Posts Tagged ‘Bechdel test’
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.
Friday!
* Adjuncts and theories of politics.
- Attack the tenured and those on the tenure track.
- ???
- Profit.
* New Year’s Resolutions and cruel optimism.
* The tyranny of data: Neflix’s 76,897 genres. No more, no less!
* Slate’s Embarrassing Middle-Earth Error.
Given this it makes the most sense, and would in some sense be most accurate, to understand both Aragorn and Arwen as half-Elvish who chose the fate of Men, though even then few citizens of Gondor would think of Aragorn as anything but a Man. (Indeed Aragorn, descended from Elros, who chose mortality, is not even given the choice of identifying as an Elf, in the sense that his bloodline does not give him access to Aman.) What none would do is think of Arwen as “3/16 human.” Attempting to force this kind of “scientific” racialism, obsessed with fractional bloodline, on to Middle-earth and Arda is a sort of cultural imperialism: It’s just not how Elves or Men (or Valar) understand race.
* Dan Harmon Is Still Pretty Torn Up About Everything. Joel McHale on the return of Community.
* Science! Dogs align their bodies along a North-South axis when they poop.
* Our Trash Has Become A New Ocean Ecosystem Called “The Plastisphere.” How climate change will starve the deep sea.
* What could possibly go wrong? The United States Is Now the Most Unequal of All Advanced Economies.
* But there’s good news too! Lightning strikes killed fewer Americans than ever in 2013.
* How many of your health supplements are actually snake oil?
* It’s not just your imagination: mass shootings are increasing.
* 10 Films That Passed the Bechdel Test in 2013. There were ten?
* And Walmart Recalls Tainted Donkey Meat from Chinese Stores. “It’s actually fox meat, regulators say.”
Tuesday Night!
* This is probably the most American thing that has ever happened: A 70-year-old woman employed by the same court for more than 34 years was fired just nine months before her scheduled retirement, for helping an inmate obtain a DNA test that led to his exoneration.
* A people’s history of Oregon Trail.
* Harlan Ellison Isn’t Dead Yet.
* North Carolina Ends Teacher Tenure.
* Emissions From North Dakota Flaring (Visible from Space) Equivalent To One Million Cars Per Year.
* If McDonald’s doubled workers’ pay, your Big Mac would cost 68 cents more.
* The Sexy Lamp Test: When the Bechdel Test Is Too Much To Ask.
* Did I do this one already? Grad Students Are Ruining Everything.
Which brings me to the second intersection: Universities are saving a ton of money in this arrangement. Good jobs with health insurance and a decent salary are being replaced by grad students who are desperate to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Our own job descriptions are so vague (if they exist on paper at all) and our employment so tenuous (its common to not know if or how much you’ll get paid from semester to semester) that you can convince us to do just about anything: we’ll work 60, 80, maybe 100 hours a week on things that amount to maybe one line on a CV and another soon-to-be outdated software fluency skill. This is time that could be spent on a second job (if you’re contract lets you even do that) that might supplement your paltry living stipend. A grad student might need the money for all of the supplies and services that she’ll need to buy upfront on her credit card while she waits a few weeks or months for her reimbursement. Or maybe a grad student just needs to buy a new computer, something that every other white-collar corporate job would have waiting for you at your desk. Or $400-worth of books because your cash-strapped library hasn’t procured a recent title in your field since 2007.
* And MetaFilter perfects mansplaining as a bunch of dudes without kids hector poor moms about how to manage their diaper needs. Stay for the breastfeeding hectoring!
Friday!
* When writer AD Harvey invented an 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, it was for years accepted as fact. So why did he do it – and why did he also create a series of fake academic identities? Following up on this classic from the Times Literary Supplement.
* Academia’s Pink-Collar Workforce.
* Accreditor Approves Competency-Based Degree at U. of Wisconsin.
* Aaron Carroll draws our attention today to a new study in JAMA that compares American health outcomes with those in other rich countries. Overall, we’re now in 28th place, sandwiched in between Chile and Poland. The massive chart below shows how we do on treating specific diseases. We’re 31st on diabetes, 16th on breast cancer, 32nd on COPD, and (in our best showing) 8th on colon cancer.
* The country has cheaper medical care, smarter children, happier moms, better working conditions, less-anxious unemployed people, and lower student loan rates than we do. And that probably will never change. Finland vs. the U.S., in the Atlantic.
* Fracking: basically comically evil.
* Google: basically comically evil.
Google, which prides itself on building a “better web that is better for the environment,” is hosting a fundraiser for the most notorious climate change denier in Congress, it has emerged.
* Unpopular opinion: I’m a sex-negative feminist.
* Visualizing the Bechdel test.
* Drones in Niger. Prison hunger-strikers in California. Food stamps in New Jersey. Violent crime in Milwaukee this year is highest since ’08. Unemployment Rate For Black Women Higher Now Than Four Years Ago.
* If jobs mean maturity, not everyone gets to grow up.
Saitō ventured a count: There were 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or hikikomori, about one percent of the Japanese population. Eighty percent of them were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, not the name of an illness,” and “there has been no sign that the number of cases will decrease.” His book became a best seller in weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death from overwork) as a loan word in English to describe a new social phenomenon that at first appeared uniquely Japanese.
* And the thin get everything.
Academics who interview graduate school applicants systematically favor thinner candidates, according to a study.
Poor bastards.