Star Wars Day Links! Yay!

* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).

I realized recently, with surprise, that ROTJ is the only one that actually seems philosophically interesting to me. https://t.co/UzR5aMALac

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Yeah, that, but also the weirdly unsettled politics of pacifism and forgiveness that undergird the Luke-Vader plot. https://t.co/99HGF12U2C

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

.@traxus4420 Oh, by “unstable end” I thought you meant more the “okay, well, I guess we did it!” aspect the EU novels viciously take apart.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH Yeah, that’s what’s so singular about it. He gets to be a ghost too, Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t even seem mad at him.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH From the standpoint of our usual narratives it’s almost obscene! It’s really striking.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Is it “fear” when it’s something you know is definitely going to happen? https://t.co/9YZUbl819A

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Fully prepared to spend the next ten hours before I see THE FORCE AWAKENS arguing RETURN OF THE JEDI is underrated.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.

* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.

My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.

When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“

* Running the Red Cross like a business.

* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.

* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.

* “If tenured faculty teaching high-demand courses can be fired without cause, as they were at St. Rose, then tenure no longer exists,” Lemieux said.

* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.

* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.

* The law school collapse continues.

* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.

* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?

* My life story: Tsundoku.

* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.

* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?

* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.

* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.

* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.

* The DEA warns that drugs are funding terror. An examination of cases raises questions about whether the agency is stopping threats or staging them.

* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.

* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.

* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.

I’ve listened to the first episode of the new season of SERIAL now, and it really strikes me as deeply unethical on just about every level.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Serial = bad media form for covering ongoing story; tainted by commercialization, also by exploitation of someone who appears mentally ill.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Idea that SERIAL’s “brand” is refusal of definitive conclusions also seems like serious problem for their ability to report going forward.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

I’ll admit, though, I still feel burned by their irresponsibility in the previous story, and probably wouldn’t have liked anything they did.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.

* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.

* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).

* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?

* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.

Today’s 10-year-olds will be serving in the wars the next president starts. https://t.co/jhuRGQwFs6

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Supersized Post-Computer-Crash Weekend Feel-Good Happy Links

Sorry I’ve been MIA. John Siracusa’s OS Mavericks review didn’t tell me the update would completely nuke my computer for three days. Fairly big omission, JS.

* Only by the grace of God did I not wind up on Senator Session’s anti-NEH hit list.

* Apple screws up Capitalism 101 by having its products remain useful on a too-long obsolescence-cycle.

* “If part-time is so good, why don’t we have part-time administration?”

* Against student evaluations. UPDATE: Of course the natural form for discuss this is a Twitter fight.

.@criener @_EdwardK_ The goal should be an evaluation process whose results are so personalized and idiosyncratic they can’t be generalized.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 26, 2013

* Rape culture at UConn. Really stunning report.

Carolyn Luby, a student who organized the complaint, said the university failed to stop harassment she faced for criticizing the school’s new “powerful and aggressive” Husky logo in an open letter to UConn president, Susan Herbst. Luby saw the redesigned logo as “glorifying intimidation with an already prevalent rape culture.”

In reaction, commenters on Barstool Sports posted links to her Facebook page. Rush Limbaugh did a segment criticizing Luby in which he stated, “I, El Rushbo, have amplified it and made it even bigger. Let’s see what happens.”

Luby subsequently received rape and death threats. People walked by her on campus and called her “a bitch,” she said. One email she received told her, “I hope you get raped by a husky,” and another said, “I wish you would’ve run in the Boston marathon.” Fraternity members sexually harassed her, Luby said, making statements like, “Don’t worry, we won’t rape you,” as they drove by.

“[The university] would send campus-wide emails about picking up trash, but no warning about hate speech and harassment,” Luby said.

Unlike Georgetown University’s president, who sent a campus-wide email defending Sandra Fluke after Limbaugh and others made her a target in 2012, UConn did nothing, Luby said. Herbst remained silent, and Luby said one school official told her, “That’s kind of the risk you run when you publish something on the Internet.”

University police suggested she keep a low profile and wear a hat on campus, Luby said.

* I ranted about this one enough on Twitter, but this story about the University of Iowa TA who accidentally emailed nude photos to her class (which I feel dirty even linking to at all) is also rape culture in action.

The Iowa TA story is a national story because someone forwarded the pics and someone else published them, both knowing they were private.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2013

So it's as much a story about rape culture and revenge porn as it is about an embarrassing mistake. And only one is a story about a system.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2013

We should be asking what social forces have given people the idea that images (almost always of women) should be passed around like this.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2013

* 62% of higher education professionals report experiencing workplace bullying.

* Talking with Students about Being an Adjunct. Totally insanely, CUNY hasn’t been paying its adjuncts for months.

* The UC Davis Pepper-Spraying Cop Gets a $38,000 Settlement, $8000 more than his victims.

* City College of S.F. outlines closing plan.

* Thinking (only) like an administration: Faculty Couples, for Better or Worse.

* We have the rare opportunity to chronicle a labor movement’s development in real time from its infancy as we watch the organization of college football players.

* Confessions of a Drone Warrior.

* Flood Insurance Jumping Sevenfold Depresses U.S. Home Values. I wonder if even “the market speaking” could pull us out of the death spiral now.

* Climate change cost you the McDonald’s dollar menu. Greenland Has Melted So Much That We Can Mine It for Uranium Now. Arctic Temperatures Reach Highest Levels In 44,000 Years. Gambling with Civilization.

* The men’s rights movement is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

* Rortybomb on striking fast food workers and the neoliberal failings of Obamacare. From the second:

Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism.

* The Decline of Wikipedia.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

* Mitch Hurwitz at the New York Television Festival.

* Davis Sedaris writes about the suicide of his sister Tiffany.

* We should put hyper-efficient rich people in charge of everything: How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes. That’s why they earn the big bucks, I guess.

* Condé Nast Discontinuing Internship Program. The first of many, I’d bet.

* After all this time I’m completely amazed that people still talk to the Daily Show at all. “They made all those other people look like total idiots! I’d better be super-careful as I make my wise and reasoned argument!”

* From the archives: How They Made Bottle Rocket. 1995.

* Wisconsin conservatives file challenge against state’s same-sex partnership law. Special Prosecutor Looking At Wisconsin Recall Elections. Milwaukee has still not enrolled anyone for ACA.

* What Good Wife Storyline Did CBS Kill to Avoid Pissing Off the NFL?

* They said it: Fox News: Anti-Bullying Policies Limit Conservatives’ Free Speech.

* America’s Most Popular Boys’ Names Since 1960, in 1 Spectacular GIF.

* The Harvard Crimson says don’t teach for America.

* American Schools Are Missing 389,000 Teachers. Study: Charters Pose a Financial Threat to Already-Struggling School Districts.

* The Duke Chronicle says walk out on Charles Murray.

A man is stealing your home, poisoning your food and burning the forests around you, all the while explaining why you should thank him. Maybe you are allowed to question his genius, and maybe he answers. Some nod; others frown.

And you watch the flames rise, knowing at least you have engaged in “discourse.”

* Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee.

* The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

* List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum from the late 1800s, supposedly.

* California Deputies Shoot and Kill Boy Carrying a Fake Gun. Black Teen Detained by NYPD for Buying an Expensive Belt.

* Zombie Simpsons: How the best show ever became the broadcasting undead.

* It’s handled: Scandal has its own scandal after popular fan blogger turns out to be ABC executive. UPDATE: Followup!

* Old villains never die, they just fade away: Diebold charged with bribing officials, falsifying records in China, Russia, Indonesia; fined nearly $50 million.

* Gawker is seriously arguing no one should be fired for uncritically publishing an entirely fact-free smear job so ludicrously inaccurate it didn’t even last two hours. I disagree!

* We’ve all been there: Groom Who Called in Bomb Hoax to Own Wedding Sentenced to Year in Jail.

* Facebook OKs Decapitation Videos (But No Breastfeeding).

* OMG WTF TSA.

* And today’s apocalypse: “We’ve Reached ‘The End of Antibiotics, Period.’”

Bomb Threats and Evacuations at UT Austin and NDSU

Angus has a running liveblog.

Monday Night Links

* Günter Grass barred from Israel over poem.

* U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money.

* Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman: There’s no need for an Equal Pay Law because money is more important for men. Scott Walker’s on board. What decade is this? Honestly.

* Paul Feig walks us through Freaks And Geeks.

* One of my earliest political disillusionments was discovering how bad Clinton’s trumpeted “welfare reform” really was. Everything old is new again.

* Life after The Real World.

* U Pitt is under siege.

* Project Iceworm: Back in the 50s, the US planned to create a network of tunnels underneath the Greenland ice sheet to fire nuclear missiles from.

* And Ze is back. Hooray for everything.

Map of the Day

Mother Jones on where the bombs are.

This is a map of highways 18-wheelers use to cart atomic warheads and nuclear waste around the country.

Some More Links

* Smart presidents making stupid arguments:

For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste.

They call it poison. We call it life.

* From the don’t-know-if-this-is-crazy-or-awesome file: Though stem cell therapies are still in the early stages of development, some families are having their children’s baby teeth extracted and saved in anticipation of treatments that could be around by the time the child reaches adulthood, the Miami Herald reports.

* When Left-Wing Editors Fight Unions.

* When Famous Directors Lose Their Minds.

* Being Roger Ailes.

* Bomb Planted Along MLK Day Parade Route In Spokane.

* David Simon v. Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III. Discussion at MeFi.

* Last Stand 4 Children is devoted to providing all children with a quality education in spite of their teachers. See also: Billionaires for Educational Reform. (Via @mrtalbot.)

* Almost none of these “literal New Yorker cartoons” are actually “literal,” though a few are amusing nonetheless.

* Uplifting Duke/Durham story of the day: The Secret Game.

The North Carolina College Eagles were coming off their most successful season ever at that time. McLendon had just led his team to a 26-1 season. Aubrey Stanley, Henry (Big Dog) Thomas, Floyd (Cootie) Brown and James (Boogie-Woogie) Hardy were the stars on a team that ran McLendon’s fast break with great discipline.

That team was not eligible for participation in the National Invitational Tournament or the NCAA tournaments simply because they were African-Americans, but many — including the Hall of Famer McLendon — felt like the Eagles could’ve beaten anyone.

Meanwhile, Burgess and others regularly attended meetings at the local Y in Durham, as students from both sides of the tracks met secretly to discuss ways to overcome racism in the local area. During one of those meetings, the conversation turned to basketball and a bold challenge was issued: What about a secret game between the Eagles and the Duke Medical School team?

* And your couch is trying to kill you. Don’t let it!