Posts Tagged ‘continuity’
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The course descriptions for Marquette’s Fall 2017 English classes are up at the department website. Check them out! I’m teaching Tolkien and a grad seminar on utopia.
* Also in Marquette news! Marquette to host ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ conference in April.
* Becoming a parent forces you to think about the nature of the problem — which is, in a lot of ways, the problem of nature […] the realities of aging and sickness and mortality become suddenly inescapable. […] [My wife] said something during that time I will never forget. “If I had known how much I was going to love him,” she said, “I’m not sure I would have had him.” Mark O’Connell on transhumanism and immortality.
* From the great Ali Sperling: Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene. And this review of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem from the great David Higgins!
* Adam Roberts reviews New York 2140. Another review, from a climate scientist. And an interview with Stan. My review comes out in LARB this weekend…
* The Most Cringeworthy Monuments to Colleges’ Innovation Jargon.
* Speculative Fiction and Survival in Iraq.
* The liberal arts at Harvey Mudd College, whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford.
* You-might-be-from-Wisconsin-if at Ask MetaFilter.
* Wisconsin is apparently harassing trans state employees.
* Chaos, again. This is fine. Even James Comey. Twilight of Reince Preibus. Ten Questions for President Trump. Ten More Questions for President Trump. Remember when it was scandalous that Obama, years before he became a politician, once sold his house?
* It is through the Justice Department that the administration is likely to advance its nationalist plans — to strengthen the grip of law enforcement, raise barriers to voting and significantly reduce all forms of immigration, promoting what seems to be a longstanding desire to reassert the country’s European and Christian heritage. It’s not an accident that Sessions, who presumably could have chosen from a number of plum assignments, opted for the role of attorney general. The Department of Justice is the most valuable perch from which to transform the country in the way he and Bannon have wanted. With an exaggerated threat of disorder looming, the nation’s top law-enforcement agency could become a machine for trying to fundamentally change who gets to be an American and what rights they can enjoy.
* The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
* “Forever war, but too much.”
* An Afghan family of five that had received approval to move to the United States based on the father’s work for the American government has been detained for more than two days after flying into Los Angeles International Airport, a legal advocacy group said in court documents filed on Saturday. Profiles of immigrant arrested in Austin. Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws. (Note this lawsuit was filed in 2014.) This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World. And if it were a book, it’d seem laughably contrived: A letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Resisting ICE. Here we go again.
* 4chan and the Great Meme War.
* Russia and the Cyber Cold War.
* And while we’re on the subject: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation. I think this is a very good reminder of the need to stay calm and detached from the chaos of the news cycle.
* Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
* Democrats keep trusting demographics to save them. It hasn’t worked yet — but maybe this time…
* NASA unveils plan to give Mars an ‘Earth-like’ atmosphere.
* House Republicans Unveil Bill To Repeal Obamacare. The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.
* Austerity measures don’t actually save money. But they do disempower workers. Which is why governments pursue them in the first place.
* No! It can’t be! Researchers have found strong evidence that racism helps the GOP win.
* Contrary to What You Learned in Sex Ed, You Can Get Pregnant While Pregnant.
* Mid-decade gerrymander in Georgia.
* What We’ve Learned from Giving Dolphins LSD.
* Possible lynching outside Seattle, in 2017.
* In the richest country in human history, children have “lunch debt.”
* “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” said Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology. “They have factual intelligence.” How millions of kids are being shaped by know-it-all voice assistants.
* Finding a jury of your peers in a racially segregated society.
* Divination hasn’t disappeared; it’s taken over the world.
But these second-order obstacles aren’t enough to explain the current collapse of poll-driven political certainty. They’re just excuses, even if they’re not untrue. Something about the whole general scheme of polling—the idea that you can predict what millions of undecided voters will do by selecting a small group and then just simply asking them—is out of whack. We need to think seriously about what the strange game of election-watching actually is, in terms of our relation to the future, our power to choose our own outcomes, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the mysteries of fate. And these questions are urgent. Because predictions of the future don’t simply exist in the future, but change the way we act in the present. Because in our future something monstrous is rampaging: it paces hungrily toward us, and we need to know if we’ll be able to spot it in time.
When I said that opinion polls are sibyls and soothsayers, it wasn’t just a figure of speech. Opinion polling has all the trappings of a science—it has its numbers and graphs, its computational models, its armies of pallid drones poring over the figures. It makes hypotheses and puts them to the test. But polls are not taken for what they are: a report on what a small number of people, fond of changing their minds, briefly pretended to think. Instead, we watch the tracking graphs as if the future were playing itself out live in front of us. The real structure of the electoral-wonk complex is more mystical than materialist: it’s augury and divination, a method handed down by Prometheus to a starving and shivering humanity at the faint dawn of time. Behind all the desktop screens and plate-glass of his office, the buzz of data and the hum of metrics, Nate Silver retreats to a quiet, dark, and holy room. He takes the knife and slits in one stroke the throat of a pure-white bull; its blood arcs and drizzles in all directions. He examines its patterns. And he knows.
* There’s a never-ending fount of stories you can write about when someone is breaking away from canon or not, and create many controversies all the way through preproduction and production and even until a movie opens, about whether or not they’re breaking canon. Is it a blasphemous movie or not? At some point, you gotta stop and say, Is there this expectation that it’s like we’re doing Godfather Part I and II, only it’s going to nine movies? And we’re just gonna cut them into this kind of Berlin Alexanderplatz that never ends? We’re gonna suddenly take a moment to really savor the fact that these movies exist in an identical tone? The reality to me is that you can’t have interesting movies if you tell a filmmaker, “Get in this bed and dream, but don’t touch the pillows or move the blankets.” You will not get cinema. You will just get a platform for selling the next movie on that bed, unchanged and unmade. James Mangold on Logan.
* The making of The Silmarillion.
* And we have but one choice: the Ring must be destroyed.
Submitted for Your Approval, Wednesday Links
* CFP with a Monday deadline: Paradoxa 29, “Small Screen Fictions.” And relevant to my current courses: CFP: The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
* Application period now open for 2016-17 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort.
* Tor has an excerpt from Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, which is amazing (and which I’ll be reviewing for The New Inquiry, by and by).
* Just in the nick of time, the United States’ newly minted Solar Forecasting Center was able to convey the true cause of the radar jamming: a rash of powerful solar flares.
* On Pokémon Go and Psychogeography (and Philip K. Dick).
* Submitting (SFF) While Black.
* Trump, Second Amendment people, and stochastic terrorism. Could this actually be rock bottom? Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not two sides of the same coin but libidinally necessary for one another. The horror of Trump manages to create the ultimate liberal fantasy of post-partisanship, consensus and respect for the discourse.
* Remember When Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump Were Maybe Forced To Pose Nude In College?
* Coming soon to a university near you: We’re implementing new general education requirements without having first figured out how we want to deliver it or even what it is we’re trying to deliver, on a model where all the previous examples we can think of have failed.
* The US government will track killings by police for the first time ever.
* Justice Department to Release Blistering Report of Racial Bias by Baltimore Police. Should shock even the most cynical.
* Chicago Police Can’t Explain Why Their Body Cameras Failed At The Moment Of Unarmed Black Teen’s Death. I suppose it will always be a mystery.
* Oneida: The Christian Utopia Where Contraception Was King.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 26: Bootcamp.
* Finally, there’s a good way to play Dungeons & Dragons online.
* An unsettling thing happened at the Olympic diving pool on Tuesday: the water inexplicably turned green, just in time for the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform diving competition.
* Exceptionalism: More and more women are now dying in childbirth, but only in America.
* Nailing it: We’ve Devoured a Year’s Worth of Natural Resources in Just Seven Months.
* DCTVU Watch: This is a bad idea and they shouldn’t do it, though they will.
* Harley Quinn and sexism by committee. All the Ways Suicide Squad Could Have Been Much, Much Better.
* Trailers! Luke Cage! Story of Your Life Arrival! Even an improvised Rick and Morty mini-episode!
* And a friendly reminder to always look on the bright side of life.
Tuesday, Tuesday
* The U.S. Cities Where the Poor Are Most Segregated From Everyone Else. Milwaukee, alas, is #1.
* “Dr. Kissinger’s visit to campus will not be publicized, so we appreciate your confidentiality…”
* Yet the Senate House files show a university elite admitting that outsourcing has actually pushed up costs and made services worse. Despite that, the executives vow to press on with an even grander privatisation scheme.
* How to Talk to Prospective Grad Students.
* “The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work.”
* BREAKING: Raising the minimum wage doesn’t actually crash the economy.
* BREAKING: The TSA is useless.
* Vignettes from the Modern Workplace.
* Whispers and rumors of Shaka Smart.
* Race, privilege, and paying college athletes. Meet the Press’s Epic NCAA Fail.
* Everyone hates Nate Silver now, and/but/because his model says Republicans will take the Senate. More at Slate.
* There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent.
* The Atlantic profiles Duke’s Own™ Zach Blas and his Facial Weaponization Suite.
* Pointless cruelty in the British prison system.
* The College Board and ACT are being sued for stealing student information.
* In a civilized country, it wouldn’t be possible: Detroit water department preparing mass utility shutoffs.
* Then again, apparently we can’t even recognize the equal humanity of our own future selves.
* The law, in its majestic equality… Arkansas Judge Ruled for Corporation Just Days After PAC Contributions.
* Annals of Star Trek continuity. That explains it!
* Sometimes muckraking is the worst: What the Heidelberg Project doesn’t want you to know.
* To whom is George Zimmerman a hero?
* Scott Walker endorses Obamacare.
* Yale Daily News, 1971: Educated Unemployables.
* Life after prison in Baltimore.
* All this happened, more or less.
* Great moments in checks and balances: Obama will ask Congress to put an end to the NSA bulk data collection program the executive branch personally, secretly, and extralegally inaugurated.
* Precrime watch: LAPD says every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
* The Onion is founding a new comedy festival in Chicago.
* And BREAKING: The Qatar World Cup Is a Total Disaster.
Exactly One (1) Ton of Midweek Links
* Join us at the Science Fiction/Fantasy Now Conference at the University of Warwick this August!
* Go home, 2014, you’re drunk: Man Admits Eating Landlord’s Heart at End of Year-Long Chess Game.
* The richest nation in the history of the world: Three Children Died During The Polar Vortex After Their Heat Was Cut Off.
* MLA Subconference Wrap-Up (and teaser for 2015).
* Contingent Mother: The Role Gender Plays in the Lives of Adjunct Faculty.
* In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.
* Matt Bruenig pushes back against framing all NTT labor as adjunct labor.
* In 1998, a 20-something guy named Jesse Reklaw was doing some Dumpster diving on the campus of an Ivy League university that he’d rather not name when he came across a bunch discarded of Ph.D. applicant files from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Each file included a photo of the applicant, along with assorted paperwork, including feedback from university officials.
* If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people.
* Every cop is a criminal: Any arrest in New York City can trigger a civil forfeiture case if money or property is found on or near a defendant, regardless of the reasons surrounding the arrest or its final disposition. In the past ten years, the NYPD has escalated the amount of civil forfeiture actions it pursues as public defense offices have been stretched thin by the huge amount of criminal cases across the city.
* “These peace officers were doing their jobs…they did what they were trained to do.”
* What could possibly go wrong?
All these jobs are dangerous and involve carrying a deadly weapon. They entail giving a human being the power to detain another human being, and the benefit of the doubt if they should shoot one. And all the positions are unpaid.
* From the “Military & Defense” desk at Business Insider: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel.
* Legal challenges to the death penalty.
* Pannapacker: Shared Governance, Tenure, and Academic Freedom Are Worth the Trouble.
* …when his salary depends upon his not understanding it: Speakers at MLA generally are skeptical of idea of shrinking Ph.D. programs.
* Why does the man behind ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Sherlock’ still have a job?
* Eighteen months after the law took effect, over three-fourths of employers reported that they were very supportive or somewhat supportive of the paid sick days law.
* Man Poses as Woman on Online Dating Site; Barely Lasts Two Hours.
* Begun the Canon Wars have: Disney To Rip Out Star Wars EU Continuity “Like A Tumor.”
* Life is suffering: HBO renews ‘The Newsroom’ for third and final season.
* Legalizing murder maybe not the absolute best idea Florida ever had.
* Decades-Old Underground Jet Fuel Leak In New Mexico Still Decades From Being Cleaned Up.
* If the Supreme Court upholds this decision (or refuses to hear an appeal), net neutrality is dead unless the FCC or Congress decide to reclassify broadband internet as a telecom service regulated as a common carrier.
* The federal judge overseeing the concussion lawsuit brought by 4,500 former players against the National Football League denied a preliminary motion to approve the proposed settlement to the case Tuesday, saying that the agreement may not include enough money to compensate all players properly.
* Friends, they may say it’s a movement: Judge Rules Oklahoma Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional.
* How administrators defeat student campaigns.
* Breaking: It Is Expensive to Be Poor.
* Chloe as Edward Snowden is actually a pretty great premise for a 24 movie. It seems like it’d be better without any involvement from Kiefer at all.
* The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
* And it’s even worse than we thought: TEHRAN (FNA)- Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents providing incontrovertible proof that an alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, some media reports said.
* And we’ll finally know what Bruce Wayne was like as a twelve-year-old. Because you demanded it!
Sunday MLA Hangover Links
* Horrors and horrors: Missouri prosecutors say they are unable to bring rape charges in the brutal Maryville case, though one of the boys involved will be charged for abandoning the 14-year-old to die in the snow afterwards. The victim in the case attempted suicide last week.
* For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.
* Run the university like a sandwich: The University of East London paid a total of £589,000 in settlement to three senior managers, including its former vice-chancellor, who resigned before news emerged that two overseas ventures had collapsed.
* A student’s request to be excused from course work on religious grounds so he would not have to interact with female peers has opened a fractious debate over how institutions navigate between competing human rights.
* A Bang, and Then a Whimper: Some Thoughts On the Death of Cooper Union.
* The Poverty Line Was Designed Assuming Every Family Had a Housewife Who Was a ‘Skillful Cook.’
* As many as 300,000 West Virginians have been warned not to use their water for drinking, cooking, or bathing following a massive chemical spill. The 6 Most Terrifying Facts About The Chemical Spill Contaminating West Virginia’s Drinking Water. Radio Disney’s pro-fracking elementary school tour sparks outrage. Freedom Industry.
Freedom means this happens constantly, a little bit. Freedom means sometimes it happens a great deal.
* With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late and we are all doomed told reporters today.
* A Side Benefit of Legal Weed Is the Cops Go Broke.
* Public service announcement: These Twenty Cities Are Allowed to Complain About the Cold.
* I think I did this one before, but Google can’t find it: Population distribution of the US, as measured in Canadas.
* Poverty rates soar in US suburbs.
* Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500.
* Neat tech demo for a puzzle game premised on manipulating forced perspective.
* Horace Lamb said he’d have two questions for God. I’d have just one.
* Baby monkey reacts to the touch of cold metal.
* America gains yet another weird marriage status on its endless road to marriage quality: Obama Administration To Recognize Utah Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages.
* A series of unrelated events: College football and rape culture.
* Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women.
* No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States.
* Everybody knows it isn’t sweet and right to die for one’s country. But what this column presupposes is…
* Signs of the times: Tens of Thousands of Dead Bats Are Falling From the Sky in Australia.
* How the blind are socialized to understand race.
* Why having a woman’s body under patriarchy is a job in itself.
* Understanding white privilege.
* Norway is ludicrously wealthy.
* Antinomies of Ultimate Spider-Man. Does anyone know if the described theory of Miles Morales as at least partially anti-Sony flack has any evidentiary basis?
* Chewbacca Actor Peter Mayhew Unloads Stockpile of Star Wars Set Photos.
* Disney appoints a group to determine a new, official Star Wars canon. I hope to develop the first official heresy.
* Grantland rates every aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s career on an UNDERRATED, OVERRATED, PROPERLY RATED scale. See also a seven-part interview with the Boss from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
* Poetry Magazine has your Game of Thrones fanficpoetry of the week.
* And Steven Moffat says he never bothered to plot out Sherlock season three because he’s been too busy plotting out seasons four and five. Yay?
A Few Links for a Travelin’ Sunday
* After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. A teacher resigns.
* Academics have finally “started” to talk about capitalism? Inconceivable!
* Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.
* An outrage of the week right in my own backyard: Botched ATF sting in Milwaukee ensnares brain-damaged man.
“I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life,” said Greg Thiele, who spent 30 years working for the Milwaukee Police Department including on undercover stings with federal agents, including those with the ATF. “Something is very wrong here.”
* The latest from the law school scam.
* How people die in Shakespearean tragedy.
* And when continuity collides: The new Doctor Who companion’s ten-second appearance in Captain America.
Seriously, Like, 10,000 Sunday Links
In May, President Obama visited SUNY’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) for a bro-hug with Governor Andrew Cuomo and a speechpraising Albany’s silicon-driven economic agenda. The president’s stamp on Cuomo’s development plan, which calls for public-private research partnerships centered at New York’s university hubs, earned the governor early points for a potential 2016 White House run. In exchange, Obama could tout New York as a state-level version of his ideal economic agenda while jabbing Congress for moving more slowly than Cuomo.
“I want what’s happening at Albany to happen all across the country,” he said, “places like Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, and Raleigh.”
* The Crisis in Higher Education. Spoiler: it’s MOOCs.
* Get pepper-sprayed by campus cops, get not all that much money at all considering.
* Great moments in neoliberalism: Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990. Too good to check! Damn you, Snopes!
* Great moments in neoliberalism, part 2: Camden is going to solve its crime problem by firing its entire police force. But don’t get too excited; it’s just a union-busting thing.
* While we’re on the subject: I just figured out a way to cut crime by 5% overnight.
* Kaplan Post balance sheet suffering as the for-profit scam university sector takes a haircut.
* What I caught up on while I was traveling: Evan Calder Williams on Cop Comedies. The Prison-Educational Complex. Anti-Anti-Parasitism. Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites.
A graduate of Brown University, Hayes’s path was essentially paved by sixth grade when he passed the entrance exam to attend New York’s Hunter High School—one of the best public schools in the country, and one in which only a standardized test determined admission. But as he points out, one test score hides much—including an entire test-preparation industry that only the wealthy can access. Hayes quotes at length the remarkable 2010 commencement address by 18-year-old Justin Hudson, who laid bare the lie of merit that Hunter perpetuated: “I feel guilty because I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do any of you. We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on our performance on a test we took when we were eleven-year-olds.”
* BREAKING: Poll Averages Have No History of Consistent Partisan Bias.
* Here it is, mere days after everyone’s already stopped being annoyed about it: Rebecca Solnit’s “Stop Leftsplaining!”
* Freddie de Boer: I don’t know how else it say it, considering I’ve said it a thousand times. I want my country to stop killing innocent people. Our Bipartisan Apathy Toward Civilian Drone Deaths. Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama. Is It Moral for Lefties to Vote for Obama? The Thing about Drones.
* The weird thing about the you-stupid-lefties craze is Obama is decisively winning, Were they just afraid they wouldn’t have a chance to punch any hippies this year? Don’t they know it never goes out of season, no matter what happens?
* On the other side: Romney Aides “Pretty Resigned” to Losing. Is the GOP still a national party? And, of course, poll denialism.
* As if Obama needed the help, the economy turns out to be not quite as bad as reported. Still awful though.
* Americans growing tired of the glories of gridlock. It’s too bad our institutions are designed to essentially guarantee it.
The absence of pity of any sort from Kim E. Nielsen’s new book A Disability History of the United States, published by Beacon Press, is hardly the most provocative thing about it. Nielsen, a professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo, indicates that it is the first book “to create a wide-ranging chronological American history narrative told through the lives of people with disabilities.” By displacing the able-bodied, self-subsisting individual citizen as the basic unit (and implied beneficiary) of the American experience, she compels the reader to reconsider how we understand personal dignity, public life, and the common good.
Take the “ugly laws,” for instance. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, major American cities made it illegal for (in the words of the San Francisco ordinance from 1867) “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” to appear in “streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places.”
* Enterprising Dog Becomes the Ranking Police Officer in a Small New Mexican Town. Nikka 2016?
* If all men were Republicans, would you let your daughter marry one?
* I might have done this one before, but it’s so visually striking: The True Size of Africa.
* All the secrets from Joss Whedon’s Avengers commentary.
* 25 facts about Star Trek: The Next Generation you might not know.
* xkcd vs. fantasy metallurgy.
* In which Curiosity finds a river bed on Mars.
* My homeland: New Jersey bans smiling in driver’s license photographs. Now, if we could just ban smiling in photographs altogether…
* American tragedies: Man Shoots, Kills Suspected Burglar at Sister’s House Only to Find Out It Was His Teen Son. Pertussis epidemic in Washington.
* This story has everything! “Buddhist ‘Iron Man’ found by Nazis is from space.”
* How to Buy a Daughter. Fascinating that upper middle class Americans prefer daughters.
* Here come the Definite Harry Potter Uncut Final Director’s Cut Special Editions.
* William Gibson: The Complete io9 inteview.
* On being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
* Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop.
* And they solved global warming; they’ll just make the snow for ski slopes out of “100 percent sewage effluent.” You’re welcome, future.
Monday Links
* The Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent Of Americans.
* One of the four Italian autonomists behind the “David Graeber” persona just gave an interview to Ezra Klein explaining Occupy Wall Street.
EK: This movement is organized rather differently than most protest movements. There isn’t really a list of demands, or goals, or even much of an identifiable leadership. But if I understand you correctly, that’s sort of the point.
DG: It’s very similar to the globalization movement. You see the same criticisms in the press. It’s a bunch of kids who don’t know economics and only know what they’re against. But there’s a reason for that. it’s pre-figurative, so to speak. You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.
* Proud neoliberal, proud former Romney voter Matt Yglesias argues Obama could have made better use of the left as his stooges during the heady days of 2009-2010.
The giant puppet people protests against “globalization” in the late-1990s were, I think, always helpful to Bill Clinton.* They gave him the positioning he wanted — as a center-left mildly progressive neoliberal technocrat trying to take practical steps toward prosperity.
“Home run.”
* Talking Points Memo decides to dump its oppo research against Chris Christie a few days early.
* Cheat to win: Restrictive voting laws in states across the country could affect up to five million voters from traditionally Democratic demographics in 2012, according to a new report by the Brennan Center. That’s a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.
* Adam Liptak has your Supreme Court preview. What long-standing institutions of democracy and good government will five randomly selected fanatics destroy this year? Tomorrow’s news today!
* I really can’t tell whether this “No More Plan B” response to the academic job crisis is “bargaining” or “acceptance.”
* And in D.C. Comics news: The fact of the matter is that almost nothing in DC makes sense anymore, because this whole idea was so incredibly poorly thought-through. And that’s not even touching the rampant, ubiquitous misogyny.
Female characters are only insatiable, barely-dressed aliens and strippers because someone decided to make them that way. It isn’t a fact. It isn’t an inviolable reality, especially in a comic book universe that has just been rebooted. In the end, what matters is what you choose to show people and how you show them, not the reasons you make up to justify it. Because this is comics, everybody. You can make up anything.
Some Sunday Links
* David Simon: “The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I’ve spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.” (also via)
* 20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know.
* The Monochromatic City of Chefchaoen, Morocco. Via Cynical-C.
* Naked Capitalism takes a stand against selling out.
The “you need to have a seat at the table” crowd misses how best to steer a path in complex systems. As John Kay points out in his new book Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, one does better by sticking with principles, since it is beyond our capabilities to map a straight path. He compares the performance of companies within a number of different industries who set out to maximize profits against those that set higher and more complex objectives. The ones that had the richer, more aspirational aims did better in financial terms. Apple is a classic example.
* The New York Times reviews China Miéville’s Embassytown. This is already on my Kindle, and next up after I finish Kraken.
* And John Seaver explains the coming DC reboot.
What with all that, even the best creative teams eventually pile up a gradual accumulation of mistakes. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time now seem like the thing that cost you about twenty percent of your reading audience, and not all of the changes are as easy to reverse as a costume change. You can do stories that undo other stories to a limited extent, but eventually audiences get sick of contrived deals with the devil and hokey memory erasures and you wind up stuck in a corner, telling stories about a teenage version of your old character who’s from a parallel universe created when a time-traveling supervillain set a trap for his enemies using pocket-dimensional copies of a superhero who’s no longer in continuity thanks to…
You can start to see why the idea of sweeping it all under the rug and starting over from the point when your characters still made sense sounds like a good idea, right? Reboots cut away, at least in theory, all of the detritus that piled up over the years, all the Spider-Mobiles and deaths of Doctor Octopus and Grim Hunters and teen Iron Men and missing hands and Jewel Kryptonites, and leave the character iconic and sensible again. To a desperate and semi-sober editor, it’s got to start looking like a pretty attractive idea. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s not like the amazing adventures of the one-handed, dead, wifeless, childless, kingdomless Aquaman is going to sell anyway.
Gerry Canavan 
Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise
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* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR’s The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I’ve put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!
* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.
* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.
* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and “ratings agencies could downgrade the university’s credit by as many as two notches.” In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators’ overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.
* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.
* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.
* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city’s schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.
* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.
* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
* …disaster relief and the “disaster narrative” is central to the development of the American welfare state.
* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.
I don’t know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it’s an idea I’ll be thinking about a while. There’s a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can “withdraw” consent.
* “Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others.” The Case for Staying Home from Work.
* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.
* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:
* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.
* The case against the Supreme Court.
* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.
* Corey Robin on the emerging “right to be forgotten.”
* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.
* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can’t-believe-they-haven’t-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.
* That’s they’re actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.
* Provocation: It’s not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.
* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.
* SMBC on proof by induction.
* The only link from this list you really need: There’s A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.
* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont’s own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 27, 2014 at 10:25 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, America, austerity, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, comics, consent, continuity, course evaluations, democracy, disaster capitalism, Don't mention the war, Ello, Fanon, film, financial aid, gentrification, Google, governmentality, grad student life, graduate school, How the University Works, humanitarianism of a particular sort, Iraq, ISIS, Jack Kirby, Kim Stanley Robinson, legalism, liberalism, logic, Marvel, metacommentary, military interventionism, Milwaukee, misogyny, mousetrap, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, presenteeism, proof by induction, public health, race, rape, rape culture, Red Mars, rule of law, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, Silicon Valley, social media, solitary confinement, Star Trek, superheroes, Supreme Court, Syria, television, the courts, the end of culture, The Expendabelles, the law, The Lucky Strike, the mental fog of proceduralism, the right to be forgotten, torture, true crime, tuition, University of Chicago, Vermont, war on education, welfare state, Y: The Last Man