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.

* Aggrieved students find books dangerous; neoliberal administrators say they’re useless. I’d take the former any day.

* 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.

* Fun Home at Duke: 1, 2.

* 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.

* Psychology is bunk.

* Žižek Says Thing.

* Against the Anthropocene.

* Whatever happened to DC Comics?

* Being Stephen Colbert.

* The free encyclopedia anyone can edit.

* Tinder as video game.

* 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.

* RIP, Oliver Sacks.

* 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.

* Mars by 2039?

* Renaming Denali.

* 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!

* The law, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike not to clean up their billion-dollar toxic oil spills.

* The New Servility.

* 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.

Thursday Links!

* Here Are the 55 Schools Currently Under Federal Investigation for Sexual Assault. Behind Focus on College Assaults, a Steady Drumbeat by Students.

* There have been violent threats, angry screeds, Twitter flame campaigns and an entire website predicated on the putative hideousness of Dan Kane’s existence. Someone sent Kane an email wishing him a lingering death by bone cancer. Someone else tweeted him a photograph of a noose. Emotions can run amok when you take on something as sacrosanct as the athletic program at the University of North Carolina, as Kane, 53, has found in the last few years…

* All The Times Science Fiction Became Science Fact In One Chart.

* On valuing the Humanities at MIT.

* So if you’re a college president overseeing a portfolio of lucrative, heavily marketed, largely unaccountable terminal master’s-degree programs that offer little or no financial aid and charge market prices financed by debt, congratulations: You, too, own a for-profit college!

* On the other hand, Coursera’s “Global Translator Community” offers a new model for corporations looking to expand their exploitation of uncompensated skilled labor, and perhaps ultimately replace nearly all paid labor with unpaid “volunteering”: 1) The mission of the company, regardless of its for-profit status, is defined in exclusively philanthropic terms; 2) A gigantic blitz of media hype provided by sympathetic journalists and columnists leads the public to associate the company exclusively with its world-saving charitable priorities; 3) Workers are persuaded to contribute their labor to the company through an appeal to their desire to “change the world” and “become part of a global community” of similarly idealistic souls.

* Automated-grading skeptic uses Babel to expose nonsense essay.

* What if Everyone in the World Became a Vegetarian? Yes, fear not, Slate makes sure this is a Slate pitch.

If the world actually did collectively go vegetarian or vegan over the course of a decade or two, it’s reasonable to think the economy would tank.

* “Smaller classes in the early years can lift a child’s academic performance right through to Year 12 and even into tertiary study and employment,” Dr Zyngier said.

* You can prove anything with facts: States That Raised Their #MinimumWage in 2014 Had Stronger Job Growth Than Those That Didn’t.

* A not-so-brief history of LEGO’s wonderful “Space” line of products.

* You may be done with the past, but… Waddington’s pulls child’s blood-stained tunic from auction gallery.

* Amazing what a little organized labor can accomplish.

* What we talk about when we talk about trigger warnings.

* Thomas Piketty and his Critics.

* Striking Down Wisconsin Voter ID Law, Judge Finds ‘No Rational Person Could Be Worried’ About Voter Fraud.

* L.A’.s Most Arrested Person Is a Homeless Grandmother. Execution nightmare in Oklahoma. Louisiana About To Make It Illegal For Homeless People To Beg For Money. Woman Loses Her Home For Owing $6.

* Lawsuit: Penn denied prof tenure for taking child-care leave.

* Area man changes opinion on Obamacare after it literally saves his life.

* MFA vs POC.

* This is a sad day for the Gerry community.

* Marquette recognized as green college by Princeton Review.

* They say he’s a lame duck, but Obama is still out there, pounding the pavement, looking for things he could still make just a bit worse than they are now.

* The coming antibiotic resistant hellscape.

* The coming SyFy TV hellscape.

* Congratulations, Zoey!

* Babies cry at night to prevent siblings, scientist suggests.

* Your close reading of the Star Wars Episode 7 cast photo.

* America is Hungry, Let’s Eat.

* Springsteen’s “Born to Run” First Draft to Be Displayed in Perkins Library.

* Even mice are terrified of men.

* And rest in peace, Bob Hoskins.

Weekend Links

* CFP: Midwest Modern Language Association 2013 on Art & Artifice, November 7-10. Right here in Milwaukee!

* A disturbing catch from the MetaFilter thread on MOOCs: Obama has quietly decoupled Pell grants from accreditation, opening the door for full-throated neoliberal profiteering.

Last year, similar language tying federal aid to “value” was explicitly limited to a group of relatively minor aid programs. The Pell grant and loan programs that make up $140 billion in annual aid were excluded. No such restrictions appear here (although the President did refer to only “certain types” of aid in the speech itself.) But the real kicker is at the end: a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.

The existing accreditation club has been around since the end of the 19th century. It has had an exclusive franchise on determining federal financial aid eligibility since the middle of the 20th century. Opening a new doorway to the Title IV financial aid system would be an enormouschange, particularly when coupled with the phrase “higher education models and colleges.” The clear implication is that the higher education models that would eligible for federal financial aid through the alternate accreditation system wouldn’t have to be colleges at all. They could be any providers of higher education that meet standards of “performance and results.”

MOOCiversity, ho!

* Think about it: When was the last time a college or university president produced an edgy piece of commentary, or took a daring stand on a contentious matter? 

* Disaster capitalism, Chicago style.

There aren’t any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder?

They create a crisis.

* The Drone Industry Wants a Makeover. Dissent on drones.

* Malcolm Harris explains yellowism.

* The delightfully named Ben Kafka explains bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy, Kafka argues, can be everybody’s enemy, and can thus serve as the organizing principle for otherwise untenable alliances, like the one between eighteenth-century liberals and democrats, or between some contemporary working-class voters and the neoliberal elites they vote for. Sowing contempt for bureaucracy, in the form of lambasting all government efforts as inherently inefficient, full of “lazy” and “parasitical” civil servants and their “bloated” pensions, remains a potent tactic of right-wing populism, but whereas conservatives of old evoked a nostalgic class paternalism to cure paperwork’s ills, the American Right offers a myth of self-sufficiency, of everyone for themselves, with no claims to be filed and no burdens to be shared. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, comes to stand for the inevitable outcome of all types of collective power, the emblem of neutered individualism. And since paperwork is an evil that proliferates no matter what the form of government, it can seem irrelevant to mount any political fights to reform it. Politics is thus reduced to the pettiness of sorting out strictly personal grievances, which in turn worsens bureaucracy, as these sorts of selfish claims are precisely what bureaucracy exists to process.

* Duke professor proposes that students be required to produce a video summary of the dissertation. I actually think this kind of distillation can be really useful and productive — someone once told me you know you’re done with your dissertation when you can summarize its argument in one sentence — but making it an actual requirement is silly.

* North Carolina is the only state that will clearly mark all people who are not U.S. citizens – everyone from business executives with “green cards” to students on visas – with a newly designed driver’s license coming this summer, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislation in all the states. History contains absolutely no examples of times when this kind of thinking has ever gone wrong, so I’m sure it’s a really good idea.

* In other words, in the midst of a major national debate over America’s finances, 90% of Americans are wrong about the one basic detail that probably matters most in the conversation, while only 6% — 6%! — are correct.

* A cottage at 71/2 West End Court in Long Branch where one-time renter Bruce Springsteen wrote “Born to Run” is up for sale for $349,900, said real estate agent Susan McLaughlin of Keller Williams Realty. Anyone want to go halfsies?

* World Press Photo Of The Year: Nov. 20, 2012, Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and his older brother Muhammad were killed when their house was destroyed by and Israeli missile strike. Their father, Fouad, was also killed and their mother was put into intensive care. Fouad’s brothers carry his children to the mosque for the burial ceremony as his body is carried behind on a stretcher.

* Even Megan McArdle has stopped believing in meritocracy.

* And io9 on how your favorite cancelled science fiction series would have continued. Start your FlashForward fan fics now…

Copyright Infringement Saturday, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” Edition

If you’ve been dying for an MP3 of Bruce Springsteen’s awesome cover of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” from SXSW last week, I went ahead and made one.

Scenes from the Class Struggle in My Hometown

From Inside Higher Ed:

Facing criticism from local politicians and conservative groups, the County College of Morris board this week reversed a policy on undocumented students that was adopted only two months ago, The Star-Ledger reported. The New Jersey community college had voted to permit such students to pay in-state tuition rates if they graduated from high school in the United States and entered the country before the age of 16. But this week, the board voted to charge such students out-of-state tuition rates. For a full-time student, the shift increases tuition for a year from $3,450 to $9,780. The Daily Record reported that several board members were influenced by the threat of a lawsuit over the policy granting in-state tuition rates.

Baby, this town rips the bones from your back. It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap…

Bruuuuuuuuuuce

USA Today has a long and rather excellent profile on America’s greatest living folk hero, Bruce Springsteen. Here he is on his work as it relates to the 2008 presidential campaign:

But while he won’t endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama yet, he specifically praises the latter, who cited Springsteen as the person he would most like to meet in a recent interview with People.

“I always look at my work as trying to measure the distance between American promise and American reality,” Springsteen says. “And I think (Obama’s) inspired a lot of people with that idea: How do you make that distance shorter? How do we create a more humane society? We’ve lived through such ugly times that people want to have a romance with the idea of America again, and I think they need to.

“The hard realities and how things get done are important, too, but if you can effectively convince people that it’s possible to make things better, they get excited.”

The Wikipedia articles on Born to Run and Darkness actually make this point about the distance between promise and reality in a very nice way:

In terms of the original LP’s sequencing, Springsteen eventually adopted a “four corners” approach, as the songs beginning each side (“Thunder Road”, “Born to Run”) were uplifting odes to escape, while the songs ending each side (“Backstreets”, “Jungleland”) were sad epics of loss, betrayal, and defeat. (Originally, he had planned to begin and end the album with alternative versions of “Thunder Road”.)

and

In terms of the original LP’s sequencing [for Darkness], Springsteen continued his “four corners” approach from Born to Run, as the songs beginning each side (“Badlands” and “The Promised Land”) were martial rallying cries to overcome circumstances, while the songs ending each side (“Racing in the Street”, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”) were sad dirges of circumstances overcoming all hope.