, austerity, Ayn Rand, Barack Obama, BBC, Bobby Jindal, bolt cutters, boondoggles, Boston, CBO, CFPs, children, Chris Christie, civil asset forfeiture, civil rights movement, class struggle, comic studies, conferences, cultural preservation, Daily Show, daughters, David Graeber, deficits, digitally, disarmament, Doctor Who, Duke, dynamic scoring, ecology, Eric Holder, extrasolar planets, Facebook, far out, feminism, Florida, football, for-profit schools, free lunches, Germany, good advice, Gothicism, groovy, group projects, Heaven, helicopter parents, historical memory, history, How the University Works, income inequality, Inside Higher Ed, Islam, Islamophobia, job training, jobs, Keystone XL, kids today, kleptocracy, labor, language, libertarianism, lies and lying liars, lifehacks, Lili Loofbourow, Line 61, Louisiana, love, Madison, Malcolm Harris, Marquette, marriage, mass extinction, mental illness, misogyny, Mitch Hurwitz, MLK, modernism, modernity, MOOCs, neoliberalism, Netflix, NFL, not safe for work, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, ocean acidification, oil, oil spills, Olympics, overparenting, Packers, paid leave, parental leave, parenting, pedagogy, pensions, photographs, podcasts, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, poverty, Princeton, privilege, race, racism, rants, Republicans, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, school, science fiction, science fiction studies, Scott Walker, Scrooge McDuck, Settlers of Catan, sex, social media, solar power, stadiums, Star Trek, surveillance society, Sweden, talks, tar sands, taxes, teaching, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, the courts, the debt, the law, the Netherlands, the oceans, they mess you up your mom and dad, Thomas Piketty, TNG, torture, tuition, Twitter, Uber, UNC, University of Wisconsin, war on education, war on terror, Werner Herzog, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, work, Yale, YouTube, zero stroke
Saturday Links!
* Does the BBC want Moffat off Who? Well, then, I guess that’s pretty much everyone.
* The AV Club argues the American Office, to the end, was a great television show about how terrible love can be.
* So you survived the apocalypse. Here’s what would it take to rebuild the world.
* How to Avoid Toxic Chemicals.
* But it’s not only the Globe. This failure is repeated across the mainstream media landscape — the product of a mindset in which climate change is simply another environmental problem, albeit a particularly complex one for which we’ll eventually find a technical fix, mainly by doing more or less the same things we’re doing now, only more efficiently and with better technology. It’s nothing to get too excited about. It’s certainly not anything to sacrifice your career over.
* Mark Fisher on affective labor. Warning: The ultimate imagistic reference is pornographic, if that’s unpleasant for you.
Being exploited is no longer enough. The nature of labour now is such that almost anyone, no matter how menial their position, is required to be seen (over)investing in their work. What we are forced into is not merely work, in the old sense of undertaking an activity we don’t want to perform; no, now we are forced to act as if we want to work. Even if we want to work in a burger franchise, we have to prove that, like reality TV contestants, we really want it. The notorious shift towards affective labour in the Global North means that it is no longer possible to just turn up at work and be miserable. Your misery has to be concealed – who wants to listen to a depressed call centre worker, to be served by a sad waiter, or be taught by an unhappy lecturer?
Yet that’s not quite right. The subjugatory libidinal forces that draw enjoyment from the current cult of work don’t want us to entirely conceal our misery. For what enjoyment is there to be had from exploiting a worker who actually delights in their work? In his sequel to Blade Runner, The Edge of Human, K W Jeter provides an insight into the libidinal economics of work and suffering. One of the novel’s characters answers the question of why, in Blade Runner‘s future world, the Tyrell Corporation bothered developing replicants (androids constructed so that only experts can distinguish them from humans). “Why should the off-world colonists want troublesome, humanlike slaves rather than nice, efficient machines? It’s simple. Machines don’t suffer. They aren’t capable of it. A machine doesn’t know when it’s being raped. There’s no power relationship between you and a machine. … For the replicant to suffer, to give its owners that whole master-slave energy, it has to have emotions. … . The replicant’s emotions aren’t a design flaw. The Tyrell Corporation put them there. Because that’s what our customers wanted.”
* And the only way to win is not to play: In part, this is how all solitaire games work. The solitaire aesthetic in general is about taking rational content and form — apparent in the effort to model the range of a T-37 turret gun in the game’s structure — and giving it metaphysical expression and feeling in a game-play design. It is a constructed channel of experience, with clearly defined player operations, yet completely undefined in terms of how the player experiences it. Even though you are rolling a die and consulting a results table, you see the battle in terms beyond paper and dice; your mind creates a narrative in which the enemy is repulsed or surges forth, where a battle-scarred unit makes the break-through or where defeat is quickly assured when a leader is cut down in the opening hellfire of bullets. A string of successful rolls translates into cosmic kismet, failed rolls into a series of punches putting you on the ropes.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 18, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing media bias, affective labor, America, apocalypse, BBC, Blade Runner, capitalism, climate change, collapse, Doctor Who, flexible accumulation, futurity, games, how terrible love can be, love, neoliberalism, pornography, science fiction, slavery, solitaire, Stephen Moffat, suffering, The Office, toxic chemicals
Wednesday Morning Links
* I’ll be at SCMS 2013 in Chicago tomorrow, talking about War and Science Fiction in Battle: Los Angeles. I have to be back in Milwaukee that evening and Friday, but I’m hoping to meet up with some people while I’m there.
* How to Turn Higher Education into an Engine of Inequality.
* The Nation on the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. At FAIR. At the New Yorker (c. 2008).
* Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make. Trickle-Down Feminism.
* The technocrats are akin to conspiracists in that they both claim a monopoly on the sorts of political facts that should sway policy. Both groups come equipped with their own body of experts and studies to vouch for their prescriptions. And both Jones and Klein derive their legitimacy from having, through their supposed diligence and uniquely sharp analytical minds, privileged access to some set of truths of political significance. Both assume that answers to factual questions will make the necessary political action irrefutable. All that divides the conspiracist from the technocrat is the nature of the facts they fetishize.
* There’s no direct analog to statistical analysis in baseball. But where Congress and the White House are concerned, what if the press put much greater emphasis put on “the sausage” and much less on the sausage-making? What if we judged legislators on their votes, Obama on what legislation he signs and vetoes, and left it at that?
* Jeb Bush disagrees with own book released yesterday.
* A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013. The Atlantic responds. Some commentary.
* If People Talked About Seinfeld Like They Talk About Girls.
* Gawker is shitty, but Amy Poehler makes it all okay.
“Aw, I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff. “
* Civilization with a global warming focus. Climate change will open up surprising new Arctic shipping routes. Los Angeles Aims To Be Coal-Free In 12 Years.
* China experiments with arcologies.
* Ralph Macchio finally old enough for long-awaited Karate Kid sequel.
* 12-Year-Old Victim of Bullying Dead After Being Attacked At School.
* Breaking: men aren’t actually better at math than women. Gasp!
* Jon Stewart Is Taking the Summer Off to Make a Movie About Iran. John Oliver will guest host for 8 of the 12 weeks he’s gone; I hope Jessica Williams takes the other four.
* “If she had said elephants, I would have said elephants.” How does that make it better?
* This time, Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla asked all 12 to approach so she could shake their hands.
“I hope you continue your work in a law-abiding way,” said Padilla. “I must say you are the most affable group of defendants I’ve ever come across.” Jury acquits Occupy protesters.
* New Elevators Segregate Rich from Poor.
* Another new twist on the zombie genre: zombie rehab.
* And the only news around here that people really care about.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 6, 2013 at 8:05 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Amy Poehler, arcology, Battle: Los Angeles, BBC, Big Catholic, Big East, bullying, Chicago, China, civilization, class struggle, climate change, coal, college basketball, conspiracy theories, Daily Show, don't work for free, ecology, energy, Ezra Klein, feminism, film, freelancing, girls, Hell, How the University Works, Hugo Chávez, I grow old, immigration, income inequality, Iran, Jeb Bush, Jessica Williams, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Karate Kid, Lena Dunham, Los Angeles, March Madness, Marquette, math, misogyny, mostly boring tax stuff, NCAA, Northwest Passage, obituary, Occupy, politics, Princeton, process, protest, Ralph Macchio, rape culture, science fiction, Seinfeld, sexism, someone actually said this, student loans, technocrats, The Atlantic, the economy, the Internet, the kids aren't all right, the law, they say time is the fire in which we burn, underemployment, unemployment, Venezula, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, websites, what it is I think I'm doing, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing, zombies
A Few More Tuesday Links While I Procrastinate
* Penn Puts Hiring Ban on Smokers.
* A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene — with a consumer-grade DVD drive. That was groundbreaking in and of itself, but the real surprise came when Maher El-Kady, a researcher in Kaner’s lab, wired a small square of their high quality carbon sheets up to a lightbulb.
* Talkin’ TNG at Grantland and An und für sich.
* Fraternities on the side of good. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.
* More massive profits for banks. I guess the crisis really is over!
* Tennant says he’s starting to ‘give up hope’ for Who 50th return. You bastards. This was a gimme.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with bankings, BBC, corpocracy, corporations, David Tennant, Doctor Who, fraternities, futurity, Great Recession, Harry Potter, Hogwarts, LEGO, medical fascism, neoliberalism, science fiction, smokers, smoking, Star Trek, supercapacitors, TNG, transgender issues, University of Pennsylvania, worst financial crisis since the last one
‘Each Age Gets the Sherlock Holmes It Deserves’
Nicholas Meyer in the L.A. Review of Books. Benedict Cumberbatch is the definitive Holmes, though. That’s just a fact.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 22, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with adaptation, BBC, Benedict Cumberbatch, film, Sherlock Holmes
Gerry-Built Monday Links
* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.
* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.
* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.
* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.
* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.
* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”
* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.
* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 30, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", Barack Obama, BBC, Captain Marvel, comics, DC Comics, fandom, Fox News, Grover Norquist, health care, impeachment, jerry-built, journalism, jury-rigged, Kindle, letters, Muppets, Newt Gingrich, novels, politics, Reagan, religion, Republicans, risk factors for lethal violence, self-publishing, Shazam, Sherlock Holmes, slavery, spoiler alert, Supreme Court, taxes, the Constitution, the courts, the law, trademarks, words, writing
Post *All* the Links
A big post, catching up from most of last week:
* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.
* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.
* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.
* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.
* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”
* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.
* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.
* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.
* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.
* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.
* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”
* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.
* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.
* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.
* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.
* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.
People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.
But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”
So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.
* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.
* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.
* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.
* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.
* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!
* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.
* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 9, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, Africa, aliens, all-women societies, America, Apple, banking, Barack Obama, Batman, Battlestar Galactica, BBC, Canada, cave of time, childhood, Choose Your Own Adventure, CIA, climate change, Colbert, college football, comics, community, copyright, corporate personhood, debt, delicious Coca-Cola, democracy, deportation, dissertations, District 9, Doctor Who, Dr. Seuss, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, Fermi paradox, film, games, genetics, genomics, gold, Herland, How the University Works, immigration, Iowa, iPads, Kant, literature, longevity, Louis C.K., Mars, Marvel, Matt Taibbi, Mitt Romney, MLA, money in politics, Montana, morally odious monsters, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, nuclear proliferation, nuclear war, nuclearity, only the super-rich can save us now, Paypal, Pepsi, poetry, politics, Portlandia, priceless violins, public domain, science fiction, Shel Silverstein, Steve Jobs, taxes, teleportation, the courts, The Joker, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the truth is out there, Tolkien, trivia, Zelda, zombies
Wednesday Night Links: The Sequel
* Repeating myself from Twitter: you should know how great the Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman Sherlock series from the BBC is. How we spent our evening. Great fun.
* The situation at Fukushima continues to worsen: now they’re dropping water from helicopters. The news just gets bleaker and bleaker by the day.
* Understatement of the day: Japan crisis revives global nuclear debate.
* Chris Newfield recaps the UC Regents Committee on Finance.
* Michigan Governor’s Anti-Union Power Grab Is Unconstitutional
* Attempts to recall Democratic legislators in Wisconsin aren’t coming together. I’m sure the Koch brothers will make it happen, but I’m glad it won’t be easy for them.
* Wanna Cut Wasteful Spending? Let’s Start with Abstinence-Only Education.
* And once you become willing to take on the philosophical baggage of a multifoliate universe (and aren’t bothered by your countless identical twins), some of the deepest and most vexing problems about physics become easy to understand. All those nonsensical-seeming quantum-mechanical laws—that a particle can be in two places at once, that two objects can have a spooky connection that appears to transcend the laws governing space and time—instantly become explicable the moment you view our universe as one among many. And from Greene’s point of view, the 10⁵⁰⁰ different cosmoses described by string theory have ceased to be an unwanted artifact of the theory’s equations, instead becoming a factual description of universes that actually exist. Each of these universes is a bubble cosmos with its own cosmological constants, and as he says, “with some 10⁵⁰⁰ possibilities awaiting exploration, the consensus is that our universe has a home somewhere in the landscape.” Which is to say, string theory can no longer be accused of describing a landscape of fictional universes; our universe is just one in a collection of cosmoses as real as our own, even if we’re unable to see them. Charles Seife at Bookforum on Brian Greene’s multiversism. Via (where else?) 3 Quarks Daily.
* And MetaFilter remembers creepy moments from ’80s sitcoms.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 16, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abstinence-only education, academia, BBC, catastrophe, class struggle, Europe, Fukushima, How did we survive the 1980s?, How the University Works, Japan, many worlds and alternate universes, Martin Freeman, nostalgia of a particular sort, nuclear energy, nuclearity, physics, politics, recalls, science, sex, Sherlock Holmes, sitcoms, television, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?