Monday! Morning! Links!

* Jaimee’s lesson on the letter L, “Lo Lee Ta,” is up at Red Paint Hill.

* How to prepare your campuses for a queen sacrifice: a handy guide from Connecticut.

From Inside Higher Ed and excellent reporting by Colleen Flaherty, we start with a series of proposals to cut back faculty autonomy and increase administrative power over instructors.  The central, multi-campus administration can fire tenured profs more easily, and also move them to other campuses in the system:

tenured faculty members may be moved to another regional university without their consent, without the guarantee of tenure there. Tenured faculty members could be terminated, not just in cases of financial exigency, as is now the case, but if the administration “believes economic or programmatic conditions exist” for retrenchment. And tenured faculty members also could be fired without the chance to appeal for breaking any local, state or national law, ethical standard or policy statement…

Moreover, “faculty members would have to be ‘professional’ and ‘collegial,’” i.e.,, more easily disciplined. Additionally, a significant union-managed faculty grant program would end, making professors more dependent on the administration.

* On Campus, Older Faculty Keep On Keepin’ On. Far out man.

* Maryland Debacle Shows Why We Must Get Football Out Of Our Universities.

* Cheat-Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design.

* The Voice Trap: On the Perils of Authorial Parochialism.

* Disaster citizenship.

* Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

* Profiting from the “cop cloud.” From TNI‘s “Cops 2” issue.

* “It is my conclusion that Officer Loehmann’s use of deadly force falls within the realm of reasonableness under the dictates of the Fourth Amendment.”

* Inspiring.

* Inside the Intense, Insular World of AOL Disc Collecting.

* See the Sketches J.R.R. Tolkien Used to Build Middle-Earth.

* Malicious defamation lawsuit against Mother Jones ends in exoneration, $2.5 million dollar legal bill.

* Pretty vacant: the glory of abandoned spaces. Bonus: photos of empty Chinese amusement parks.

* There is a long tradition in the West of dancing on the Soviet grave in order to celebrate Western values, and so it comes as no surprise that the focus on Soviet historical artifacts is a focus entirely on the dead and decaying.

* Bring on the climate trials.

* But don’t worry, a bioethics professor at NYU has the solution: stunt child growth to use fewer resources. Got it in one.

* BREAKING: Slavery in America was much worse than you probably imagined.

* Designing the space suit to explore Mars.

* RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE.

* Hope Is the Enemy: Caring for a patient suffering from dementia means coming to terms with the frustrating paradoxes of memory and language.

* We’re flushing all these antidepressants into our water. How big is the problem?

* From the mammography files.

* Masculinity Is an Anxiety Disorder.

* Donald Trump Reviews The Lord of the Rings.

* Happy Columbus Day everybody. Here’s your roundup.

* The two Sacagaweas.

* Oh, I don’t know that I’d say that I’m a genius.

* I’ll allow it, but you’re on thin ice: Wes Anderson’s Next Project Is a Stop-Motion Movie About Dogs.

* And the last alphabet you’ll ever need.

Weekend Links!

* Coming soon in DC: Anthony Thwaite and Jaimee Hills.

* The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The MetaFilter thread is almost always the best resource for these things. And here she is on Chernobyl.

* Please, though, don’t champion work. That is, not a sense of academic life as just work. Work is everywhere in the age of neoliberalism. Advocate for something bigger. Push for community.

* Don’t believe what you read at the Wiki or at the Chronicle: there are basically zero fake searches.

* CFP: Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.”

* Who Speaks at Meetings? Find Out with GenderTimer.

* Third Annual MLA Subconference: Between the Public and Its Privates.

* Coming this month to the Milwaukee Ballet: Dracula.

* …the incarcerated population, if viewed as a single community, would be the fourth-largest city in the United States.

* You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization.”

* How gentrifiers gentrify.

* Wisconsin legislature takes its eye off the dumpster fire that is the regional economy to focus on the real problems.

* This isn’t a fairy tale. Economic historians call the post-war years, 1950 to 1973, the Golden Age because those were the years the US and world economy grew faster than ever before or since. Neoliberalism’s dirty secret is that its policies don’t work that well. It isn’t just since the financial crisis that growth has been stagnant. Even the boom was mediocre. The best year since the election of Ronald Reagan was 1999, when the economy grew an impressive 4.8 percent. Sounds good until you realize that economic growth was higher in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Even the 1970s, a byword for stagflation and economic turmoil, saw better growth than any decade since.

* Miserablism and Resistance at the American Studies Association.

* Great story for my Lives of Animals class: Uplift, Inc.

* Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer.

* The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.

* Matt Yglesias: Hillary Clinton Is Our Cheney, and That’s Okay. More on this subject here. In some sense I don’t even disagree with him; American democracy really is doomed, and the project of the liberal-left at this moment (as I’ve said before!) should be actively and deliberately seeking to build its replacement through the construction of a new constitution.

* The problem with the Old Republic was the lack of a strong minority party. No, the problem with the Old Republic was the Jedi.

* What Does My Brain Tumor Mean for My Life as a Mother?

* Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York inmates.

* Rick Moranis Isn’t Retired (He Just Doesn’t Know How to Change His Wikipedia Page).

* Beautiful study of UFO sightings from ancient history.

* Jacobin: Want to improve animal welfare? Focus on bettering the conditions of the people who work with them.

* She was checking on her sons — then ages 11, 9 and 5 — by looking out the window every 10 minutes, she said. But when a passer-by saw the Felix kids, along with a 9-year-old cousin, she assumed they were unsupervised and called the state’s Department of Children and Family Services hotline.

* Class action lawsuit filed against DraftKings and FanDuel. How Daily Fantasy Is Changing the Game. You Aren’t Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football. Why I’m Quitting Fantasy Baseball.

* Playing in the Dark: On Gaming’s Blind Protagonists.

* Unsung songs of the Golden Age of Television: Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

* Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies.

* How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports.

* I want to believe: Fargo season two.

* New Civilization: Beyond Earth Expansion Finally Feels Like Sciene Fiction.

* What financializing pensions hath wrought: California Teachers Have Been Financing Evictions.

* And forever and ever amen.

At this point it might just be easier to get rid of schools than guns.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) October 9, 2015

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.