Sorry I’ve been MIA. John Siracusa’s OS Mavericks review didn’t tell me the update would completely nuke my computer for three days. Fairly big omission, JS.
* Only by the grace of God did I not wind up on Senator Session’s anti-NEH hit list.
* Apple screws up Capitalism 101 by having its products remain useful on a too-long obsolescence-cycle.
* “If part-time is so good, why don’t we have part-time administration?”
* Against student evaluations. UPDATE: Of course the natural form for discuss this is a Twitter fight.
* Rape culture at UConn. Really stunning report.
Carolyn Luby, a student who organized the complaint, said the university failed to stop harassment she faced for criticizing the school’s new “powerful and aggressive” Husky logo in an open letter to UConn president, Susan Herbst. Luby saw the redesigned logo as “glorifying intimidation with an already prevalent rape culture.”
In reaction, commenters on Barstool Sports posted links to her Facebook page. Rush Limbaugh did a segment criticizing Luby in which he stated, “I, El Rushbo, have amplified it and made it even bigger. Let’s see what happens.”
Luby subsequently received rape and death threats. People walked by her on campus and called her “a bitch,” she said. One email she received told her, “I hope you get raped by a husky,” and another said, “I wish you would’ve run in the Boston marathon.” Fraternity members sexually harassed her, Luby said, making statements like, “Don’t worry, we won’t rape you,” as they drove by.
“[The university] would send campus-wide emails about picking up trash, but no warning about hate speech and harassment,” Luby said.
Unlike Georgetown University’s president, who sent a campus-wide email defending Sandra Fluke after Limbaugh and others made her a target in 2012, UConn did nothing, Luby said. Herbst remained silent, and Luby said one school official told her, “That’s kind of the risk you run when you publish something on the Internet.”
University police suggested she keep a low profile and wear a hat on campus, Luby said.
* I ranted about this one enough on Twitter, but this story about the University of Iowa TA who accidentally emailed nude photos to her class (which I feel dirty even linking to at all) is also rape culture in action.
* 62% of higher education professionals report experiencing workplace bullying.
* Talking with Students about Being an Adjunct. Totally insanely, CUNY hasn’t been paying its adjuncts for months.
* The UC Davis Pepper-Spraying Cop Gets a $38,000 Settlement, $8000 more than his victims.
* City College of S.F. outlines closing plan.
* Thinking (only) like an administration: Faculty Couples, for Better or Worse.
* We have the rare opportunity to chronicle a labor movement’s development in real time from its infancy as we watch the organization of college football players.
* Confessions of a Drone Warrior.
* Flood Insurance Jumping Sevenfold Depresses U.S. Home Values. I wonder if even “the market speaking” could pull us out of the death spiral now.
* Climate change cost you the McDonald’s dollar menu. Greenland Has Melted So Much That We Can Mine It for Uranium Now. Arctic Temperatures Reach Highest Levels In 44,000 Years. Gambling with Civilization.
* The men’s rights movement is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
* Rortybomb on striking fast food workers and the neoliberal failings of Obamacare. From the second:
Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism.
* The Decline of Wikipedia.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
* Mitch Hurwitz at the New York Television Festival.
* Davis Sedaris writes about the suicide of his sister Tiffany.
* We should put hyper-efficient rich people in charge of everything: How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes. That’s why they earn the big bucks, I guess.
* Condé Nast Discontinuing Internship Program. The first of many, I’d bet.
* After all this time I’m completely amazed that people still talk to the Daily Show at all. “They made all those other people look like total idiots! I’d better be super-careful as I make my wise and reasoned argument!”
* From the archives: How They Made Bottle Rocket. 1995.
* Wisconsin conservatives file challenge against state’s same-sex partnership law. Special Prosecutor Looking At Wisconsin Recall Elections. Milwaukee has still not enrolled anyone for ACA.
* What Good Wife Storyline Did CBS Kill to Avoid Pissing Off the NFL?
* They said it: Fox News: Anti-Bullying Policies Limit Conservatives’ Free Speech.
* America’s Most Popular Boys’ Names Since 1960, in 1 Spectacular GIF.
* The Harvard Crimson says don’t teach for America.
* American Schools Are Missing 389,000 Teachers. Study: Charters Pose a Financial Threat to Already-Struggling School Districts.
* The Duke Chronicle says walk out on Charles Murray.
A man is stealing your home, poisoning your food and burning the forests around you, all the while explaining why you should thank him. Maybe you are allowed to question his genius, and maybe he answers. Some nod; others frown.
And you watch the flames rise, knowing at least you have engaged in “discourse.”
* Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee.
* The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.
* List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum from the late 1800s, supposedly.
* California Deputies Shoot and Kill Boy Carrying a Fake Gun. Black Teen Detained by NYPD for Buying an Expensive Belt.
* Zombie Simpsons: How the best show ever became the broadcasting undead.
* It’s handled: Scandal has its own scandal after popular fan blogger turns out to be ABC executive. UPDATE: Followup!
* Old villains never die, they just fade away: Diebold charged with bribing officials, falsifying records in China, Russia, Indonesia; fined nearly $50 million.
* Gawker is seriously arguing no one should be fired for uncritically publishing an entirely fact-free smear job so ludicrously inaccurate it didn’t even last two hours. I disagree!
* We’ve all been there: Groom Who Called in Bomb Hoax to Own Wedding Sentenced to Year in Jail.
* Facebook OKs Decapitation Videos (But No Breastfeeding).
* OMG WTF TSA.
* And today’s apocalypse: “We’ve Reached ‘The End of Antibiotics, Period.’”
Gerry Canavan 
What I’m Teaching This Semester
leave a comment »
I have two classes this semester I’m very excited about. First, I’m repeating my post-Civil-War American literature sophomore survey with some slight tweaks based on what seemed to work best last time; the one major change is the addition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland to the syllabus.
Second, I’m debuting my NEH “Enduring Questions” course Cultural Preservation, which in addition to being a bit out of my usual wheelhouse offers a more flexible and student-research-focused pedagogy than I’ve typically offered (as well as copious field trips and guest speakers!). It should be a blast. I’ve needed to wait to finalize much of the course schedule pending student availability for our trips, but the first four weeks of the course are up at the course blog.
After some reflection I’ve decided to scrap my original plan to lead with the thought experiment in chapter two of Red Mars (though we’ll be returning to some of its ecological questions later in the course) in favor of some metacommentary on the development of the course itself. So for Wednesday we’ll be reading my own grant proposal for the course, as well as Senator Jeff Sessions’s recent denunciation of this very grant. We’ll also read Natalia Cecire’s recent defense of the humanities as a counterpoint/antidote to Sessions…
Written by gerrycanavan
January 13, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with cultural preservation, enduring questions, Herland, Jeff Sessions, Marquette, metacommentary, Natalia Cecire, NEH, the humanities, what it is I think I'm doing