Posts Tagged ‘bridges’
Close Every Tab from the Semester or Die Trying Links
* Some nice conference acceptance news: My semester of David Foster Wallace will end with a panel on “Infinite Jest at Twenty” with Lee Konstantinou, Carrie Shanafelt, and Kate Hayles at MLA 2017. I’ve put the full panel description in the comments for anyone interested…
* David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen. Guest appearance from my friend from grad school, Meredith Farmer!
* It’s been such a busy week I haven’t had time to crow about Jaimee’s poem appearing on Verse Daily.
* An obituary for my friend and Marquette colleague Diane Long Hoeveler.
* CFPs from Foundation: The Essay Prize (for graduate students and adjuncts) and a special issue on SF theater.
* Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor.
* For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER: Nigerian players dominate tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible.
* Want to See Hamilton in a City Near You? Buy a Subscription and Wait Two Years. Okay, maybe I will!
* How Hamilton Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda Is Building A Brand For The Ages.
* google d&d player’s handbook truth: The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist.
* Burlington College Will Close, Citing Longstanding Financial Woes. What Killed Burlington College?
* Ending HBCUs in North Carolina.
* Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. And on the Harry Potter Social Justice Wizard beat: a genderqueer student comes to hogwarts and…
* How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth.
* More data on learning and laptops — but you’ll never convince me that students benefit more from pen-and-paper notes than from a searchable, permanent archive of their entire academic career Spotlight can access and retrieve instantly.
* Big-Time College Sports Neglect Academics, Deflect Blame.
* Huge, if true: In other words, the rush to embrace entrepreneurship is ideological rather than practical.
* Diversity defunded in Tennessee.
* UW English Chair Caroline Levine: Enough with Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m leaving.
* Texas School District Votes to Build Totally Tasteful $62 Million High School Football Stadium.
* A new documentary, Agents of Change, describes the five-month SF State protest and a similar strike at Cornell University through the voices of former students like Tascoe who were involved. The film is a gripping case study of the meticulous organizing, community engagement, and careful planning that went into two of the most effective student strikes in American history. Black Studies Matter.
* I was seriously thisclose to writing a #TeamCap blog post to comicsplain Civil War to the confused, but Mightygodking got there first.
* Milwaukee in the ne — oh for fuck’s sake.
* Wisconsin communities dominate “Drunkest Cities” report.
* Wisconsin woman has confirmed case of Zika virus.
* “Rare detailed personal memory a burden, and ultimately a gift.”
* “This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager.”
* “Why do all old statues have such small penises?”
* Probably the most honest thing ever said about this election: 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead. Meanwhile, this is just totally bananas: Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself.
* What Would It Take for Donald Trump to Deport 11 Million and Build a Wall?
* A First-Person Account of a Texas Artist’s Deportation.
* From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent “burn it down” turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I’ve seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it’s not clear that this time we have any countervailing force – adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.
* Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election.
http://mobile.twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/732583842175975428
* Almost starting to see a pattern here, Disney: Shane Black reveals Iron Man 3 scrapped a female villain because of toy sales. Why Disney needs a gay princess.
* A brief history of the giraffe.
* “When you have a child with a life-threatening illness, you have an irrevocably altered existence,” Barbara Sourkes had told the Levys, and Esther feels that is true. She had always felt in control of her fate, but now she believes this to be a fiction. She finds it difficult to reconcile bitterness over the blight of Andrew’s illness with gratitude for the reprieve. “We are the luckiest of the unluckiest people in the world,” she says. “I truly believe that.”
* Can Graduate Students Unionize? The Government Can’t Decide.
* After all this time, who can say really who sent whom to Robben Island for 27 years.
* I too like to live dangerously: Uber Says Riders Will Pay the Most When Their Phone Battery Is Dying.
* Small Beer Press to Publish 400-Year-Old SF Novel.
* On Kim Stanley Robinson and “solarpunk.”
* Nate Moore, 37, is the lone African-American producer in the film division at Marvel Studios. And elsewhere in Marvel news: Agents of SHIELD Star Says Marvel Doesn’t Care Enough About Its Own TV Show.
* DC has, to all reports, done something utterly crazy. Big shakeup in their film division to boot. Can Booster Gold save the DC Cinematic Universe?
* Not even $100 million can make Daniel Craig give a fuck about James Bond.
* World-famous ethicist isn’t.
* What terrible luck! The CIA has “mistakenly” destroyed the sole copy of a massive Senate torture report in the custody of the agency’s internal watchdog group, Yahoo News reported Monday.
* Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions.
* University title and salary generator.
* Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals.
* Attempt no landings etc: Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected.
* Outrageous slander: The Warriors Still Aren’t the Best Team Ever.
* Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets. Bruenighazi.
* Against the Crowdfunding Economy.
* In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.
* What Kinds of Difference Do Superheroes Make?: An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz. Part Two.
* NCDOT tries something new to thwart Durham’s Can Opener bridge.
* The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut.
* The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.
* Ted Chiang vs. Chinese logograms.
* An unorthodox anthropologist goes face to face with ISIS. Is the payoff worth the peril?
* CBS All-Access gets a second show. And that’s why The Good Wife had a terrible ending!
* Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen.
* I’m feeling pretty on board with Luke Cage, I have to say.
* As with the comic before it, the film version of The Dark Tower will likely detail a different, later iteration of the series’s defining time loop.
* “Perfect” Donkey Kong score achieved.
* The only Twitter account you need: @LegoSpaceBot.
* No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before. Get with the program, Great Lakes!
* What drought? Nestle plans $35 million plant to bottle water in Phoenix.
* Alas, Venezuela: There has never been a country that should have been so rich but ended up this poor.
* Project Earth is leaving beta.
* In the back room of the morgue.
* But it’s not all bad news: Our Solar System Could Remain Habitable Long After Earth Is Destroyed.
Happy graduation day, Marquette!
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).
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
Thursday Night Links: Liars, Scoundrels, Star Trek, and More
* Transcript from the September 19 meeting of the Cooper Union Board of Trustees. Even putting aside that their short-sighted and obviously bad decisions caused the problem in the first place, the enthusiasm with which these supposed trustees speak about the possibility of closing the school is just unreal.
* All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem. All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.
* “Since it won’t reform itself, Starfleet needs to be destroyed.” Star Trek into Darkness Hostile to Star Trek, Intelligence.
Remember how Kirk was going to nobly take Khan to Earth to stand trial? Did this actually happen? Is it possible to imagine such a trial ending with a court imposing the punishment of cryogenic stasis? How could a court not demand the other 72 be brought back to life? Wouldn’t such a trial inevitably entail Marcus’s cimes — leading to the exposure of his massive corruption and a public outcry to structurally reform Starfleet?
* Bridge collapse in Washington State, sending vehicles and people into the water.
* Scenes from the fight over Obama’s judicial appointments. Obama won one battle today.
* The best headline ever? The FBI Investigated the Song ‘Louie Louie’ for Two Years.
* Diane Kendig’s letter of resignation from her adjunct position at Kent State.
* Senate Accepts Deal to Kick Formerly Incarcerated Off Food Benefits.
* The kids are all right: Teens hate Facebook.
* Historian Helen Fry, who has written a book called The M Room: Secret Listeners who bugged the Nazis, says the information gleaned by the eavesdropping of the German generals was vitally important to the war effort – so much so that it was given an unlimited budget by the government. She believes what was learned by the M room operations was as significant as the code-breaking work being done at Bletchley Park.
* The Boy Scouts inch forward.
* And This Incredible Full Scale Lego X-Wing Is the Largest Model In History. I’ll allow it.
Boom
The Champlain Bridge we always used to get to Vermont, recently closed for safety concerns, has now been blown up good.
Gerry Canavan 