Posts Tagged ‘Conan O'Brien’
Weekend! Links!
* Program for the 2014 MLA Subconference, January 8-9 at Columbia College Chicago.
* CFP for “Joss Whedon: A Celebration” at DePaul University this May.
* The New Yorker considers Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?
Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
* It is an open question as to whether academics today, in their heart of hearts, still realize that the choice between the employability agenda or the death of universities actually means the death of universities through the employability agenda.
* Our football team here at Purdue went 1-11, losing the final ten games in a row by an average of almost 25 points and going 0-8 in Big Ten play, including a 20 point blowout to arch-rival Indiana. The lone victory on the season came through a nail-biting 20-14 performance against Indiana State… an FCS school… who themselves went 1-11. If beating the doormat team of the Missouri Valley Conference is the highlight of your season, it’s perhaps time for a reevaluation of priorities. After ranking 122nd in points scored a game and 114th in points against a game, making a legitimate case for being the worst team in FBS football, the campus is buzzing about how long a rebuild will require and whether first-year coach Darrell Hazzell is the man to lead it. With the season’s “One Brick Higher” slogan now seeming like a sad joke, my message to the Purdue community is simple: don’t rebuild. Retreat. The best path forward for Purdue University is to dismantle its football program altogether.
* I also liked Freddie’s piece on how the permanent squabble between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty plays directly into the hands of administrators.
* This Thousand-Year Institution Could Really Learn Something from These Fly-By-Night Scams: Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge.
* Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity.
* “If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is”: Animal rights activists vs. the agribusiness industry in Rolling Stone.
* Liberalism is a game the rich play with themselves. They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen: Liberalism in the tank.
* Aaron Bady considers Mandela, all of him.
If you’re a president, it probably feels good to think about this, about how a revolutionary came to defend the stability of the society he once threatened to overturn. It probably also feels good to think of him as historical, as past: like Nkrumah or Lumumba, he is no longer our problem, no longer our responsibility. Instead of a defiant refusal to stop short of victory and a refusal to compromise or negotiate on principles, he can represent the passing away of that very thing.
* Want the best person for the job? Don’t interview.
* Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?
* Jackson’s Hobbit II so little resembles the book, it may as well be called Some Further Adventures in Middle-earth. The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction.
* Here’s Every Time Paul Rudd Has Shown the Same Movie Clip on Conan.
* Jaws retold as Peanuts comic.
* Everything in the oceans is dying.
* The Economy Looks Good Because The Data Has Been So Bad For So Long.
* No Civilian Leadership for NSA After All.
* Ph.D.s With and Without Jobs.
* Please excuse Davontaye, he suffers from povertenza.
* Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.
* A national study being released today in book form found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely than those with just average or below average looks to go on to earn a four-year college degree.
* Take that, conventional wisdom! Study: Long Distance Relationships Can Work.
* Whether you agree with the ASA’s boycott of Israeli state institutions or not, I think we can all agree that to boycott Larry Summers.
* The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.
* America, 2013: No charges after man pulls gun on ‘b*tch’ with disabled kid over Walmart parking delay.
* Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million. The Lottery Is a Predator and You Are Its Math-Illiterate Prey.
* Space Race back on! China lands on the Moon!
* Hollywood finally goes too far.
* And Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Overflow Error: Abort, Retry, Fail….
Friday Night!
* Swordfighting: Not What You Think It Is.
* Laurence H. Tribe on how to undo Citizen’s United.
* A new poetic form: Scrabble Tile Poems.
* Meet China’s first female taikonaut.
* And just because it’s Friday: Jack McBrayer Visits Chicago’s famous insult-restaurant Weiner’s Circle.
Friday Night
* Kevin Drum throws some cold water on the notion that the payroll tax cut is a GOP Trojan horse. Be careful, though—unlike Obama the GOP really does play 11-dimensional chess.
* But while we debate the tax policy compromise, the Obama White House moves boldly on to its next preemptive capitulation.
* Is Bernie Sanders still talking?
* Salon asks whether the time has finally come for the rich to just outsource the entire country. Charlie Stross has an even more promising cognitive framework:
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
Tuesday Night
* A Note to Parents from Bruce Springsteen, High School Cross-Country Coach.
* Unexpected: Conan beat everyone last night.
* How to serve Koopa meat. Via Kottke.
* And the Hudson River Tunnel lives (maybe). Meanwhile Christie needs to cut the feds a check for ruining everybody’s day.
Monday Night Links
* Vincent Kartheiser (Angel‘s Connor, Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell) turns out to be sort of awesomely crazy, living in a one-room apartment without even a toilet.
* Science proves that for the depressed chocolate is even more delicious.
* Do you suffer from Mean World Syndrome?
* Behold, Space Monkey.
* And sometimes weird things happen. You just have to go with it.
Other Stuff
* Details on the U.S. operation of Port-Au-Prince’s last working airstrip from Crooks & Liars, a possible (or partial) answer to complaints about its allocation. A second airport is now working at Jacmel, administered by tiny American charity Joy in Hope. From Ryan, I see the Caribbean is still at risk for more earthquakes.
* Yahoo News is hiring bloggers.
* Gawker has your roundup of clips from the ongoing NBC late-night fiasco.
* Louis Menand and how to rescue the professoriate from professionalization.
The ultimate problem is this: How do you create a system for the production of knowledge that is, on the one hand, rigorous and peer-reviewed and, on the other, committed to aims and obligations beyond its own survival? The professoriate itself is well aware of the dilemma, Menand observes, and has enthusiastically promoted what sounds like a solution: “interdisciplinarity.” The hope is that if professors join in conversation with one another, they’ll remember to be interesting to people outside their building.
Theoretically, this solves everything. The disciplines are still accountable only to themselves, but they’re also engaged with something broader—i.e., other disciplines. They are still autonomous without being hermetic. Except that, Menand explains, interdisciplinarity finally does nothing to alter the ways in which the individual disciplines produce their professors. Rather than a therapy for academic neurosis, interdisciplinarity is in fact yet one more symptom of it. “Interdisciplinary anxiety,” he writes, “is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
Misc.
* A stage production of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski is already in the works.
* Asheville, NC, is one of the gayest cities in America.
* You said it: “The Senate is just a pain in the ass to everybody in the world as far as I can tell.”
* And if NBC screwed over Conan because they wanted me to watch his monologue on YouTube every day, mission accomplished.
Tuesday Late Night
* A major earthquake has hit Haiti, throwing the nation into chaos and likely causing massive loss of life. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti has called it “a catastrophe of major proportions.” Rolling coverage at MetaFilter.
* Google has announced it is reversing its stance of compliance with Chinese government censorship.
* Murdoch unhappy with Ailes and Fox News? Children always grow up into monsters.
* Every spring, Patterson runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information. Every fall, I run a two hour mini-simulation designed to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out. In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla. Since vampires seem to be in the news lately, this year I chose a vampire oriented scenario.
* And now Scalia looooooooves foreign legal precedent. Originalism sure is complicated!
Gerry Canavan 