Posts Tagged ‘clickbait’
Monday Morning Links!
* Permanent addition to the sidebar: Resources for planning a trip to the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington. Send me anything I’ve missed!
* CFPs I have going: Women and Science Fiction Media (SFFTV Special Issue). Buffy at 20 (April conference at Marquette).
* My friend and colleague Dan Hassler-Forest has been composing a Trump Film Studies Syllabus: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus.
* So you think you elected an autocrat.
* Dr. Strange and the Trump Presidency.
* Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office. Not even the same scandal: Donald Trump Pauses Transition Work to Meet with Indian Business Partners.
* Electoral College fan fiction getting good now.
* This seems fine. Disabled People Will Die Under Trump. Trumpwatch. Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular. @EveryTrumpDonor. Trump vs. neoliberalism, #whoeverwinswelose. Racism with No Racists. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Man in the High Castle. After Trump. Being Mike Pence.
* It can’t happen here. It probably can’t happen here. It probably won’t happen here. Okay but that was a long time ago. George Takei.
* Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” So propaganda is bullshit — in the philosophical sense.
* Don’t normalize this. Don’t ever, ever normalize this.
* We’ll be talking about this question for a long time, whether we like it or not: The End of Identity Liberalism. Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. And yet: Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.
* Close Reading Hamilton: “What’d I Miss?” I only did two days on Hamilton in my class this time around and wound up focusing a lot on these two songs myself.
* Abolish Chuck Schumer. Abolish the Presidency.
* More than 100 campus leaders urge Trump to take more forceful stand against “harassment, hate and acts of violence.” Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election. Wesleyan declared sanctuary campus.
* It doesn’t matter how effective a deterrent it is — it’s cruel and unusual and we need to act.
* Only the superrich can save us… oh forget it.
* Meet the Professor Who’s Trying to Help You Steer Clear of Clickbait.
* Michigan fights court order to give Flint residents bottled water.
* Keep an eye on North Carolina.
* A Brief History of Fascism in the Pacific Northwest.
* When a Sibling Goes to Prison.
* The Limits of Gossip: Informal system of warning colleagues about senior scholars who engage in inappropriate behavior doesn’t really protect anyone, study finds.
* The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing.
* A Mere 12,000 US Schools Are Within a Mile of a Hazardous Chemical Facility.
* Science proves the rich really are different.
* We might be done with climate change, but climate change is not done with us.
* It’s official: NASA’s peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Though sports culture continues to be a domain of intense patriarchal production and violence — rape jokes are just locker room talk, after all — these days jocks in the news are just as likely to be taking a knee against American racism in the image of Colin Kaepernick. The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.
* And because you demanded it…
All Your Weekend Links
* Waywiser Press has two new MP3s of Jaimee reading from her first book, How to Avoid Speaking: “Derrida Eats a Dorito” and “On Beauty.”
* New SF from Cixin Liu: “The Weight of Memories.”
* Duke Lit is hiring. And Georgetown has a cluster hire in African American studies.
* Automatically preordered: Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, New York 2140. China Miéville’s October: A History of the Russian Revolution. The Miéville- and Le-Guin-fronted new edition of More’s Utopia. Box Brown’s graphic history of Tetris.
* I love this Oulipoesque writing game from Steve Shaviro, on writing like a pundit.
- Every sentence must be a cliche.
- There must be no logical or narrative connection among the sentences. Each one must be a complete non sequitur.
* Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom.
* Reevaluating Teaching Evaluations.
* Can grad students unionize? Academia awaits major labor board ruling.
* Univision buys Gawker for $135m, shuts Gawker itself down.
* Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.
* Relatedly: Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons. Some immediate effects.
* The new Star Trek distribution model in a global context.
* 15 Technologies That Were Supposed to Change Education Forever.
* Foundation 124 is out, with a special focus on More’s Utopia.
* I feel this now about a lot of things I read: Why Scott Snyder Doesn’t Write Damian Wayne Much.
* Unfortunately, Landis — the director who co-wrote and executive produced Clue — and the studios were completely wrong about there being any box office appeal for a film with three endings. As Lynn explained, “The audience decided they didn’t know which ending to go to, so they didn’t go at all.”
* Meanwhile, from the death of culture.
* It was the deadliest massacre of disabled people since World War II. How do we honor the victims if we don’t even know their names? Remembering the Sagamihara 19.
* Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing.’
* Something unexpected I learned recently: the practice of giving presidential candidates classified intelligence briefings began in the 1950s with President Truman, who didn’t want his successors coming into office without knowing crucial information (the way he hadn’t known about the Manhattan Project).
* Donald Trump is assembling gathering the Legion of Doom. (The ubiquitous Twitter joke was calling it “the hospice stage.”) Trumpism: first as tragedy, then as farce. The Presidential Debates Will Almost Definitely Exclude Third Parties. Finding Someone Who Can Imitate Donald Trump. Battleground Texas? The short, unhappy life of the Naked Trump statue. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots.
* The GOP’s Chances Of Holding The Senate Are Following Trump Downhill.
* A digital exhibit from the Milwaukee Public Library on the history of race and class in Milwaukee. Milwaukee by the numbers.
* Frodo’s trip to Mordor as a Google Map. Via Boing Boing.
* Aetna to pull out of the Obamacare markets, apparently for revenge. EpiPen Price Hike Has Parents of Kids With Allergies Scrambling Ahead of School Year.
* Diagnoses of 9/11-linked cancers have tripled in less than 3 years.
* Why gifted kindergarten is 70 percent white. How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success.
* “Clickbait”-esque titles work for academic papers too.
* Why aren’t there more women in Congress?
* What crime is the robbing of a neighborhood, compared to policing it?
* These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk. In a panic, they try to pull the plug…
* The Original Plan for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four Sounds Completely Amazing.
In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great…well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.
By coincidence, we watched the actual Trank Fantastic Four tonight and I was utterly shocked to see that there was almost a decent movie lurking in there somewhere.
* Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered.
* The spectacle of mixed gender racing unravels fascistic models of sex/gender difference and sex/gender purity. Every woman runner competes with the lie that men are faster than women. That fiction can only be maintained by ensuring that men and women never run with each other — when men and women run with each other, they scale down each other’s understanding of their differences. The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion. Capturing Semenya.
* The Forgotten Tale of How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village Into a Prison.
* That time NASA accidentally sold a piece of irreplaceable Apollo history for less than $1,000.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Heidelberg Project is coming down.
* Allow me to recommend the Julia Louis-Dreyfus portion of this episode of the Katie Couric Podcast, where she talks Veep, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The Al Franken episode is pretty good too.
* This episode of Criminal, on the founder of The Leaky Cauldron’s experience of being cyber-stalked for eight years, is also a really fascinating listen.
* I’m sad about this, but it’s probably time: Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman Announces End of Long-Running Superhero Comic Invincible.
* Perhaps, once at a summer barbecue, when both were still alive, Maude grabbed Marge’s hand under the table and held tight.
* Meritocracy and system dysfunction. Meritocracy and system dysfunction and free tuition at public colleges.
* One of the biggest crime waves in America isn’t what you think it is: wage theft.
* The race of the police officer doesn’t matter. The race of the mayorimplementing the policy doesn’t matter. What matters is who enjoys a “right to the city” — and who gets thrown up against a wall and patted down.
* New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
* Elsewhere at Jacobin: Jacobin vs. Scientology.
* Scenes From the Terrifying, Already Forgotten JFK Airport Shooting That Wasn’t.
* Stranger Things, Parallel Universes, and the State of String Theory. And an interesting proposition from Chuck Rybak: Is the ubiquity of cell phones driving the nostalgia craze in film and TV?
* Please don’t mess this up: Marvel And Hulu Announce Runaways TV Series.
* Or this one either: Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar return for animated Batman movie.
* What killed The Nightly Show?
* When Nixon almost implemented universal basic income.
* Understanding the Harambe meme. Understanding the bees are dying at an alarming rate meme.
* A list of 150+ SF Writers of Asian Descent.
* Terraforming Mars without Nukes.
* Gins often said that the reason she and Arakawa made art and architecture was to “construct optimism.” Their whole philosophy began there, in the desire to embrace being alive and to shift their focus away from the certainty of death. Gins made the choice to believe that art, and her work, were strong enough to do that. It was her version of faith, and her work made that faith solid, physical. Her life, like all our lives, was often filled with sadness and difficulty. There were periods of depression, anxiety, sick parents, financial problems, her husband’s illness and death. Through it all, she insisted not just on continuing to live, but on living forever. Trying to build a world where fewer people suffered made her own suffering bearable. A year and a half after Arakawa’s death, Gins recalled in a letter to a friend her struggle to move forward. “Despite my shattered state,” she wrote, “in spite of the gaping hole that had been punched into my optimism, I asserted that nothing is of more interest than to be alive.”
* J.K. Rowling announces new Harry Potter short story collections.
* Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In the 136 years scientists have been tracking global temperatures, there has never been a warmer month than this July, according a new NASA report.
* Arctic Cruises for the Wealthy Could Fuel a Climate Change ‘Feedback Loop’.
* RIP John McLaughlin, who I watched with my father every week for a decade. Bye-bye.
* Dune, as it was always meant to be experienced.
* Feet of clay: Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland vs. the unions.
* Exercise we can believe in: Watching horror films burns nearly 200 calories a time.
* And physicists may have discovered a fifth fundamental force of nature. This is the one that gives people superpowers, I know it.
Weekend Links!
* Good news, everyone! “A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.
* What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny of the Impression.
* U. of New Hampshire Concedes It Shouldn’t Have Bought $17,000 Table.
* Chicago State lays off a third of its staff.
* RiffTrax tackles The Force Awakens.
* The legally and ethically fraught world of post-mortem sperm donation.
* Raising a Child With Grit Can Mean Letting Her Quit.
* Yale Watch: Neither retaining Calhoun nor adding Franklin makes a lick of sense.
* Elisabeth Moss to Star in Hulu Straight-to-Series Drama Handmaid’s Tale.
* Heroic time-traveling weasel shuts down Large Hadron Collider to protect the weasel future.
* “Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.” Meanwhile: Susan Sarandon: I’m more afraid of Hillary’s war record than Trump’s wall.
* And he’s will have had always had my vote: This Candidate for President Claims He’s Traveled Through Time.
Thursday Night Links!
* Did you know Jaimee Hills’s incredible How to Avoid Speaking has started to ship? Buy it today! Hear her on Lake Effect!
* Presenting the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence. Will “decoherence” be the doom of American democracy?
* The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Race Is Always the Issue.
* The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us about freezing brains and reanimating human minds. A Dying Young Woman’s Hope.
* The Caine Prize after “emergence.”
* The Nine Dumbest Things in the Rutgers Report on Kyle Flood.
* The Internet after Ad Blocking. Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web.
* Inside the Brains of Happily Married Couples.
* Friends don’t let friends write clickbait confessionals.
* The feminist think piece industrial complex.
* Twilight of the Elites and the rise of a global left. Even Yglesias is on board!
* We enter into something of a contract as a faculty member: we trade income for autonomy and security. If we do not use the latter, we enter a fool’s bargain. This is why I stay, and why being ready to quit is an important part of staying.
* Inside the Battle for Cooper Union.
* Doing the Lord’s work at GOG.com.
* Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.
* 30 Questions to Ask Your Kid Instead of “How Was Your Day?”
* These 25 schools are responsible for the greatest advances in science. Go Spartans! #11.
* If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism.
* Tased at the Harris Teeter. After an often torturous tenure at the helm of the Durham Police Department—including, most recently, last week’s controversial Tasering of an unarmed black man at a Durham Harris Teeter—Chief Jose Lopez Sr. is out.
* Fraternities are pretty bad.
* “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
* The NFL and the military: a love affair as strange and cynical as ever.
* God save Title IX from its champions.
* Memo to Clinton-world: It might be time to start panicking.
* Ahmed Mohamed and the “Freedom to Tinker.”
* How to screw up the Muppets in one easy step.
A spoiler-free example: The Miss Piggy-Kermit relationship has always worked because of how unfathomable it is, both in terms of species and temperament. These people don’t belong together, but somehow they’ve formed a decadeslong pairing, one that always felt buoyed by Miss Piggy’s stronger affections and a submissive aspect to Kermit. But discovering that Kermit is dating another pig now, perhaps a slightly more docile pig, inverts the whole dynamic of the relationship. Now Kermit just has a fetish, so has he always been playing hard-to-get with Piggy as part of some role-playing that we haven’t previously established? Once you open the window a crack, you’re gonna have to throw open the doors eventually. And within the same dynamic, Miss Piggy’s affections for Kermit, even affections tempered by occasional abuse, have always been a key softening factor for Miss Piggy. We tolerate her awfulness because of her love for Kermit and the love we believe Kermit has for her. Without that core, the risk of Miss Piggy spiraling into an untenable sty of callus words and consistent mistreatment of subordinates is all too real.
* What’s it like to take Jim Henson’s place?
* Don’t Have Sex With Robots, Say Ethicists.
* Nemo iudex in causa sua, but, you know, the opposite.
* Utilitarianism, y’all. Also: the Singularity.
* What Happens When A Parent’s Grief Goes Viral?
* At WeWork, an Idealistic Start-Up Clashes With Its Cleaners.
* Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art.
* “The Long Emancipation” offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists.
* Students’ Requests for Trigger Warnings Grow More Varied. Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine. How Salaita Was Fired: One Year Later. Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data. Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down. Colleges Flush With Cash Saddle Poorest Students With Debt. No Child Left Behind Goes to College. Is College Tuition Really Too High? The Uberification of the University. The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University. Tacit knowledge and graduate education. Can’t afford to eat at a college sitting on over $9 billion? There’s an app for that. The Whistleblower Effect. The entire Japanese public university system attempts a massive queen sacrifice. There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts. Are College Lectures Unfair? Microaggressions and good manners. The coming human capital contract nightmare.
* In 1997, the ETS announced that the SAT could not properly be labeled a scholastic assessment test, either; the initials now stand for nothing.
* Maybe the best description of what it is I think I’m doing I’ve ever seen: He said that his best professors “took texts that seemed complicated, made them look simple, and then made them complex again.”
* “We couldn’t imagine Oregonians’ turning their backs on higher education, but they did.”
* Some have called Harvard a Hedge Fund with a school attached, because it has over $36 billion in its endowment, but the UC holds over $100 billion in its retirement funds, endowments, and working capital funds. This large amount of money can be used for good, or it can be used for darker purposes, but one thing for sure, it makes the university an important global finance player. Of course, we should all ask what it means when a public university enters global finance.
* Jerry Brown’s University of California Perma-Temp Problem.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 22: Collaboration (part 2 of 2).
* The rise of the woman comic book buyer.
* Studies in Cruel Optimism, Bernie Sanders campaign edition.
* Yes. Yes. Embrace your hate.
* This week, the site enabled hosts of events to determine who has actually seen the Facebook invites they’ve sent out but not replied, making the simple act of viewing of your notifications a horrifying social contract you can’t escape.
* Nice work if you can get it: How I Felt After 70 Days of Lying in Bed for Science.
* If We Burn All the World’s Fossil Fuels, We’ll Melt Antarctica & Flood the Earth. Right, that’s the plan. Climate Apocalypse and/or Democracy. PS: Almost Half of the World’s Ocean Life Has Died Off Since 1970.
* Markets in everything! Refugees bring in big business in Europe.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* And some news you can use: The IRS Will Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
How to Grad School
1. Know how bad the job market sucks and why.
2. Find out what can get you one of those precious few jobs.
3. Prepare for the academic path to blow up in your face.
Short and sweet and bleak bleak bleak, this is probably the best “how to grad school” advice piece I’ve seen yet. It’s not very well-suited to our clickbait media ecology, but abiding by these three principles is really the only way to do it.
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it from the weekend: a CFP for a Science Fiction Film and Television special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”
* Call for submissions: Accessing the Future.
* Today’s twenty-first-century political weirdness is the Scotland referendum on independence. The Guardian. MetaFilter. The economic case. Schroedinger’s Kingdom. John Oliver. Why Scotland thinks it can survive as an independent country. I’m Guardian editor Matt Wells. Got questions on Scottish independence? Ask away!
* Alison Bechdel, certified genius. Some professors won too.
* Postdoc of the year: “The Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University invites applications for its 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellowship program. The successful candidates will couple their own research and publishing agenda with their contributions to the Center’s Collective Memory Project, a wide ranging oral history of the George W. Bush Presidency.” Friend, do I have a story for you.
* Chris Ware is serializing a novella in the Guardian: “The Last Saturday.”
* Unpopular opinions watch: Carceral progressivism.
* More Weird Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Original Star Trek.
Roddenberry believed there was no chest hair in the future.
The dream never dies.
* A day in the life of a data mined kid.
* This Is What Happens To Transgender Kids Who Delay Puberty.
* The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World.
* World War II and the creation of the paperback industry.
* Cruel optimism watch: Are More MLA Faculty Jobs on the Way?
* The madness of crowds: Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s.
* Hamburg wants to be the best city in the world in 20 years.
* Burlington nipping on its heels.
* Calvinball in Wisconsin: the rules on voting just changed again.
* Study: 30 percent of former NFL players will get dementia or Alzheimer’s.
* Don’t look now, but the US prison population is growing again.
* The University of California is just literally a hedge fund now.
* What Are the Real Odds That Your Birth Control Will Fail? Pretty frightening.
* A King Kong prequel, because we haven’t even come close to hitting bottom yet.
* BREAKING: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization.
* In decades of public debate about global warming, one assumption has been accepted by virtually all factions: that tackling it would necessarily be costly. But a new report casts doubt on that idea, declaring that the necessary fixes could wind up being effectively free. The price is too high!
* BREAKING: Immigrants aren’t stealing your jobs.
* A feminist history of Wonder Woman.
* Every panel of Watchmen, sorted by average lightness, ascending.
* Understanding the Tortoise and the Hare.
* Because you demanded it: “Play It Again, Dick,” the weird quasi-Veronica-Mars nega-sequel, is finally here.
* Necrocapitalism in the Anthropocene: Govt may do away with tribal consent for cutting forests.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Thievery marring Little Free Libraries.
* Anti-monuments in Milwaukee and beyond.
* May 2015 can’t come fast enough.
* And no one could have predicted: Apple releases U2 album removal tool.
Meanwhile, Some Links
* Marquette has a new president, the first lay president in its history. His farewell message to UWM.
In closing, I would like to thank everyone at UWM for your efforts to make this a great university. I have been proud to serve as your leader for the last three and a half years, and I am confident that UWM will continue to make significant strides to become a top-tier research university that is a great place to learn and work. I will continue to promote UWM and spread the word about the great things being accomplished by our campus even after I am no longer Chancellor. I will also work hard to strengthen and build partnerships between UWM and Marquette, as I believe that by working together, Milwaukee’s two largest four-year academic institutions will help address many of Milwaukee’s problems, drive growth within the region and increase the prestige of both universities.
* Dia/lectics of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
* It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse.
* Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling. US House votes to allow dumping of coal mining waste into streams. Escape the Devastation of Future Earth on a Luxurious Space Mayflower.
* Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming.
* An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz. This is the army-as-utopia piece I was going on about last week, if you were curious about it.
* What Life Will Be Like for Girls’ Hannah at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
* What I’m Learning on a Simulated Mars Mission.
* Harvard University has discovered three books in its collection are bound in human hide. Come now, only three? Don’t be coy, Harvard…
* Amy Acker joins Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because of course she is.
* Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers, begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about it.
* Inside UFO 54-40, the Unwinnable “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
* In sum, this so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis, making no quantitative predictions whatsoever. It has no relationship whatsoever to the sophisticated analysis of rich data sets for which Nate Silver himself has become famous. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
* Why was Charlotte’s absurdly corrupt mayor doing the bag drops himself? Amateur hour. He’s going to be so mad when he finally gets around to seeing American Hustle.
* Clickbait publication says stop talking so much about clickbait.
* Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan.
* And nothing gold can stay: Bradley Cooper is rumored to take over Indiana Jones.
Weekend Links
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Unreturned library books can mean jail time.
* It’s intuitive but wrong to picture the public debt as private debt we’re all on the hook for. In reality, public debt isn’t really properly thought of as borrowing at all, according to Frank N. Newman, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Clinton. Since the U.S. doesn’t need to borrow back the dollars it originally spent into existence in order to spend them again, the purpose of issuing Treasuries is really just for “providing an opportunity for investors to move funds from risky banks to safe and liquid treasuries,” he writes. Investors aren’t doing the U.S. a favor by buying treasury securities; the U.S. is doing investors a favor by selling them. Otherwise, without the option “to place their funds in the safest most liquid form of instrument there is for U.S. dollars,” would-be bondholders “are stuck keeping some of their funds in banks, with bank risk.”
* We frack the places we’ve already abandoned.
* Sherlock Holmes, First Published in 1893, Is Officially in the Public Domain in the US.
* Twitter account of the night: @ClickbaitSCOTUS.
* The problem with white allies.
* An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself. How the “Wolf of Wall Street” Is Still Screwing His Real-Life Victims.
* Institutional Prestige and the Academic Caste System.
* What happens to workers when jobs becomes gigs? The Fear Economy.
* An administrative law judge in Florida this week upheld new rules by the State Department of Education that require significantly more of state college faculty members — particularly in the areas of student success — for them to earn continuing contracts (the equivalent of tenure).
* Slate covers the US’s insane hostility towards presymptomatic genetic testing.
* Connecticut just hands ESPN sacks of money every year.
* Degenerate, Inc.: The Paranoid and Obsessive Life of a Mid-Level Bookie.
* Reality Pawns: The New Money TV.
* Why I voted for an academic boycott of Israel.
* Wisconsin finds another use for cheese.
* The kids are all right — they’re abandoning Facebook.
* The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places On Earth. Some new ones in the mix here.
* And good news everyone! Your dystopian surveillance nightmare is legal again.
Tuesday Night Links!
* This won’t be the last time you hear about it, but Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction finally has a pre-order page.
* In a post-employment economy ridden with arbitrary credentialism, a résumé is often not a reflection of achievement but a document sanctioning its erasure. One is not judged on what one has accomplished, but on one’s ability to walk a path untouched by the incongruities of market forces.
* Want to teach your students about structural racism? Prepare for a formal reprimand. Lessons from the Collection IV: Teaching While Black (Part I). Part II.
* Has UC Berkeley mortgaged itself to football?
* American Students Fall Behind International Peers In Math, Science, And Reading. Countries With Higher Math Scores Have Unhappier Kids.
* Point: Superheroes are a bunch of fascists. Counterpoint: Stop Calling Superheroes ‘Fascist.’
* Democracy watch: Gov. Snyder has effectively absolute authority dismantling Detroit despite losing in the city 20-1. What’s next for Detroit?
* I Am Sitting in a Room, 2013.
* Europe Could Be 9 Degrees Warmer By The End Of The Century.
* Uruguayan President Asks for World to Support His Marijuana Legalization Plan.
* British Think Tank Revives 40-year-old Plan to Build Space Colonies. How NASA might build its very first warp drive.
* And What’s Wrong With America’s Newspaper Opinion Columnists in One Chart.
It’s Always Mischief Night Somewhere Links
* You can now order the special Paradoxa issue on “Africa SF.” The testimonials indicate that Samuel Delany has at least heard of something I’ve written, so there’s that…
* Those who do not study history will have their wise decision ratified by bean-counting administrators: One of the 17 University of North Carolina campuses could stop offering degrees in physics, history and political science. If you read that sentence and thought to yourself, “gee, I bet that’s a historically black college,” give yourself a prize!
* MLA Reports Modest Decline in Job Ads Posted in 2012-13. The State of the Academic Job Market, by Discipline.
* ‘I Wish I Were Black,’ and Other Tales of Privilege.
* The Logic of Stupid Poor People.
* What The U.S. Would Look Like If It Mirrored The Main Characters On Prime-Time Network Television.
-Half the population would be white men.
-Five percent of the population would be black men.
-Just 1.9 percent of the world would be Asian or Latino men.
-Overall, 57 percent of the population would be men.
-34 percent of the world would be white women
-3.8 percent would be African-American women
-And 3.8 percent would be Latino or Asian women
-31.8 percent of the population would work for the police or some sort of federal law enforcement agency.
-9.7 percent of us would be doctors.
-2.6 percent of us would be criminals.
-1.9 percent would be supernatural creatures or robots.
* What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.
Students whose parents pay tens of thousands for SAT tutors to help their child take the test over and over compete against students who struggle to pay the fee to take the test once. Students who spend afternoons on “enrichment” activities compete against students working service jobs to pay bills – jobs which don’t “count” in the admissions process. Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C Z Nnaemeka termed “the un-exotic underclass” – the poor who have “the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting”, the poor who make up most of the US today.
* …a recent Twitter thread started by a popular feminist blogger examines a dark side of that cliché in real-life academe, one in which professors’ advances – intellectual and otherwise – feed a need for validation and flattery, and at times cross the line into sexual harassment.
* By the numbers: Sex crimes on campus.
* The New York Times spends 36 hours in Milwaukee.
* Colorado Counties Ban Sale of Marijuana, Want Share of Proposed State Sales Tax Anyway.
* Obama’s going to be super-mad when he finds out about the nonsensical security state procedures his administration has been using in lieu of actual oversight. And breaking into Yahoo! and Google? Why didn’t anyone tell him!
* Ripped from the pages of Philip K. Dick! Pentagon weighs future of its inscrutable nonagenarian futurist.
* Pennsylvania law protects pregnant women from unwanted belly rubbing.
* The Chronicle follows up on last year’s PhD-on-food-stamps, who is now in a TT position at Martin Methodist College.
* How Not To Take The GRE With a Non-Standard-English Name.
* The richest country in history: The Number Of Homeless Students In The United States Hits A Record.
* “Riots always begin typically the same way”: Food stamp shutdown looms Friday.
* Perry Anderson accidentally writes a whole issue of New Left Review.
* 20th Century Headlines, Rewritten to Get More Clicks.
* How the Koch Brothers laundered illegal campaign contributions.
* They’re marketing the Veronica Mars movie as a love triangle. This is my skeptical face.
* Sesame Street parodies Homeland.
* The chart that explains the world.
* What’s W.R.O.N.G. with ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’? A.L.M.O.S.T. E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
* No accidents, comrade: The New Inquiry considers Cold War nostalgia and Twilight Struggle.
* People Who Live Downwind Of Alberta’s Oil And Tar Sands Operations Are Getting Blood Cancer.
* BREAKING: Student Debt Is Making All Your Life Choices Worse.
* Matt Zoller Seitz completes his series on video essays on Wes Anderson films. Bring on The Grand Budapest Hotel!
* PRINCETON, N.J., Nov. 27: Princeton’s freshmen again have chosen Adolf Hitler as “the greatest living person” in the annual poll of their class conducted by The Daily Princetonian.
* The coming Terry McAuliffe landslide as proof the GOP brand is in serious disrepair.
* And it looks like they’ve finally (almost) proved that Darth Vader wasn’t always going to be Luke Skywalker’s father. Gotcha Lucas! You can run but you can’t hide.
Gerry Canavan 