Posts Tagged ‘evil’
Don’t Fall Behind, Spring Ahead with These Sunday Morning Links
* The R.D. Mullen Fellowship is calling for applications. The deadline this year is April 2, 2018.
* Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector.
* For Your Consideration: African Speculative Fiction Society Nommos 2018.
* I had a few bad parents during my time in One Hour, One Life but only one of them outright abandoned me. Most of them, even if they could barely care for themselves, tried to keep me alive. “We’re going to die,” one mother told me when I spawned into the game with her in the middle of a barren wilderness. We did, but she carried me with her every step of the way through our brief lives. ‘One Hour, One Life’: This Game Broke My Heart and Restored My Faith in Humanity.
* We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake.
* Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future.
* Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they’re not actually left-wing places at all.
* Fewer foreign students exacerbate financial challenges for some U.S. universities.
* What passes for intellectualism on the right.
* Unpaid internships are back.
* All The Movies I Didn’t See.
My guess is, having elected, much to their surprise, a lunatic as the most powerful man on the planet, a man who boasts of ‘his’ nukes being bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, a man who could actually be crazy enough to unleash a nuclear warhead on millions, the Americans are sorely missing a time when the white man did something right.
* A slow, cerebral, Miracleman depiction of Barry Allen losing all touch with his humanity Dr.-Manhattan-style seems like the only way for The Flash to proceed from here.
* Black Panther crosses $1 billion.
* “President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.”
* Echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today’s immigration debate.
* We’ll Never See This Politically Themed Black-ish Episode Because of ‘Creative Differences.’
* How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps.
* This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town.
* YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.
* Super Mario as it was meant to be experienced.
* The Singularity in theory and practice.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* I Felt Despair About Climate Change—Until a Brush With Death Changed My Mind. “Leukemia and climate change have more in common than you might think.”
* Remembering The Hobbit: The Text Adventure.
* And a much-too-long-delayed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The oceans are warming. It’s altering turtle reproduction so that the vast majority of offspring are female. It was mistake to drop acid with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Pure evil. I’ll do anything for a good grade. Dear science. Dr. Bees. On sequels. I have this nightmare where a giant monster chases me. I’m going to give you a pill that’ll double your intelligence. Welcome to robot heaven. Penguin have a much happier version of the Titanic story. Finegan’s Wake. You are watching The Nihilist Channel. Where do you think all these fossils come from? Get me a scientist! Purposelessness is the only real super villain. Daddy, can I ask you something? The fundamental kid utility function. And my whole life has been one string of failures. Please send help.
Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day Links
* Call for Papers: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene.
* People that found their doppelgängers in art museums.
* We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities in order to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. Many of us stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some barely audible phrases involving “skills,” “relevance,” “a changing economy,” “engagement,” and “values.” The reason it does not come out as something coherent or articulate, much less compelling, is that the ideas behind the words are just as hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
* George Ciccariello-Maher Resigns: “We are all a single outrage campaign away from having no rights at all.” Iowa senator proposes bill decried as ‘political litmus test’ for universities. A note to tenured faculty.
* Meet the black architect who designed Duke University 37 years before he could have attended it.
* J.R.R. Tolkien, Beyond Good and Evil.
* What was Leia supposed to do in Episode 9?
* Teach the controversy: the legend of Mark Hamill’s face.
* Another profile of the worst job on the Internet.
* NANO issue 12, a special issue on The Force Awakens.
* Ada 12, radical speculation and Ursula K. Le Guin.
* What if Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?
* Anomie. Quantum Mechanics. Love. Stotting. Zeno. Choice paralysis. Frosty. Melville. Poetry. Keep scrolling!
* Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.
* Why Is a Small Montana Town a Hotbed of Far-Right Activity? Emboldened white nationalists? Look no further than this liberal Oregon college town.
* Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners.
* US nuclear tests killed far more civilians than we knew.
New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
* Obamacare and the survival test.
* How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America. Extreme poverty in America. World’s richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1tn this year. The U.S. without pensions. No ‘Easy Answer’ To Growing Number Of Stray Dogs In The U.S., Advocate Says. Long after Trump is gone, we’ll still be fighting him. As Wildfires Raged, Insurers Sent in Private Firefighters to Protect Homes of the Wealthy. Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong. Death in an Amazon dumpster. The homeless and the coming cashless economy.
* Why Has Science Only Cured One Person of HIV?
* Same: Young American Men Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers. WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition in 2018.
* I’m starting to take this stuff personally: Poor social skills may be harmful to health.
* I mean really. Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?
* Academics ‘face higher mental health risk’ than other professions.
* Atheism is caused by poor breath control.
* The Rise and Fall of the Racist Right.
* Every Black Mirror. Against SNL. Against Star Wars. Disney Apparently Expects ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ To Bomb. How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit.
* When Michael Jackson Almost Bought Marvel.
* Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme. How We Know It Was Climate Change. And just because there can never be a single moment’s peace from toxic masculinity: Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly.
* Can humanity make peace with its death?
* Seinfeld: The Point and Click Adventure.
* The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth.
* Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime.
* Marquette in the ne — oh no, this again?
Spring Break Forever Links
* Hey look! LARoB reviewed Green Planets.
* Another science fiction studies research opportunity: The 2016-2017 Le Guin Fellowship.
* Notes from ICFA roundtable on The Force Awakens, on cast, nostalgia, and franchise. This was a great panel; I’m so glad we did it.
* Will we ever learn George Lucas’s original Plan for Star Wars Episode 7?
* What a Funding Fracas Could Mean for the Future of CUNY.
* They’ve finally diagnosed my unusual condition.
* Snubbed again! Here Are 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman. Meanwhile:
* In other words, bad food becomes linked to good memories, and to our sense of who we are and where we come from. To give up that food would be to give up not only a piece of our childhood, but of ourselves. “When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility,” Wilson writes. “It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss.”
* In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false. It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck. Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves. Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.
* What a weird coincidence, ten straight record warm months in a row.
* Appalachia in the Anthropocene: When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years. Ice in the Anthropocene. Oil in the Anthropocene. Boulder-Hurling Megawaves in the Anthropocene. Cli-Fi in the Anthropocene.
* “There are no plausible scenarios in which climate stabilization is compatible with a pace of capital accumulation required for economic and political stability under a capitalist system.” Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.
* How are the political effects of “terrorism” produced?
* #altac
* A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* The Christians, the Soviets, and the Bible.
* It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
* Game theory and the GOP nomination. Can’t #StopTrump? Third parties: a beginner’s guide. Of course, there’s always Plan B. Or Plan C.
* I, Cthulhu, endorse Donald Trump.
* BART Social Media Intern ’16.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
* A Brief History of Sabotage.
* Twilight of Gawker: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit.
* Sea World Promises to Acquire No New Orcas. Why SeaWorld is ending its killer whale program, in one brutal chart.
* Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.
* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.
* A book length history of abolition.
* More from the death of psychology.
* Well, he tried: the Obama legacy.
* The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana.
* The stock market is a sucker’s bet.
* What we talk about when we talk about jobs.
* These measures seem harsh, but if Trump really is a sui generis evil, then unprecedented and difficult measures are called for. If we’re not willing to make and carry through with such threats, does that mean that we don’t really view him as a sui generis evil? That this is just the latest thing we’re willing to humor for the sake of family peace and avoiding social awkwardness?
* Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings. I’m currently in the process of filing a request with the chalk administration office so I can respond to this with the detail and attention it deserves.
* What if physical activity doesn’t help people lose weight?
* Duke’s non-tenure-track faculty have unionized.
* They found Himmler’s occult book stash.
* “Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms.”
* Inside the Crazy Back-Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship With Cuba.
* Hackers ‘could take over your dildo and make it go berserk’, expert warns.
* Reading Calvin and Hobbes in Korea.
* I’ll be 100% honest, you had me at hello.
* And the best fantasy series you’ve never heard of is getting a second chance at a film franchise. This time it will work for sure!
Friday Links!
* Terrible news from UWM: The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) is facing an unprecedented attack on its very existence.
* CFP for SLSA 2016: “Creativity.”
* The shift from a subordinate learner as a grad student to a would-be peer on the job market is one of the most predictable traumas in an academic’s life, inducing professional and emotional distress in almost everyone who encounters it. I think this is true, but I wish we would encourage graduate students not to think of themselves so much as students in the first place.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on the Game of Fibble. Played on a Scrabble board.
* Raucous confrontation at SF State over ethnic studies cuts.
* Melissa Click has been fired by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.
* Washington State Prof Charged With $8M Research Fraud.
* Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico (R-Grayson) said that books such as “Beloved” plant the seeds of evil in the minds of young people. This country’s gone completely mad.
* A 150-Year Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis.
* Nuclear waste dumped illegally in Ky. Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years. Lead Warnings Issued for Pregnant Women, Kids in Jackson, Mississippi. Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns. America’s airlines are introducing a class below economy. America is pulling apart.
* A woman who was arrested at a hospital over the summer for failing to pay court fines died the next day because she was deprived of water at the Charleston County jail, her family’s attorneys said Wednesday.
* We’ve all thought about it: High School Honors Student Was Actually a Creepy Adult Pretending to Be a Kid.
* Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.
* This goes with another point: drones are a signal departure from the impersonal destruction that typifies modern technologically advanced warfare, in which the attacker rarely perceives his individual victims. The drone pilot, in contrast, even though he is thousands of miles away, spends many hours closely observing his victim and those near him, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The stories are about both the killers and the killed.
* A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. Counterpoint: A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.
* The Mirror Universe: A Historical Analysis.
* How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story.
* “Asteroid Will Pass Agonizingly Close To Earth.”
* In this article Huntington’s disease becomes the core of the case for editing genes, against even blindness on the other side. I wrote about it!
* Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.
* “I felt nothing,” she told me, smiling. “He was a dog thief, after all.”
* Finally we find that 38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* Americans first learn about slavery as children, before adults are willing to explain finance capital or rape. By high school, young adults are ready to hear about sexual violence as an element of slavery and about how owners valued their property, but there’s no level of developmental maturity that prepares someone to grasp systemized monstrosity on this scale. Forced labor we can understand—maybe it’s even a historical constant so far. Mass murder too. But an entire economy built on imprisoning and raping children? One that enslaved near 40 percent of the population? Even for the secular, only religious words seem to carry enough weight: unholy, abomination, evil.
* Plan C: The top secret Cold War plan for martial law in the USA.
* The Huntington honors Octavia Butler. And from the archives! My writeup on the Butler papers at the Huntington.
* The first issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Feeding English Majors in the 21st Century.
* Chicago State University in danger of closing: Alumni speak out.
* CFP: Fantasies of Contemporary Culture. Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.” MUHuCon 2016. Feminist Review: Dystopias and Utopias.
* Melissa Click has now been suspended, after being charged with third degree assault.
* A University Softens a Plan to Cut Tenured Faculty, but Professors Remain Wary.
* Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on ‘Feminist Fog’ Sparks an Uproar.
* How startling, unique cuts have transformed Louisiana’s universities.
* Is It Discriminatory to Require Peer Review?
* 2.5 million men ‘have no close friends.’
* Sanders and the Theory of Change: Radical Politics for Grown-Ups.
* Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination.
* How to pair wine with your favorite Girl Scout cookies.
* How Intellectuals Create a Public.
* Long Before Helping Flint, Michigan Officials Were Shipping Clean Water to Their Own Workers. Flint’s Bottom Line. What went wrong in Flint. Flint Residents Told That Their Children Could Be Taken Away If They Don’t Pay For City’s Poison Water. Report: ‘Every Major US City East of the Mississippi’ Is Underreporting Heavy Metals In Its Water. It’s everywhere. “Milwaukee taking steps to prevent lead from getting in water.”
* And elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: FBI arrests suspect who allegedly wanted to cause mass terrorism in Milwaukee. MPS as “national disgrace.” ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Milwaukee leaders speak out against deadly rise in car thefts. Have I mentioned we’re hiring?
* Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show.
* What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers.
* The Difference a Mutant Makes.
* See? It’s good that I’m like this.
* Suggested Amazon warning labels.
* Richard Feynman, “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle.”
* Rhode Island: Children Under 10 Shall Not Be Left Home Alone, Even Briefly.
* Sea level rise from ocean warming underestimated, scientists say.
* Climate dystopia is here: Zika virus prompts calls for women to stop having babies.
* Why science-fiction writers find it so hard to discuss climate tech.
* Racial harmony in a Marxist utopia: how the Soviet Union capitalised on US discrimination.
* Linguists Analyze Every Disney Princess Movie, to Somewhat Depressing Results.
* List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.
* Everything’s fine: Hillary’s team copied intel off top-secret server to email.
* Constitutional Convention 2016.
* Today in Doctor Who fandom: The Season of River Song. And then there was Chibnall.
* Fictional Games From Epic Fantasy Books. A People’s History of Board Games.
* Here’s why we’re attracted to people of a similar height, scientists say.
* Former NFL Player Tyler Sash Had CTE When He Died At Age 27.
* A dark, gritty Hanna-Barbera reboot.
* Airbnb makes half its SF money with illegal listings.
* Trailer with $70,000 worth of cheese stolen in Wisconsin. And that’s only the second-largest cheese heist in the state this week.
* Nearly $50,000 In Bull Semen Stolen From Turlock Truck.
* The final days of Al Jazeera America.
* Twilight of the sleazy professor.
* The FBI Claims Not to Have a File on David Bowie.
* Meet the Americans Who Moved to Europe and Went AWOL on Their Student Loans.
* And there is no politics — only LEGO.
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
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.”
* 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…
