Posts Tagged ‘Dartmouth’
Wednesday Night Links!
* How Bad Was It? Mitch McConnell Triumphant. Losers, not unlucky. And they probably managed to pre-lose the Senate in 2016 in the bargain. If you want a vision of the future. Decision 2014: The Higher-Ed Outlook. The biggest loser in this election is climate (as always). President Obama Has Earned Our Disapproval.
* Amazon wants to give you ten dollars: Spend $45 or More on Select Amazon Gift Cards, Get a $10 Promotional Credit for Yourself.
* I’ve seen some really polarizing opinions on this piece today: Confessions of a Young, Prolific Academic. I understand why people aren’t on board, but all the same I’m attracted to pieces that present the joyful side of academic work.
* Ecotopia today: Esteemed evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson believes the only way we can avoid a catastrophic mass extinction is to set aside half of the planet in permanently protected areas for the 10 million other species who live on Earth.
* 21 Photos Of Nature Winning The Battle Against Civilization.
* Writing the future: A timeline of science fiction literature.
* It seems like every 30-something couple has an embarrassing financial secret: their boomer parents are covering their mortgages, child-care costs and other expenses. The Bank of Mom and Dad: confessions of a propped up generation.
* New Bill Watterson Comic Is A Simple But Perfect Celebration Of Comics.
* Alone as a queer, young, black sci-fi nerd: then I discovered Samuel Delany.
* Why Banksy Is (Probably) a Woman.
* Uber defends price surge that charged Durham man $455 on Halloween.
* Prequelism infects David Chase. There is still no cure. Won’t you give what you can today?
* Why Isn’t Hogwarts Using All That Magic To Explore Space? It’s a Kind of Magic. Like Methods of Rationality minus the cult (and one page instead of ten thousand).
* And Dartmouth Professors Vote to Abolish Greek System. Nonbinding, purely symbolic, but points for trying…
Midweek Links!
* Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds: X-Wing, Tie Fighter Are FINALLY Getting Digital Re-Releases. I don’t meant to brag but I was the very very best in the world at this game, back when.
* CFP at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at UWM. This year’s theme is “the unbearable.” Keynotes by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman!
* How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts.
* Higher Education and the New Brutalism.
We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and cruelty. The United States is sullied by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice. Academics who speak out against corruption and injustice are publicly demeaned and often lose their jobs. At the same time, the Obama administration criminalizes public servants who expose unethical behavior, the violation of civil liberties and corruption.
* Elsewhere in the richest society in the history of the world: How many homeless S.F. schoolkids? Enough to fill 70 classrooms.
* When I was a black woman, I was hated. Now, as a black man, I’m feared.
* Priscilla Wald on Media Treatment of Ebola. How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere.
* Any grad student could have told you: drunk people are better at philosophy.
* Tufts and Unionized Adjuncts.
* Scenes from the competency-based education scam. And the for-profit scam.
* UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation.
* Free education is not a crazy dream; some countries already have it. We should too, or we face a future where the study of literature or art becomes a luxury available to the rich alone.
* Some things mankind was never meant to see. More links below!
* Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day.
* You Can Buy This Abandoned CT Town For Less Than A Brooklyn Apartment.
* 30 Philip K Dick Stories That Should Be Movies.
* Voight-Kampff test for college admissions.
* ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ Is Now an Actual College Class. I’d take that. I know I could teach it.fe
* Someone finally said it: I Don’t Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men.
* Yosemite Lifehacks. Recommended.
* There’s no anti-college nonsense so aggressively silly that the Washington Post won’t push it.
* How the culture of assessment fuels academic dishonesty.
* US currency reimagined to celebrate ideas, not the dead. Still more links below!
* The Race to Nowhere In Youth Sports.
* You Can Still Eat This Corgi In Pennsylvania, Thanks To The NRA.
* Krypton TV Series In The Works. The CW Is Making A Young Shakespeare Vs. Witches TV Show.
* But it’s not all terrible ideas: I’m cautiously optimistic about Marvel Phase III. Black Panther! Captain Marvel!
* Halfway through this review of William Gibson’s The Peripheral I broke my no-buying-books rule and bought the book.
* Milwaukee hosts first Fantasticon comic convention.
* The NFL Concussion Settlement Is Pure Evil.
* The end result is always the same. You do all this work just to get money. So fuck it: Why not skip everything and just start making currency?“
* The Dartmouth (America’s Oldest College Newspaper) issues a rare correction.
* Damning every damnable river on Earth: what could possibly go wrong?
* When Russell Brand Met David Graeber.
* Martin Jarvis, professor of music at Charles Darwin University in Australia, claims some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best-loved works were actually written by his wife.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking, Study Says.
gerrycanavan.com Is Pleased to Offer This Sunday Reading Experience
* The schedule for the final third of my Cultural Preservation course. This has been one of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had; I’m hoping things go as well next spring when I do it all again.
* Starting out with two strikes with this guy and he hasn’t even found out where I work yet.
* The institution of the faculty wife is alive and well in academic culture. She’s an adjunct.
* Nietzsche was right: it turns out without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
* Elsewhere in the American nihilism files: NASA study concludes it’s not just you, we really are doomed.
* Meanwhile, we can’t even agree on the incredible, undeniable, world-historical usefulness of vaccines. One map sums up the damage caused by the anti-vaccination movement.
* Surely we’ll start the school day later, when every bit of science backs this up… Oh.
* Unreal: Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked. Could the Passengers Still Be Alive?
* Don’t be evil: Google’s anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content.
* There’s no escape from the corporate-NSA surveillance network.
* Five Cops Beat Innocent, Unarmed Father to Death Outside Cinema.
* No one could have predicted a completely unregulated peer-to-peer hotel network would lead to bad outcomes. Next up: Hey, Uber, your unregulated taxi was just some random creep’s unsafe car!
* For the true believers: A Brief History of the Quidditch World Cup.
* It’s not Mortal Kombat we should fear; it’s Candy Crush Saga and FarmVille.
* 50,000 Activists Demand Sexual Assault Reform At Dartmouth After Student Publishes A ‘Rape Guide.’
* On the spell-binding catastrophic collapse of the Juan Pablo season of The Bachelor.
* If we make the world a paradise where everyone is immortal, will we still be able to have all these awesome jails? Aeon Magazine reports.
* Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes.
* Kim Stanley Robinson is all over the ASU “Thoughtful Optimism” project.
* As of 2010-2011, the most recent year with available data, recent humanities and liberal arts majors had 9 percent unemployment. That’s right about on par with students in computer and math fields (9.1 percent), psychology and social work (8.8 percent), and the social sciences (10.3 percent). And it’s just a bit above the average across all majors of 7.9 percent. The larger problem, as always, is that there’s still not enough work for young people post-recession.
* Pussy Riot launches a prisoners rights center in Russia, demands freedom in Wisconsin.
* Promisingly specific: Projecting ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ in Theaters Requires Special Instructions.
* Game of the Weekend: 2048, an addictive simplification of Threes!, in your browser.
* And good news for fans of medieval maps.
And Somehow Even More Still for Friday
* Cut from the top to save UC.
The current University of California Office of the President, or UCOP, is a labyrinthine bureaucracy that takes money from the 10 campuses where actual teaching and research happen. Instead of investing more authority in a president whose ambit is already absurdly huge — an annual budget of $24 billion, 230,000 students, 191,000 faculty and staff — the regents should scale back UCOP and empower each campus to make even more of its own decisions.
* The case for S4 of Arrested Development as masterpiece.
* Why Didn’t the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To.
* And MetaFilter has a big post up about major universities running afoul of the Clery Act.
Wednesday Night Links: 8,000 Barrels, 0.000025%, 3,387 Men, $100 Bills, and More
* Over a longer time span, say a decade, we would expect about 19 spill incidents with an aggregate spill volume of about 8,000 barrels, enough to fill about half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We would expect about 1.3 of these spills to be “large,” which means that on average we would expect a “large” spill to occur about once every 8 years or so. Clearly, based upon reported historical industry performance, spills in general and large spills in particular would not be a rare occurrence for the proposed pipeline.
* Elsevier’s behavior is so egregious that it has provoked a boycott from academics who refuse to write or review papers for its journals. But to focus on one malefactor elides a larger question: Why should academic knowledge — largely produced by academics at public and nonprofit universities and often with government grants — be turned into private property and kept from public dissemination?
* Dartmouth College Cancels Classes After Sexual Assault Protesters Receive Rape Threats. More at Student Activism.
* Piranhas are a very tricky species: On Gift Horses and Trojan Horses: The Proposed Aquatics Center.
* Tumblr of the day: Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You.
* Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the “American Novelists” page and into the “American Women Novelists” category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly–except of course–when you google “American Novelists” the list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men).
* Mad Men’s Misery Problem And How TV Can Handle Characters Who Never Change.
* Right Wing Media Exploit Boston Bombings To Attack Government Assistance Programs. West Virginia Republican: Make Kids Work As Janitors For School Lunches.
* Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts. That’s a crushing 0.000025% of the federal budget going to WASTE.
* Holding Corporations Responsible for Workplace Deaths. And then there’s Matt “Proud Neoliberal” Yglesias.
* Rhode Island Becomes 10th State To Approve Marriage Equality.
* A Slavoj Žižek Text Adventure.
* Monster.com bans unpaid internships.
* And the new $100 is awful. Good thing I’ll never actually have one.
They’re on to Me
A mere fifteen years after the fact, colleges are realizing I scored a 5 on the AP Calculus BC exam without knowing any calculus whatsoever.
Interesting Pedagogy
Duke students, you’re on notice: A Dartmouth professor is going after students who disagreed with her in class. The Wall Street Journal, not unexpectedly, is beside itself with glee.
Gerry Canavan 