Posts Tagged ‘disaster capitalism’
Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!
* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!
* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…
* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.
* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.
* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.
* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.
* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.
* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.
* This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.
* Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.
* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.
* The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.
* Death at a Penn State Fraternity.
* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.
* African Science Fiction, at LARB.
* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.
* Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.
* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.
* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.
* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.
* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.
* This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.
* A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.
* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.
* “Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”
* They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
* When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.
* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.
* Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.
* How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.
* What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.
* Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.
* ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!
* Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.
* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.
* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”
* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.
* We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!
* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’
* An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.
* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?
* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.
* Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.
* The Digital Humanities Bust.
* We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.
* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?
* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.
* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.
Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.
That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.
* Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.
* Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.
* Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.
* The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
* In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.
* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.
* Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
Vermont: where the manner in which pie is served has statutory conditions. https://t.co/LOPMHobraC pic.twitter.com/RuDnKvHafP
— Keith Lee (@associatesmind) October 13, 2017
* The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.
* I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.
* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.
* I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”
* An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.
* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.
* The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.
* The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!
* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 21, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoLivesMatter, 23andMe, academia, academics, addiction, Africa, African science fiction, America, animal personhood, animals, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Batman, Batman: The Animated Series, bears, Blade Runner, Breitbart, Buffy, California, Calvin and Hobbes, carbon, CFPs, childhood trauma, CIA, civil rights, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, conflict, Daffy Duck, Dan Hassler-Forest, data, death, Democrats, deportation, digital humanities, disaster capitalism, disaster studies, Disney, disruption, DNA, dogs, dolphins, Donald Trump, Drexel, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, eating meat, ethics, extinction, fantasy, fascism, Flannery O'Connor, floods, Florida, fraternities, free speech, futurity, games, Go, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, guns, Harvey Weinstein, hate, health care, hope, How the University Works, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, hurricanes, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, Jeopardy, juvenilia, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kurt Vonnegut, Las Vegas, lies and lying liars, literature, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles Review of Books, Louis C.K., Mad Max, Mad Max: Fury Road, Manhattan, maps, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, mass shootings, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, music, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, Neal Stephenson, New York, NLRB, Nobel Prize, nuclear war, nuclearity, obituary, Octavia Butler, opioids, optimism, orcs, paperclip maximizers, Penn State, photography, photos, pie, police, police abolition, police violence, politics, pornography, precarity, prison, prison abolition, prison-industrial complex, Puerto Rico, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, rich people, Rick and Morty, Rogue One, Roy Moore, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Seveneves, sexual assault, sexual harassment, Shadow of Mordor, slavery, Slayage, smartphones, soccer, socialism, solitary confinement, Star Wars, stop snitchin', suicide, taxes, Texas, the Census, the Constitution, The Hobbit, The Last Jedi, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the right, Tokyo, Tolkien, Tom Petty, Tom Price, torture, transmedia, Twitter, UNC, University of Florida, UPenn, vegetarianism, Vermont, Vonnegut, voter suppression, war on drugs, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing
Wednesday Is Now Trumpnesday, All Hail Trump
* CFP: 42nd Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, Memphis, TN.
* Fascism happens fast: First look at Biff to the Future, the alt-history comic chronicling the BTTF universe.
Where are the time travelers?
Options:
1- Forbidden by physics
2- It all works out, no need to intervene today
3- There is no future— Starship Engineers (@StarshipBuilder) January 20, 2017
4- They did this to us https://t.co/s7kHjEVLuc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2017
* Trump and disaster capitalism.
* Dissenting from Within the Trump Administration.
* Delusional Democrats Yearning to Prove They Can Work With Trump. From Jonathan Chait, no less!
I keep coming back to this. I think it's the most important political commentary of our time. pic.twitter.com/IRvRNQ0TkI
— David Menschel (@davidminpdx) January 24, 2017
sean spicer looks like the guy in the group of survivors that hides the fact he was bitten by a zombie pic.twitter.com/NelW22afc8
— Eli Terry (@EliTerry) January 23, 2017
* “The White House is deploying a network of advisers to the top of federal agencies as a direct line to stay on top of Cabinet officials.” “U.S. Government Agencies Go Silent, May Have Been Swallowed By Black Hole.” “Trump Health Care Plan Would Take Medicaid Coverage Away from Up to 31 Million People.” “Trump Aides Can’t Stop Blabbing about How He’s a Madman.” “Donald Trump’s stock in oil pipeline company raises concern.” Oh, no, not concern! “American Carnage.” “The Resistance.” Nailing it.
Trump's victory makes it impossible to convince any political actor they should obey *any* norm. What's the upside?
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 24, 2017
How long is this really supposed to be sustainable, especially if the GOP continues to govern like this? https://t.co/cnvBkneD9e
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2017
The bad press over the weekend has not allowed Trump to “enjoy” the White House as he feels he deserves, according to one person who has spoken with him.
* Almost certainly our next president, ladies and gentleman.
* Within minutes of each other: Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline. Canada oil pipeline spills 200,000 liters on aboriginal land.
* Bill would end Virginia’s ‘winner take all’ electoral vote system.
All you need to know about Trump is he's so delusional he believes, devoid of proof, he won the election despite millions of illegal votes.
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) January 24, 2017
* Some details on the shooting at the Milo Yiannopoulos talk at U Washington.
* Science corner! Badlands National Park Twitter account goes rogue, starts tweeting scientific facts. The Science of Sean Spicer’s Compulsive Gum Swallowing Habit. How long would a liberal have to cry to fill a coffee mug with tears? Flint water is fine again, also it was no one’s fault, trust us.
Not for nothing, but “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” has got to be one of the new ten commandments after the revolution.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2017
* Standpoint theory doesn’t say we can just make shit up; it says we need a clear-eyed understanding of power relations in order to understand and evaluate knowledge-claims. In other words, pomo feminists didn’t create “alt facts”; it’s pomo feminists who have given us the tools to oppose them.
* In Discarded Women’s March Signs, Professors Saw a Chance to Save History.
* Minnesota bill would make convicted protesters liable for policing costs. N.C. state lawmaker says shouting at current or former gov’t officials should be punishable by 5 years in prison.
* Interesting little story about Dan Harmon’s work on/against an early version of Dr. Strange.
* Like someone peeled open my skull and put my inner monologue on the Internet.
* The arc of history is long, but white women are going to prison at a higher rate than ever before.
* Wisconsin lawmaker wants Sheriff David Clarke booted from office, immediately.
* Further Thoughts on the Problem of Susan.
* Whitefish, Montana vs. the Nazis.
* This is how American health care kills people.
* Going back to the old days on health insurance, a first draft.
* Potential Trump Science Adviser Says 90 Percent of U.S. Colleges Will Disappear. I’m amazed they think a full tenth will escape the Sentinels.
* Arrested Development Season 5 rumors.
* Columbia University Releases Report on School’s Ties to Slavery.
* The Other Buffett Rule, or, why better billionaires will never save us.
* The Web Is a Customer Service Medium.
* And this truly is the darkest timeline.
If you think it's bad now: just wait for when there's a genuine crisis (which there will be, because there always is).
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 25, 2017

Tom the Dancing Bug 1322 view from trump tower 2
Written by gerrycanavan
January 25, 2017 at 12:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 25th Amendment, academia, America, anxiety, Arrested Development, Back to the Future, Badlands National Park, Biff Tannen, billionaires, Canada, carnage, censorship, CFP, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, college, Columbia, conferences, Connor, crisis, Dan Harmon, democracy, Democrats, disaster capitalism, dissent, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, dystopia, Electoral College, endings, EPA, fascism, feminism, Flint, franchises, games, gum, guns, health care, health insurance, Hero's Journey, How the University Works, informants, ISIS, Keystone XL, kids, kids today, lead poisoning, Medicaid, Michigan, Mike Pence, Milo Yiannopoulous, Minnesota, Montana, Narnia, Nazis, norms, North Carolina, oil, oil spills, only the super-rich can save us now, parenting, plot, politics, postmodernism, prison, protest, representality, resistance, Rick and Morty, science fiction, Sean Spicer, Sheriff Clarke, slavery, social media, standpoint theory, story circle, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the Constitution, the darkest timeline, the Internet, the Left, The Problem of Susan, time travel, Trump Tower, unit, Utopia, Utopian studies, Virginia, voter fraud, voting, Warren Buffet, water, white women, Whitefish, Women's March, Zoey, zombies
Thursday Links
* Marquette President Fr. Scott Pilarz on the TV talking about Pope Francis. (He issued a formal statement, too.) And history Professor Fr. Steven Avella was on the radio.
* The 8 Worst-Dressed At The Papal Conclave.
* Why is Google killing Google Reader? Google’s Lost Social Network: How Google accidentally built a truly beloved social network, only to steamroll it with Google+.
* California’s Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but Key Questions Remain Unanswered.
* “An emergency manager is like a man coming into your house,” said Donald Watkins, a city councilman. “He takes your checkbook, he takes your credit cards, he lives in your house and he sleeps in your bed with your wife.” Mr. Watkins added, “He tells you it’s still your house, but he doesn’t clean up, sells off everything and then he packs his bag and leaves.” Lessons for Detroit in a City’s Takeover.
* Gender and ethnic diversity on Sunday shows.
* Sherlock Holmes copyrights are an insane hairball.
* And How to Put On a Show: The Unwritten WWE Rulebook.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 14, 2013 at 11:21 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Berkeley, California, Catholicism, College of Cardinals, copyright, Detroit, disaster capitalism, Google, How the University Works, Jesuits, male privilege, Marquette, MOOCs, neoliberalism, papal conclave, professional wrestling, race, rules, rules are rules, sexism, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, shock doctrine, Sunday talk shows, television, The Onion, the Pope, the Vatican, UCLA, white people, white privilege
Wednesday Links: MOOCpocalypse, Debtpocalypse, Truthserumpocalypse, and More
* Privatization. Naked. Higher Education Shock Doctrine.
* The actual politics of professors.
* Exactly as the Founders intended: Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a “narcoanalytic interview” would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year. There’s some things an adversarial legal system just isn’t good at; this is obviously one of them. Determination of insanity should be inquisitorial: let a panel of experts evaluate him and make a decision about how to proceed on that basis.
* An open letter to The Atlantic regarding the payment of workers.
* The latest law school debt figures are pretty ugly.
* The U.S. drones program is shrouded in confusion. The media generally has portrayed the project as one that targets high-level terrorists with surgical precision, when in fact a very small percent of its targets are senior level, and hundreds of civilians have been killed. Giving people that information tends to change their attitude toward the program.
* And more Big Data from Big Porn: Porn search site PornMD has, for the sake of publicity and social science, collected its most-used search terms for the last six months and accounted them by location—not just in the U.S. but across the world. This is a safe-for-most-workplaces Gawker link, though there are some bawdy words in the searches.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 13, 2013 at 9:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abstinence porn, adversarial legal systems, austerity, Barack Obama, Berkeley, class struggle, communists are everywhere, consciousness, data, disaster capitalism, drones, freelancing, Greeks, guns, How the University Works, inquisitorial legal systems, insanity defense, James Holmes, law school, literature, MOOCs, neoliberalism, Occupy Cal, politics, polls, privatize everything, shock doctrine, shrouded in confusion, student debt, The Atlantic, the Iliad, the Odyssey, truth serum, UCLA, writing
How the University Makes Decisions
At this point, a few of us threw out the idea that we all just do without the Copy Center for a few weeks. The place is empty half the time anyway, and if somebody really needed some copies, would it kill them to walk to Kinko’s? And what about all that talk about “going paperless” a couple years back? The proposal was considered, but ultimately failed to make it out of the appropriate sub-committee.So that put us back with this PCSGFE Report. Addressing those recommendations touched off another round of decisive actions, followed by quick concessions and petty in-fighting. At this point, it would probably be easier just to list the changes.
As of the start of this semester:
* English is no longer a Major
* The Field Hockey Season has been cancelled
* The school’s mascot is now “The Violet Hurricanes”
* Jefferson Hall is now The Bank of America Fun Zone!
* The Botany Department now recognizes the Armenian Genocide
* All Twitter hashtags must be approved
* “African American” is no longer to be hyphenated
* Tuesday is now Taco NightIn closing, a few more small odds and ends: Parking Lot C is now Parking Lot D and all collective bargaining rights have been rescinded.
We wish you all a pleasant start to the semester!
Written by gerrycanavan
March 12, 2013 at 8:48 am
Weekend Links
* CFP: Midwest Modern Language Association 2013 on Art & Artifice, November 7-10. Right here in Milwaukee!
* A disturbing catch from the MetaFilter thread on MOOCs: Obama has quietly decoupled Pell grants from accreditation, opening the door for full-throated neoliberal profiteering.
Last year, similar language tying federal aid to “value” was explicitly limited to a group of relatively minor aid programs. The Pell grant and loan programs that make up $140 billion in annual aid were excluded. No such restrictions appear here (although the President did refer to only “certain types” of aid in the speech itself.) But the real kicker is at the end: a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.
The existing accreditation club has been around since the end of the 19th century. It has had an exclusive franchise on determining federal financial aid eligibility since the middle of the 20th century. Opening a new doorway to the Title IV financial aid system would be an enormouschange, particularly when coupled with the phrase “higher education models and colleges.” The clear implication is that the higher education models that would eligible for federal financial aid through the alternate accreditation system wouldn’t have to be colleges at all. They could be any providers of higher education that meet standards of “performance and results.”
MOOCiversity, ho!
* Disaster capitalism, Chicago style.
There aren’t any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder?
They create a crisis.
* The Drone Industry Wants a Makeover. Dissent on drones.
* Malcolm Harris explains yellowism.
* The delightfully named Ben Kafka explains bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy, Kafka argues, can be everybody’s enemy, and can thus serve as the organizing principle for otherwise untenable alliances, like the one between eighteenth-century liberals and democrats, or between some contemporary working-class voters and the neoliberal elites they vote for. Sowing contempt for bureaucracy, in the form of lambasting all government efforts as inherently inefficient, full of “lazy” and “parasitical” civil servants and their “bloated” pensions, remains a potent tactic of right-wing populism, but whereas conservatives of old evoked a nostalgic class paternalism to cure paperwork’s ills, the American Right offers a myth of self-sufficiency, of everyone for themselves, with no claims to be filed and no burdens to be shared. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, comes to stand for the inevitable outcome of all types of collective power, the emblem of neutered individualism. And since paperwork is an evil that proliferates no matter what the form of government, it can seem irrelevant to mount any political fights to reform it. Politics is thus reduced to the pettiness of sorting out strictly personal grievances, which in turn worsens bureaucracy, as these sorts of selfish claims are precisely what bureaucracy exists to process.
* Duke professor proposes that students be required to produce a video summary of the dissertation. I actually think this kind of distillation can be really useful and productive — someone once told me you know you’re done with your dissertation when you can summarize its argument in one sentence — but making it an actual requirement is silly.
* North Carolina is the only state that will clearly mark all people who are not U.S. citizens – everyone from business executives with “green cards” to students on visas – with a newly designed driver’s license coming this summer, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislation in all the states. History contains absolutely no examples of times when this kind of thinking has ever gone wrong, so I’m sure it’s a really good idea.
* A cottage at 71/2 West End Court in Long Branch where one-time renter Bruce Springsteen wrote “Born to Run” is up for sale for $349,900, said real estate agent Susan McLaughlin of Keller Williams Realty. Anyone want to go halfsies?
* World Press Photo Of The Year: Nov. 20, 2012, Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: Two-year-old Suhaib Hijazi and his older brother Muhammad were killed when their house was destroyed by and Israeli missile strike. Their father, Fouad, was also killed and their mother was put into intensive care. Fouad’s brothers carry his children to the mosque for the burial ceremony as his body is carried behind on a stretcher.
* Even Megan McArdle has stopped believing in meritocracy.
* And io9 on how your favorite cancelled science fiction series would have continued. Start your FlashForward fan fics now…
Written by gerrycanavan
February 22, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, administration, administrative blight, art, artifice, Barack Obama, Born to Run, bureaucracy, CFPs, Chicago, class struggle, conferences, crisis, disaster capitalism, dissertation, drones, Duke, end of history, Firefly, Flashforward, for-profit schools, How the University Works, immigration, Israel, Journeyman, Megan McArdle, meritocracy, Milwaukee, MOOCs, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Palestine, pedagogy, Pell grants, photographs, politics, revolution, science fiction, shock doctrine, Springsteen, television, the debt, the deficit, war, war on education, yellowism
Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise
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* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR’s The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I’ve put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!
* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.
* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.
* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain’s Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and “ratings agencies could downgrade the university’s credit by as many as two notches.” In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators’ overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.
* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.
* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.
* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city’s schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.
* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.
* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
* …disaster relief and the “disaster narrative” is central to the development of the American welfare state.
* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.
I don’t know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it’s an idea I’ll be thinking about a while. There’s a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can “withdraw” consent.
* “Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others.” The Case for Staying Home from Work.
* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.
* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:
* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.
* The case against the Supreme Court.
* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.
* Corey Robin on the emerging “right to be forgotten.”
* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.
* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can’t-believe-they-haven’t-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.
* That’s they’re actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.
* Provocation: It’s not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.
* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.
* SMBC on proof by induction.
* The only link from this list you really need: There’s A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.
* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont’s own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 27, 2014 at 10:25 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, America, austerity, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, comics, consent, continuity, course evaluations, democracy, disaster capitalism, Don't mention the war, Ello, Fanon, film, financial aid, gentrification, Google, governmentality, grad student life, graduate school, How the University Works, humanitarianism of a particular sort, Iraq, ISIS, Jack Kirby, Kim Stanley Robinson, legalism, liberalism, logic, Marvel, metacommentary, military interventionism, Milwaukee, misogyny, mousetrap, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, presenteeism, proof by induction, public health, race, rape, rape culture, Red Mars, rule of law, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, Silicon Valley, social media, solitary confinement, Star Trek, superheroes, Supreme Court, Syria, television, the courts, the end of culture, The Expendabelles, the law, The Lucky Strike, the mental fog of proceduralism, the right to be forgotten, torture, true crime, tuition, University of Chicago, Vermont, war on education, welfare state, Y: The Last Man