Posts Tagged ‘Down Syndrome’
All the Monday Links!
* Look alive, Octavia Butler scholars! 2015-16 Fellowships at the Huntington.
* Exciting crowdfunding project on disability and science fiction: Accessing the Future.
* If what we were fighting against in World War II were not just enemy nations but fascism and militarism, then did the atomic bombs that massacred the defenseless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — coming as a grand climax to our “strategic bombing” of European and Asian cities — help bring us victory? Or defeat?
* The Sheep Look Up: 7 Things You Need To Know About The Toxin That’s Poisoned Ohio’s Drinking Water. Farming practices and climate change at root of Toledo water pollution.
* Newborns laugh in their sleep, say Japanese researchers.
* Common sense solutions to alt-pop song problems.
Problem: We all want something beautiful, man I wish I was beautiful.
Solution: Diet, exercise, and plastic surgery.
* Op-ed: Adjuncts should unionize.
* What colleges can learn from journalism schools. English departments seem particularly well-positioned to apply some of these lessons.
* Meet The Sexual Assault Adviser Top U.S. Colleges Have On Speed Dial.
* Understanding college discounting.
* The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”
* Emirates becomes first major international airline to suspend all flights to virus-affected region. Why you’re not going to get Ebola in the U.S.
* When Moral Panics Collide! GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination.
* The Golden Age of Comics Is Now.
* Just another weekend in Milwaukee.
* IRS Agrees To Monitor Religious Groups For Political Campaigning.
* How an honors student became a hired killer.
* A Thai surrogate mother said Sunday that she was not angry with the Australian biological parents who left behind a baby boy born with Down syndrome, and hoped that the family would take care of the boy’s twin sister they took with them. Honestly, I think I’m pretty mad at them.
* Is Howard the Duck Really Marvel’s Next Franchise? A Close Look at the Evidence.
* They say Western civilization’s best days are behind it, but Bill Murray will star as Baloo in Disney’s live-action The Jungle Book.
* Ever tried. Ever meowed. No matter. Try Again. Meow again. Meow better. Beckittens.
* Filming is apparently wrapping on Fantastic Four, but they didn’t even have a teaser trailer for Comic-Con. This film must be a complete disaster. Can’t wait!
* Why are we impeaching Obama today?
* The third Lev Grossman Magicians book ships tomorrow. Soon to be a TV show, maybe!
* Presenting the all-new, all-different Ghostbustrixes.
* Always remember: The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.
* And it took its sweet time, but the Singularity is finally here.
Sunday Super Sunshine Hit Links
* “The professional backgrounds of many of the defendants is troubling,” said James T. Hayes Jr., a special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations. “We can no longer assume that the only people who would stoop to prey on children are unemployed drifters.” WHY WERE YOU ASSUMING THAT?
* Adjuncts are not considered “full time” or “part time” mostly because no one still bothers to accurately keep track of hours. It’s a choice; not an impossibility.
* Breaking: Alt-Ac Isn’t the Answer.
* The Unpaid Intern Economy Rides on the Backs of Young Women.
* The Art of Screenwriting: Matthew Weiner.
* Boston Public Schools to Eliminate History & Social Science Departments. But there’s money for a laptop for every student and computer coding in the curriculum.
* The Case for Reparations. Reparations: What the Education Gospel Cannot Fix. On Whose Shoulders The Research Stands.
* For Hire: Dedicated Young Man with Down Syndrome. From Michael Bérubé.
I knew Jamie would not grow up to be a marine biologist. And I know that there are millions of non-disabled Americans out of work or underemployed, whose lives are less happy than Jamie’s. I don’t imagine that he has a “right” to a job that supersedes their needs. But I look sometimes at the things he writes in his ubiquitous legal pads when he is bored or trying to amuse himself — like the page festooned with the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, written in alphabetical order — and I think, isn’t there any place in the economy for a bright, gregarious, effervescent, diligent, conscientious and punctual young man with intellectual disabilities, a love of animals and an amazing cataloguing memory and insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world?
* They proposed that we genetically engineer a species of cat that changes color in the presence of radiation, which would be released into the wild to serve as living Geiger counters. Then, we would create folklore and write songs and tell stories about these “ray cats,” the moral being that when you see these cats change colors, run far, far away.
* Pope Francis and climate change.
* 10 Years of Pollution, $2 Million in Penalties. As always, that’s barely noticeable on Citgo’s balance sheet.
* This 9/11 Cheese Plate May Be The 9/11 Museum’s Most Tasteless Souvenir. Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark.
* Buzzfeed’s list of underrated towns includes both Milwaukee and Burlington.
* “For reasons that I really don’t understand Durham is an outlier,” said Baumgartner. “Where we found a 77 percent disparity across the state between blacks and whites and their likelihood of being searched, in Durham, it’s about 260 percent. So that is truly astounding.”
* Richard Dawkins: “I am a secular Christian.” Oh, New Atheism, what have you become!
* Moral panics, chess edition.
* Jessie White, a 99-year-old woman from Belfast, Maine, was finally granted her college degree from Bangor’s Beal College after the college’s president stepped up and paid the $5 transcript fee she’d not been able to afford in 1939.
* Today in free speech: This Drug Defendant Spoke Her Mind, Then A Judge Told Her She’d Stay In Jail Until She Retracted Her Statements To The Media. Meanwhile, Utah Man Facing Hate Crime Charges Says Threatening Black Child Was ‘Just My Opinion.’
* Today in the competency and wisdom of our armed forces.
* Congress Reluctant To Cut Funding For Tank That Just Spins Around And Self-Destructs.
* Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine.
* Cruel optimism watch: Could Scott Walker lose in November?
* David Wittenberg reviews a whole lot of time travel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* A Brief History of The Shawshank Redemption.
* A Brief History of “All Good Things…”
* Zombie properties in Milwaukee.
* Quentin Tarantino wants to recutDjango Unchained as a miniseries.
* And Marvel has made its first DC-level big mistake. What a bummer.
Gerry Canavan 