Finals Week Links!

* ICYMI: The CFP for the 11th Annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference ends tomorrow.

* College sports’ fastest-rising expense: Paying coaches not to work.

* Huge, if true: While university presidents earn millions, many professors struggle.

* Shakespeare, by the numbers.

* Soviet Science Fiction Christmas Cards.

* The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad.

* In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels. “A long-shot chance to save the planet.” And on the neg: Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments.

* The climate movement as peace movement.

* In a security video obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Strickland is seen in handcuffs, barely conscious and being dragged along the floor by officers, while a prison nurse standing close by does nothing. Even as he lies face down on the floor, near death, guards can be heard shouting, “Stop resisting.”

* Police restraint saves lives.

* Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement.

* Divorce on the frontier.

* Unpregnant.

* For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. “We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!” laughed Miller. “So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.’” And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. “She’s a real stickler for that,” said Miller. “And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.”

* Roar Magazine #0: The Potential of Debtors’ Unions.

* Jacqui Shine at LARoB reviews We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.

* MST3K breaks Kickstarter records, secures 14 new episodes. Let the backlash commence!

* We’re apparently getting two China Miéville novels this year, and the second one sounds incredible.

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS is an intense and gripping tale set in an alternative universe: June 1940 following Paris’ fall to the Germans, the villa of Air-Bel in Marsailles, is filled with Trotskyists, anti-fascists, exiled artists, and surrealists. One Air-Bel dissident decides the best way to fight the Nazis is to construct a surrealist bomb. When the bomb is accidentally detonated, surrealist Cataclysm sweeps Paris and transforms it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic.

* He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.

* The Senate is so crazily designed it would be literally illegal for a US state to copy it.

* Dilbert minus with too much Dilbert.

* The lost Marxists: what happened to the academics made jobless by communism’s collapse?

* Mockingjay Part 2: Let’s talk about that epilogue.

* The rich are different!

* Teach the controversy: The sealed mausoleum believed to be a fully-functioning time machine.

* A brief history of trying and failing to impeach Supreme Court justices.

* The Indo-European and Uralic Language Families.

* Your short of the week: “Lost Property.”

* Jessica Jones, Buffy season six, and rape.

* The Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, updated for 2015.

* And rest in peace, Benedict Anderson.