Posts Tagged ‘Coen Brothers’
Sunday Reading!
* CFP: Folk Horror. CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2022.
* Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.
* The Future Is Black, Not Bleak: On Afrofuturist Poetry.
* Notes on Contemporary University Struggles: A Dossier.
* The Great Faculty Disengagement: Faculty members arenât leaving in droves, but they are increasingly pulling away.
* Hustling to get by: side jobs in grad school. Great Books, Graduate Students, and the Value of Fun in Higher Education.
* Microsyllabus: The History of Campus Policing.
* They fought critical race theory. Now theyâre focusing on âcurriculum transparency.â
* Two years since Covid was first confirmed in U.S., the pandemic is worse than anyone imagined. Americaâs second pandemic winter: More virus, less death. Parents and caregivers of young children say they’ve hit pandemic rock bottom. Students are protesting covid policies â and the adults who wonât listen to them. America’s youth turn left.
* Families are in distress after the first month without the expanded child tax credit.
* âIf I Die, I Dieâ: Meat Loaf Spurned COVID Rules Before Death. Inside Meat Loaf’s Health Troubles, Including Vocal Strain, Alcoholism and Onstage Collapses. Meat Loaf Was My Softball Coach.
* Americaâs shift to the right in 2021 is worse news for Democrats than it seems. The long slide: Inside Bidenâs declining popularity as he struggles with multiple crises. âThe Lowest Point in My Lifetimeâ: How 14 Independent Voters Feel About America. Joe Biden Promised Change. He Hasnât Delivered.
* What Does It Mean If Republicans Wonât Debate?
* Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines. Georgia Has a Very Strong Case Against Trump. Would Trump Throw His Own Kids Under the Bus to Save Himself? We May Soon Find Out.
* Florida Advances Bill That Would Ban Making White People Feel Bad about Racism, and No, That’s Not a Joke.
* Scientists Warn that Sixth Mass Extinction Has âProbably Startedâ. How to Prepare for Climate Change’s Most Immediate Impacts. Donât Look Up Is Missing What We Really Need From Climate Change Movies.
* Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tongaâs Volcano. Tonga volcano: islands covered in ash as three deaths confirmed.
* âWhen my last movie UHF came out in 1989, I made a solemn vow to my fans that I would release a major motion picture every 33 years, like clockwork. Iâm very happy to say weâre on schedule,â said Yankovic in a statement. âAnd I am absolutely thrilled that Daniel Radcliffe will be portraying me in the film. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the role future generations will remember him for.â
* The Moon Knight moment.
* The Star Trek century.
* Do you know what’s cooler than One Ring?
* Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Looks Absolutely Incredible, But… Crunch and TT Games.
* Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
* Smedley Butler Helped Build American Empire. Then He Turned Against It.
* The Fall of NC Mutual.
* Mother sues Meta and Snap over daughter’s suicide.
* Where’s the snow? Milwaukee is nearly 15 inches below its average this season.
* At-will employment in Wisconsin apparently means that you can be fired at any time for any reason but you need your boss’s permission to take a new job.
* Acting Mayor Johnson announces public safety plan to tackle gun violence, car thefts and reckless driving in Milwaukee.
* Discrimination has cost Black home owners of billions of dollars of generational wealth. What can change that?
* Huge, if true: Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme.
* Shakespeare Noir. The Tragedy of Macbeth Is a Cinematic Feast for Starving Film Lovers.
* 6 Dysfunctional Family Roles and Their Characteristics.
* New Bad Art Friend / West End Caleb mashup just dropped.
* Alcohol consumption can directly cause cancer, new genetic study finds.
* The Medieval Vegetarian.
* The Battle over Howard the Duck.
* This is your only friend in the world right now. It’s gonna be a long night.
* tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life
* They stan.
* We stan.
* What are the most compelling and readable “plotless” novels you’ve ever read? My answer.
* And it’s hard to imagine it wouldnât be better with the pizza in hand.
Monday Links! Quite a Few!
* I had a review of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest in The Los Angeles Review of Books last week. Can’t wait for Death’s End.
* “Star Trek style teleportation would take billions of years.” Not if you reverse the polarity of the inertial dampeners, you nitwits!
* The same website has a piece hyping cryonics, so you know it’s legit.
* Meanwhile:Â AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed.’
*Â Trek at 50: The quest for a unifying theory of time travel in Star Trek.
* The Discovery of Gravitational Waves. Gravitational Waves and Neoliberalism.
* The Mount St. Mary’s situation is even more astounding than you’d think when you refocus attention back on the “culling” survey itself. A Violation of Trust. From embarrassing to appalling to surreal. Twenty-first-century legal paradoxes: You can’t re-hire me, I wasn’t legally fired.
*Â Cleveland Files Claim Against Tamir Rice’s Family For Unpaid EMS Bill.
*Â Fathers and Childless Women in Academia Are 3x More Likely to Get Tenure Than Women With Kids.
* The Crisis Facing America’s Working Daughters.
*Â For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications.
* Antonin Scalia, in memoriam.
* The end of SCOTUS. Laying out the recent vote totals like that really does give credence, alas, to the idea that Democrats started it and now Republicans are going to finish it.
* Term Limit the Supreme Court. Don’t Term Limit the Supreme Court. No, I Mean It, Term Limit the Supreme Court.
* The end of Louisiana. Worth it for, what, fourteenth place in the GOP primary?
* A Rallying Cry for A Second-Chance School: The Fight to Save Chicago State.
*Â Antitrust Case Against Duke and UNC May Move Forward.
*Â Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming.
* Climate and Empire. (Sounds like a book Asimov would write today if he were still alive.)
* How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones.
* “Killing a million people was just the sort of thing a superpower had to do.”
* Bernie Sanders and Palestine. The Washington Post found a political scientists who thinks he wouldn’t get blown out. Could Superdelegates Really Stop Bernie Sanders? Clinton now managing exceptions in Nevada, and has shockingly few staffers in South Carolina. And it’s fine. It’s fine.Â
* Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department. To be fair, though, those don’t seem super hard to get.
* The skills gap: still a fraud to lower labor costs.
* The Internet ruins everything, even Jeopardy!.
* From the nice-work-if-you-can-get-it files: Concordia executive gets $235,000 in severance after 90 days on the job. No public bidding on major University of Nebraska contracts. Michigan Coachâs jet travel valued at more than $10,000 a day.
* Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: They found BoShek. Hyperspace Maps, Graphs, and Trees.
* Are you an academic superhero?
* Adjuncts and/as freelancers.
*Â Why So Few American Indians Earn Ph.D.’s, and What Colleges Can Do About It.
* When Is Campus Hate Speech No Longer Protected Speech?
* The Coen Brothers and the defeat of the American left. I knew it was them.
* Marvel’s The Vision Is Telling a Story Unlike Any Superhero Comic I’ve Ever Read.
* Day late, buck short: Suffragette valentines.
*Â The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.
*Â âIâm too old to do things I donât enjoyâ: An interview with Margaret Atwood.
* And SMBC catches on to my philosophical method.
Thurs. 3
* Bart Stupak’s reign of terror may finally be over.
* “Christians urged to boycott Glenn Beck.”
* “Someone should not be able to walk into a restaurant and order a plate of an endangered species”: Whale sushi illegally sold in California. Like Tim I’m disappointed to find out this was only a misdemeanor.
* The good guys are losing the messaging war on climate climate. More on these unfortunate poll results from Peter Daou, Kevin Drum, Amanda Marcotte, and Aaron Wiener.
* And Star Wars, by the Coen Brothers.
Ecolinks!
Still working through a backlog of open tabs. First up: ecology and the environment.
* There’s no such thing as clean coal. Just ask the Coen brothers. Also at Grist: dealing with the fact of environmentalism’s soft public support.
As I have argued before, our attention to wide but weak public support is misplaced, leaving us vulnerable to the cycles of an ADD media and alienating our potential core. It is increasingly evident that the vast scale of climate risk provokes a number of numbing psychological responses — pre-conscience cognitive dissonance and buffering in various forms — which exacerbates the usual forces of diffusion.
The only means by which a worldview and solution that is significantly at odds with majority public opinion may be driven onto the public agenda is through the agency of “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” — in other words, a determined, partisan core.
* ‘Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?’ First up: a sunshield. I guess it’s true what they say: from the dawn of time mankind really has yearned to block out the sun.
* Sympathy for the Unabomber? Don’t open any packages from Kevin Kelly for a few days.
* Times Square and several blocks of Broadway are being shut down to cars for most of the year in the name of traffic management and pedestrian malls. Awesome.
* Nuke your city. Via BLDG BLOG (which has a lot of examples) and io9. Of course, we’ve already done Durham.
Late Night
Late night.
* ‘Our Phony Economy’: Why measuring GDP doesn’t tell us much of anything we need to know. In Harper’s, via MeFi.
The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. âWe have to spend our money on something,â shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about âdisease-led recovery.â To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.
* Springfield Punx Simpsonizes celebrities and superheroes. At right: Tobias FĂŒnke.
* Al Giordano says Tim Kaine is growing on him for VP.
The number one rule in choosing a vice presidential nominee is “first, do no harm.” If you’re a presidential nominee, you don’t want a running mate that will distract from you, commit gaffes, speak off-message, or that secretly thinks he or she is too good to be number two.
And the second rule is, “then, do some good.” You want a VP that will reinforce your messages and make voters more comfortable with you.
Kaine is so far passing both tests with flying colors.
I’m not there yet—as I’ve mentioned before, just about everything I hear about Kaine turns me off—but Al’s instincts have never steered me wrong. I guess we’ll see.
* What are the essential reads in literary fantasy? Personally I’d have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, GarcĂa MĂĄrquez, and Calvino…
* Mission accomplished, corporations! Wal-Mart employee voluntarily enforces her entirely false belief that “copyright lasts forever.”
* And will Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers comedy, be the new greatest movie of all time? All signs point to yes:
Magazine Catchup 2
I’m still flipping through the last six months of magazines after a long and trying semester. A few highlights from New Yorkers past:
* “Numbers Guy”: Exploring the way our brains process math.
One morning in September, 1989, a former sales representative in his mid-forties entered an examination room with Stanislas Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris. Three years earlier, the man, whom researchers came to refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brain hemorrhage that left him with an enormous lesion in the rear half of his left hemisphere…
Dehaene also noticed that although Mr. N could no longer read, he sometimes had an approximate sense of words that were flashed in front of him; when he was shown the word âham,â he said, âItâs some kind of meat.â Dehaene decided to see if Mr. N still had a similar sense of number. He showed him the numerals 7 and 8. Mr. N was able to answer quickly that 8 was the larger numberâfar more quickly than if he had had to identify them by counting up to the right quantities. He could also judge whether various numbers were bigger or smaller than 55, slipping up only when they were very close to 55. Dehaene dubbed Mr. N âthe Approximate Man.â The Approximate Man lived in a world where a year comprised âabout 350 daysâ and an hour âabout fifty minutes,â where there were five seasons, and where a dozen eggs amounted to âsix or ten.â Dehaene asked him to add 2 and 2 several times and received answers ranging from three to five. But, he noted, âhe never offers a result as absurd as 9.â
* “Friend Game”: Life in the wake of the famous Megan Meier MySpace suicide.
Shortly after Steve Pokinâs story broke in the Suburban Journals, Tina Meier ran into Lori Drew at a shopping center. Tina followed Lori to a pizzeria. When Lori walked out, Tina entered the store and spoke to the owner.
âDo you advertise with The Drew Advantage?â Tina asked. âIf so, I advise you to take a look at the Journals. The girl involved was my daughter.â She did the same thing when Lori went to Divine Nails, several doors down.
âTina, just please stop this,â Lori said, in the parking lot.
âStop this? Lori, I will never stop this.â
* They’re horrid and useless. Why do pennies exist?
* Understanding the Coen Brothers.
* Fixing the planet ain’t easy.
n 1977, Jimmy Carter told the American people that they would have to balance the nationâs demand for energy with its ârapidly shrinking resourcesâ or the result âmay be a national catastrophe.â It was a problem, the President said, âthat we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.â Carter referred to the difficult effort as the âmoral equivalent of war,â a phrase that was widely ridiculed (along with Carter himself, who wore a cardigan while delivering his speech, to underscore the need to turn down the thermostat).
Carter was prescient. We are going to have to reduce our carbon footprint rapidly, and we can do that only by limiting the amount of fossil fuels released into the atmosphere. But what is the most effectiveâand least painfulâway to achieve that goal? Each time we drive a car, use electricity generated by a coal-fired plant, or heat our homes with gas or oil, carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases escape into the air. We can use longer-lasting light bulbs, lower the thermostat (and the air-conditioning), drive less, and buy more fuel-efficient cars. That will help, and so will switching to cleaner sources of energy. Flying has also emerged as a major carbon donâtâwith some reason, since airplanes at high altitudes release at least ten times as many greenhouse gases per mile as trains do. Yet neither transportationâwhich accounts for fifteen per cent of greenhouse gasesânor industrial activity (another fifteen per cent) presents the most efficient way to shrink the carbon footprint of the globe.
Entertainment News
Entertainment news!
* The writers’ strike is now officially over, which means the Daily Show and Colbert writers will be back tonight. You can watch with a clear conscience now.
* High off their comeback success on No Country for Old Men, the Coens are going to adapt and direct Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
* One interesting consequence of the strike: Showtime’s Dexter, a show I’ve talked up in the past, will be on CBS this spring, starting this Friday.
Best Film of 2007?
Roger Ebert says Juno is the best film of 2007, while blucarbnpinwheel says it’s just okay at best. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m inclined to trust Ben, especially insofar as we apparently had the exact same reaction to Napoleon Dynamite right down to the Rushmore comparison. (Although in fairness to N.D. I have grown a little more fond of it in retrospect and upon a subsequent viewing.) In Ebert’s plus column, he does note the greatness of No Country for Old Men, which I’ve been meaning to write about but am having trouble improving upon the Candleblog review: Holy crap. I was just punched in the face by the Coen brothers. Every single individual moment of this film is perfect. I am in awe. How dare they make this film?
But Ebert maliciously and incorrectly snubs by omission The Darjeeling Limited, obviously my choice for best film of Oh Seven, almost as if he’s deliberately trying to provoke me into a blind rage. Winner: blucarbnpinwheel!
I’m still hoping I like Juno, though. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, literally everything Michael Cera does makes me laugh, so the outlook is good.
Le Conversazioni: The writers’ conference so elite you’ve never even heard of it. Last year Zadie Smith, David Fosty Wally, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and some other guy met on the Isle of Capri to talk about language and identity. Next week it happens again with Ethan Coen, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Chuck Palahniuk, and Claire Messud, talking about the intersection between literature and cinema.
YouTube has clips of last year’s event, but the real meat is at the leconversazioni.it site itself.
Via MeFi. I’m going to be looking through this all day.
Gerry Canavan 