Wednesday Morning!

* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.

* Faculty on Strike at UIC.

* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.

* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.

* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.

* On Teaching While Black.

* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?

* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.

* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.

* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.

* Academic freedom with violence.

* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.

* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.

“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.

* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.

* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.

* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.

* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.

* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”

* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”

* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.

* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!

* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.

* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.

* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.

* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.

* How the north ended up on top of the map.

* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.

* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.

“I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.”

Maybe it’s because I don’t read Don DeLillo novels hoping to connect with the characters, or maybe I was just born to be a contrarian, but I liked Falling Man quite a bit more than the reviewers seemed to. I thought it was probably his best book since Underworld, and maybe earlier. As is often the case with DeLillo, the characters are not real people, and barely even qualify as simulacra of real people—but for this book, at least, about the psychic aftermath of 9/11, that emptiness and stilted disconnectedness made a great deal of sense. It’s interesting that once again, as in Libra, DeLillo’s best character work is in representing those consciousnesses that might popularly be considered unrepresentable: here, the minds of the terrorists.

I’m not sure what 9/11 novel people were hoping DeLillo might write, but a novel about PTSD was more or less what I was expecting. Honestly I think it’s probably the only sort of 9/11 novel that is capable of being either written or widely published, at least for a couple decades—which is just one of the reasons why DeLillo has thus far been the only exception to my rigorous personal ban on all 9/11 novels.

You have to look for them a bit—and I think the fact of that looking was one of the things the reviewers didn’t care for—but DeLillo still manages to get in a few nice DeLilloesque grand pronouncements, though he’s careful always to put them into the mouths of his characters rather than in untagged text, almost as if even six years later he still needs the protection of a proxy to talk about these things:

“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”

and

He said,”It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”

“Because it has to be.”

“It has to be,” she said.

“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”

“But only the first one.”

“Only the first,” she said.

“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a bit older and wiser.”