Posts Tagged ‘Ebola’
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
I’ve been talking about this with respect to science fiction studies too for a long time. Widely seen as a field with no history, that anyone can just invent ex nihilo whenever they randomly get interested in it. https://t.co/58glEA9CFv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 9, 2019
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
Well sure we could stop burning the world, but then how would we create Jobs, the things we all hate that make us want to die
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) August 11, 2019
A big reason conspiracy theories are so believable is that most of them start from the fundamental idea that there’s a lawless class of sociopaths running our society, which is demonstrably true
— Erik Hane (@erikhane) August 10, 2019
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
Climate TBD.https://t.co/XsNHwwr4ar pic.twitter.com/mWzfqIlbe2
— Rosemary Mosco (@RosemaryMosco) August 12, 2019
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
Excitement aside I think the facts really do point to a prison system so monstrously incompetent and corrupt it couldn’t keep Epstein alive even when they knew everyone was watching. https://t.co/p4I7Y8otl3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2019
People want to see this as a conspiracy but imo the real story here is just that our criminal justice system destroys people's mental health and the mitigants against that damage are laughable. https://t.co/v0yAgmGcUM
— 🇧🇧🇹🇹🇺🇸👨👩👧👦🐕🌉 (@eparillon) August 14, 2019
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
This is a hilarious idea for a history of Batman from his initial publication onward. "Year by year, what movie was it that the ten-year old Bruce Wayne likely saw?" https://t.co/gEl3QLYtqU
— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 9, 2019
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 17, 2019 at 9:50 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Duritz, administration blight, Alaska, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Art Spiegelman, austerity, autism, Avengers, Batman, Bernie Sanders, biometrics, biopics, black holes, Bollywood, Brazil, business majors, California, canon, Captain America, CBP, Charlie Brown, cities, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, climate change, coal, college majors, conspiracy theory, Cops, cosmology, Counting Crows, cruelty, debt forgiveness, democracy, deportation, DNA, driving, drugs, dungeons, eating meat, Ebola, ecofascism, El Paso, elections, Elizabeth Warren, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Endangered Species Act, Endgame, escape rooms, ethnonationalism, Europe, facial recognition, fandom, fascism, Flat Earth, food, Foxconn, fraud, futurity, games, Generation X, good grief, Google, graduate student nightmares, Greenland, Gulf Stream, guns, Hamlet, Harry Truman, hate, Hiroshima, horror, House of X, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Hurricane Maria, hurricanes, ice, insurance companies, IPCC, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Jaws, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, kids' menu, Loot Crate, Lord of the Rings, lunch debt, Lyft, maps, Marvel, mass shootings, Maus, Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum, Milwaukee, miracles and wonders, misanthropy, misogyny, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, National Popular Vote Compact, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New School, New York Times, nice work if you can get it, nuclearity, NYPD, Ophelia, organs, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Standard, Peanuts, pedagogy, philosophy, phones, physics, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, private colleges, race, racial slurs, racism, radicalization, rats, recession, Red Skull, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, segregation, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, smart houses, socialism, Star Trek, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, syllabi, teaching, Thanos, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the economy, The Hunt, the rent is too damn high, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, true crime, tuition, Twitter, Uber, underwear, University of Alaska, war on education, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, YouTube
Christmas Hangover Links!
* An excerpt from the conversation between Tim Morton and Jeff VanderMeer from my and Andy Hageman’s issue of Paradoxa is up at LARB. You can read our introduction too! The issue has been printed and will be on its way to subscribers (and available for purchase) soon.
* acting as if nothing terrible has happened
is a failed strategy you yell and this docility
has ruined and crushed us and afraid as I am
I cannot hold your vehemence against you
at this political moment as I watch you dig
your fingers into the rubble you’re sitting on
and you say maybe it’s impossible to believe
in politeness or civilization anymore…
* Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” is the first story to hit the Hugo / Nebula / World Fantasy Award trifecta. Read it!
* The Christmas archives: Home Alone! Die Hard!
* Being a parent really is a second childhood: I’m even terrified of nuclear war again. “A tense new battle over nuclear arms erupts between Donald Trump and his staff.” Tweeting our way to Armageddon.
* How to Be a Guy: What I Learned My First Year Living as a Guy (at Age 34).
* Carrie Fischer is apparently in stable condition, but George Michael is gone.
* Ted Chiang talks adapting Arrival.
* Blade Runner 2 (“Blade Runnest“) and the Koreanization of the future.
* #TheResistance: American Mustache Institute takes a stand against Donald Trump’s anti-facial hair bias. John Bolton Vows Not to Shave Moustache.
* Today’s purge: Donald Trump is demanding the names of federal employees working to curb violent extremism.
* Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary. Trump to dissolve Trump Foundation, having moved on to bigger grifts. And why not dissolve the UN while he’s at it?
* Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel.
* Neo-Nazi March Planned for Whitefish, Montana.
* The GOP Theocracy: Xmas vs Hanukkah Statements. And don’t worry: RNC: The ‘new King’ is not Trump.
* Looking back: The collapse of the Obama coalition. What could explain it? More data that couldn’t possibly explain it. Having presided over the catastrophic collapse of his party and the possible end of American democracy, Obama gives himself high marks. Why Did Planned Parenthood Supporters Vote Trump?
* 2016 wasn’t actually bad, he explained. I’ll give it one point, for this.
2016 really only seems bad when you forget that literally every person on the planet is going to die in 2017.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2016
* We can end the war on milk in our time.
* Prime Minister Dreamboat can’t wait to Keystone XL again.
*A consummate bullshit artist, Bucky Fuller’s career was built on failure, if not outright fraud. With few of his ideas achieving commercial success, he amounted to nothing more than a hand-waving proponent of outlandish notions. Worse still, he was an aggressive manager of his own profile and patents, an authoritarian technocrat who sought not students but compliant disciples to disseminate his muddled messages. The lynchpin of this view: even the geodesic dome, Fuller’s greatest “success,” rested on a concept borrowed (to be charitable) from an aspiring student sculptor. Buckminster Fuller in the 21st Century.
* John Williams Hasn’t Seen a Single Star Wars Movie.
* Don’t make the joke, don’t make the joke: Sex robots will ‘come a lot sooner than you think’, scientist claims.
* Elsewhere in the rise of the machines.
* A&E Cancels KKK Docuseries Following Criticism. That whole network needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
* BREAKING: All pro sports are bad.
* Actually, my speciality is evil ethics.
* Gasp! Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* They did it: They found the worst Star Wars take.
* The arc of history is long, but it can kick over its own head.
* Meanwhile, in Japan: Can the Emperor abdicate?
* And wherever we are on the political spectrum: let’s give the giant meteor a chance.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2016?, A true patriot is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins, A&E, academia, animals, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, Arrival, artificial intelligence, asteroids, Barack Obama, beards, being a parent is a second childhood, Blade Runner 2, Buckminster Fuller, Carrie Fischer, charity, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, communism, concussions, Congress, Democrats, denialism, Die Hard, Donald Trump, Ebola, ecology, elves, ethics, evil ethics, film, George Michael, Germany, giant meteor, giraffes, global weirding, Google, hockey, Home Alone, hot takes, How the University Works, Hugos, Israel, Jacobin, Japan, Jay Edidin, Jeff Vandermeer, jobs, John Bolton, John Williams, Justin Trudeau, Ken Liu, Keystone XL, KGB, kids today, KKK, Korea, labor, milk, Montana, mustaches, my scholarly empire, Nazis, Nebula Awards, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, obituary, oil, Pakistan, Paradoxa, parenthood, pipelines, politics, PR, purges, Putin, race, racism, reality TV, Republicans, robots, Rogue One, Santa, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex robots, sports, Star Wars, Stephen Pinker, Ted Chiang, television, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the Census, the courts, the law, the long game, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the Rockettes, Tim Morton, trans* issues, Trump Foundation, vaccines, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, World Fantasy Award, World War II
Thursday Links!
* 2015 CFP for the MRG: “Enthusiasm for Revolution.”
* Reminder: Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: Alternative Futurisms.
* The Long, Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz You Have to Read. By the great Taryne Taylor! From the same issue of Paradoxa that has my essay on Snowpiercer in it.
* Ellen Craft, the Slave Who Posed as a Master and Made Herself Free.
* Having paddled so hard to avoid the Scylla of hyperprofessionalization in English studies, some promoters of alternative careers may not notice that they are in the grip of Charybdis’s hyperprofessionalization of everything else. The harder they paddle, the harder the whirlpool pulls us all down. Great piece from Marc Bousquet addressing a number of key issues in academic labor.
* Universities without Austerity.
* A History of the MLA Job List.
* The headline reads, “UMass Ends Use of Student Informants.”
* Loved Your Nanny Campus? Start-Up Pledges Similar Services for Grads.
* These Two States Will Revoke Your License If You Can’t Pay Back Your Student Loans.
* These World Leaders Are a Worse Threat to Free Press Than Terrorism.
* Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Newspaper Edits Female World Leaders Out of Charlie Hebdo March.
* What’s Missing From the Debate on Obama’s Free Community-College Plan.
* The end of the university in Louisiana.
* Malcolm Harris: The Small Miracle You Haven’t Heard About Amid the Carnage in Syria.
* Report: Duke Ignored Warnings on Research Fraud.
* 53 Historians Weigh In on Barack Obama’s Legacy.
* Back to the Future, Time Travel, and the Secret History of the 1980s.
* To be clear, late-night votes might be a bit of a problem for Joseph Morrissey, the newly sworn-in Virginia House delegate who must report to his jail cell about 7:30 each evening.
* Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of military attacks on civilians, compared with members of other major religious groups Gallup has studied in the United States. Seventy-eight percent of Muslim Americans say military attacks on civilians are never justified.
* $1 Million Prize for Scientists Who Can Cure Human Aging. Sure, I’ll go in for a few bucks on that.
* Too real: Woman’s Parents Accepting Of Mixed-Attractiveness Relationship.
* What If We Could Live In A World Without War But Way More Famine?
* Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor.
* A Cybernetic Implant That Allows Paralyzed Rats To Walk Again.
* In 2014, Florida recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system, an all-time high for the state in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years. Hundreds of these deaths from 2014 and from previous years are now under investigation by the DOJ because of the almost unimaginable role law enforcement officers are playing in them.
* Last week: The City Is Reportedly Losing $10 Million a Week Because the NYPD Isn’t Writing Enough Tickets. This week: NYPD Slowdown Turns Into “Broken Windows” Crackdown.
* The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down.
* Albuquerque cop mistakenly guns down undercover narcotics officer during bungled $60 meth bust. Elsewhere in Albuquerque.
* 1 In 3 College Men In Survey Said They Would Rape A Woman If They Could Get Away With It.
* Danny Boyle Having “Serious” Conversations About 28 Months Later. I’m in as long as it’s the first step towards Years.
* Radically unnecessary Avatar sequels reportedly having script problems. What could explain it?
* Frozen in everything, forever and ever amen.
* Seems legit: NASCAR driver says his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin.
* This Computer Program Is ‘Incapable Of Losing’ At Poker.
* Scholar and activist Glen Coulthard on the connection between indigenous and anticapitalist struggles.
* This seems like glorified Avengers fan fiction but I’m on board. Meanwhile, in Fantastic Four news.
* Ah, there’s my problem: iPhone Separation Anxiety Makes You Dumber, Study Finds.
* I’m you, from the future! At the 16th most popular webcomic.
* They say time is the fire in which we burn.
* The Marquette Tribune is following the ongoing McAdams suspension at the university.
* Study says we prefer singers who look like big babies during good times. This research must be stopped. Some things mankind was never meant to know.
* Community get a premiere date.
* whothefuckismydndcharacter.com.
* And Cookie-Based Research Suggests Powerful People Are Sloppier Eaters. Of course the sloppy among us have always known this.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 15, 2015 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 1985, 28 Months Later, 28 Years Later, academia, academic freedom, academic labor, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Adnan Syed, Afrofuturism, aging, Albuquerque, altac, assassins, austerity, Avatar, Avengers, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, Big Data, blue eyes, broken windows, cancer, CFPs, Charlie Hebdo, civilians, class struggle, community, computers, Cookie Monster, cookies, cultural preservation, Danny Boyle, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, Ebola, Ellen Craft, Elvis, famine, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, flashbangs, Florida, free range parenting, free speech, Frozen, gambling, games, genetics, grenades, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, informants, interviews, iPhones, Islam, Islamophobia, James Cameron, jokes, Judaism, Junot Díaz, kids today, Kojave, labor, longevity, looksism, Louisiana, love, LSU, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, medicine, misogyny, MLA, moral panics, murder, music, Muslims, my media empire, NASCAR, Nixon, Nnedi Okorafor, NYPD, orgasms, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pandemic, paralysis, parenting, peace, platinum-coin seigniorage, poker, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politicians, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, rape, rape culture, research, revolution, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, Scooby Doo, Serial, sexism, slavery, socks, Sofia Samatar, Spider-Man, startups, strikes, student debt, teaching pedagogy, tenure, the rich are different, the sublime, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, This American Life, time travel, true crime, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Texas, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, Won't somebody think of the children?, zombies, zunguzungu
NYE Links!
* Finally, my moment has arrived: Smuggling LEGO is the new smuggling diamonds.
* The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.
* On Optimism: Looking Ahead to 2015.
* From climate denialism to climate cashing-in with nothing in between. Are We Approaching the End of Human History?
* Thanks to energy drilling operations, northern New Mexico is now covered by “a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud.”
* Serial, episode thirteen: 1, 2, 3 coming today or tomorrow I think. A sort-of out-there blog post on what it could all mean: The Serial Podcast: The Possible Legal Implications of Jay’s Interview for Jay & Adnan.
* UI Chancellor Responds To Salaita Report. This is actually a fairly significant walk-back of Wise’s position — I think she’s actually more progressive on academic freedom than Cary Nelson now — though since she’s still pretending Salaita wasn’t actually hired it doesn’t do much good for him.
* Professors are teaching less while administrators proliferate. Let’s find out how all that tuition is being spent. Colleges Need a Business Productivity Audit. Of course the actual text of the article zeroes in on instruction first, which is not the source of the problem…
* It’s the original sin of college football, and you’ll never guess what it is. In Harbaugh hire, excessive pay would send wrong message. How one former coach perpetuated a cheating scheme that benefited hundreds of college athletes. Shut down middling college football programs and shift the money back to instruction.
* The arc of history is long, but: New Michigan Law Bars College Athletes From Unionizing.
* Another angle on the growing Title IX mess: Mothers of accused college rapists fight back.
* Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play At Hard Work.
* Brent Bellamy reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization.
* 538 profiles the best damn board game on the planet, Twilight Struggle.
* Really interesting idea from Bleeding Cool about what might be happening with Marvel’s sliding timescale. I could honestly see them doing this, or something like it, at least until they start getting some rights back.
* Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America.
* Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.
* Is Wisconsin destined to be a Rust Belt backwater?
* Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond.
* Seriously, though, sometimes you can’t just switch the skin tones and have the story turn out the same.
* Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence.
.* BREAKING: Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.
* Counterpoint: Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri.
* To Discipline and Punish: Milwaukee Police Make Late Night Visits.
* I say teach the controversy: Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination.
* High School Basketball Team Banned From Tournament Over ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirts.
* This Deadspin piece has really made me regret softening my anti-Vox stance in recent months.
* Sounds like the Afghanistan war has ended again. This is #3 or #4 at least, right?
* How to destroy a city: just build a highway.
* The CDC is saying we’re all going to get the flu.
* And as if the IMF wasn’t bad enough.
* “Why should the legality of a sale of secrecy depend entirely upon who initiates the transaction? Why is bribery legal but blackmail not?”
* Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.
* No Charges for Police Chief Who Used Badge to Try and Intimidate Teen into Posing Nude.
* …but believe it or not it is possible for a cop to get fired over a fatal shooting.
* LAPD Launches Investigation Into ‘Dead, Dead Michael Brown’ Song Sung at Retired Cop’s Party.
* The labor movement should rally against police violence, whether police unions like it or not. I think we should let this whole work stoppage thing play out personally.
* Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine de Blasio. The headline actually undersells the severity of a story where they talk about planting drugs on his daughter.
* Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.
* Elsewhere in the richest city in the richest nation ever in the history of the world.
* Military Turns To Prison Labor For $100 Million In Uniforms — At $2-Per-Hour Wages.
* What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition.
* North Dakota to eliminate taxes because fracking fracking fracking forever fracking. What could go wrong?
* Real life Alien vs. Predator: Cuomo vs. the New York State Legislature.
But Cuomo has insisted he would agree to a pay hike only if the Legislature addressed a long series of criminal and ethical charges against many of its members by passing several reforms, such as a limit on outside incomes earned by lawmakers and a system of publicly financed campaigns.
The legislative leaders, however, responded that Cuomo was making demands he knew were unacceptable in a politically motivated effort to appear as a reformer because he’s under federal investigation for dismantling his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel.
* “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing.”
* Streetcars, maybe not so great?
* Heartbreaking story of a trans teen’s suicide, based on a suicide note that went viral. Now go hug your kid.
* Exciting new pioneers in research:
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors
ALLEN C. GOODMAN (Wayne State University)
JOSHUA GOODMAN (Harvard University)
LUCAS GOODMAN (University of Maryland)
SARENA GOODMAN (Federal Reserve Board)We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
* Bat-Kierkegaard: The Dark Knight of Faith.
* Want to feel old? This Is What the Cast of Doug Looks Like Now.
* For its first Star Wars spinoff Disney has selected the impossible task of recasting Harrison Ford. They chose… poorly.
* Austerity in everything: Science proves once-in-a-lifetime moments will just make you more depressed.
* And there’s more! You’re more likely to die on your birthday.
* Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide.
* “Deputies said the shooting appears accidental”: Idaho toddler shoots and kills his mother inside Walmart.
* Wake up, sheeple! Back to the Future predicted 9/11.
* From io9: Physics students at the University of Leicester claim to have calculated the amount of energy required to transform water into wine.
* Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 31, 2014 at 7:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2015, 9/11, academia, academic freedom, Afghanistan, Africa, alcohol, Alien vs. Predator, Andrew Cuomo, anthropology, apocalypse, austerity, Back to the Future, bae, Barack Obama, Batman, Bill de Blasio, birthdays, blackmail, books, brands, bribery, capitalism, Cary Nelson, CDC, celebrity culture, cheating, child abuse, child care, child pornography, cities, civil liberties, civility, class struggle, climate change, climate trials, collapse, college football, college sports, comics, Cornell, crisis, dark Internet, David Duke, David Graeber, denialism, depression, Disney, Don't mention the war, Doug, drunk driving, Ebola, ecology, ethics, euthanasia, faith, feminism, games, gender, great moments in academic presentations, guns, Han Solo, Harrison Ford, high school sports, homelessness, How did we survive the Cold War?, how I'm going to die, How the University Works, hydrofracking, Idris Elba, IMF, it's finally happening, James Bond, Jesuits, Jesus Christ, juvenile detention, kids today, Kierkegaard, LAPD, LEGO, literature, Louisiana, Marquette, Marvel, mattresses, methane, Michigan, Milwaukee, money, mortality, names, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New Year's, New York, North Dakota, nuclearity, NYPD, optimism, pedagogy, physics, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, polls, prison, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rare corrections, roller coasters, Rust Belt, Serial, shock doctrine, simulations, smuggling, Steven Salaita, street cars, student athletes, suicide, teach the controversy, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the courts, the flu, the law, This American Life, time travel, Title IX, Tor, trans* issues, true crime, Twilight Struggle, Twitter, UIUC, unions, urban renewal, Vox, white supremacy, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing
Sunday Links!
* Letter of Support for Abbate from Marquette Dept Chairs. Pres. Lovell Letter to the Campus Community — November 22, 2014.
* Cold and Hungry: Discourses of Anorexic Femininity in Frozen (2013).
* We Need To Talk About Tyrion: How HBO Failed George R. R. Martin’s Iconic Character.
* Another good one from Charlie Stross: Let’s put the future behind us.
Anyway, this is the future, folks. It’s built from the bones of the past, it’s unevenly distributed, and it’s already here. And while it’s an interesting place to visit, I’m not sure I’d want to stay.
* Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns. Well, there’s an Ebola crisis to co– oh? really? Well, there’s Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration to cover!
* How to Shave $1 Trillion Out of Health Care.
* Under pressure, Wisconsin universities boost response to campus sex assaults.
Across town at Marquette University, three fraternities last spring received official warnings after reports of sexual misconduct. Complaints against fraternity members were handled through student misconduct channels, and the university ordered the fraternitiesto undergo training.
* UVA Suspends Fraternities Following Rolling Stone Campus Rape Investigation. As is usual with these sorts of things, what’s stunning is how clear it is they’re only doing this because they got caught. They knew everything Rolling Stone reported before RS reported it; the only difference is now everyone knows those things.
* The University of Virginia’s selection of an independent counsel to investigate rape allegations turned out to have been a member of the fraternity that is the subject of the accusations.
* Universitybot Responds: Gang Rape as “Sexual Misconduct.”
* The Historical Moment at UC Davis – Strategies for Davis Activists. Some UC Occupiers on Ferguson and the State of Emergency.
* I tell you, the ethical shambles that is today’s Young Person. Watching live college football — college football paid for by your tuition dollars, whether you like it or not — is not a right! It’s not even a privilege! It’s an obligation.
* Marion Barry has died. I’ve been learning a lot today from people talking about who he was before and besides a walking punchline.
* Transgender woman dies suddenly, presented at funeral in open casket as a man.
* And Where the Academic Jobs Aren’t: Philosophy Edition.
Right offhand, a number of notable trends pop out. First, this looks like a terrible job season so far. Over at the Smoker, Zombie has tallied only 110 tenure-track jobs [note: now, going back all the way to June, it doesn’t look quite so bad–though most AOS are still in the single digits). Second, the most in-demand AOS this year are ethics (37 listings), applied ethics (35) jobs, open (37), and social-political (20). So, value theory’s looking comparatively good. Third, it’s surprising (to me, at any rate) how few jobs are in the “core”, though Mind isn’t doing too bad (15 listings).
From what I can gather of the contemporary philosophy discipline a lion’s share of those ethics jobs (themselves now the supermajority of the field!) are in interdisciplinary attempts to make ethics “relevant” to science, medicine, business, etc. If you want a vision of the future of the humanities…
Written by gerrycanavan
November 23, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic job market, actually existing media bias, anorexia, applied ethics, Barack Obama, Benghazi, Charlie Stross, civil rights movement, class struggle, college football, college sports, Ebola, Elysium, ethics, femininity, feminism, Ferguson, fraternities, Frozen, funerals, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, grad student nightmares, health care, How the University Works, if you want a vision of the future, immigration, kids today, Marion Barry, Marquette, Missouri, Occupy Cal, orbital suburbs, outer space, philosophy, politics, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, retrofuture, science fiction, St. Louis, student movements, student occupations, the humanities, Title IX, transgender issues, University of California, University of Wisconsin, UVA, UWM, Washington DC, Wisconsin
All the Weekend Links!
* Ursula Le Guin gave a great speech at the National Book Awards this week.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
* It’s quite a bit better than the other thing that happened that night, though Handler is trying to making amends.
* Kirkus Reviews on the radical Joanna Russ.
* A Sokal hoax we can all believe in.
* Roofs are caving in in Buffalo after a week of truly insane November storms. The temperature is projected to be 60 degrees on Monday, which means this could all melt in one day and cause a whole new set of problems.
* CFP: Hostile Intelligences and The General Antagonism.
The purpose of this conference is to organize and proliferate the material heresies that are the basis for what Matteo Pasquinelli has called “hostile intelligences” and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as “the general antagonism.” Pasquinelli writes, in “The Labour of Abstraction,” “Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to find eventually its epistemic twin.” For him, forms of knowledge and subjectivity play a prominent role in his theory of anti-capitalist revolution. Hostile intelligence is one imaginary in which the recently formed Accelerationists conceive such an epistemic twin. Moten and Harney’s category, “the general antagonism,” is no doubt the epistemic twin of “the general intellect”, and powerfully indicates a generalized disidentification with white-supremacist, capitalist culture that is an extant part of the fugitive practices of what they eloquently call “The Undercommons.”
* Program of the 2015 MLA Subconference.
* While the Regents claim to negotiate on behalf of those who use the university–students, staff and faculty–their new gambit instead shows the difference between the Regents and higher Administration, on one hand, and “those who use” the university on the other. UCOP’s Failed Funding Model.
* A Communiqué from the UCSC Occupation of Humanities 2.
* What the students were doing in 2010, and what they’re doing today, is defending art, science and philosophy against a regime that believes none of these things are of any value except as a means to wealth and power. They are quite literally defending the values of civilisation from those who have abandoned them.
* Jacobin: Higher education should be free. But we can’t just copy the flawed European model.
* Do you want to be responsible for something that’s gonna paint UVA in a bad light? Horrifying report in Rolling Stone about a young woman’s experience being attacked at a UVA fraternity and then reporting it. Please note that the description of what happened to her is quite graphic and very disturbing.
* Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women.
The repository would need some kind of physical marker that, foremost, could last 10,000 years, so the task force’s report considers the relative merits of different materials like metal, concrete, and plastic. Yet the marker would also need to repel rather than attract humans—setting it apart from Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, or any other monument that has remained standing for thousands of years. To do that, the marker would need warnings. But how do you warn future humans whose cultures and languages will have evolved in unknown ways?
* Public officials once operated for profit. Now that system has returned with a vengeance. Mike Konczal reviews The Teacher Wars and Rise of the Warrior Cop.
* Academics sometimes seek to make the world a better place, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
* Seven years in, Twitter finally puts in what you’d think would be one of its most basic features.
* Bangkok cinema chain cancels Hunger Games screenings over salute protest.
* 400 Things Cops Know Is the New Bible for Crime Writers. By MU English Alum Plantinga!
* The Singularity Is Here: 5-foot-tall ‘Robocops’ start patrolling Silicon Valley.
* NYPD Officer ‘Accidentally’ Shoots and Kills Unarmed Man in Brooklyn. Why would police officers have their guns drawn as a matter of course? How can that be protocol?
* Late capitalism and the viral imagination.
* Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment.
* Exhibit A? U. of Colorado Will Pay Philosophy Professor $185,000 to Resign.
* Mass hysteria at the Department of Education.
* Now we see the violence etc: In a blow to schoolchildren statewide, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 7 the State of Michigan has no legal obligation to provide a quality public education to students in the struggling Highland Park School District. The law, in its majestic equality…
* First Grader Was Told ‘Guess What, You Can’t Have Lunch’ Because His Family Was In Debt.
* Being bullied physically changes kids’ brains.
* The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More.
* When My Mom Was an Astronaut.
* Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. Passwords are the new poetry.
* Accrediting commission says UNC ‘not diligent’ in exposing academic scandal. Let the stern finger-wagging commence!
* Lunatic: Keystone Pipeline Will Teach Men “What it Is to Be a Man.” Literally toxic masculinity.
* It’s one reason we’re poorer than our parents. And Obama could fix it—without Congress. Whatever Happened to Overtime? I’m sure he’ll get right on it.
* ‘Text neck’ is becoming an ‘epidemic’ and could wreck your spine.
* A new analysis by PunditFact found that of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were flat-out false. What’s more, only a measly 8% could be considered completely “true.”
* In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat.
* No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally.
* Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities.
* The enduring legacy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers’ room.
* The Ghostbusters 3 we’ll never see.
* The Empire Strikes Back we’ll never see.
* This One-Page Comic Explains Why Batman Never Seems To Die.
* From this vantage, the efficient society that terrorizes and comforts Codemus, and enfolds him in the straitjacket of a diffused, technologized fascism, resembles the experience of many workers today. Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones.
* Flatland, at last, is truly two-dimensional.
* And this Deceptively Cute Animation Illustrates The Horrors Of My Addiction to Coca-Cola.Won’t you give what you can, please, today? The case for treating sugar like a drug.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 22, 2014 at 10:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic publishing, accreditation, activism, actually existing media bias, addiction, adoption, Afghanistan, algorithms, austerity, Barack Obama, Batman, Berkeley, Bill Cosby, Boulder, Buffalo, Buffy, bullying, capitalism, CFPs, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, cognitive science, comics, conferences, Cops, cultural preservation, David Graeber, debt, delicious Coca-Cola, Department of Education, diversity, Don't mention the war, Ebola, ecology, fascism, feminist science fiction, film, Flatland, flexible accumulation, Fox News, fraud, Fred Moten, freedom, futurity, Ghostbusters 3, grad student nightmares, guns, hoaxes, hostile intelligences, How the University Works, human rights, Hunger Games, Joanna Russ, Keystone XL, kids today, Lemony Snicket, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Michigan, MLA, museums, neoliberalism, neuroscience, nuclear waste, nuclearity, NYPD, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, overtime, podcasts, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, post-Fordism, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, resitance, Robocop, Sand Creek Massacre, science fiction, Serial, Silicon Velley, smartphones, snow, Sokal hoax, Star Wars, Stefano Harney, strikes, student occupations, subconferences, sugar, tech economy, text neck, texting, Thailand, the courts, The Empire Strikes Back, the general antagonism, the humanities, the law, the long now, the Singularity, toxic masculinity, tuition, Twitter, Uber, UNC, undercommons, University of California, University of Colorado, University of Oregon, Ursula K. Le Guin, UVA, viral imagination, war on education, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, Yucca Mountain
Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links
* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.
* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.
* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.
* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.
* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.
* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”
* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.
* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.
* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:
* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.
* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.
Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.
* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.
* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.
* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.
* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.
* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.
* No capital projects but the end of capital.
* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!
* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.
* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.
* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.
* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.
* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.
* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.
* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.
* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.
* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.
* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.
* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.
* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.
* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.
* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.
* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.
* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?
* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.
* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.
* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?
* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.
* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”
* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.
* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.
* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 19, 2014 at 8:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abiogenesis, academia, actually existing government waste, Africa, Afrofuturism, Al Gore, America, An Inconvenient Truth, apartheid, apocalypse, archaeology, art, at last my story can be told, austerity, bad kid jokes, Big Pharma, Bill Cosby, Black Panther, Buffalo, bullying, California, capital, capitalism, capitalist realism, carbon, Charles Manson, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, comets, comics, cultural preservation, David Lynch, death penalty, debt, Democrats, digital humanities, drugs, Ebola, ecology, endowments, fandom, Ferguson, games, Gorbachev, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrofracking, income inequality, Indiana Jones, intersectionality, Kamala Harris, kids today, looting, male privilege, malls, Mark Dery, Mark Fisher, Marquette, marriage, Marvel, Marxism, mass shootings, medicine, military-industrial complex, millennials, misogyny, Missouri, MTV, museums, my scholarly empire, Naomi Klein, necrostreaming, Nelson Mandela, neoliberalism, Octavia Butler, oil, parenting, pedagogy, Pennsylvania, pharmakon, polar vortex, police brutality chocolate, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, Providence, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Rhode Island, Robben Island, Saved by the Bell, science fiction, sexism, Shakespeare, slavery, snow, South Africa, St. Louis, states of emergency, states of exception, student debt, student loans, Ta-Nehisi Coates, talks, television, tenure, the archives, the courts, the law, the rich want everything, tuition, Twin Peaks, Uber, UC Riverside, University of California, war on education, what it is I think I'm doing, white people, white privilege, whiteness, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, Yelp
Happy Halloween Links!
* China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween. “Halloween, for a rigorous socialist, is worth defending.”
* A new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television has come out, a special issue on SF anime. This is the last one before I became an editor, but read it anyway!
* Submission guidelines for Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. A really interesting document of the new fandom.
* How much is revenge worth? The Life Aquatic: A Stanley Kubrick Film.
* William Gibson: The Future Will View Us “As a Joke.”
* SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.
* This Is What Happens When You Criticize Teach for America.
* How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA.
* Vowing to break “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” Gov. Cuomo on Monday said he’ll push for a new round of teacher evaluation standards if re-elected. Democrats! Catch the fever!
* Cops shows and the denial of death.
* “My whole life has been affected by a fight that I was in when I was 14,” she says. “It’s not something that you can take back and not something that was premeditated, and I still have to deal with the consequences every day.” Racist policing of African-American kids in Minneapolis.
* The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. Spiritual meritocracy.
* Ebola and quarantine. The Grim Future if Ebola Goes Global.
* Hidden secrets of the MIT Science Fiction Society.
* Civility is truly an intricate riddle, friends.
* Mitch Hurwitz is so hurt that you didn’t like Arrested Development Season 4 that he’s going to waste his time reediting the whole thing his chronologically.
* If this catches on my daughter could be in some serious legal trouble: Court orders man to stop pretending to fall over.
* Hobby Lobby redux: Inmate Sues Prison Claiming His Religious Liberty Entitles Him To Dress Like A Pirate.
* Report: Piece of Amelia Earhart’s Plane Found on Island Where She Died.
* Incredibly, nearly half of North Americans say they’ve succumbed to mate poaching attempts at some point. One estimate suggests that 63% of men and 54% of women are in their current long-term relationships because their current partner stole them from a previous partner. I can’t work out the math on this but including the relationships that ended after a partner was “stolen” from a previous partner you’re dealing with an overwhelming supermajority of relationships beginning with cheating/”poaching.” That just doesn’t seem plausible to me on its face.
* Meanwhile, the film industry seems pretty worried that a man could fall in love with a computer.
* Michael Showalter is developing a sci-fi comedy for FX. A dark, gritty reboot of The Bearded Men of Space Station 11 or I walk.
* Paying an exorbitant monthly fee to feel like you have friends can get expensive, and the New York Times is on it.
* So you want to troll an academic.
* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
* Disney Princesses with realistic waistlines.
* Now we see the violence inherent in academia.
* Rest in peace, Galway Kinnell. A favorite:
She is leading her old father into the future
as far as they can go, and she is walking
him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes
and they foxtrotted on this same rug.
I watch them closely: she could be teaching him
the last steps that one day she may teach me.
At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.
* And your SF short story of the day: “How to Get Back to the Forest.”
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2014 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Africa, Amelia Earhart, Andrew Cuomo, anime, Arrested Development, Berkeley, Bill Maher, cheating, China Miéville, civility, class struggle, death, deep state, democracy, Democrats, Disney, Ebola, Ex Machina, fandom, FML, FMLA, fraternities, futurity, Galway Kinnell, games, gaming, Halloween, Her, Hobby Lobby, horror, How the University Works, Jian Ghomeshi, karma, kids today, Kubrick, love, Marxism, meritocracy, Michael Showalter, misogyny, MIT, Mitch Hurwitz, mortality, my media empire, neoliberalism, Netflix, nonviolence, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, Pastafarianism, poetry, politics, pregnancy, princesses, public health, quarantine, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, religious freedom, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, sexism, shadow government, SimCity, socialism, sororities, Teach for America, television, The Bearded Men of Space Station 11, the courts, the law, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the new fandom, The State, trolling, voting, William Gibson, writing, Zoey
Midweek Links!
* Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds: X-Wing, Tie Fighter Are FINALLY Getting Digital Re-Releases. I don’t meant to brag but I was the very very best in the world at this game, back when.
* CFP at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at UWM. This year’s theme is “the unbearable.” Keynotes by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman!
* How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts.
* Higher Education and the New Brutalism.
We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and cruelty. The United States is sullied by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice. Academics who speak out against corruption and injustice are publicly demeaned and often lose their jobs. At the same time, the Obama administration criminalizes public servants who expose unethical behavior, the violation of civil liberties and corruption.
* Elsewhere in the richest society in the history of the world: How many homeless S.F. schoolkids? Enough to fill 70 classrooms.
* When I was a black woman, I was hated. Now, as a black man, I’m feared.
* Priscilla Wald on Media Treatment of Ebola. How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere.
* Any grad student could have told you: drunk people are better at philosophy.
* Tufts and Unionized Adjuncts.
* Scenes from the competency-based education scam. And the for-profit scam.
* UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation.
* Free education is not a crazy dream; some countries already have it. We should too, or we face a future where the study of literature or art becomes a luxury available to the rich alone.
* Some things mankind was never meant to see. More links below!
* Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day.
* You Can Buy This Abandoned CT Town For Less Than A Brooklyn Apartment.
* 30 Philip K Dick Stories That Should Be Movies.
* Voight-Kampff test for college admissions.
* ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ Is Now an Actual College Class. I’d take that. I know I could teach it.fe
* Someone finally said it: I Don’t Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men.
* Yosemite Lifehacks. Recommended.
OS X Yosemite. Accessibility > Display > Increase Contrast. OMG THAT’S BETTER. #whew
— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) October 29, 2014
* There’s no anti-college nonsense so aggressively silly that the Washington Post won’t push it.
* How the culture of assessment fuels academic dishonesty.
* US currency reimagined to celebrate ideas, not the dead. Still more links below!
* The Race to Nowhere In Youth Sports.
* You Can Still Eat This Corgi In Pennsylvania, Thanks To The NRA.
* Krypton TV Series In The Works. The CW Is Making A Young Shakespeare Vs. Witches TV Show.
* But it’s not all terrible ideas: I’m cautiously optimistic about Marvel Phase III. Black Panther! Captain Marvel!
* Halfway through this review of William Gibson’s The Peripheral I broke my no-buying-books rule and bought the book.
* Milwaukee hosts first Fantasticon comic convention.
* The NFL Concussion Settlement Is Pure Evil.
* The end result is always the same. You do all this work just to get money. So fuck it: Why not skip everything and just start making currency?“
* The Dartmouth (America’s Oldest College Newspaper) issues a rare correction.
* Damning every damnable river on Earth: what could possibly go wrong?
* When Russell Brand Met David Graeber.
* Martin Jarvis, professor of music at Charles Darwin University in Australia, claims some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best-loved works were actually written by his wife.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking, Study Says.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 29, 2014 at 7:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abandoned towns, academia, accreditation, adjuncts, airplanes, alcohol, America, anti-intellectualism, Apple, assessment, austerity, Avengers, Bach, best of all possible worlds, Black Panther, books, Brutalism, capitalism, catcalling, CFPs, cheating, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, college courses, college sports, comics, communism, competency-based education, concussions, cruel optimism, cura personalis, dams, Dartmouth, David Graeber, dogs, don't go to college, Ebola, epidemics, feminism, film, for-profit schools, forgery, fraternities, games, Glenn Beck, health, homelessness, How the University Works, ideas, Jonas Salk, kids today, kill all men, Krypton, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, leftism, liberal arts, maps, Marvel, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, misogyny, money, my misspent youth, NCAA, neoliberalism, new media, NFL, NRA, OSX Yosemite, patents, pedagogy, Philip K. Dick, philosophy, plagiarism, polio, prequels, Priscilla Wald, psychology, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reparations, reproductive futurity, rivers, Russell Brand, San Francisco, scams, science fiction, sexism, Shakespeare, soda, sports, Star Wars, Superman, television, the CW, the humanities, The Peripheral, the unbearable, there's nothing sweet in life, trans* issues, Tufts, tuition, Uber, UNC, unions, UWM, Voight-Kampff Test, wasting time on the Internet, William Gibson, witches, X-Wing
Monday Morning!
* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
* Smartly realizing that nothing is going to change on the climate change beat, NPR guts its environmental reporting.
* Epigrams for my research agenda: That’s to say nothing of the fact that the people involved in GamerGate that Grieco defends are, in fact, not poor bullied kids. They are, overwhelmingly, employed, educated, privileged adult men, many of whom work for some of the most powerful and profitable industries in our economy. Their beloved sci fi and comic books and fantasy genres and media– those aren’t reviled and disrespected properties that people are ashamed to like. They’re economically dominant and critically lauded, and given the way the internet makes culture spread more broadly and intensely than ever before, are probably the most powerful force in the history of the arts.
* Different Bodies & Different Lives In Academia: Why The Rules Aren’t The Same For Everyone.
* Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns.
* 6 Brilliant Art Projects That Ruin Classic Kids’ Characters.
* Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps.
* All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone.
* Top Health Official Warns That Ebola Quarantines Could Backfire. And yet.
* Spock was right: Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion.
* National insanity watch: Students at a Nebraska High School Can Now Pose With Guns in Their Senior Portraits.
* I want to talk about how badly we’re failing the boys who can’t see their way out of a totally lethal, totally toxic distortion of masculinity — the kind that says that if boys aren’t manly, or gentlemanly, they can be gunmanly.
* Forty percent of mass shootings start with the gunman targeting his wife, girlfriend, or ex. And access to firearms makes it seven times more likely that a domestic abuser will kill his partner.
* Yes, Mass Shootings Are Occurring More Often.
* Elon Musk: Developing artificial intelligence would be as dangerous as ‘summoning a demon.’
* The “Southern Belle” Is a Racist Fiction.
* LARoB interviews David Mitchell.
* Why Google wants to replace Gmail. They should have nationalized Google fifteen years ago.
* Now we see the violence, &c: Wisconsin cops deploy armored vehicle to collect fines from 75-year-old man for messy land.
* “The city’s new budget includes $25,000 to buy one-way bus tickets for homeless people.” “Hawaii even passed a measure that offers paid flights off the state to homeless people.” (via)
* Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required.
* Building a Better Panopticon: The Wire as melodrama.
The Wire extends and elaborates melodrama in remarkable ways. But, as Williams says, melodrama remains a broadly liberal medium — and as Williams doesn’t say, liberalism and neoliberalism are not especially distant cousins. Liberalism can critique neoliberalism for its inequities, its cruelties, and its callousness. But to neoliberalism’s call for data and surveillance, liberalism can only respond with a call for better data and more nuanced surveillance; to neoliberalism’s doctrine of individuality as sameness, liberalism can only offer a deeper individuality subsumed within a deeper sameness. The Wire is undoubtedly one of the greatest melodramas extant, and an object lesson in how powerful the form can be. Its limitations aren’t a failure on the part of its creators so much as an indication that melodrama, having gotten us to this particular liberal democratic impasse, is unlikely, on its own, to get us out.
* Hackers of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
* And I learned today that Star Trek secondary canon features a running subplot where an unfrozen Wall Street guy slowly takes over the Federation. This is going in the Khan essay for sure…
Written by gerrycanavan
October 27, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Age of Ultron, America, Andrew Cuomo, art, artificial intelligence, books, cartoons, Chernobyl, Chris Christie, class struggle, climate change, comics, David Mitchell, David Simon, deep state, Ebola, ecology, Elon Musk, emotion, epigrams for my research agenda, equality, feminism, Gamergate, games, general election 2016, girls, Gmail, Google, guns, HBO, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, IRS, justice, Khan, kids today, literature, logic, mass shootings, medicine, military-industrial complex, misogyny, morally odious monsters, morally odious morons, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, now we see the violence inherent in the system, NPR, nuclearity, pedagogy, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, princesses, race, racism, Roko's Basilisk, science fiction, secret government, sexism, Spock, Star Trek, superheroes, taxes, teaching, television, the Internet, the Singularity, the South, The Wire, true crime, Wisconsin
All the Weekend Links You’ll Ever Need
* Key Findings in Chapel Hill’s Academic-Fraud Investigation. I find the scale of this thing totally amazing; that the NCAA is still claiming it has no jurisdiction here is also amazing. It’ll be interesting to see UNC’s next accreditation report.
* Another sportsball-related disaster that the NCAA, alas, just can’t do anything about: Many Athletes Receive Little Education on Concussion.
* Lawsuit Alleges College Athletes Should Be Paid at Least Minimum Wage. The NCAA wishes it could act.
* S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education.
* Miami University gave George Will four adjuncts’ yearly salary for this nonsense. But presidents of higher ed nonprofits say that’s chump change.
* Study: we should probably just abolish men.
* Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Birth Control. So old I can remember when giving employers direct veto power over health care was the reductio ad absurdum of the Hobby Lobby case.
* Surfers of the nightmare Internet: The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.
* The Anti-Socialist Origins of Big Data.
* African Writers in a New World. The interviews in this series will lead up to the Symposium of African Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The event, which will take place December 2-3, 2014, will feature conversations with Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and Taiye Selasi. “African Writers in a New World” will conclude with a conference report from the Symposium.
* It became necessary to destroy Detroit in order to save it. And Chicago. And pretty much everywhere.
* Rio has used mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics as a “state of exception” to push through private development projects and neoliberal reforms. The Jock Doctrine.
* America’s perpetual state of emergency.
* I said on Twitter that this “13th grade” pilot program in Oregon seems like an example of Goodhart’s Law, though I think I could probably be convinced otherwise.
* Republicans increasingly saying the quiet part loud.
* And that’s not even a link to this utterly bizarre video from AEI about roofies.
* Infidels defile the sacrament: I suspect some of the irrationality around voter ID laws might be linked to Stephen Keating’s notion of voting as religious ritual.
* Speaking of saying the quiet part loud: Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have A Constitutional Right To Use Excessive Force.
* At about 4 a.m., officers were dispatched to 3779 W. 5300 South to check on a man who had called a suicide hotline, according to Detective Matt Gwynn, the public information officer for Roy Police Department. A negotiator from the SWAT team was then brought in, and Gwynn says a 6- to 6 ½-hour standoff ensued. “At some point those negotiations failed and unfortunately the SWAT team was involved in a shooting, and the subject is now deceased,” Gwynn said.
* Cops Use Action-Movie Arsenal to Catch Teen Who Stole Cigarettes. I just thank god they caught the guy.
* CHP officer says stealing nude photos from female arrestees ‘game’ for cops.
* Cash damages for woman duped into having undercover spy’s child.
* Climate Change Is Causing Mountain Goats To Shrink. Will you act now, America?
* Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit Of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm.
* By pretending climate change isn’t real we develop the tax base to deal with climate change. With a plan this solid, what could go wrong?
* I’m sure Miami seceding from the rest of Florida would solve it. Of course Republicans have a better idea.
* The United States of Reddit.
* It’s nearly impossible to fire a tech millionaire.
* I mean really, we need to figure out how to fire some of these guys.
* On the Internet, Men Are Called Names. Women Are Stalked and Sexually Harassed. Cassandra among the creeps.
* Matt Yglesias Entirely Misunderstands Why [Anything] Exists.
That Yglesias piece is actually really good at revealing neo/liberalism as Panglossian in-this-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-ism.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014
Everything that exists is necessary; everything that exists is good. -Matt Yglesias
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014
Americans killed by Ebola today: 0 Americans killed by ISIS today: 0 Americans killed by guns today: 86 Source: http://t.co/QCOpdKkjPN
— Sam Johnston (@samj) October 24, 2014
* Peter Jackson vows Battle of the Fire Armies will be literally unwatchable.
* J.K. Rowling releasing new Harry Potter story about Dolores Umbridge.
* If you call slipstream “transrealism” it sounds like a new thing.
* You’re finally getting (another) dark, gritty Archie reboot.
* What’s my risk of catching Ebola? But that’s no reason not to panic.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on “Mount Thoreau” and the naming of things in the wilderness.
* Science proves I listen to Counting Crows because I’m just that smart. So it’s not my fault and no one can blame me. I’m as much a victim as anyone.
* And io9 has your Top 100 Science Fiction-Themed Songs Of All Time. That they left off “Nothing But Flowers” is a crime against all time and space.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 25, 2014 at 8:21 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 13th grade, abolish men, academia, accreditation, adjuncts, Africa, America, American Enterprise Institute, Archie, austerity, Battle of the Five Armies, Big Data, birth control, books, Buzzfeed, Chicago, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civic religion, class struggle, climate change, college sports, concussions, corporatism, Counting Crows, Detroit, Ebola, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, film, Florida, fraud, George Will, graduation rates, guns, Harry Potter, Hobby Lobby, How the University Works, hydrofracking, intelligence, J.K. Rowling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lord of the Rings, Matt Yglesias, men, methane, Miami, Miami University, minimum wage, misogyny, moral panic, music, names, natural gas, nature, NCAA, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, nothing but flowers, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Olympics, only the super-rich can save us now, Oregon, paper classes, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, police brutality, police state, politics, rape, rape culture, reboots, Reddit, Republicans, revenge porn, Risk, ritual, roofies, saying the quiet part loud, science fiction, Seattle, secessionism, sexism, shock doctrine, Silicon Valley, slipstream, sports, stalking, state of exception, states of emergency, suicide, SWAT teams, Talking Heads, teaching, television, the Constitution, the courts, the dark side of the digital, The Hobbit, the Internet, the law, the marshmallow test, the wilderness, theft, Tolkien, transrealism, true crime, UNC, voter ID, voter suppression, voting, war on education
Monday Morning Links!
* I have an essay in Oil Culture, out this week, on “Retrofutures and Petrofutures.” It’s about science fiction framings of fossil fuel use and its eventual supersession. Amazon link!
In other words, these universities unnecessarily reduced the pay of hard-working professionals, and for no other purpose than to say that they did so. The motto of so many university administrators was “leave no crisis behind,” as these administrators used the national economic situation as justification for unnecessary reductions in the compensation of the people who educate our students.
* In academia, conferences matter.
This paper provides evidence for the role of conferences in generating visibility for academic work, using a ‘natural experiment’: the last-minute cancellation — due to ‘Hurricane Isaac’ — of the 2012 American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting. We assembled a dataset containing outcomes of 15,624 articles scheduled to be presented between 2009 and 2012 at the APSA meetings or at a comparator annual conference (that of the Midwest Political Science Association). Our estimates are quantified in difference-in-differences analyses: first using the comparator meetings as a control, then exploiting heterogeneity in a measure of session attendance, within the APSA meetings. We observe significant ‘conference effects’: on average, articles gain 17-26 downloads in the 15 months after being presented in a conference. The effects are larger for papers authored by scholars affiliated to lower tier universities and scholars in the early stages of their career. Our findings are robust to several tests.
* With Voter ID On Hold, Here’s What Wisconsin Republicans Have Planned For Election Day.
* New York as I remember it from day trips growing up: A City Covered in Graffiti.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man.
* Reduce the deficit, use only female astronauts.
* Maps of the end of the world.
* Ebola in Perspective. Also at Cultural Anthropology: “Ecologies of Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee.”
* Pentagon gearing up to bring their famous competence to the war on Ebola (in the US).
SMASH CUT TO: The year is 2016. The army is asking for $5 trillion for anti-Ebola helicopters. Everyone in the US has Ebola.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 20, 2014
* That Time The Reagan White House Press Briefing Erupted With Laughter Over AIDS 13 Times.
* The Dark Market for Personal Data. An interview with Frank Pasquale on his book The Black Box Society.
* Headlines from the apocalypse: NASA Confirms A 2,500-Square-Mile Cloud Of Methane Floating Over US Southwest.
* Something’s gone wrong in America: Police are looking for a group of men who opened fire after losing a game of beer pong.
* Biocapital watch: How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.
* Why we can’t have nice things: a nice demonstration of how 12% of the U.S. population controls 60% of the Senate.
* And science has finally proved I’m not a baby: men really do have weaker immune systems. If anyone needs me I’ll be in bed…
Written by gerrycanavan
October 20, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, Alzheimer's disease, America, anthropology, apocalypse, astronauts, austerity, beer pong, bees, Big Data, biocapital, capitalism, class struggle, conferences, Ebola, energy, fossil fuels, gender, graffiti, Great Recession, guns, HIV and AIDS, How the University Works, language, maps, Mars, medicine, men, midterm election 2014, military-industrial complex, NASA, neoliberalism, new media, New York, oil, oil ontology, Paul Farmer, politics, pollution, Reagan, Republicans, retrofuture, Revelation, scams, science fiction, shock doctrine, surveillance society, the flu, the Senate, Ursula K. Le Guin, voter ID, voter suppression, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one
Saturday Night Links!
* I’ve had a nice bit of professional good news: I’ve been asked to join Extrapolation as an editor beginning with their Spring 2015 issue.
* “Crutzen, who is not a geologist, but one of the modern great scientists, essentially launched a small hand grenade into the world of geological time scales,” Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the ICS’s anthropocene working group, told the Guardian. “The word began to be used widely, well before geologists ever got involved.”
* That old-time religion: Now that science fiction is respectable, it’s lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest.
* From AfricaIsACountry: Ebola and neo-imperialism. And from Jacobin: The Political Economy of Ebola.
* The arsenal of, well, let’s say democracy: The U.S. sold $66.3 billion in weapons last year –- more than three-fourths of the entire global arms market.
* Richest 1% of people own nearly half of global wealth, says report.
* Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay.
* Of Collaborators and Careerists.
* Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting.
* Meritocracy watch: Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.
* The 21st century university: women’s only colleges and trans identity.
* Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers.
* The Milwaukee police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park is believed to be the first officer in the city fired as a result of a fatal on-duty shooting in at least 45 years.
* More back-and-forth on carceral feminism from Amber A’Lee Frost and Freddie deBoer.
* Pieces like this are enough to make you nostalgic for the quietly understated narcissism of “job creators.”
like Uber but for poor people to sell their organs to rich people
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2014
So old I can remember when technological progress was going to increase human happiness instead of helping everyone hustle 24 hours a day.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2014
* An oral history of The Wonder Years.
* New Scrabble Dictionary Disrepects The Game.
* Stop worrying about mastermind hackers. Start worrying about the IT guy.
* And just for fun: How to die in the 18th century. Watch for for evil, and for the purples…
Written by gerrycanavan
October 18, 2014 at 9:50 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, Africa, Airbnb, Always Be Closing, America, arms trade, carceral feminism, carceral liberalism, careerism, class struggle, climate change, collaborators, college, death, deep time, Ebola, ecology, everything is trying to kill you, evil, Extrapolation, games, geology, hackers, How the University Works, humanitarianism, imperialism, income inequality, job creators, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, mortality, my media empire, neoliberalism, Paul Crutzen, police violence, politics, protest, race, racism, rich people, science fiction, Scrabble, sex, shipwrecks, technology, television, the Anthropocene, the hustle, the purples, The Wonder Years, trans* issues, Uber, voter ID, wealth, weird hobbies, what it is I think I'm doing, white people, women and children first, women's colleges
Weekend Links!
* Marquette University invites applications for the Arnold L. Mitchem Dissertation Fellowship Program. Mitchem Fellowships seek to help increase the presence of currently underrepresented racial and cultural groups in the U.S. professoriate by supporting advanced doctoral candidates during completion of the dissertation. The fellowships provide one year of support for doctoral candidates who are well into the writing stage of their dissertation work, are U.S. citizens, and are currently enrolled in U.S. universities. In addition to library, office and clerical support privileges, Mitchem Fellows receive a $35,000 stipend plus fringe benefits, research and travel monies for the 2015-16 academic year. The teaching load is 1-0.
* UC-Riverside Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: “Alternative Futurisms.”
* NEH watch: Save the Overseas Seminars.
* When Harvard is one of the worst colleges in America: colleges ranked by social mobility index. Marquette doesn’t come out looking all that great by this standard either, though it does beat both Duke and Case Western by a good bit. (Greensboro, oddly, seems not to have been ranked at all.)
* If I can’t dance: U.C. Berkeley set to pull plug on anarchist’s archive.
* Student loan borrowers are not getting enough help avoiding default, according to a report released Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Meanwhile, the Nation reports: Should You Go to College?
* Against Carceral Feminism. I agree with @DavidKaib that “carceral liberalism” is the more important frame here; there’s no reason to single out feminism when so much of liberalism across the board is carceral in its orientation.
* Then the drought ate all the sportsball.
* Youth Are on the Frontlines in Ferguson, and They Refuse to Back Down.
* The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem.
* A people’s history of Gamergate. The Routine Harassment of Women in Male Dominated Spaces. Brianna Wu: It Happened to Me. ‘We Have a Problem and We’re Going to Fix This.’
* 4 Reasons Why A Travel Ban Won’t Solve The Ebola Crisis. Why travel bans will only make the Ebola epidemic worse. Why An Ebola Flight Ban Wouldn’t Work. And yet I would guess one is only a few days off.
* Peak Meritocracy: Andrew Cuomo thinks being the son of a former governor has been a “net negative” for his political career. If only we could somehow harness the radical cluelessness of these people and use it for productive ends.
* Two reports on outcomes for humanities majors could serve to reinforce two disparate beliefs about the field: one where they are seen as a viable path to a successful career, and another where they are seen as a track to a low income and few job prospects. The gender gap is vitally important here.
* Italy Just Pulled Out of Recession Because It Began Counting Drug and Prostitution Revenue.
* John Grisham, completely full of shit.
* Report: Airbnb Is Illegal, Rapacious, & Swallowing Lower Manhattan.
* Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa.
* Podcast interview with out-of-character Stephen Colbert, as he transitions towards taking over The Late Show.
* Another great Superman deconstruction from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Paradise is always just five years off: 3D printed mud houses will soon be an option in impoverished countries.
* John Siracusa reviews OS Yosemite.
* White House Seeks Advice On “Bootstrapping A Solar System Civilization.”
* And what has been seen cannot be unseen: Spider Burrows Into Dylan Thomas’s Appendix Scar & Up Into His Sternum.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 18, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Airbnb, alternative futurism, anarchism, Andrew Cuomo, Apple, archives, Arnold L. Mitchem Fellowships, Berkeley, California, carceral feminism, carceral liberalism, class mobility, class struggle, college rankings, CWRU, default, diversity, drought, drugs, Duke, Ebola, Emma Goldman, English majors, epidemic, Ferguson, futurity, Gamergate, Great Recession, Harvard, How the University Works, income inequality, indigenous futurism, Italy, John Grisham, kids today, Marquette, meritocracy, misogyny, Missouri, NASA, NEH, neoliberalism, nepotism, OS Yosemite, outer space, pandemic, podcasts, police brutality, police violence, politics, pornography, postdocs, prostitution, race, radical cluelessness, rape, rape culture, rent to own, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sexism, sexual harassment, sharing economy, social mobility index, solar system, space colonies, spiders, sports, St. Louis, Stephen Colbert, student debt, Superman, supervillains, the courts, the humanities, the law, travel bans, UC Riverside, UNCG, water
Thursday Links!
* Marquette English Spring 2015 courses! I’m teaching a section of 3000 (our new intro to major — mine is themed around magic) and the second round of my NEH “Cultural Preservation” course. I’m also doing a honors seminar on “video game culture” that I’m really excited about, GamerGate notwithstanding.
* A rare spot of optimism: Lockheed announces breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy.
* But don’t hang on to it: It’s time to push the panic button on the global economy. Markets are panicking again. What’s going on?
* Sea Level Rising Faster Than Anytime In 6,000 Years, Study Finds.
* WHO: 10,000 new Ebola cases per week could be seen. The CDC is apparently taking the over. One thing is certain: it’s time to panic.
* Another Obama triumph for the left: let a thousand wage thefts bloom.
* The Assassination of Detroit.
* Charter School Power Broker Turns Public Education Into Private Profits. Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor.
* Identifying The Worst Colleges In America.
* Could Oculus Rift be the next great higher education boondoggle?
* In Taste of Autonomy, Sports Programs Now Battle for Athletes’ Bellies.
* The most alarming thing I’ve heard from friends who’ve had miscarriages is their surprise (only upon miscarrying) at hearing about how many of their friends, aunts, cousins, sisters, mothers and grandmothers have had them, too. If miscarriages are so common, why do we hide them behind a wall of shame and silence?
* What It’s Really Like to Have an Abortion.
* The radical teamsters of Minneapolis showed what democratic unionism looks like.
* “Most schools’ internal judicial systems are the worst of both worlds,” Berkowitz said. “They don’t give the accused the protections of the criminal justice system, and they mistreat the victims, too.”
* For example, even into the 1980s, some doctors didn’t believe that babies felt pain and so routinely did surgery on them using just muscle relaxants to keep them still. Pain and medicine.
* Guy Debord’s The Muppets. More links below Gonzo.
* “You had one job” screwup of the week.
* South Carolina governor levels outrageous accusation against the nation’s CEOs, says they’re all white supremacists. Huge if true.
* Study claims that whales and dolphins can speak to one another.
* DC has a bit hit on its hands with The Flash, so of course the smart move here is to recast for the film.
* Father, there’s a gateway to Narnia in the closet!
* The Absolute Weirdest Thing Ever To Happen At A Political Debate.
* How A California Man Was Forced To Spend 100 Days In Prison For Being An Atheist.
* Next week: Civilization: Beyond Earth.
* Behold! The Counter-Intuitivist!
Written by gerrycanavan
October 16, 2014 at 8:39 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AA, abortion, academia, addiction, adjunctification, Amazon, animals, atheism, austerity, babies, Barack Obama, Bartleby, boondoggles, California, CDC, CEOs, Charlie Crist, charter schools, Civilization: Beyond Earth, class struggle, climate change, college sports, contrarianism, cultural preservation, DC Comics, Detroit, digital humanities, doctors, dolphins, Ebola, ecology, English, epidemics, Florida, fusion, Gamergate, games, Great Recession, Guy Debord, Herman Melville, How the University Works, I would prefer not to, magic, Marquette, medicine, Minneapolis, miscarriage, Muppets, Narnia, NCAA, NEH, neoliberalism, nuclear energy, Oculus Rift, pain, politics, pregnancy, prison, race, racism, rape, rape culture, real estate, reverse college rankings, Rick Scott, rising sea levels, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, South Carolina, superheroes, teaching, the Confederacy, the economy, the Flash, theory of mind, This Modern World, time to panic, Title IX, unions, wage theft, war on education, whales, what it is I think I'm doing, World Health Organization, worst financial crisis since the last one, you had one job