Posts Tagged ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
I May Have Committed A Little Light Treason Links
* thisisfine.jpg: An iceberg the size of Delaware has broken off Antarctica. My kids are three and five. Just 90. And you’re a little late.
* Blogger completely debunks claim Amelia Earhart was a Japanese prisoner.
* CFP: The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy, University of California, Irvine, on April 26–29, 2018. CFP: Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction. And our deadline was extended a month with the rest of the SUS: Suvin Today?, A Roundtable Discussion, The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN).
* Nothing now would better serve the maturity and the invigoration of the Democrats than to give up any hope of sound advice or renewal from Bill or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They were pleasant to think about, but their politics have turned out wrong, and there’s nothing they can do for us now. The Age of Detesting Trump.
* Fredo, Fredo, Fredo. I tried to warn you: These revelations—and the possibility that more is yet to come—have made it increasingly untenable for Trump’s supporters to argue that there is nothing to the collusion story. And so, many have now begun to argue that even if there was collusion of the kind suggested by the Times, it wouldn’t be a crime—or even all that out of the ordinary. Some Trump loyalists are even making the case that it was smart and savvy for the campaign to pursue help from the Russians. Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
* I mean the wheels are really coming off.
* Trump still hasn’t resigned from his businesses like he promised, either.
* Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen: The Democrats! The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans.
* The attempt to stay faithful to the actual facts of the world that would make this impossible tanks the piece, but the overall message — that our political elites are soulless monsters without any hint of integrity or principle — is absolutely sound: What If Trump Had Won As a Democrat?
* Democrats should take the class warfare message to upscale suburbs.
* Science Fiction and Dystopia in the Age of Trump.
* What happens to America if Anthony Kennedy retires?
* Cancer researcher was held at Boston airport. Now he is being sent back to Iran.
* 23 emotions people feel, but can’t explain.
* Space colonization, faith, and Pascal’s Wager.
* In St. Louis, America’s nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.
* Between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. Rent Is Affordable to Low-Wage Workers in Exactly 12 U.S. Counties.
* Stage four credentialing. The Library of Heaven.
* The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) garnered more than 3,000 complaints regarding the uniforms. They conducted their own tests and found concerning evidence: a short-sleeved jacket had levels of cadmium, a highly toxic chemical, that were above the acceptable textile industry standard. The tests also found traces of formaldehyde, nickel, and tetrachlorophenol, all of which can cause major irritations. Formaldehyde, for instance, is even on the American Cancer Society’s list of known human carcinogens. What’s more, in 2011, Alaska Airlines experienced a very similar problem after issuing uniforms from Twin Hill. Around 10 percent of employees reported reactions and that airline issued a recall. Despite this damning evidence, American Airlines maintains that their uniforms are safe.
* Looking forward to this movie: Chicago Library Seeks Help Transcribing Magical Manuscripts.
* Gotta love a headline that has the courage of its convictions: CRISPR gene editing technique is probably safe, study confirms.
* We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. America leads the world in drug overdose deaths — by a lot. Trump-Loving Sheriff Won’t Let Deputies Carry Overdose Antidote. A Small-Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs.
* The Klan comes (back) to Charlottesville.
* Drones keep dropping drugs and porn into prisons.
* Yes! Yes! Yes! And I’m especially all in for this: Quentin Tarantino’s Next Movie Will Be About the Manson Family.
* Remembering Milwaukee’s Own Cordwainer Smith.
* The mass defunding of higher education that’s yet to come.
* Jeff VanderMeer Amends the Apocalypse. Russia 1917: You Are There. Nor Secret Griefs Nor Grudges: Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances. Cottage Industry.
* The racial daring of Sundance’s Cleverman gives it an edge most superhero stories can’t match.
* The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.
* As you can probably tell by looking around, every employee at our startup is 23 years old. On the morning of your 24th birthday, the barcode on your employee ID stops working and you can no longer enter our building. We do this to ensure our company has a ceaseless, youthful energy. We believe old people are displeasing to look at and also, bad at ideas.
* Nightmare jobs I’d never even though about: Rape Choreography Makes Films Safer, But Still Takes a Toll on Cast and Crew.
* First object teleported to Earth’s orbit.
* Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again! Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood in conversation.
Big Tuesday Links!
* Sadly always relevant: How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. I bought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in Philly in 7 minutes.
* Since, in fact, we lack the ability to realise even a single one of these demands in the foreseeable future, and since all other apparent solutions are unavailing, the unwelcome thought begins to insinuate itself — we are going to live in a world with Daesh and its massacres no matter what we do.
* Presenting The Bee. Exciting new “Beyond Criticism” project from Lili Loofbourow.
* Along the way to a world of driverless cars there are many potential roadblocks: infrastructure issues, different technical standards, restrictive state licensing policies, and more. But something more problematic might be the one most likely to derail this important technology: excessive lawsuits. To avoid the chilling effect that excessive litigation might have on this life-saving innovation, Congress may need to provide a certain amount of legal immunity for creators of driverless car technologies, or at least create an alternative legal compensation system for when things go wrong.
* There are no ifs, maybes or caveats allowed in American sports and now in American culture—you’re either a champion or you’re a loser: a nothing.
* We Finally Know Why Birds Are So Freakishly Smart. The tragedy of the pit bull. Fugitive capybara captured in Toronto park 19 days after zoo escape.
* The Ecstatic Experience: “Hamilton,” “Hair,” and “Oklahoma!” “Hamilton” and History’s Darkened Rooms.
* Moving as a child can change who you are as an adult.
* Aldermen call for hearings on lead in water at Chicago schools.
* The Blacklist: Here are the media outlets banned by Donald Trump.
* Sad! These three campaign gurus for Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have had some time to reflect on their loss to The Donald. And do they ever have stories to tell.
* The case for, and the case against, Elizabeth Warren as Clinton’s VP pick. Democrats vs Democrats. Clinton running even in Utah.
* Curb returns. So does Clementine.
* Harrison Ford is moving to one of the five or six cities I call home: Burlington, Vermont.
* Not all heroes wear capes: Traveler sues TSA for missed flight.
* Abolishing Daylight Savings Time in California.
* If you want to understand the contemporary moment. Why Trump Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid.
* Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.
For example, the White House, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, becomes sulk.held.raves; the Tokyo Tower is located at fans.helpless.collects; and the Stade de France is at reporter.smoked.received.
Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
* First, let’s vote out all the lawyers.
* Video is terrible, is almost certainly the future of everything.
* And the future just isn’t very stable: Carbon nanotubes have been pegged as the wonder material that could finally allow us to build a space elevator. A discouraging new study suggests these microscopic strands aren’t as resilient as we thought—and all it could take is a single misplaced atom to bring the whole thing crashing down.
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Monday Morning Links!
* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”
* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.
* Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical.
* I just can’t believe “crip theory” is really a brand with staying power, but it’s showing up in job titles now.
* Margaret Atwood on our real-life dystopia: “What really worries me is creeping dictatorship.” Oh, if only it were “creeping!”
* All Things Must Pass: McDonald’s franchisees say the brand is in a ‘deep depression’ and ‘facing its final days.’
* Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
* Teach the controversy: Is UC spending too little on teaching, too much on administration? More links below the chart.
* The Plan to Make California Wet By Bringing Back Beavers.
* Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.
* Free the cheese bandits. Free all political prisoners.
* I still think Democrats are severely discounting the possibility that Clinton gets indicted.
* Vox, the website that explains the news, suggests Nordic genetic superiority might explain Denmark’s social institutions. Interesting, but not dispositive! I get that this is supposed to be a troll, but all the same…
* Wealth therapy tackles woes of the rich: ‘It’s really isolating to have lots of money.’
* Fukushima Looks Like An Apocalyptic Ghost Town 4 Years After The Nuclear Disaster.
* A few days ago, a reddit user posted a thought-experiment about living in Las Vegas and working in San Francisco, commuting four days a week by airplane. Their back-of-the-envelope calculations have them saving about $1100/month.
* I’ll allow it: Larry David Fulfills Destiny, Plays Bernie Sanders In SNL Cold Open. Bonus David Content! Larry David’s Daughter’s Instagram Will Make You Wish She was Your Best Friend.
* Beowulf vs. Satan vs. Grendel vs. Dracula.
* I’ve seen this movie: Aer Lingus Passenger Flips Out, Bites Fellow Passenger, Dies.
* And somehow I always knew it would end like this: Japan Engineers Design Robotic Bear to aid in Assisted Suicide.
Friday: Steven Salaita Link Roundup and More
* Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair. Return of the blacklist? Cowardice and censorship at the University of Illinois. Academic Freedom, Except When I Disagree. Bérubé on Salaita. The national AAUP’s statement. Cary Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of bestowing academic freedom. Cary Nelson’s Case. John K. Wilson. The definition of academic freedom, for many, does not accommodate dissent. The University of Illinois Is Not an Island. A Love Letter to Twitter. A New Birth of Academic Freedom.
* One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against. So it’s probably natural for college students to be a little ironic, a little unsettled. It’s time, meanwhile, to admit that the college years aren’t for figuring out some improvised “sense of purpose.” They’re more like a period of acclimatization—a time when realizations can dawn. If you’re feeling uneasy about life, then you’re doing the reading.
* Matthew Cheney has a call to read Survivor over Octavia Butler’s objections, inspired in part by my recent series at LARoB.
* Princeton Considers End to Limit on Number of As.
* The University of Colorado is moving to fire a tenured faculty member after the Boulder campus paid $825,000 this week to settle a graduate student’s allegations that the philosophy professor retaliated against her for reporting she was sexually assault by a fellow student.
* Watch NJ cop go rogue: Since Obama ‘doesn’t follow Constitution, we don’t have to.’
* Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health.
* Is Student Debt Harmful to Your Health? Student debt correlated with nagging sense that life is pointless.
* Oh, there’s your problem, your culture produces monsters: Telling white people the criminal justice system is racist makes them like it more.
* On not being cynical enough: LeBron James just leapt from one carefully constructed superteam to another. Of course I’m talking about you; I was always cynical about this. #cynicprivilege
* The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.
* An interview on death and mourning with Thomas Laqueur, from the great TNI issue on mourning I was hyping the other day.
* When stock photography modeling goes wrong.
* Endless Adjunct: The Game! From @readywriting.
* “Ole Miss Struggles to Be a New Miss.” On trying to rebrand.
* The Wonder Years: An Oral History.
* I guess in Obama’s America it’s not always legal to randomly murder people for no reason.
* Run Cruel optimism, Liz, run cruel optimism!
* “Punk archaeologists” explain why they dug out the Atari landfill. I should have been a punk archaeologist.
* Christina Hendrick’s time-travel-centered Mad Men spinoff looks pretty promising. The Mary Poppins one is good too.
* Lost in Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam trying to make Don Quixote again, which is now about trying to make Don Quixote.
* There’s only one thing Disney/Marvel loves more than money, and that’s not making inclusive superhero movies.
* Perhaps most importantly to everyone outside of Broadway, this production basically puts the kibosh on any new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—at least until it’s over. David said he “hadn’t ruled out” doing more Curb, but that he’s “not going to mentally do that to myself right now.” Also, if he did do another season, “this play would push that schedule back.” So we’d say that if he did do a ninth season, it could be about how Larry David starring in a Broadway show ends up irritating everyone else. But of course, he already did that.
* Everything old is new again: Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016. NBC has great idea for family show starring Bill Cosby.
* Slot-machine science: How casinos get you to spend more money. A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos.
* The arc of history is long, but bends towards justice: Cops no longer desire photo of teenager’s erection.
* Over the cliff: Almost 20 percent of people near retirement age have no retirement savings.
* The headline reads, “Experts Split If Robots Will Usurp Human Workers By 2025.”
* Google Saved by the Bell Truth. Wake up sheeple.
* My god. The bureaucracy works.
* And SMBC presents: The Darwinist!
Sunday Links
* Breaking Bad *and* Curb Your Enthusiasm tonight. I’m in TV heaven.
* Former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was arrested Sunday in connection with British police investigations into phone hacking and police bribery, her spokesman told CNN. And there’s more: Ed Miliband has demanded the breakup of Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire in a dramatic intervention in the row over phone hacking. UPDATE: And the head of Scotland Yard has now resigned.
* Class struggle: 11 states receive more in lottery revenues than they do in corporate taxes.
* Twitter Mona Lisa. Via zunguzungu’s always wonderful Sunday reading.
* Scadenfreudelicious: Sarah Palin hagiography The Undefeated currently has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
* Local color: Scenes from the pun contest at the Regulator Bookshop.
* And from Al Jazera: “Mass psychosis in the US: How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.”
My Enthusiasm Cannot Be Curbed
I deeply admire Al Gore and I’m very sorry to hear about the dissolution of his marriage, but the fact remains Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 8 just got awesome.
