Posts Tagged ‘Department of Education’
Wednesday News Brief, This Is All the News Today
* The US is now on track to have the worst outbreak anywhere. In the end we will have handled this worse than any nation on earth, because our leaders lied to us, said it was under control, said it wasn’t a big deal, said we were doing great, privately sold their stocks, told us to *buy* stock, ignored science, ignored experts, lied.
* Vox has some details on the coronavirus bailout, including how UI will be extended to freelancers and the self-employed and when you’ll get your check. Here’s another read from Forbes. This thread on Twitter seems to have more information on how the UI expansion will work for the self-employed.
* Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Reclaim our homes. Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression. European countries are writing blank checks to save their economies from coronavirus.
* “Herd Immunity” Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism.
* On Monday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
* Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2. From the list let me recommend Four Futures by Peter Frase, which I thought was great.
* We are in a time of wild magical thinking: miracle cures, coronavirus parties, Disney reopening next week, return to work by Easter, life without fear. Meanwhile, as a direct result of Trump administration policy: Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies.
* New York has 5% of Covid-19 cases worldwide as city becomes battlefront. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. “We have 11,000. We need 30,000.”
* Trump Shrugged Off Repeated Intelligence Warnings About Coronavirus Pandemic. DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck. U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak. Coronavirus and Fox News.
* How the virus got out. How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It). What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus.
* A Day in the Life of an ER Doc. A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients. Nursing Home Worker: “Everything About This Is Designed for Disaster.”
* Higher Education in the Age of COVID-19. How Is Covid-19 Changing Prospective Students’ Plans? Here’s an Early Look. Central Washington University Board of Trustees declares exigency. “To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.” Embrace the Canavan plan for pass/fail.
* Amidst a global health crisis, porn finds a way.
* The Very Specific Reason We Shouldn’t Bail Out the Cruise Industry.
* We Need a Hard Pause, Followed by a Soft Start.
* That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Really Scares Me.
* It will only get worse: ICE Detainees Are Being Quarantined. DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency. ‘Terrified’ Package Delivery Employees Are Going to Work Sick. Coronavirus hits rural Kansas, Missouri towns. Many don’t have a single hospital bed. U.S. Hospitals Prepare Guidelines For Who Gets Care Amid Coronavirus Surge. White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up.’ Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus. Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals. “This week, it’s going to get bad.”
* Science you can use: the Great Depression and death rates.
* DoE won’t let this crisis go to waste.
* Africa’s mountain gorillas also at risk for coronavirus.
* In some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline.
* The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
* Comrade Britney Spears shares post calling for general strike and redistribution of wealth.
* Chess in the time of coronavirus.
* Joe Biden Pivots to Video. ‘There’s no playbook for this’: Biden trapped in campaign limbo. You know it’s bad when the political cartoons start agreeing with you.
* A really exciting new book series: Palgrave SFF: A New Canon.
Thursday Links!
* Deadline extended: Special Issue: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Narrative, Characters, Media, and Event.
* CFP: Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction.
* After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go.
* The banality of evil in Baltimore.
* “Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles.” Every revelation in this story is stunning. Trump leans on ‘fake news’ line to combat reports of West Wing dysfunction. Donald Trump says all negative polls about him are fake news. Check out this fake news about voter fraud. Yemen Withdraws Permission for U.S. Antiterror Ground Missions. Milwaukee passes resolution opposing Trump travel ban. White House rattled by McCarthy’s spoof of Spicer. White House Denies Report That Bannon Had to Be Reminded He Wasn’t President Amidst Travel-Ban Chaos. Probably best to put this in writing ahead of time. The simple fact is that Trump has never had real friends in the sense you or I think of the term. Never Believe the Republicans’ B.S. Ever Again. How Each Senator Voted on Trump’s Cabinet and Administration Nominees. Five Theses on Trump. To Stephen Miller, Duke University Class of 2007.
* Elsewhere in Duke News! Bernie and the Duke Grad Student Unionization Movement.
* Apparently those who support income redistribution through aggressive top marginal taxation are still willing to accept union busting and poor parent shaming before considering direct infusions of cash. No matter how lofty their rhetoric, there is an intuitive desire within mainstream American liberalism to believe that the trouble in education is not so obvious as poor people not having enough money to do well—but rather, that poor parents are to blame for not being enough like middle class ones. DeVos Was Inevitable. Democrats reject her, but they helped pave the road to education nominee DeVos.
* The 10 US colleges that stand to lose the most from Trump’s immigration ban. American Universities Must Take a Stand.
* The Nervous Civil Servant’s Guide to Defying an Illegal Order.
* Meet Antifa, the Most Reasonable People in America.
* The Wisdom of Science Fiction in the Age of Trump.
* “All the pieces of the neo-Nazi solution to climate change already exist.”
* Dakota Access Pipeline Is Back On, Skipping Environmental Review.
* The New Yorker celebrates the great Mo Willems.
* Much has been written about the toxicity of internet “call out” culture over the past five years. But less has been said about the prevalence of efforts to fire people, one of that culture’s creepiest and most authoritarian features.
* Doctor Strange Has Now Made More Money At Box Office Than Man Of Steel. DC is really bad at this.
* Liberalism looks and feels like a waiting period that may never end. A primary purpose of this tactic is to allow policymakers and elites to announce their intention to do something about a problem while hoping the problem goes away on its own as public attention dies down or as they move on with their careers.
* We Asked Sci-Fi Writers About The Future Of Climate Change.
* Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network—to be called “Elevate”—of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes—for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. Theoretically.
* The Singularity has already happened.
* 150 Years to Alpha Centauri. But it’s no place to raise your kids.
* Make stamp-collecting great again.
* Teaching is not longer a middle class job. College professor isn’t either, pretty much anywhere but a town like Milwaukee.
* The Arc of History Is Long But Republicans Are Moving To Scrap Rules That Limit Overdraft Fees.
* A clever study showing how protests impact election outcomes, using rain.
* A general strike could transform American politics. But we’re nowhere near being able to call one.
* Capitalism is struggling to reproduce the misery and terror required for worker compliance.
* Even baseball hates baseball.
* Donald Trump Had A Superior Electoral College Strategy.
* I don’t think there’s been a better postmortem on the election, and what it means for the coming decades, than this by Mike Davis: The Great God Trump and the White Working Class.
In addition, as Brookings researchers have recently shown, since 2000 a paradoxical core-periphery dynamic has emerged within the political system. Republicans have increased their national electoral clout yet have steadily lost strength in the economic-powerhouse metropolitan counties. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output — just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.”
* Trump believes his base desires cruelty above all else. Here is today’s case study.
* “Uncle Biden” has done a lot to mask the fact that the real Joe Biden fought desegregation, wrote the 1994 crime bill, and appeared to side with Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill during Thomas’s confirmation hearings. The hyper-competent “Texts From Hillary” made it more difficult for the real Clinton to rebut charges of shadiness and corruption, and also served to mask over the fact that she had never won a closely fought election. Liberal Fan Fiction.
* When Details in a Story Can Put People at Risk.
* He speaks for us all: “Man found stuck in waist-deep mud has no idea how he got there, officials say.”
* The best news anybody’s gotten since 1997.
* What it’s like to lose your short-term memory.
* Ubiquitous surveillance watch.
* A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months. Oh, well, that explains everything, doesn’t it.
* Rick and Morty and Bojack and existentialism.
* Yes Weekly interviews the great Fred Chappell.
* What a horrible night to have a curse.
* And this is a really good start, but I’m sure we can find a way to do worse.
Monday Morning Links!
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Closing Every Tab Because My Computer Will Barely Work Right Now Links
Sorry I’ve been so quiet! Between summer teaching and wrapping up a few big projects it’s been a very busy couple of weeks. Here’s every tab I had open!
* CFP: Hamilton: A Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre.
* 2016 World Fantasy Award Finalists and Shirley Jackson Award Winners.
* Graduate students in literary studies may often feel despair, even deadness and meanness, but an excess of cool seems like an especially implausible explanation. Far more damaging are bad mentoring, crippling overwork, social and geographic isolation, and the absence of opportunities to join the profession after spending a decade training. For too many graduate students, whether critical or postcritical, earning a PhD is the end — not the beginning — of a promising academic career. The skepticism that threatens graduate students and young faculty members results, therefore, not from the skepticism of academic theorists but from the skepticism of legislatures, administrators, donors, austerity-loving think tanks, and taxpayers. The Hangman of Critique.
* Jeff Vandermeer: Hauntings in the Anthropocene.
* The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF.
* The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Have Been Determined.
* The Best of Science Fiction (1946) and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016).
* Cleveland Police Are Gearing Up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention. Case Western in the News: Changes to campus operations during RNC. What’s a University For? Meet the Student Fighting Case Western U. for Shutting Down Campus to House 1,900 Police Officers.
* At least the convention went great.
* “Secretary Clinton Is A Different Person Than Donald Trump,” Says Bernie Sanders in Ringing Endorsement. GOP Establishment Relieved After Conventionally Abhorrent Beliefs Make Way Onto Presidential Ticket.
* Clinton has 945 Ways to Win. Trump Has 72.
* A Brief History of Turkey and Military Coups. The view from inside the bunker. Turkey ‘suspends 15,000 state education employees’ after attempted coup, including 1,577 deans at all universities.
* US air strike in Syria kills nearly 60 civilians ‘mistaken for Isil fighters.’
* Bleeding the poor with fees and fines, Virginia edition.
* The end of Roger Ailes. The Drudge Era.
* Now, Baton Rouge. A 538 Special on Gun Deaths in America. The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear. “One group is responsible for America’s culture of violence, and it isn’t cops, black Americans, Muslims or rednecks.” No lives matter. And from the archives: A Manifesto from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.
* Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth. Donald Trump Heads Into The Convention With Barely Any Campaign At All: Many of the numbers listed for his state offices don’t even work. Did you ever have to make up your mind? Donald Trump’s Announcement of Mike Pence in 18 Tweets. “Trump’s campaign logo mocked on Twitter.” He’s Really Pretty Bad at This. Being Honest about Trump. Jeb! We Play the Trump Board Game So You Don’t Have To. Republicans Keeping Their Dignity. Teach the controversy: Is Trump Working for Russia? Understanding Trump Supporters: The Machine of Morbius. Back to the Future in Cleveland. The Last GOP President?
* Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? Confessions of Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter.
* Donald Trump Said Hillary Clinton Would ‘Make a Good President’ in 2008. Donald Trump should talk about Hillary Clinton’s email all the time. Here’s why. Pollster Frank Luntz: GOP has ‘lost’ the millennial generation.
* There are about 20 households where she now lives. Like Susie, most of the residents in Snowflake have what they call “environmental illness”, a controversial diagnosis that attributes otherwise unexplained symptoms to pollution.
* Newborn Ducklings Judge Shape and Color.
* Small Arms, Long Reach: America’s Rifle Abroad.
* Education Department’s proposed rule for student debt forgiveness could threaten traditional colleges as well as for-profits, particularly over its broad view of what counts as misrepresentation. College and the Class Divide. Wicked Liberalism.
* As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis.
*Dying in America, Without Insurance.
* When Not to Get Married: Some 19th Century Advice.
* The Ontology of Calvin and Hobbes.
* The Fight Between Berkeley’s Academics And Its Football Team Is Getting Ugly.
* A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email.
* Black Dishwasher at Yale University Loses Job After Shattering “Racist, Very Degrading” Stained-Glass Panel. Yale Rehires. Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor.
* Ghostbusters (2016) and The Fan. Fake Controversy, Terrible Comedy. Ghostbusters‘ nostalgia problem. And from the archives!
Ghostbusters more than any other film highlights the growing devaluation of public-sector jobs at the hands of privatized for-profit entities operating for mercenary reasons. The protagonists of this movie spend their time removing unwanted, unpaying residents from spaces they occupied their whole lives (and longer) and placing them into a form of prison at the behest of the current owners who can get more rent from more affluent persons and don’t like the neighborhood being ‘brought down’ by those now-undesirable who lived there first. Not only that, but budget cuts have forced the New York Public Library to retain the dead as current employees, cutting into what should have been their final retirement, and the entire crux of the film comes from belittling and mocking elected officials’ uselessness in the face of corporations who can solve the city’s problems for cash and without all the useless regulation tying up the mayor, firefighters and police. Ghostbusters is essentially Blackwater for the dead, cleaning up the town of its unwanted past, making life safe for the corporate oligarchies.
* A Zero Star Review of The Secret Life of Pets.
* ‘Pokémon Go’ and the Persistent Myth of Stranger Danger. If Pokémon Go could resemble the best of childhood, it might have some value. What it actually does is very different.
* Did Wes Anderson Design North Korea?
* How Sexual Harassment Halts Science.
* Why rich parents are terrified their kids will fall into the “middle class.”
* Prepare to cry: Appleton teen makes heartbreaking decision to die.
* To recap, the idea behind the Reverse Turing Test is that instead of thinking about the ways in which machines can be human-like we should also think about the ways in which humans can be machine-like.
* “He noted that further research is needed”: Women Wearing Low-Cut Tops In Application Photos Are 19 Times More Likely to Land a Job Interview.
* Penn State Football really should have gotten the NCAA death penalty.
* Am I a man, dreaming he is a Pokémon, or am I a Pokémon dreaming he is a man? Here’s All the Data Pokémon (Was) Leeching From Your Phone. Resist Pokémon Go. And as Adorno said: To catch Pokémon after Auschwitz is barbaric.
* OK, just take my money: Nintendo’s next assault on nostalgia is a mini-NES with 30 built-in games.
* Canon Police: Sulu’s Sexuality. But, you know, let’s not lose our heads. J.J. Abrams Won’t Re-Cast Anton Yelchin’s Role in ‘Star Trek’ Movies. For Some Baffling Reason, This Star Trek Beyond TV Spot Spoils the Big Twist. But the next one will be good, we swear.
* That piece I’m writing on Star Wars and canonicity will just never, ever be finished: Grand Admiral Thrawn Joins Rebels and the New Star Wars Canon.
* The headline reads, “Gonorrhea may soon be unbeatable.”
* Cancer, or, death by immortality.
* Hacking the brain in Silicon Valley.
* This blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22.
* Comic Books Are More Popular Now Than They’ve Been in 20 Years.
* Presenting the Apollo 11 Code.
* 67 Years of LEGO — by the numbers.
* Darwin’s Kids Doodled All Over His “Origin of Species” Manuscript.
* Neanderthals Ate Each Other and Used Their Bones as Tools.
* The Films Rian Johnson had the Episode 8 Cast Watch.
* This sizzle reel from Rogue One is the best.
* Treaty loophole might let someone claim ownership of the Moon.
* Should You Quit Your Job To Go Make Video Games?
* A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories of consciousness.
* And Mightygodking pitches the dark, gritty Sesame Street reinterpretation you didn’t know you needed.
Just a Few for Wednesday
* The U.S. Department of Education has recommended the termination of a controversial accreditor, which could threaten access to federal financial aid for 243 institutions — many of them for-profits — that enroll more than 800,000 students.
* MetaFilter mega-post on the gun industry in America, tied to this Mother Jones investigation.
* New Calculation Shows We’ll Make Contact With Aliens in A Mere 1,500 Years. 1,508 if Trump wins.
* Hamilton and Liberal Education.
As we thought about the best way to honor this achievement, we decided to create a major prize to recognize creative potential in a student beginning her or his academic career at Wesleyan. This week we are announcing the Wesleyan University Hamilton Prize for Creativity: awarded to the incoming student (class of 2021) who has submitted (with the application for admission) a work of fiction, poetry, song, or creative nonfiction judged to best reflect originality, artistry and dynamism. The Hamilton Prize includes a full tuition scholarship at Wesleyan for four years. The winner of the prize will be selected by a panel of distinguished faculty and alumni.
* Crazed Greenwich Village Gunman Also Off-Duty NYPD Officer.
* Matt Thompson imagines being outed in Orlando, in the worst possible way.
* Alas, Trump! At least someone likes him.
* The question is how long can this last. Pretty much daily, major Republican leaders don’t just disagree with Trump but denounce him in pretty round terms, even as they remain at least nominal endorsers of his candidacy and accept him as the leader of their party. That is entirely unprecedented in modern American political history. It doesn’t seem sustainable.
* The best years of your life. (This one’s great too.)
* The Five People You Meet on Election-Year Social Media.
* I’m still enjoying Great Minds with Dan Harmon: Paul F. Tompkins as Edgar Allan Poe, Kristen Schall as Amelia Earhart, Danny Pudi as Buddha… I even enjoyed the Trump vs. Bernie debate. And Jason Alexander on parenting! I may be a cheap date.
* And I think The Expanse (which I’ve also been watching) is actually good. Watch that too. Why not watch everything? It’s summer! Summer!
Thursday Links, Just for You
* 8 Characters I Created To Teach My Kid About Dental Hygiene That Have Unfortunately Come To Life.
* There’s organized crime, and then there’s organized crime.
Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
It’s called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.
Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.
This is literally highway robbery.
* In Rochester, a paid informant went undercover and drove a man suspected of being an Islamic extremist, Emanuel Lutchman, to a Walmart in December to buy a machete, ski masks, zip ties and other supplies for a would-be terrorist attack on New Year’s Eve. Because Mr. Lutchman, a mentally ill panhandler, had no money, the informant covered the $40 cost.
* Even The National Review thinks Cuomo’s anti-BDS executive order is trouble.
* Having a child is like rereading your own childhood.
* On Eve of Graduation, University of Chicago Student President Faces Expulsion.
* Inside the growing movement against campus militarization.
* Five eye-opening figures from the U.S. Education Department’s latest civil rights data dump.
1. In the 2013-2014 school year, 6.5 million children were chronically absent from school, missing 15 or more days of school.
2. 850,000 high school students didn’t have access to a school counselor.
3. 1.6 million students went to a school that employed a sworn law-enforcement officer, but no counselor.
4. Nearly 800,000 students were enrolled in schools where more than 20 percent of teachers hadn’t met state licensure requirements.
5. Racial disparities in suspensions reach all the way down into preschool: Black children represent 19 percent of all preschoolers, and 47 percent of all those who were suspended.
* Everyone has celebrated how Beyoncé’s celebrity power has elevated Warsan Shire’s work to global attention. But African literature should not only attain universal value when endorsed by the west, argues Ainehi Edoro.
* Dry Taps and Lagoons of Sewage: What America’s Water Crisis Looks Like.
* OrderOfBooks.com: Complete List of All Book Series in Order.
* Talk grows of replacing Trump at GOP convention. Talk of a convention coup rattles Republican politics. Walker Agonistes. Advisors Fear Trump Will Suddenly Announce VP Pick on Twitter. Google GOP Dot Com Truth. Trump is really bad at this. Calm Down, Trump Won’t Be President. Trump and Weimar America. “For what it’s worth, however, I would suggest that the least bad option is for all career lawyers in the Justice Department—and career officials in other agencies—to stay put and serve in a Trump administration.”
* The Anointed One, or the Comeback Kid? It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician. Here Comes Hillary the Hawk.
* The 11 states that will determine the 2016 election.
* The general problem is that the modern liberal nation-state and its characteristic institutions are simply no longer capable of delivering on their baseline promises and possibilities to any national population anywhere. Even in nations that appear by most measures to be successful, the state withers due its lack of vision. Liberalism cannot handle the extension of its rights to all who are entitled, and its major alleged champions increasingly endorse depraved forms of military and economic illiberalism in the name of its defense. The brief moment of reform in which capital seemed to be harnessed to social democracy is very nearly over, and the difference between illicit and licit economies now seems paper-thin at best. Very little policy gets made because it’s the right thing to do; most policy is about transfer-seeking. Every dollar is spoken for. Every play is a scrum in the middle that moves the ball inches, never yards. Political elites around the world either speak in laughably dishonest ways about hope and aspiration or stick to grey, cramped horizons of plausibly incremental managerialism. Young people all around the world recognize that there is little hope of living in a better or more comfortable or more just world than their parents did, and their grandparents must often live every day with the possibility of losing whatever they’ve gained, that they are one lost job or sickness away from falling without a safety net. In the United States, what this all means in a more immediate sense is that Donald J. Trump is only the beginning.
* Welcome to the Party, America! 11 Muslim women who have been PM or President.
* Here are the proposed names for the 4 newest elements on the periodic table.
There are some constraints to naming, however. The IUPAC rules stipulate new elements must be named after either
* “A mythological concept or character (including an astronomical object)”
* “A mineral, or similar substance”
* “A place or geographical region”
* “A property of the element”
* “A scientist”
* Scientists Avoid Studying Women’s Bodies Because They Get Periods.
* What everyone earns working on a $200m blockbuster.
* A new study produced by Cambridge University statistician David Spiegelhalter suggests the cause of declining sex trends over the past 30 years is Netflix.
* What Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?
* Being Dinosaur Comics’s Ryan North.
* Snow Crash and Infinite Jest Both Predicted Our Cyberpunk Present.
* Fighting salary compression at the University of Washington. This is such a tough problem everywhere; the situation sounds much worse on every level at Marquette, for instance, than even what the article describes at Washington.
* Do Deaf Babies Need to be ‘Fixed’? I’ve found this debate utterly fascinating for years. I have no idea how to solve it.
* From Cleveland: Testing of backlogged rape kits yields new insights into rapists and major implications for how sexual assaults should be investigated.
* Behind Peter Thiel’s Plan to Destroy Gawker.
* Of course you had me at “Biologists Have Learned Something Horrifying About Prairie Dogs.”
* And this could be the biggest case of treason involving cheese — ever.
Friday Friday!
* Killing tenure is academia’s point of no return. Wisconsin’s Fight Over Faculty Rights: What’s at Stake, and What’s Next. What’s Gone Wrong in Wisconsin? Prof says Regents failure to protect tenure is the beginning of the end of UW. Why Wisconsin Matters to You.
* One College’s Method to Prove Its Value: Scanning Students’ Brains. Sure, that’ll solve it!
* A University Banks on Ph.D. Stipends to Better Compete With Its Peers. Seems wise!
* Secret Aerial FBI Program Uncovered By 23-Year-Old Journalist.
* What Happens When The First Texas Town To Run Out Of Water Gets Record Rainfall.
* Before Lego Ripped Off Minecraft, Minecraft Ripped Off Lego.
* How did “rabbit hole,” which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land, evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction?
* When Rebecca Schuman interviewed Arne Duncan about for-profit colleges.
* Fermat’s Last Theorem watch: How Math’s Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke.
* And our debate yesterday was a blast. Thanks to FutureTense for the invitation! Next resolution: does it still count as winning if you sway more voters to your side, but still don’t clear 50%. I’ll take the aff…
Wednesday Links! No Fooling.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 17: Brand/Branding/Rebrand.
* Jackson was paid $7.1 million in 2012, more than any other college president in the nation, and continues to be paid at that level. Just in case you don’t click through, the headline to that piece reads “Report: R.P.I. facing $1 billion in debts, liabilities.” So you know she’s worth every penny of that salary.
* But did you know the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets less than half the public money per student that Madison Area Technical College gets and less than a third of what goes to Milwaukee Area Technical College?
* And speaking of UWM: After Extinction, at UWM April 30-May 2.
* Meanwhile, at Duke: Response to President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth. The original incident is described here.
* Unsettling the University, at UCR April 2-3.
* But what also became clear was that she and I have radically different visions of what constitutes the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System and how it might be preserved and protected. Through the course of our conversation it became increasingly clear to me that in the current situation in Wisconsin we find ourselves in what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “a differend,” a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement.” Despite all parties–Regents, chancellors, faculty, staff, students, and alumni–being committed to the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System, it seems impossible to agree upon a rule of judgment or any set of criteria by which to adjudicate our different visions of what that well-being would look like.
* Dept. Names More Than 550 Colleges It Has Put Under Extra Financial Scrutiny.
* Salaita lawyers: ‘No doubt’ that UI, prof had agreement for employment.
* Over time, however, more and more departments failed to meet that standard; last year some 60 units were out of compliance, according to information gathered by the union. At Bridgewater State University, one of the worst offenders, for example, adjuncts taught more than 15 percent of courses in 16 large departments in 2014-15. Some 50 percent of classes in the English department were taught by part-time faculty, along with 40 percent in math and computer science. In philosophy, it was 63 percent of classes. Bridgewater officials did not respond to a request for comment.
* Google Maps turned your streets into Pac-Man yesterday, though I can’t imagine how anyone could have missed this news.
* The Entire History of ‘Doctor Who’ Illustrated as a Tapestry.
* 24 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.
* California Snowpack Hits All-Time Low, 8 Percent Of Average.
* Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.
* Chomsky: The Death of American Universities.
* There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
* The Trevor Noah train wreck.
* “Lutheran pastor resigns after being linked to threatening email.” That’s… something.
* Italian grandmother causes illness with cocoa expired in 1990.
* Why You Should Really Be Afraid of the Zombie Apocalypse.
* Gas Siphoning Coverup May Have Caused East Village Explosion. Jesus Christ.
* But there’s at least one unforeseen upside when all episodes are released at once: The writers don’t get the chance to self-correct in the middle of the season.
* The Long And Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl.
* The Americans renewed for season four. Hooray!
* Study: Not Many Disco Songs About Daytime. But of course more work is required.
* Oh my God, Becky, look at this vigorous debate among scholars about the true origin of the straight male preference for a curvier backside.
* I can”t believe they’re bringing this thing back: The X-Files Could Have Ended With a West Wing Crossover.
* And Paul F. Tompkins picks his best episodes from a prolific podcasting career. My tragedy is I’ve heard all these. Perhaps you’ve heard he’s got a new one out today…
Spring Break Is Over and All Our Accomplishments Turn to Ash Links
* The best news: Jaimee’s book has won the Anthony Hecht Prize at Waywiser Press.
* Median Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges, 2014-15.
* Russian Witch Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.
* Get ready for Margaret Atwood’s next.
* Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won’t Be As Easy As He Thought. But it’s not all bad news: Suddenly, It Seems, Water Is Everywhere in Solar System.
* Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation.
* They found Cervantes’s tomb.
* * The Concussion Crisis Reaches a New Level.
* Choctaws helped starving Irish in 1847.
* Ian Bogost: Video Games Are Better Without Characters.
* But in 2014, the financial year that appears to have been the final straw for Sweet Briar, total operating revenues were $34.8 million and total operating expenditures were $35.4 million, which means that the deficit the school is running is actually smaller than the cost of any of the bad deals it’s gotten itself into with banks.
* The United Arab Emirates, where New York University opened a new campus last year, has barred an N.Y.U. professor from traveling to the monarchy after his criticism of the exploitation of migrant construction workers there.
* If one arbitrary, designed-by-committee college ranking system is good, two must be…
* What is Star Trek’s vision of politics?
* The Uncensored, Epic, Never-Told Story Behind ‘Mad Men.’
* The Secret History of the Hardy Boys.
* A household name to black audiences yet completely unknown to white audiences, Gary Owen, a blond, blue-eyed stand-up from Ohio, has a career wholly unlike that of any comedian before him.
* Almost seven years ago, a troubled 11-year-old girl reported that she had been raped — twice — in her Northwest Washington neighborhood. Despite medical evidence of sexual assault, records show that no suspects were arrested and the cases were given only sporadic attention by the police . Instead, in the second case, the police had the girl, Danielle Hicks-Best, charged with filing a false report.
* People who lose their jobs are less willing to trust others for up to a decade after being laid-off, according to new research from The University of Manchester.
* Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List: 28 Favorite Books That Shaped His Mind and Music.
* The Disturbing Puzzle Game That Nobody Can Solve.
* What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?
* The two Wisconsin tween girls accused of stabbing a friend 19 times and leaving her in a park—because they believed doing so would protect their families from the mythical internet horror known as Slender Man—will be tried as adults for first-degree attempted homicide, a judge ruled Friday.
* Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has been on a mission to weed out purported voter fraud in the state since he took office in 2011. After launching an investigation into what he called an “expanding loophole” allowing non-citizens to vote in Ohio and potentially decide elections, he announced Thursday that 145 non-citizens were registered to vote illegally in 2014, amounting to just .0002 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in the state.
* Nihilism watch, Washington Post edition.
* How to Build a $400 Billion F-35 that Doesn’t Fly.
* This is the best version of Star Wars — and watching it is a crime.
* Before Star Wars: Rogue One Takes Off, a History of the X-Wing Series.
* What could possibly go wrong? In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Mutant Animals to Be Hunted. Have to say I’m really pulling for the mutant animals here.
* And now comes another, increasingly prevalent way to show appreciation for those who’ve served in the military: exempting them from taxes. Would you like to know more?
* Guess Who’s Editing the Wiki Pages of Police Brutality Victims.
* California has about one year of water left.
* That gum you like may actually not be coming back into style.
* How did they manage to screw up Powers?
* Four years after Fukushima, just one man lives in the exclusion zone – to look after the animals.
Friday Links!
* The Department of Education is surprisingly frank about how impossible it is to turn Obama’s gibberish on education into a usable ratings system. And here is the tentative list of stats colleges must now juke.
* Serial missed its chance to show how unfair the criminal justice system really is. What Serial really taught us.
* Aaron Bady interviews Sofia Samatar on steampunk, Afrofuturism, science fiction, and more. The latest in his Post45 series.
* Marquette says it hasn’t suspended professor John McAdams.
* The best list like this I’ve seen: 5 Reasons To Study The Humanities.
Uber claims Done wasn’t even the driver who was supposed to pick the woman up, and points out that he passed a background check before he started driving for them.
So did the L.A. driver charged with kidnapping and rape, the San Francisco driver charged with hitting a passenger in the head with a hammer, and another San Francisco driver accused of assault who turned out to have prior felony convictions and was on parole for a previous battery charge.
* But in statehouses across the country, Uber has fought against legislation requiring background checks as strong as those demanded of traditional taxis. Other ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Sidecar, Uber’s chief rivals, have also pushed against the laws, but supporters of stronger background checks say Uber has been by far the most aggressive.
* The Winning Images From National Geographic‘s 2014 Photo Contest.
* The very last Colbert. RIP. Today marks the exact moment this stops being a relevant reference for students, so expect to see it fade from classrooms around 2027.
* And I too wish my snowman were alive.
Wednesday Links! Seriously a Lot!
* Like C.P. Snow’s two cultures of the humanities and the sciences, a new bimodal view of higher education is becoming increasingly important at the start of the twenty-first century: one that sees the goal of universities as developing “the whole person” and another that sees it as largely or even exclusively in terms of job training. The Two Cultures of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century and Their Impact on Academic Freedom.
* Academic search season watch: How To Tailor a Job Letter (Without Flattering, Pandering, or Begging).
* Episode 21 of Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (with Kurt Busiek) is a great look at how Marvel’s sausage is made. Give it a listen if you’re a fan of the comics…
* Time for the Libya mea culpas.
* TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.
* What Happened To Jennifer Lawrence Was Sexual Assault.
* The Police Tool That Pervs Use to Steal Nude Pics From Apple’s iCloud.
* Steve Shaviro: Twenty-Two Theses on Nature.
* Even the Department of Education thinks their rating system will be a mess.
* Yale’s tax exempt New Haven property worth $2.5 billion.
* Thirty-two teens escaped from a Nashville youth detention center by crawling under a weak spot in a fence late Monday, and nine of them were still on the run Tuesday, a spokesman said.
* Change Of Habit: How Seattle Cops Fought An Addiction To Locking Up Drug Users.
* Three Myths About Police Body Cams.
* Jeff Mizanskey Is Serving Life in Prison for Marijuana.
* Scientists Find ‘Alarming’ Amount Of Arsenic In Groundwater Near Texas Fracking Sites.
* Can journalistic ethics include nonhuman perspectives?
* Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female.
* All The Game Of Thrones Fan Theories You Absolutely Need To Know.
* NIH finally makes good with Henrietta Lacks’ family.
* Twenty Days of Harassment and Racism as an American Apparel Employee.
* Durham Public Schools dumps Teach for America.
* The Four-Year-Old’s Workday.
* Rape culture and Title IX at the University of Kansas.
* “Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better — perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background — we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.”
* Twitter has an algorithm that assigns gender to its users.
* Why top tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees.
* In Virginia, thousands of day-care providers receive no oversight. After a child’s death, parents grapple with second guesses.
* Unlike most other states, Wisconsin does not recognize prisoners’ good behavior with credits toward accelerated release. Wisconsin had such a “good time” program for well over a century, but eliminated it as part of the policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s that collectively left the state unusually — perhaps even uniquely — inflexible in its terms of imprisonment. Why No “Good Time” in Wisconsin?
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Meet The Guy Who Spent Seven Months Killing Everyone In Fallout 3.
* When Disney forbade Stan Lee’s original cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy. When they cut Hawkeye’s bit from Captain America 2.
* Rule of law watch: The Dumb Line In New York’s Constitution That Could Elect A Governor Most Of The State Doesn’t Want.
* For the geeks: How Randall “xkcd” Munroe wrote What If?
* Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox.” Bah! We need to go back in time and prevent this simulation from ever being devised!
* The arc of history is long, but: HBO has commissioned some sort of new Flight Of The Conchords show.
* The Most Compelling Athlete In America Right Now Is Here To Play Chess.
* And just because it’s gerrycanavan.wordpress.com: Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.
Monday Night Links
* The kids are all right: Last Friday night, the Harvard College Undergraduate Council announced that the student body had voted 72% in favor of Harvard University divesting its $30.7 billion endowment from fossil fuels.
* Barbarians at the Wormhole: On Anthony Burgess.
The trope of invasion is doubly brilliant, first because the invasion plot is a mainstay of SF and second because the trope captures quite neatly what it must feel like for some literary intellectuals to be forced to confront the increasing cultural cachet of SF, to face its meteoric rise over the last thirty years from lowbrow genre to literary respectability. The genre now comfortably occupies university syllabi, best-of lists, and handsome Library of America editions — though some hardened highbrows might suspect its popularity is more a function of marketing than of quality.
For all its brilliance, Clowes’s trope of invasion makes an important mistake, failing to note that the invasion is largely moving in the other direction. After all, one wouldn’t expect Asimov’s Science Fiction to run a special issue featuring “literary fiction,” but publications like the New Yorker apparently do feel the need for a science fiction issue, perhaps trying to freshen themselves up by tapping into the unruly energies of a disreputable genre. Indeed, the lure of the so-called low genres — and SF in particular — has long proven irresistible to those who otherwise fashion themselves as literary types, at least since Kingsley Amis’s classic 1960 study of the genre, New Maps of Hell.
Clowes’s New Yorker cover is, in fact, a perfect example in miniature of the subgenre Amis called the “comic inferno” — humorous dystopias such as those written by Frederick Pohl, C.M. Kornbluth, and Robert Sheckley. This subgenre, by Amis’s account, mocks ideas of progress in its humorous rendition of dystopian futures. What is dystopian about Clowes’s comic cover is very precisely that SF cannot be ignored, that it disrupts the bourgeois regularity and comfort that informs the imagination of hypothetical readers of The New Yorker. The genre — which always bears with it the threatening knowledge that the world might change inexorably, beyond human control, or at least beyond the control of those who are humanistically inclined — cannot be ignored, because the signs of our world’s deepening state of crisis (political, technological, environmental) cannot be ignored.
* Bonus: “Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions” by Jonathan Lethem.
* Not only are student loans not a burden on the federal government, they’re a good investment. In 2012 the DOW estimated its subsidy for student lending at -17 percent. In other words, the DOE “subsidies” actually represent money coming in. Including all expenses, from loses on defaults to debt collection to program administration, the DOE will pull in more than $25 billion in profit from student lending this year alone—billions more dollars than the IRS will assess in gift and estate taxes combined, and more than enough to pay NASA’s whole budget. The DOE explains the negative subsidy through a divergence between “the Government’s borrowing rate and the interest rate at which borrowers repay their loans.” After all, no one can borrow at lower rate than the U.S. Treasury, certainly not college students and their families. Bondholders aren’t the only ones who think student debtors—including defaulters—will pay back every cent they owe, with interest. The government is literally counting on it.
* The headline reads, “Charges dropped against man arrested for wearing an elaborate wristwatch.”
* Elmo accuser wants to retract his retraction. Hostess may survive after all.
* Hostess Bankruptcy Has Worked Out Well for CEO Brian Driskoll.
This is not identical to the story with the American Airlines bankruptcy, but there’s something similar about it. There the CEO gets a large payday if he can avoid a merger, regardless of the value for the enterprise.
* The handwriting is on the wall. Until Republican candidates figure out how to perform better among non-white voters, especially Hispanics and Asians, Republican presidential contenders will have an extraordinarily difficult time winning presidential elections from this point forward.
* JSTOR provides free access to Wikipedia editors via pilot program.
* Cory Booker to live on food stamps for a week.
* My name is R______. I am six years old. I think it’s not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won’t give little girls much care.
* Remixed trailer of the moment: Gotham High.
* And a new game: impressions of Sean Connery as Gandalf. Oh, what might have been!
Gerry Canavan 