Star Wars Day Links! Yay!

* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).

I realized recently, with surprise, that ROTJ is the only one that actually seems philosophically interesting to me. https://t.co/UzR5aMALac

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Yeah, that, but also the weirdly unsettled politics of pacifism and forgiveness that undergird the Luke-Vader plot. https://t.co/99HGF12U2C

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

.@traxus4420 Oh, by “unstable end” I thought you meant more the “okay, well, I guess we did it!” aspect the EU novels viciously take apart.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH Yeah, that’s what’s so singular about it. He gets to be a ghost too, Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t even seem mad at him.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH From the standpoint of our usual narratives it’s almost obscene! It’s really striking.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Is it “fear” when it’s something you know is definitely going to happen? https://t.co/9YZUbl819A

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Fully prepared to spend the next ten hours before I see THE FORCE AWAKENS arguing RETURN OF THE JEDI is underrated.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.

* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.

My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.

When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“

* Running the Red Cross like a business.

* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.

* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.

* “If tenured faculty teaching high-demand courses can be fired without cause, as they were at St. Rose, then tenure no longer exists,” Lemieux said.

* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.

* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.

* The law school collapse continues.

* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.

* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?

* My life story: Tsundoku.

* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.

* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?

* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.

* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.

* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.

* The DEA warns that drugs are funding terror. An examination of cases raises questions about whether the agency is stopping threats or staging them.

* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.

* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.

* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.

I’ve listened to the first episode of the new season of SERIAL now, and it really strikes me as deeply unethical on just about every level.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Serial = bad media form for covering ongoing story; tainted by commercialization, also by exploitation of someone who appears mentally ill.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Idea that SERIAL’s “brand” is refusal of definitive conclusions also seems like serious problem for their ability to report going forward.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

I’ll admit, though, I still feel burned by their irresponsibility in the previous story, and probably wouldn’t have liked anything they did.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.

* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.

* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).

* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?

* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.

Today’s 10-year-olds will be serving in the wars the next president starts. https://t.co/jhuRGQwFs6

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Monday Morning Links!

* Call for Papers: “Reframing Science Fiction.”

* Chris Ware: Why I Love Comics.

* Ghosts of Marquette.

* 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.

* Monica Morrison has now let herself be named in her lawsuit against the University of Miami for its mishandling of Colin McGinn’s harassment.

* 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.

Where Is Your Labor Day Now Links

* Great local event alert: George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UCSB) will be speaking at UWM’S Golda Meir on Wednesday (September 9) at 4:30pm on “The Ferguson Conjuncture: Why the Humanities Matter Now.”

* One of Jaimee’s poems was on Lake Effect on Friday; her full interview on the program is coming soon.

* After meeting my class and talking a bit with them about their familiarity with Tolkien I’ve updated my syllabus with a few supplementary readings.

* There’s a storm in the poetry world, this one set off by the bio in Best American Poetry 2015 of Michael Derrick Hudson, who has been publishing under the name Yi-Fen Chou. A pre-post-mortem from editor Sherman Alexie.

* @AcademicsSay: The Story Behind a Social-Media Experiment.

* Wikipedia Editors Uncover Extortion Scam And Extensive Cybercrime Syndicate.

* Iowa’s New President Is Choice Faculty Opposed. Unpopular pick. On the Suborning of Free Speech and Shared Governance at the University of Iowa.

* UH shifts millions from academics to sports.

* Harvard as tax-free hedge fund.

* Speaking for the humanities.

* Instead of hoping that higher education should be the solution to all of our economic problems, we should follow Cassidy’s advice and return to the notion that college is a public good and an end in itself: “Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis.” If we focus on making higher education more accessible and affordable as we enhance its quality, we can at least make sure that it does not enhance inequality and decrease social mobility.  The first step is to stop believing that college degrees produce good jobs. 

* Meant to keep academics compliant, obedient, and domesticated, audit culture comes to Canadian universities at an otherwise exciting moment for research. Indigenous epistemologies and publicly engaged, participatory, and open forms of research are asserting their places in the academic landscape today. In response to rich debates about what constitutes knowledge, universities are being called to feature relationally and community oriented research outcomes. But with audit culture’s narrow benchmarks and retrograde understandings of what counts as real research, there is little breathing room in the academy for public engagement, community-based research, and Indigenous forms of knowing, since these methodologies can’t be easily captured in the audit forms. Indeed, academics are driven away from socially engaged scholarly activities in part because they are more difficult to measure, assess, and judge.

* Daniels seems mildly indignant at the extent to which he has been monitored by Disney, now the home of the Star Wars franchise. As well he might. He didn’t just step off the first space-cruiser from Mos Eisley: he is 69 years old and has been playing C-3PO since before many of his current paymasters were born. “The secrecy has been beyond ludicrous,” he sighs. “For heaven’s sake, it’s a movie. When I got the script, it was typed in black on paper of the deepest red so you couldn’t photocopy it. I got a hangover just reading it.” He was censured by the studio recently for mentioning on Twitter a fellow actor from The Force Awakens.

* Obamaism distilled: In Alaska, Obama warns against climate change but OKs drilling.

* Scientists Calculated How Much Lembas Bread Would be Needed to Walk to Mordor.

* The Privatization of Childhood: Childhood has become a period of high-stakes preparation for life in a stratified economy.

* The oceans are full of bodies. The things they carry. Migrants welcome.

* TNI, on the counterfeit.

* Assessing the Legacy of That Thing That Happened After Poststructuralism.

* Jacobin on Radical America and on the Ashley Madison bots.

* The earning power of philosophy majors.

* ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

* Paid Leave for Fathers Is Good for Everybody.

* The experience will be disheartening, but remember: it is you who chose to play Adjunct Sudoku.

* The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional. Someone tell Wisconsin!

* Deaf Culture and Sign Language: A Reading List.

* After all the media fawning over the nonprofit Teach for America, there are some veterans of the program who are now telling a different story. “Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out” contains 20 essays with anecdotes that seem too crazy to make up.

* 10,000 zines and counting: a library’s quest to save the history of fandom.

* The end of overparenting. The end of workplace friendships.

* Wake up and smell the weird.

* “Stonehenge II: Archaeologists uncover true scale of ‘superhenge’ – discovered just a few miles from famous prehistoric monument.”

* The total surveillance society, but with a human face.

* Toronto’s parking ticket jubilee.

* Alzheimer’s at 38.

* PC Comedy and Paul Revere vs. Putting Out Fire with Gasoline.

* Free your mind; start high school later in the morning.

* Course List for Rupert Giles, Master of Library Sciences Candidate, Michaelmas Term 1982.

* And of course you had me at The Alternative Universe Of Soviet Arcade Games.

Friday Links!

* The UK Ministry of Defence Says Life in 2045 Will Be Unequal and Violent. That level of continuity with our present almost counts as utopian these days.

* I keep thinking about yesterday’s shooting down of a plane over Ukrainian airspace, especially the high number of children and AIDS researchers on board. And then there’s the geopolitical implications.

* Australia repeals its carbon tax because there’s just no hope.

* NSA sees your nude pix ‘as fringe benefits of surveillance positions,’ says Snowden.

* How to Answer the Diversity Question at a Campus Interview.

* I Saw a Man Get Arrested For a Sex Crime Because He Made a Scheduling Error.

* Freedom! Studies: Stand Your Ground Laws Lead To More Homicides, Don’t Deter Crime.

* Amy Poehler, then new to “Saturday Night Live,” was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”

* How prosecutors would build a case against the Batman.

*  The Return of School Segregation in Eight Charts.

* Danish DNA could be key to happiness. Well, I’m certainly glad we solved that!

* Israel and Gaza: A Plague on One House.

* A People’s History of Tattooine.

* The ‘World Cup Is Over, Now What?’ Guide to Soccer.

* Adam soldiers on in his sustained reading of the Temporal Cold War. My inclination is always to read the threat of the future as ecological rather than financial, but otherwise I’m on board.

* Amazon announces the death of the author.

* Grad school as scummy subscription service. Disruptilicious!

* Big Bang Theory Stars Could Make $1 Million An Episode, Because There’s No Hope.

* Which early Christian heresy are you?

* A Brief History of Houses Built Out of Spite.

* Okay, okay, but just this once.

* And Slate has an urgent report on my favorite subject in the world, the only thing that really matters, Roko’s Basilisk.

Thursday Night Links

* Avatar sequel hints. Everything that was cut from Avatar. Vatican says Avatar is no masterpiece.

* James Cameron’s Spider-Man.

* io9 teases me with the possibility that Wes Anderson could direct the Spider-Man reboot but says it will actually be (500) Days of Summer‘s Marc Webb. /Film says this rumor is already outdated and today’s favorite is the even-less-well known Nimrod Antal.

* Christopher Nolan talks Inception.

* Obama has officially bought the world an extra minute.

* Details emerging about the new David Simon show, Treme.

* Denmark, the awesomest economy.

* ‘System Failure’: Obama’s first year.

* Here comes the bank tax.

* Here comes the climate bill.

* Haven’t blogged about health care in a while, but the Democrats apparently struck a deal with labor today over the excise tax. The White House is also pushing a new exchanges agreement as a nose-in-the-tent that might partially compensate for the loss of the public option and the Medicare buy-in: “Over time, the exchanges will open to more and more people.”

‘This Organised Criminal Activity Has Even “Endangered the Credibility” of the Current Carbon Trading System’

Widespread fraud in the Danish carbon market?