Weekend Links 2: Even Weekendier!

* A beard, said Whitman, is preferable in a man as “a great sanitary protection to the throat.” Walt Whitman’s lost advice to America’s men: meat, beards and not too much sex.

* If defendants had well-funded, effective representation, our adversarial system would do what it is intended to do. What we have right now, however, simply is not adversarial: relatively well-funded, well-staffed prosecutor offices square off against public defenders whose caseloads defy imagination.

* Hell’s Kitchens: Privatized Prison Mess Halls.

* The end of Howard University.

* Everyone poops, and everyone pees, but no one should be stigmatized or criminalized when they answer nature’s call.

* Bring on the climate trials: When kids sue the government for failing to protect future generations against climate change, it’s a long shot. But on Friday, in King County, Wash., Superior Court Judge Hollis R. Hill ruled in favor of eight Seattle-area youth petitioners: The Washington State Department of Ecology must deliver an emissions reduction rule by the end of this year.

* Living at the Edges of Capitalism.

* The best podcasts, Ted Talks and academic papers about Beyoncé.

* The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don’t Know (But Should) About Doctoral and Faculty Life.

* Oddly enough, the late novelist David Foster Wallace, a friend of Franzen’s, appears to cast a shadow over the portrayal of Andreas, whom Franzen endows with personality traits he saw in Wallace — especially the idea that he was “unworthy” of love. Over his lifetime, Wallace suffered from various addictions and struggled with depression for years; like Andreas, he ultimately committed suicide. In his essay “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude,” Franzen says that he “loved a person who was mentally ill.” Franzen attributes Wallace’s suicide, in large part, to the fact that Wallace felt there was something wrong with him and he was unworthy of love; “[a]nd this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide.” Inaccessible on his private island of self-laceration, believing there was something wrong with him, Wallace could never reach a farther shore, and nobody could reach him. Ultimately, Franzen speculates, his suicide was designed “[t]o prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved.”

* Lake Chad in the Anthropocene.

Lake Chad was one of largest lakes in world, but 90% of it has vanished in past 50 years #climatechange @NASAGoddard pic.twitter.com/A8iM3rebYN

— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) April 30, 2016

* Yahoo, when looked at in a certain way, is worth approximately -$8 billion.

* Who owns Klingon?

* Life in the 21st century: Fearing a nuclear terror attack, Belgium is giving iodine pills to its entire population. Creeps Are Using a Neural Network to Dox Porn Actresses. Black Teenage Boy Charged With Possession of Child Porn for Sexting With White Girlfriend. Julia Ioffe profiled Melania Trump. Then she started getting calls from Hitler.

* The Untold Story of Canadian Super Heroes.

* A Japanese Map of European Stereotypes.

* We must mine redheads for the secret of their immortality gene.

* That’ll solve it: “Crisis-hit Venezuela to push clocks forward to save power.”

* How many friends can a person have?

* For the first three decades of the film industry’s existence, American “courts were not yet ready to consider motions pictures as speech worthy of constitutional protection.” And local and state governments were not ready to give up censorship as a form of good government. “In addition to the moral uplift, the logistics of film regulation were attractive. Regulation was a revenue generator; boards charged distributors for examination and approval and charged theaters for permitted exhibitions.”

* Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94.

* dontbepartoftheproblem.tumblr.com

Wednesday Links!

* Call for Papers, UWM/Marquette Graduate Student Humanities Conference: “Conflict and Liberation.”

* Call for Papers: Posthuman Futures.

* Your SF short film of the week: “Stealing Time.”

* Fifty years ago today, the United States of America dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain. It was an accident.

Fail safe systems in the weapons mostly worked

Uh, mostly?

and none of the four bombs experienced a nuclear reaction upon impact, sparing the region and its hundreds of inhabitants from multiple nuclear blasts that would’ve dwarfed the explosion over Hiroshima. “Only a fortunate stroke of luck saved the Spanish population of the area from catastrophe,” a Soviet official said at the time.

well that’s good

But the conventional high explosives on two of the bombs did detonate, essentially turning those weapons into dirty bombs that blasted plutonium radiation across the countryside.

oh

* Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis.

Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”

* Detroit’s Teachers Want You to See These Disturbing Photos of Their Toxic Schools.

* The Color of Surveillance: What an infamous abuse of power teaches us about the modern spy era.

* This is the exam from a class that MLK taught at Morehouse in the early 1960s.

* So you want to read Infinite Jest.

* These 11 laws are what keep space from becoming the wild west.

* America’s Other Original Sin.

* How the shining architectural optimism of the 1960s and 70s has ultimately produced buildings such as supermarkets, open-plan offices and other spaces of control.

* The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

* Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds. ‘I Am Drowning.’ The Voices of People With Medical Debt.

* The Nation: Bernie Sanders for President.

* And in anti-endorsements: Sanders and Reparations. Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism.

* When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her.

* Jay Edidin on his recent top surgery.

* The University of Victoria, in Canada, has announced the establishment of what it says is the world’s first endowed chair in transgender studies.

* HBO to air the rarely seen Godfather Epic cutting Parts I and II together.

* Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed.

* “Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’”

* “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Weird! Kooky! Zany!

* After Oil.

* Sick Woman Theory.

* “In Oklahoma, now the country’s earthquake capital…”

* Steven Moffat reveals the BBC almost canceled Doctor Who in 2009.

* Young People Used These Absurd Little Cards to Get Laid in the 19th Century.

* Shocking study reveals physics teachers give girls lower grades than boys – for the exact same answers.

* A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam.

* Former Nazi Medical Orderly to Stand Trial for Deaths of 3,681 People at Auschwitz.

* Writing is hard: “Shut up, Wesley!” did irreparable damage to Wesley Crusher’s role in TNG.

* WHAT YEAR IS IT

* Unbreakable! They alive, damnit!

* Why Is Sperm So Damn Expensive?

* A 120,000-Piece Lego Model of the Titanic Breaking in Half.

* The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne.

Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.

* I don’t know why I’ll watch basically anything involving Pee Wee Herman, but.

* ‘Man flu’ is real. I’m taking the month off.

* Synergy killed the Fantastic Four.

* The Weird Way That Standing (Not Walking) on Escalators Helps Move People More Quickly.

* Race and gifted and talented programs.

* News you can use from the Financial Post: Here’s how to crush student activists once they become your employee.

* The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained.

* Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

* And for real though this is aliens.