Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic, But the Other Way

* An awakening anatomy of the average life’s two years of boredom, 6 months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy. 14 minutes of joy seems low even for a single day. What are you people doing with yourselves?

* The Voyager records, as art.

* I’m With™ Clinton’s ‘Innovation Agenda’ for Higher Ed.

murder shouldn’t be *legal* for entrepreneurs but it shouldn’t exactly be illegal either

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 30, 2016

entrepreneurs should get to run three red lights every six months, no questions asked

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2016

* Republicans seem pretty obviously right about this one. I don’t see how there’s any case for its propriety, but here’s a try.

* The Humiliating Practice of Sex-Testing Female Athletes.

* Estimate of U.S. Transgender Population Doubles to 1.4 Million Adults.

* For 20 years, the center has blocked off female-only hours to accommodate the area’s large Hasidic population. The pool has no male-only hours, and some Hasidic men swim during the hours that are open to all genders. An anonymous complaint was lodged recently with the city’s Human Rights Commission, which sent a notice to the parks department this spring saying that the policy might violate a city law barring gender discrimination in public accommodations.

* Using the budget usually reserved for the committee, they created a program called Dudes Understanding Diversity and Ending Stereotypes, or DUDES.

* He said he’s glad colleges have found the research useful, but he is cautious about the institutions that are taking it as an absolute. Mr. Sue said his goal had always been to educate people, not punish or shame them, if they engage in microaggressions.

* Boris Johnson and the Cuckoo Nest Plot. Now even Gove says he won’t Brexit before the end of the year. Sanders and Corbyn: The Survivors. Brexit Might Never Happen. Brexit: a disaster decades in the making. So you want to con a country. Based on a close reading of Frank Bruni’s Brexit commentary, “A Bachelor Named Britain, Looking for Love” (reproduced below the question), please describe the bearing of the New York Times op-ed staff on the collapse of serious political argument in American establishment institutions in the early 21st century.

* How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front. Bonus Tolkien! How To Tell If You Are In A J.R.R. Tolkien Book.

A wizard has roped you into a quest because one of your ancestors invented golf.

* Westeros Is Poorly Designed. A Followup: It’s Okay That Westeros Is Poorly Designed. Some more nerdery on the subject.

When asked how fast the ships in Babylon 5 travel, creator J. Michael Straczynski replied that they travel “at the speed of plot.”

How big is Westeros? “Plot-sized.” How many people live there? “Plot thousand.” How do they make their living? “Tilling the plot.”

* Game of Thrones season 6 was good TV that shows why the series will never be great.

* Why did the Stars Wars and Star Trek worlds turn out so differently? Please Stop Marrying Fictional Characters to People They Met as Children, It’s Creepy. I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run.

* How to Get Tenure. Counterpoint: You Probably Won’t Get Tenure.

* How to Give a Conference Paper.

* Elsewhere on the academic beat: Study Finds First-Year Students Who Take 15 Credits Succeed. Why Can’t My New Employees Write? The New McCarthyism. Right-Wing Elites Love Your Abigail Fisher Hot Take.

* Rationalia has already garnered some powerful enemies.

Sadly, there is no solution to the #Rexit crisis save the formation of a new country, South Rationalia, which I must reluctantly lead.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 30, 2016

* Amazing, awful: Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions.

* Unprecedented’: Scientists declare ‘global climate emergency’ after jet stream crosses equator. The Window for Avoiding a Dangerous Climate Change Has Closed. The Day After Tomorrow Happened 30,000 Years Ago. Geoengineering at the CIA.

* Physicists just confirmed a pear-shaped nucleus, and it could ruin time travel forever. Not if I undiscover it yesterday!

* America is lying about its involvement in Africa: AFRICOM’s reports simply don’t add up.

* Secret History of the AOL Disc Campaign.

* More from the twilight of the law schools.

* “This is the single greatest panel ever published in a Transformers comic.”

* Trumpocalypse watch! Another boondoggle. And another. And another. And another. This one is probably the best yet. 4 Ways Cleveland’s Colleges Are Bracing for the Republican Convention. Who will win the presidency? Why not play along at home! And if you want a vision of the future: imagine Trump’s vice-presidential candidates stomping on a human face, forever.

Monday Links!

* CFP: SFRA 2015.

* From the archives: the inaugural issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Ephemera 11.4: “Work, Play, and Boredom.” And in the mail: Science Fiction Film and Television 7.2, all about Doctor Who.

* Pro-Sports Moochers and the True Cost of “Student Athletes.”

* Existential Comics recaps France vs. Germany.

* Today in things that won’t get a policeman thrown in jail, much less fired: Video Catches Highway Cop Punching Woman On The Side Of The Road.

* What If America Had Lost the Revolutionary War? U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.

* The past is another country: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

* Today in the surveillance state. If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance.

* Jedediah Purdy at Politco: 238 years after its first birthday, America is in deep denial.

* The Democratic Party is an inside job.

* “There’s $300 billion worth of gold in the basement, but the real money is on the ninth floor.”

* Here’s the Lawless Hellscape Colorado Has Become Six Months After Legalizing Weed.

* TSA Now Mandating That All Phones Be Turned On Before You Fly. Up is down! Black is white!

* Let’s redesign parking signs.

* Children left to play alone achieve more. So that’s my secret!

* 10 Words Every Girl Should Learn.

* Jaws Is Ridiculous, Say Kids Who Owe Everything to Jaws.

* This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting.

* Researchers Discover the Meaning of Over 60 Words Used by Wild Chimps.

* Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem.

* Presenting the absolute worst people in the world: the coal-rollers.

* Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet.

* Batman v. Superman only seems terrible because they got Kevin Smith to write a fake script to fool everyone. Well it certainly accounts for all the known facts.

* On Maleficent, Disney’s first rape-revenge film.

* And the new rules for Dungeons & Dragons are free; you’ll note for historical purposes that race is still real, but sex and gender aren’t.

Thursday Morning Links!

* In Landmark Decision, U.S. Patent Office Cancels Trademark For Redskins Football Team. So the Redskins will be forced by lost revenue and unrestrained anti-Redskins bootlegs to change their name — at which time bitter Redskins dead-enders will be able to sell each other Redskins-branded merchandise in protest…

* In praise of Diplomacy.

* We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work.

* That plan goes something like this: maximize constrained educational choices that are a function of labor market changes; commodify inequality by organizing for the highest need students; extract guaranteed funds from public coffers; call it access; wash and repeat.

* Guernica‘s special issue on class, including a report on adjuncts.

* BREAKING: The U.S. Has the Most Expensive, Least Effective Health Care System. BREAKING: Guns kill children. BREAKING: The American prison system is a nightmare. BREAKING: Capitalism is insanely corrupt. BREAKING: Uber is a scam.

* Schools and/as prisons.

* Self-plagiarism is a really weird concept to pin down.

* When innocent people are exonerated after wrongfully spending time in prison, some states pay money to the accused for their trouble. As data from NPR and the Innocence Project show, those payouts are often despicably low. 

* This Is How Much More States Spend On Prisoners Than On Students.

* Does the alternatives-to-incarceration industry profit from injustice?

* The economics of nuclear war.

* When Presidents Get Bored.

* Things instructional staff aren’t paid enough to do.

* The logic on display here shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for.

* And they say America’s best years are behind it.

* How the West was stolen.

* How ISIS Games Twitter.

* Münchausen syndrome by proxy, mommy blog edition.

* The horror of postpartum psychosis.

* Against the GRE.

* Against the simplicity of “born this way.”

* It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.

* Louie. Louie. Lou-eeeee. Louie. Louie. Lou-iiiiiii.

* You can kill anyone with your car, as long as you don’t really mean it.

* Walker said it was important to have a smooth-running highway system to avoid gridlock “that would choke off the ability of businesses to come in and out of Milwaukee.” “I think the last thing you want to do is have employers look to go bypass the city of Milwaukee when they’re talking about jobs and commerce here,” he said. “So you’ve got to make sure there’s a good transportation system.” And just wait until he finds out human beings use roads too!

* My brilliant wife has a poem in TAB.

* How to Catch a Chess Cheater.

* Elon Musk “Hopeful” First People Can Be Taken To Mars in 10-12 Years.

* And even Colbert Report writers have to form tech startups now.

Four for Saturday

* This is actually the lead story on Drudge right now: “Little Girl Standing Near Obama Looks Bored.” It’s times like this I almost feel bad for the right-wing.

* Big fat leftist that I am, I’d go much further than Obama in my claims for the need for government. But at least we finally have someone in charge who admits the need for someone to be in charge.

* Relatedly, because of GOP obstruction, unemployment benefits will run out for 200,000 people on Monday.

* And the indispensable Rachel Maddow on lying liars. More and more on this from the indispensable Steve Benen.