Tuesday Links!

* The Paradox of New Buildings on Campus: Even as long-neglected maintenance threatens to further escalate the price of higher education, universities continue to borrow and spend record amounts on new buildings.

* The “terminal” sabbatical eases the aging academic into “retirement,” the meat grinder admins use to nourish new administrators.

* Visual Proof That America’s Weather Has Gone Completely Insane.

* Our friend Nina Riggs writes of her family’s history of cancer.

* The New York Times reviews Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

* Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive. And from Cracked: 20 Paradoxes Most Human Minds Can’t Wrap Themselves Around.

* Jessa “Bookslut” Crispin has a book! Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.

* Just in time for another convention, Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

* It’s not enough to just turn over your lunch money; you have to enjoy it.

* A final response to the “Tell me why Trump is a fascist”.

* Weird science: MIT Experiment Proves Quantum Mechanics Still in Effect at Over 400-Miles.

* Twilight of the VCR. A nation remembers.

* Disability in Abramsverse Star Trek.

* UnREAL probably is going to be bad from here on out.

* Trying to understand the data on desistance in transgender kids.

* What I’ve Learned From Having A Trans Partner.

* Brain metaphors in the Age of Trump: Is Your Nervous System a Democracy or a Dictatorship?

* Elsewhere on science corner: What high heels say about the massive gap between the rich and the poor. Ancient Campfires May Have Unleashed Humanity’s Top Bacterial Killer. Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life. This map shows how many people are getting high near you. Watch language evolve as little sims wander around a grid of islands. Personality Change May Be Early Sign of Dementia, Experts Say.

* #TheWisdomofMarkets: Nintendo shares plummet after investors realize it doesn’t actually make Pokémon Go.

* Details emerge about the new Nintendo system that I will almost certainly be buying my child sight unseen.

* Interesting details about the accident that hurt Harrison Ford on the set of The Force Awakens.

* Your policy, not mine: Pokémon Go players urged not to venture into Fukushima disaster zone.

* “You are surprisingly likely to have a living doppelgänger.”

* “Mysterious green slimy foam emerges from Utah sewer.”

* And I suppose you do have to admire it.

Wednesday Links!

(…though Tuesday’s links are still perfectly good…)

* I’m really excited to see that the Jameson talk on the army as a figure for utopia I talked about at the end of my Battle: Los Angeles essay is becoming a book (with some collected responses).

* One of my favorite Ted Chiang stories, “Understand” has been adapted as a radio drama at the BBC. Go listen!

* If you’re local, don’t forget! Mad Max: Fury Road discussion on campus today at 5 PM!

* We Don’t Need to Reform America’s Criminal Justice System, We Need to Tear It Down.

* Superheroes in a Time of Terror: Rushdie’s 1001 Nights.

* Language and the Postapocalyptic World.

* Doctors Without Borders airstrike: US alters story for fourth time in four days.

* The FBI’s probe into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail has expanded to include a second private technology company, which said Tuesday it plans to provide the law enforcement agency with data it preserved from Clinton’s account.

* Against Joe Biden.

* Two great tastes: For decades, researchers have debated whether a major asteroid strike or enormous volcanic eruptions led to the demise of dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago. According to a new study, the answer might be somewhere in between: The asteroid impact accelerated the eruptions of volcanoes, and together, these catastrophes led to the mass extinction.

* The Vancouver public-speaking and drama instructor sees his reasons for assigning Alcor US$80,000 of life insurance benefits to have his brain cryopreserved as strictly pragmatic.

* Kristof said that more preschoolers are shot dead each year than are on-duty police officers. For children aged 0-4, that is accurate for the past six years. For children aged 3-5, the statement is true in most years, but not in every year. We rate the claim Mostly True.

* Twenty-first century problems: Can Crowdfunding Save This Town from White Supremacy?

* Yale Just Released 170,000 Incredible Photos of Depression-Era America.

* Free college, pro and con.

* Stay classy, Milwaukee.

* Texas’s war on birthright babies.

* A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Board that looks at what role credit scores play in committed relationships suggests that daters might want to start using the metric as well. The researchers found that credit scores — or whatever personal qualities credit scores might represent — actually play a pretty big role in whether people form and stay in committed relationships. People with higher credit scores are more likely to form committed relationships and marriages and then stay in them. In addition, how well matched the couple’s credit scores are initially is a good predictor of whether they stay together in the long term.

* This might be even worse than the drill bits: Greenfield Police Using Pink Handcuffs, Wearing New Pins For Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

* Get a head start on next week: “It’s time to abolish Columbus Day.”

* And at this point I have no idea what sort of milk I should be drinking. Thanks, Obama.

Thursday Morning Links

* Your poem of the day: Tracy K. Smith, “Sci-Fi.”

* Philosophical science fiction, 1, 2, 3. Via MeFi.

* Science fiction as white supremacist fantasy.

* Charlie Stross on why he thinks he’ll be writing more urban fantasy than science fiction in the coming years.

* If you want a vision of the future: Tenure-track jobs in YA lit and science fiction studies at the University of Calgary.

* Feces on the Philosophy of History! A Manifesto of the MLA Subconference.

* For Safety’s Sake, Get Rid of Campus Cops.

* This is not to diminish the exuberant commitment of the participants. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that pop culture really likes to be agreeable along with its thrills. It likes to say yes, and makes endless conciliations to do so. It is safer to say yes. Yes can be deeply pleasurable. History is made by those who say no. Extinction Pop.

* David Graeber has published the piece comparing Rojava to the Spanish Civil War that he and I argued about on Twitter the other day. I have to say I find Richard Seymour’s take much more persuasive.

So if we have no way to make the slogan effective, what is it for?  If it is genuinely intended to pressure imperialist states to “arm the Kurds”, then it is at best unthinking sentimentality.  At its most sophisticated, though, the idea could be to ‘intervene’ in an argument taking place in imperialist countries around the region’s uprisings and military intervention, to attack the weak points in the dominant ideology and open a space in which a leftist argument can be made to a popular audience.  In this view, Kobane represents both the most progressive front of struggle in the region at the moment, and the weakest point ideologically for imperialist ruling classes who have no desire to see the PYD/PKK prevail.  In this sense, the demand to “arm the Kurds” is a sort of feint, akin to a ‘transitional demand’ in that it is both seemingly ‘reasonable’ in light of the dominant ideology and also impossible for the ruling class to deliver.

* Malcolm Harris remembers the Milgram experiments.

* Who Why How are trolls?

* On the post-post-colonial.

“Post-post-colonial” — and that’s just because I can’t think of something wittier right now — I think is a new generation of, well, new-ish generation of writers, where we’re not driven by our dialogue with the former mother country [the United Kingdom]. The hovering power for us when growing up in the ’70s and ’80s was not the U.K. It was the States, it was America. And it wasn’t an imperialistic power, it was just a cultural influence. I’m sure if this book was written in the ’70s or the ’60s, the characters would have ended up in London. They wouldn’t have ended up in the Bronx.

For us [as opposed to the post-colonial writers], for example, identity is not necessarily how to define ourselves in the relation of colonial power, colonial oppressor — so now it’s a matter of defining who you are as opposed to who you’re not.

* Remember: Obama cannot fail, he can only be failed.

* BREAKING: Wall Street is still looting the whole country.

* Big news for a small number of academic writers and artists: Judge Overturns IRS on Artist Tax Deductions.

* Open-Carrying Guy Has His Brand-New Pistol Stolen at Gunpoint.

* One high school’s insane quest to make students print “Redskins.”

* Football is a death cult.

* Ebola is the CNN of CNN.

* Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich—Then Vegas Made Them Pay.

* The battle to make Tommy the chimp a person.

* Here’s exactly how much monetary damage Calvin and Hobbes did together.

* Here’s the plot, in a nutshell: Sinatoro follows a necronaut who is sent into the afterlife to save Earth from destruction. It draws influences from the western genre and the classic American highway Route 66. It’s something Morrison considers his magnum opus of sorts, and we’re glad he’ll finally get a chance to tell it.

* Thomas Friedman is paid an incredible amount of money to write this dreck.

* This is literally unbelievable: Fracking company teams up with Susan G. Komen, introduces pink drill bits “for the cure.” I find it difficult to even conceive of anything more absurd than this.

* And judging from the resounding crickets that followed this announcement this feels like a year that maybe I really could have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.