Posts Tagged ‘commercials’
Just Another Monday Morning Linkpost
* I asked “If you were going to do a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM lit crit class where the gimmick was that you always returned to a foundational text for application, what would you choose?” and got some really good ideas. Right now, if I do it rather than a multiple-choice or wheel-of-fortune variant, it looks like it’s going to be Frankenstein.
* CFP for SFRA 2019, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
* Her Eyes Weren’t Watching God: The Empathetic Secular Vision of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin – Building a World.
* Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in first look at ‘Lord Of The Rings’ author’s biopic. Deadwood Movie Confirmed for Spring 2019 Premiere. And the new Aladdin movie looks worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.
* This week I went on a journey into the madness of The Phantom Podcast, which reviews the Star Wars prequel trilogy as if the series began with Episode 1, and I regret nothing. Scroll all the way down.
* Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided: There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.
* Students and Faculty Plan Walkout Over Johns Hopkins’ ICE Contract.
* How to Make Grad School More Humane.
* Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate.
* International Graduate-Student Enrollments and Applications Drop for 2nd Year in a Row.
* WTF Is Going on at Wright State? Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
* “Student Loan Relief or Paid Vacation? These Workers Get a Choice.” Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans.
* Every tweet in this thread is enraging. Every one.
* Julian Glander’s Art Sqool is about Froshmin, a small, round person who is going to an art school run by an artificial intelligence that is going to help Froshmin become a great artist. Or at least some kind of artist. Actually, thinking about it, the weird little robot who evaluates all of your art doesn’t make any promises about ability or skill or fame or recognition as a product of the time that Froshmin spends at Art Sqool. Wait, shit, is this a scam?
* When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation.
* When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)
* How Flight Attendants Grounded Trump’s Shutdown.
* The battle for the future of Stonehenge.
* 250 dead, $91 billion in damages: 2018 was a catastrophic year for U.S. weather; 4th-warmest for globe. A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan. Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases. Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. Global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. The end of the Colorado. Polar thinking.
* Latinos, blacks breathe 40 percent more pollution than whites in California, study says.
* Liberal Democrats Formally Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry. More here.
* Ugh. Gotta preserve this flawless system.
* Please Stop Writing Nancy Pelosi Fan Fiction.
* Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Dead.
* Meanwhile, it sounds like things going great in Britain.
* Brett Kavanaugh Just Declared War on Roe v. Wade.
* Parable of the Talents watch: Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency.
* “I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book.
* Sesame Workshop has finally given up on Bert and Ernie.
* On the end of The Good Place.
* Patreon planning to completely betray its user base, of course.
* Google is already way down that road. As is everyone else.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York’s establishment Dems to eliminate her district.
* Headlines from the end of the world: “Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate.”
* Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows. 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.
* “Hackers using black-market Israeli ICE-breakers to extort a billionaire who’s replacing his employees with robots, at the behest of a shadowy tabloid/petromonarchy alliance, is actually the cyberpunk future we were promised, and yet.” But for real.
* On Jaws 4. On a legally distinct Harry Potter.
* Young engineer upgraded the LEGO bionic arm he built for himself.
* I’m amazed it’s even legal to sell these paintings in Germany.
* Finland gave people free money. It didn’t help them get jobs — but does that matter?
* The meat industry vs. lab-grown meat.
* An antibiotic-style treatment for cancer? Let’s hope.
Tuesday Night!
* Hard to say which is more shocking: that a male worker born in 1973 retiring at age 70 can expect to live a full year less than the expected length of retirement for a worker born in 1912, or that Richard Shelby apparently has evidence that by 2025 “America will be burned … and a lot of us will be dead.”
* Catholic Church approves iPhone confession app. Not an Onion hotline…
* Paul Campos tries to read Laurence Tribe’s mind.
* The Tea Party Movement has driven out Colorado state party chairman Dick Wadhams. Because I am an adult, I will leave the man’s absurd name out of this, and just bid him adieu…
* Behold the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.
* Wolverine or 2 Batmen: a duckrabbit for our time.
* Academic Cliche Watch: “I want to argue that . . .”
* Fox News draws ever closer to its Fort Sumter moment.
* HuffPo’s Achilles Heel: Search engine optimization won’t work forever.
* Provocative claim of the day: …I find myself slightly gratified that one consequence of the now-dying post-Thatcher free-market consensus is that it made nuclear power development in the Anglosphere more or less economically impossible.
* And a quick note on how beer commercials work.
Beer commercials are designed around certain dominant themes, but the people who sell the beer would prefer that the dominant themes be misunderstood. What are beer commercials about? The two central premises are these:
1. Beer—cheap, common, domestic beer—is a rare commodity that drives men mad with the desire to have it, at any cost.
2. Women are the great obstacle between men and the fulfillment of this desire.
Taken literally, this is baffling. Beer is cheap and easy to find. The only cost should be $6.99 for a six pack, at any convenience store. And rather than hiding from women to drink their beer, many single adult heterosexual men seek out female company when they’re drinking. “Drink our beer and avoid contact with women!”—who could possibly be the target for that pitch?
But it makes perfect sense if the target audience is—and it is—16-year-olds.
The girls aren’t really girls; they’re Mom. And Mom is the first hurdle in the thrilling obstacle course that makes up the world of the teenage beer drinker.
a writer who, reeling from a break-up, starts pretending to be a private detective
I wasn’t especially impressed with this video of Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman shopping for CDs at Borders, but that doesn’t mean I’m not pretty excited about news of Schwartzman’s HBO pilot.
Scripted by somebody named Jonathan Ames, the comedy project stars Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore,” “Shopgirl,” “Marie Antoinette,” “The Darjeeling Limited”) as a writer who, reeling from a break-up, starts pretending to be a private detective.
I’ve had that idea. Not the show—the pretending to be/becoming a private detective.
Gerry Canavan 