FNL

* My students last summer insisted Mass Effect was important science fiction. Now io9 is telling me the same thing.

* American University’s adjunct faculty have voted to unionize.

* How to design a movie poster.

* You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. What could possibly go wrong?

* Gay marriage passes in New Jersey, only to be vetoed by Chris Christie. Meanwhile marriage equality looks likely to pass the Maryland state legislature. Meanwhile Obama announces it won’t defend laws that ban same-sex couples from receiving military benefits.

* WTFEverywhere: Sweden is only one of 17 countries that require transgender people to undergo sterilization.

* Apple still trying to find some way to make the Foxconn scandal go away.

* And Springsteen explains Wrecking Ball.

“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.”

Friday Night Links

* The absolute craziest thing I’ve ever seen: Berkeley Researchers Turn Brain Waves Into YouTube Videos.

* Even news that the laws of physics have been overturned pales in comparison. I know, I know: Bad Astronomer, xkcd.

* Louis talks to the A.V. Club about Louie: 1, 2, 3, 4.

* Paul Campos: “The law’s absurd formalism was part of its strength as ideology.” Precisely. This insight applies to many more aspects of the legal system than the revolting spectacle of our contemporary system of capital punishment, which in a case such as Davis’s — which is not in this respect was not unusual — psychologically tortures the defendant, the defendant’s family, the victim’s family, and others connected to the case for literally decades before producing what the system then has the temerity to call “justice.” (The climax of this spectacle last night involved Davis being strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm for nearly four hours, waiting for various legal personages to respond to the question of whether, all things considered, it was finally time to stop his heart with state-administered poison).

That we tolerate this kind of thing so readily helps explain, in its own way, why it sometimes seems impossible to do much of anything about the absurdities and dysfunctions of the system of legal education that legitimates it in the first instance. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps we tolerate the absurdity of something like the 22-year “process” that resulted in the horror of Davis’s final hours because we ‘re socialized from the beginning of our careers in this system to accept all kinds of absurdity and injustice as natural, inevitable, and therefore legitimate.

Reading this I was reminded of Duncan Kennedy’s excellent article “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy,” which Corinne linked the other day on Twitter.

* Ground Zero Mosque opens without controversy. It’s almost as if the objections to this were complete bullshit.

* I’m steadfastly not paying attention to the GOP primary, but this is pretty astounding, even by Republican standards.

* DOJ: Rick Perry’s Texas Redistricting Plan Purposefully Discriminated Against Minorities.

* Why Is TV Suddenly Overstuffed With Buxom Bunnies, Sexy Stewardesses, and Charlie’s Angels?

* How long—how long must we sing this song? Forty years, give or take.

* Genetic sequencing indicates Australian Aborigines may have been the world’s first explorers, leaving Africa more than 60,000 years ago.

* Taxpayers in the San Francisco area spend $2,762,295 each year in junk food subsidies, but only $41,950 each year on apple subsidies.

* Speaking at a Climate Week NYC event hosted by the Maldives, the TckTckTck campaign, and the U.N., Greenpeace International President Kumi Naidoo argued that the path to a sustainable future will involve peaceful, popular civil disobedience. “The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest,” he argued. He said the lesson of the Arab Spring, and the history of struggles from suffrage to civil rights to the end of apartheid, is that change only comes when decent men and women are willing to risk their lives and go to jail in peaceful protest.

* The world’s rudest hand gestures.

* Great Lost Pop Culture Treasures.

* And Chris Ware on your iPad. Have a good weekend.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (and Several More)

* Between the tax compromise and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, I think Obama did a tremendous amount to help his chances for reelection this week. Rachel Maddow rightly calls the DADT repeal the president’s victory:

Politically, the thing to not lose touch with here is that this is the President’s victory. This is something about which the President took a lot of criticism, a lot of abuse, a lot of skepticism from his otherwise most loyal supporters. He continually insisted that this was possible that it would get done.

Guilty as charged. I confess I also love the sweet sound of right-wing screams, especially when their own caucus collapsed in the face of this “generational change.” Even Richard Burr voted the right way!

* It looks like Harvard and Yale will return ROTC to their campuses in light of the repeal. Frankly I’d prefer to see the trend going the other way—we need tighter restrictions on military recruiting, not loosening of the few restrictions that already exist—but I suppose this was unavoidable.

* Seen on Facebook: Obama wants to let gays vote. That’s why I’m voting Tea Party.

* Watch out Texas: bad news coming.

* Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions…

* The message to Nicky Wishart and his generation is very clear: don’t get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X-Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge. Via MeFi.

* And still more trouble for Britain: There are a growing number of grassroots organisations campaigning about the over-professionalisation of childhood football. Give Us Back Our Game launched four years ago. “The game has been taken away from children by over-competitive coaches and parents,” says founder Paul Cooper. It has several offshoots, including Football Football, an initiative to revive inner-city football. Then there’s the Children’s Football Alliance, which champions “mixed ability” football, and the Don’t X The Line campaign against over-the-top parental behaviour at children’s football matches. Also via MeFi.

* Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.

* And Fringe announces its move to the Friday night death slot with style.

Kudos and Anti-Kudos

I was very skeptical, but Obama got the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal done before the end of the session his way, as promised. Absolutely terrible news about the DREAM Act, though; Senator Hagan just made my list of Democrats I don’t lift a finger to support.

UPDATE: They died building the railroads, worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re dyin’ now
The hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep down

World’s Greatest Trick Play Ever – Links

* Olbermann lives. The Nation calls it a victory for “bold progressives.” Our first!

* pulparchive.com is a classic SF magazine cover a day.

* Breaking news: Democratic party leaders are completely worthless.

Look, if Democrats can’t repeal a policy more than two thirds of the American people, including a majority of conservatives want gone then they can’t expect people to vote for them.

* Climate scientists to get serious in opposing the nihilists who just took over the House.

* Hard to believe an obvious lie would gain traction in conservative circles.

* Alas, Ireland.

* The Supreme Court has turned down its first challenge to the Affordable Care Act. But don’t get too excited; it was on procedural grounds.

* Der Spiegel on the end of America.

The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.

The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance — it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.

Sounds about right.

* World’s greatest trick play ever.

* And scientific proof that 30 Rock is funnier than S#*! My Dad Says. On this there can be no debate.

Strikes and Gutters, Ups and Downs

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, well, he eats you. It was obviously a tough night for Democrats but on some level it was always going to be—with unemployment at 9.6% and millions of people underwater on their mortgages the Democrats were doomed to lose and lose big. On this the stimulus really was the original sin—if it had been bigger and better-targeted the economic situation could have been better, but it wasn’t and here we are. Unlike 2000 and 2004 I think this election stings, but it doesn’t hurt; a big loss like this has been baked in the cake for a while.

Remember that as the pundits play bad political commentary bingo all month.

As I mentioned last night, overs beat the unders, which means my more optimistic predictions were 2/3 wrong: Republicans overshot the House predictions and Sestak and Giannoulias both lost their close races in PA and IL. But I was right that young people can’t be trusted to vote even when marijuana legalization is on the ballot. Cynicism wins again! I’ll remember that for next time.

I was on Twitter for most of the night last night and most of my observations about last night have already been made there. A few highlights from the night:

* Who could have predicted: Democrats are already playing down the notion that they’ll get much done in a lame duck session. They’d rather punt to January particularly the big issues, like tax cuts. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Don’t even bother. On taxes, the outline of a compromise is there, having been floated by Vice President Biden: the rates might stay in place for a larger number of wealthier Americans. The Estate Tax, which jumps up to 55% in January, will probably be restored at a lower rate. Capital gains taxes will also be higher, but not as high as they’re slated to be. Supporters of the START treaty are very worried. Gee, maybe Obama shouldn’t have appealed DADT after all.

* Last night’s big Dem winner: implausibly, Harry Reid. Second place (of a sort): Howard Dean, whose entire happy legacy as DNC chair was wiped out in one fell swoop last night—and then some. Fire Kaine, bring Dean back.

* Last night’s big Republican losers: the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin specifically. The crazies cost them the Senate.

* An upside: most of the losses last night were from bad Democrats, especially the Blue Dog caucus, which was nearly decimated. The progressive caucus only lost three seats and now constitutes 40% of the Democratic House caucus.

* Most of the progressive online left is saddest to see Feingold lose, I think.

* Personally happiest to see Tancredo lose in Colorado. That guy’s completely nuts.

* At least losing the House means we don’t have to deal with individual Senate egomaniacs anymore.

* Weird proposition watch: Denver votes down UFO commission. Missouri prevents a feared pupocalypse. Oklahoma bans Sharia law, thereby saving freedom forever.

* The most important proposition, and the most important victory for the left, was probably California’s Proposition 23 on climate change, which went down. Quoting the HuffPo article: “California is the world’s 12th largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and its global warming law, passed in 2006, mandates the largest legislated reductions in greenhouse gases in the world.” This was a big win.

* Sad statistic of the night: “Meg Whitman’s personal spending on her campaign: $163 mil. Natl Endowment for the Arts 2010 budget: $161.4 mil.”

* And Republican gains are bad news for higher education. This is probably especially true for state universities in North Carolina, where Republicans now control the state legislature for the first time in a century.

Anything I missed?

Thursday Night!

* Why Arizona can’t have nice things: How the private prison industry crafted Arizona’s immigration law.

* More on Arundhati Roy and her Kashmir advocacy.

* Now Roger Sterling’s memoir can be yours.

* Last night on his moderately illuminating Daily Show appearance Barack Obama endorsed filibuster reform. I won’t hold my breath, but it’d be a good start.

* And Dylan Matthews criticizes the same useless gay marriage pander we’ve been complaining about in the comments.

Things That Are Bad For You: Steampunk, Football, Graduate School, and Barack Obama Edition

* MetaFilter calls my name with critiques of steampunk from Charlie Stross and my friend Nisi Shawl. Charlie:

Forget wealthy aristocrats sipping tea in sophisticated London parlours; forget airship smugglers in the weird wild west. A revisionist mundane SF steampunk epic — mundane SF is the socialist realist movement within our tired post-revolutionary genre — would reflect the travails of the colonial peasants forced to labour under the guns of the white Europeans’ Zeppelins, in a tropical paradise where severed human hands are currency and even suicide doesn’t bring release from bondage. (Hey, this is steampunk — it needs zombies and zeppelins, right? Might as well pick Zombies for our single one impossible ingredient.) It would share the empty-stomached anguish of a young prostitute on the streets of a northern town during a recession, unwanted children (contraception is a crime) offloaded on a baby farm with a guaranteed 90% mortality rate through neglect. The casual boiled-beef brutality of the soldiers who take the King’s shilling to break the heads of union members organizing for a 60 hour work week. The fading eyesight and mangled fingers of nine year olds forced to labour on steam-powered looms, weaving cloth for the rich. The empty-headed graces of debutantes raised from birth to be bargaining chips and breeding stock for their fathers’ fortunes. In other words, it’s the story of all the people who are having adventures — as long as you remember that an adventure is a tale of unpleasant events happening to people a long, long way from home. 

* zunguzungu and Adam Kotsko take on the “So you want to get a Ph.D. in the humanities” video that’s been everywhere this week. Here’s zunguzungu:

Mostly, we’re identifying with the person in a position of power bullying the student, and we attempt to pass off  contempt and hatred as cynicism. That’s the thing that’s so striking about the humanities xtranormal video (compared, say, to the law school one): how clueless the prospective grad student is. The law school student at least stands up for herself, but the humanities cliche is just a clueless robot, babbling on in utter hermetically sealed envelope of idealism. And since so many of the things that abusive bully of a professor says are so completely true, her bullying gets passed off as realism. This accomplishes several things. For one, it allows us to contrast our own bitter cynicism (we’re identifying with the jaded prof, remember?) with the naiveté of the student. We would never be so naive, thereforewe are not her. Which is the same dichotomy between good cynical realism on the one hand (though not coded as male here, as it usually is) and stupid (as usual, infantilized and feminized) idealism, just as when Fish quoted Hemingway. And if we get off on seeing the cynical-realist-us attacking and flagellating the dumb-idealistic-naive-us, well, that says a lot about us.

It also, by the way, allows us to defend our own position (or the one we would like to pretend we will have) from the competition. After all, the glaring thing in both cartoons is the fact that the cynical prof figure is trying to deter the student from following his/her own example. Not that one shouldn’t be very careful about encouraging others to follow in your own example — sometimes tenured profs can encourage students to follow in their footsteps without telling them the whole story about their chances – but as someone I’ve been conversing about this on twitter pointed out, this seems much more like an attempt to demonize the faceless masses of competitors who make the likelihood of our getting a job so much smaller. In other words, we address to the “oversupply” of humanities PhD’s by trying to deter potential competition or project onto it the rage we feel about not getting the job and life we rightfully deserve.

And here’s Adam, very nicely describing my approach to graduate school better than I could:

My approach has been that the job market is apparently very random. We can follow all the best advice in the world, but it still comes down to the preferences of a handful of people at some randomly-chosen department and the outcome of a power struggle that probably no one outside the situation could ever fully understand or predict. So aside from broad guidelines (try to publish in good journals! present at conferences! get teaching experience! finish!) that 95% of PhD candidates are following anyway, there’s essentially no way of tailoring yourself to the job market.

Under such circumstances, the only thing you can do is be true to yourself. Use your grad school years (and as many years after as you can hold out without going crazy) to do what you want to do and what you probably wouldn’t be able to do under other circumstances. For me, that included language work, serious reading in the intellectual traditions most important to me, and serious writing that intervenes into debates I find compelling and important — and more recently getting the privilege of introducing young people to those intellectual traditions and debates.

All of those things are worth doing, and I wouldn’t have been able to do them otherwise. I maintain that they’re worth doing even if society isn’t willing to pay what they’re worth. I could’ve made a lot more money, or at least had a lot more job security, doing other things, but I don’t think those other things are likely as worthwhile, and having a full-time job takes up a lot of time, particularly in the kinds of professional fields that college grads try for — so that I wouldn’t have been able to do basically any of the things I’ve done during my time as a grad student and young academic. I would’ve kept reading regardless, and I would’ve wound up a well-informed person and a good conversationalist, but I never would’ve written the books and articles I’ve written, nor would I have been able to teach anyone in any kind of sustained way.

The fact that I chose what I did doesn’t make me a cynical badass, and I also don’t think it makes me particularly “idealistic” — after all, it’s not as though I’m making some noble sacrifice for the common good: I’m doing what I want to do and what I enjoy. I’m proud that I’ve been able to publish this much. I’m satisfied that I’ve done a good job of teaching and that students like me and my colleagues here want to advocate for me. Having made these choices might adversely affect my quality of life further down the road, but in the meantime it’s greatly enriched my quality of life compared to working 40-60 hours in some office.

There’s no sacrifice involved here, because I didn’t finally do all this stuff so that I could get a job — I want to get a job so that I can continue doing all this stuff! I want to get tenure so that I can finally stop worrying about where the next paycheck is coming from and have all that emotional energy freed up for my work. The fact that it might not work out doesn’t make me a jaded self-destructive badass, it makes me a person living in a world where we don’t always get what we want.

* Shock study: playing football is incredibly bad for you.

* Obama sits down with left critics to discuss DADT.

* And Obama defends his record on tonight’s Daily Show.

“What happens is it gets discounted because the assumption is we didn’t get 100 percent of what we wanted, we only get 90 percent of what we wanted — so let’s focus on the 10 percent we didn’t get,” Obama added.

Someday they’ll learn that this is a terrible messaging strategy. Someday.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Appeal – 2

My friend Steve Benen has a response to those (like me) who think the DADT appeal is misguided. I’m not at all convinced, but there’s clearly room for good-faith disagreement. If we’re still talking about this in 2012, we’ll know who was right…

UPDATE: It’s hard not to feel like the charges of hypocrisy are justified when this Department of Justice has chosen to let other cases stand without appeal—in just the last few weeks:

Less than a week before the Obama administration’s Department of Justice appealed a judge’s ruling that the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy is unconstitutional, it elected to let stand a court ruling allowing religious groups to proselytize in federal parks.

UPDATE 2: Does the Obama Administration have to appeal the DADT ruling? Absolutely not.

The DOJ has no legal obligation to do appeal the DADT ruling, and there’s ample precedent for allowing a ruling of unconstitutionality to stand. And the case for making an exception here couldn’t be more compelling: the law unjustly burdens minority rights and lacks both popular support and the support of legislative majorities. (This case, therefore, can be easily distinguished from refusing to defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.) Whether or not one agrees with me on this, however, when the administration claims it doesn’t have discretion here they’re not telling the truth.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Appeal

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted a stay against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell injunction after an earlier judge refused to do so. This is a case where the Obama administration’s betrayal of its base seems simply brazen: according to Clinton administration Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, backed up by Newsweek, the White House is in fact under no obligation to defend Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell if it doesn’t want to. Indeed, the Clinton administration refused to appeal a similar court decision that invalidated a law requiring the military to discharge HIV+ service members, and it was only just last month that a court ruled that California was not required to appeal the decision overturning Prop 8. Why then are they bothering with appeals at all, much less aggressively seeking to reinstate a policy they claim not to like? Obama’s rhetoric on this point is completely at odds with his administration’s actions, and unlike other issues there is no one on whom he can deflect the blame.

UPDATE: Ted Olson: ‘It Would Be Appropriate’ For Administration Not To Appeal DADT Injunction.

“It happens every once in awhile at the federal level when the solicitor general, on behalf of the U.S., will confess error or decline to defend a law,” said former George W. Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson, who is leading the legal challenge of California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state attorney general have both declined to defend the law in court.

“I don’t know what is going through the [Obama] administration’s thought process on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Olson said. “It would be appropriate for them to say ‘the law has been deemed unconstitutional, we are not going to seek further review of that.’

Friday Morning Links

* A federal judge has ruled DADT unconstitutional. I can’t believe, with big Democratic majorities in both houses and a Democratic president, it still took a judge to do this.

* Jimi Hendrix loved science fiction.

* Fidel Castro in the Atlantic.

* Alan Moore vs. Watchmen 2.

* The Right vs. knowledge.

The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.
—Rush Limbaugh

* And it’s too late for us, but here’s hoping Canada can keep Fox out. Related: How a Murdoch subsidiary may have bought him big trouble spying on celebrities in England.

Quick Links

* 4th laziest state looks a lot better than 37th in child welfare.

* Receipts are coated with BPA and your box spring is conspiring to kill you. Nothing’s going right.

* For the first time in forty years, Congress has repealed a mandatory minimum sentence.

* A federal judge has blocked much of Arizona’s documentation law from taking effect.

The law will still take effect Thursday, but without many of the provisions that angered opponents — including sections that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws. The judge also put on hold a part of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

* Bill O’Reilly: America-hating hippie.

* How Glenn Beck cons his viewers (Goldline edition). Via MeFi.

* There is no good reason on Earth to oppose the DREAM Act.

* There is no good reason on Earth to continue making Battlestar Galactica spinoffs.

* There is every reason in the world to make a Quantum Leap film. Please do this.

* Conservatives may be willing to shrug off the possibility of rising sea levels, desertification and mass extinctions, but can they live with the risk of more Mexicans crossing the border to breathe their precious American air?

* Hopefully not while we’re there next week: “Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second.”

* I bet the $45 was well-spent.

* Oil spills, oil spills.

* To avenge Paul the psychic octopus, we must invade Iran.

* And Wookieleaks is your best source for anti-Imperial news.

You Remembered

* Childhood dreams confirmed: You can jump the flagpole in Super Mario Brothers.

* Early reports that the top kill had worked may have been premature.

* Twenty-two mile plume of oil slinking towards Alabama.

* In what seems to have been something of a surprise vote, a repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has passed the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now appears in the latest defense appropriations bill as well. It’s a few years late, but it’s finally happening.

* If I’m reading this right, in fourteen years I will be president.

* Solved and unsolved Lost mysteries. Life with Hurley and Ben on the Island.

* ABC is considering rebooting Alias, sans Rambaldi. I must be in the minority that thought Rambaldi was the only good part of that show.

* All but confirmed: Joss Whedon will direct The Avengers.

* In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. Via MeFi.

* I still remember how scandalized I was when I moved to Ohio and discovered that some states elect their judges. It’s simply nuts.

* For the past six years he had been studying for his PhD in the history of homicide in 19th century England from 1847-99, comparing Victorian investigative techniques with modern policing methods. There’s no way to frame this sad story about a British criminology Ph.D. student accused of murdering three women that doesn’t seem like I’m trying to make a joke out of it. Via.

* And Eyemaze has a new game, Transform. Jay Is Games has the walkthrough.

Wednesday!

* You know who else loved gay soliders? That’s right.

* BP failed to provide protective equipment to the volunteers who helped in the initial cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Of course they did.

* Great anti-BP, anti-right-wing political cartoon from Tom the Dancing Bug: Lucky Ducky in “Slick Deal.”

* Progress: we now live in a world without (new) Hummers.

* Meet Ardi Rizal, a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. The government has offered to buy his parents a car if he stops, but they claim he gets too angry without smokes.

* A Duke University archive of television advertising has gone live just in time for my Watching Television class to use it.

* Film Studies for Free does Wes Anderson.

* And here’s a neat video of Airplane! side-by-side with the original 1950s film from which its script was apparently directly lifted, Zero Hour!

Monday Night Various

* Rethinking the humanities Ph.D. in the wake of the permanent job crisis.

We are beginning to acknowledge that the graduate training we offer in the humanities is simply not fair to our students, the vast majority of whom will never get tenure-track jobs in their disciplines. But the worth of humanities graduate education need not depend on the number of tenure-track humanists it produces. Graduate education in the humanities is an excellent preparation for many, many careers. But our students should not have to find those careers on their own, and they should not have to think of those careers as “non-academic” careers—the jobs we take when we can’t get the jobs we’ve been trained for. Humanities education needs to take itself seriously. We believe that undergraduate humanities programs produce thoughtful, informed, global citizens. Now we need to decide what we really want graduate humanities programs to produce.

* Finally, an end to DADT.

* Protests against Chris Christie in my beloved Garden State.

* BP, terrible in every way.

* Huffington Post piece on the student protests in Puerto Rico.

* And Google Pac-Man might’ve cost us $120,483,800. It was worth it.