Posts Tagged ‘finance capital’
Sunday Morning Links!
Because Saturday Night Links just weren’t enough.
* Catching Up With the Next Generation of Sci-Fi Writers at the Village Voice.
* My name is Wil Wheaton. I Live With Chronic Depression and Generalized Anxiety. I Am Not Ashamed.
* Diversify your workforce the Marvel way!
“We’re 100 percent committed to diversity…Marvel is the world outside your window and we want not only our characters but our creative talent to reflect that world and it hasn’t been an easy road to be honest with you. Going back to the 60s when Marvel were created it was created by a number of white men here in New York City who were working in our studio… But now, we do not have any artists that work in Marvel. All our writers and artists work — are freelancers that live around the world so our talent base has diversified almost more quickly than our character base has.”
* Accountancy used to be boring – and safe. But today it’s neither. Have the ‘big four’ firms become too cosy with the system they’re supposed to be keeping in check? The financial scandal no one is talking about.
* The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation. Meanwhile, they keep openly admitting obstruction, and nothing matters.
* During one December 2013 hearing, still available online, Scott questioned an applicant about illegally voting after his release from prison. When the man replied he voted for Scott, the governor chuckled and, seconds later, granted his voting rights.
* I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.
* Families of Four of Eight Students Killed in Santa Fe Shooting Are Suing Gunman’s Parents.
* “All of the theoretical work that’s been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction,” says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “That’s a very shocking state of affairs.” Say what you will about critical theory in the humanities, it’s predicted just about everything that’s happened since…
* The one thing that we can I think be sure of is that if we get a signal, we will know it’s an artificial signal [and not from an astronomical source]. And then we’ll know that we are not alone. Will we ever be able to understand it? I don’t know. The researchers who study alien linguistics.
* The Soviets’ secret map of Seattle tells a lot about us.
* Itsa me!
* And I’d at least give it a watch.
#SFRA2017-turday Links!
* Keep watching #SFRA2017! It’s been a great conference. And it contains gems like this. Two other little theoretical highlights from my scattered live-tweeting:
* The audio from last week’s Octavia Butler conference at the Huntington is now up at Soundcloud. I’m track 7!
* Sci-Fi Legend Samuel R. Delany Doesn’t Play Favorites.
* Will losing health insurance mean more US deaths? Experts say yes. Republicans Left Ron Johnson for Dead Last Year, Now He Could Kill Their Health Care Bill. Crowdfunding is the Sad, Dark Future of Healthcare.
* Trump’s Twitter and the judgment of history. Bill to create panel that could remove Trump from office quietly picks up Democratic support.
* The Internet Is Actually Controlled By 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys.
* After the president’s tweet, I must withdraw my support for everything but his agenda.
* Getting closer and closer to the point where Republicans say it was good that Trump colluded with Putin. This is 100% guaranteed and will be the official position of Your Dad in six months.
* More on the voter suppression commission.
* The Trump Administration Is Using Immigrant Children as Bait to Deport Their Parents. Afghanistan’s All-Girl Robotics Team Can’t Get Visas To The US.
* Why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand running for president? Or is she?
* The moral code of Chinese sex workers.
* Political correctness is destroying this country’s cultural heritage.
* When someone says something mean to me. The kids just call it “Twitter.” And I want your secret.
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”
* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.
* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.
* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.
* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.
* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.
* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.
* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?
* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.
* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.
* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.
* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”
* The paradox of the underperforming professor.
* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.
* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.
“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”
And this used to be a free country.
* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.
* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.
* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.
* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.
* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”
* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.
* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.
* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.
* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.
* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”
* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.
* Point: “The green case for fracking.”
* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.
* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.
* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.
* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.
* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.
* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?
* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.
* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.
* Punishment Park is on YouTube.
* How privilege became a provocation.
* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.
* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.
* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.
* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.
* And they all lived happily ever after.
Weekend Links!
* South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott. The police can’t police themselves. And now the public is too scared to cooperate with them. Police Reform Is Impossible in America. The Police Are America’s Terrorists. Man Who Recorded Walter Scott Murder Is Worried Police May Kill Him. White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.
* Montreal professors stare down riot cops.
* Colleges are raising costs because they can.
* How self-segregation and concentrated affluence became normal in America.
* How to survive a mega-drought.
* The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct.
* In The Midst Of Toxic Oil Spill, Vancouver Announces It Will Go 100 Percent Renewable.
* Report: Hillary Clinton Overlooked Labor Violations After Millions in Donations. Guess what I’m #ready for?
* Is Hillary Clinton even any good at running for president?
* Elizabeth Warren Is Right About Everything.
* The Columbia Report on Rolling Stone‘s Rape Story Is Bad for Journalism.
* The Brontosaurus Is Back. Take that, science!
* A Map Showing UFO Hot Spots Across The United States.
* The analysis concluded that, over the past 10 years, the five pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said in an interview on Wednesday.
* The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early.
* What Was On a 1920s Membership Application for the KKK?
* Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale.
* Wired proves the laws of physics don’t apply to Legolas.
* Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get even more boring spinoff. If that’s possible.
* Memorial for the “Unknown Deserter” – Potsdam, Germany.
* The Photographer Who Took This Picture Barely Escaped With His Life.
* This Probably Made Up Reddit Story About a Potato Is Incredibly Good.
* There’s nothing sweet in life.
* Lili Loofbourow takes the bait on the “is that all there is?” Mad Men and boredom thinkpiece. Also from Lili: You Should Be Watching ‘Fortitude,’ A Murder-Mystery That Makes Climate Change The Real Villain.
* Arrested Development returning for 17 episodes, according to Brian Grazer.
* A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies.
* 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* And I really hope they catch him this time.
Easter Links! Find Them All!
* The 2015 Hugo nominees have been announced, and they’re a mess. The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They’re Only Political. A Note About the Hugo Nominations This Year. The Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voter’s Guide. The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of declares war. “Why I Declined a Hugo Award Nomination.”
* And in response to the question “Well, what should have been nominated for a Hugo?”: “Andromache and the Dragon,” by my brilliant Marquette colleague Brittany Pladek!
* “The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslany”: In portraying a horde of clones on ‘Orphan Black,’ the actress has created TV’s strangest — and most sophisticated — meditation on femininity. And a special bonus companion piece: Meet The Woman (Besides Tatiana Maslany) Who Plays Every Single “Orphan Black” Clone.
* Reddit’s Bizarre, Surreal, Maddening, Hypnotic, Divisive, and Possibly Evil April Fools’ Joke. I’ve become obsessed with this.
* CFP: Ephemeral Television. CFP: Into the Pensieve: The Harry Potter Generation in Retrospect.
* Watching them turn off the Rothkos.
* Somali Militants Kill 147 at Kenyan University.
* Iran’s Been Two Years Away From a Nuclear Weapon for Three Decades. The Iran deal. What if the Iranians are people too?
* So how much money is the NCAA making? In 2010, CBS and Turner Broadcasting gave the NCAA $10.8 billion for a fourteen-year broadcast monopoly on March Madness games. Estimated ad revenue for the 2013 tournament reached $1.15 billion, while ticket revenue brought in another $71.7 million. Last year no less than thirty-five coaches pulled down salaries higher than $1 million before bonuses; Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski topped the list with an income of more than $9.6 million.
* Guarding against the errant, suicidal murderous pilot belongs to a category called “wicked problems” — the complexity of the system and the conflicting incentives mean that every solution introduces another set of problems, so the only way forward is always going to be an imperfect one. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is that this once again reveals how, as humans, we are lousy at risk assessment, and also lousy of accepting this weakness. The problem is wicked, but its occurrence is so rare that it is almost unheard of — partly why it terrifies us so. Our imagination, biases and fears are terrible guides to what should actually be done to keep us safer, and this has significant consequences in a whole host of fields, ranging from terrorism to childcare to health-care.
* So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we’ve got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.
* How the Slave Trade Built America.
* But unlike its predecessor, the show has no obvious narrative progression. Nacho’s important, or he’s not; the Kettlemans are half the show, or maybe we should care about Sandpiper. There are flashbacks to Jimmy’s past where Bob Odenkirk is playing either 25 or 57—a savvy criminal or a neophyte screw-up. In the lead-up to Better Call Saul, there were theories that the show would be funnier than Breaking Bad (maybe a sitcom?) or more procedural than Breaking Bad (maybe The Good Wife for bad boys?) or more episodic (like X-Files with lawyers!). None of that is true, and all of that is true. It’s interesting, but not the way great TV is interesting. Better Call Saul reminds me more of Treme or John From Cincinnati: post-masterpiece meanders.
* In TV’s Silver Age, a logjam of shows that are ‘pretty good,’ but not great.
* Here’s A Map That Shows All The Future Megacities From Science Fiction.
* Can science fiction be a form of social activism? Walidah Imarisha thinks so, and she’s recruited everyone from LeVar Burton to Mumia Abu-Jamal to help her prove it.
* Johns Hopkins Faces $1-Billion Lawsuit Over U.S. Experiments in Guatemala.
* sirens.io, blogging from seven years in the future.
* Are Aliens Behind Mysterious Radio Bursts? Scientists Weigh In.
* Calif. Governor Orders Mandatory Water Restrictions For 1st Time In History. It’s up to us to singlehandedly save california from drought by turning off the tap when we brush our teeth! California is pumping water that fell to Earth 20,000 years ago. California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth. R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse. Children of the Drought.
* Starting this week, 25,000 households in Baltimore will suddenly lose their access to water for owing bills of $250 or more, with very little notice given and no public hearings.
* Oceans might take 1,000 years to recover from climate change, study suggests.
* Drug field tests used by cops are so bad they react positively to air, soap, candy.
* Trolley Problem: The Game. Advanced Trolley Problems.
* Scott Walker’s budget cuts $5.7 million from pollution control efforts.
* The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On A Theory We Know Is Wrong. Most antidepressant users have never had depression.
* 12 New Science Fiction Comics You Absolutely Need to be Reading.
* Hero Price Is Right model begins the revolution by just giving away a car.
* First as an unexpectedly great show, then as I don’t know it doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
* New report says manned Mars mission could reach orbit by 2033, land by 2039.
* Clarke makes her point not with stirring courtroom rhetoric or devastating legal arguments but by a process of relentless accretion, case by case, win by win. This is her cause. Because if the state cannot put these defendants to death, then how can it put anyone to death? Thirty-five executions took place in the United States in 2014 for crimes that form an inventory of human cruelty—and yet few were as willful and egregious as those committed by Judy Clarke’s clients.
* Here is an example of the priorities in New York state’s budget: There is no increase in the minimum wage, but purchasers of yachts that cost more than $230,000 are exempt from the sales tax.
* U.S. Court Officially Rules that Friendship Is Worthless.
* Tales from the Trenches: I was SWATed.
* Texas Just Does Not Care How Hot Its Prisons Get.
* Duke tries throwing polio at cancer, as you do.
* Interesting article on design: The Secret History of the Apple Watch.
* Senate Republicans say the current system is unfair because rural residents are effectively supporting urban counties’ schools and services when they shop there. Yes, that’s literally how the system is intended to function.
* The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust.
* So you want to resurrect a college.
* These Slow-Motion Videos of Fluids Vibrating on Speakers Are Wonderful.
* Now Full House, and the Muppets too.
* These Photos Of Melanie Griffith And Her Pet Lion In The 1970s Are Everything. (UPDATE: Here’s the article that seems to be the original source, plus a little bit on Roar’s rerelease. Noteworthy lines from Wikipedia: “Over 70 of the cast and crew were injured during the production of this film.”)
* Landlord Sends Man $1,200 Bill To Cleanup His Roommate’s Blood, Who Was Shot Dead By Police.
* Stan VHS, A Tumblr Blog Featuring 1980s-Style VHS Cover Art for Modern Television Shows and Movies.
* SF Short of the Weekend: “Burnt Grass.”
* …and your short short of the weekend: “No One Is Thirsty.”
* I finally found enough time to be annoyed by Obama interviewing David Simon about The Wire.
* And because you demanded it: An oral history of Max Headroom.
Wednesday Links!
* Today at Marquette! Dr. Robin Reid, “Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.”
* Tomorrow at Marquette! The English Department pop culture group geeks out over The Hunger Games.
* Solving prostitution the Swedish way.
“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 13: Engagement.
The point of engagement in this sense is not to involve the public in making decisions, but make them feel involved in decisions that others will make. That this may be done with the best of intentions is important, of course, but ultimately besides the point. Like “stakeholder,” “engagement” thrives in a moment of political alienation and offers a vocabulary of collaboration in response. So if civic engagement is in decline, one thing that is not is the ritualistic performance of civic participation. The annual election-cycle ritual in American politics is a case in point here. In one populist breath, we routinely condemn the corruption of politicians who, it is said, never listen to the average voter. And in the next, we harangue the average voter for failing to participate in a process we routinely describe as corrupted. So it’s not the “apathy” or “disengagement” of the public that we should lament or criticize—it’s the institutions that give them so many reasons to be disengaged in the first place.
* A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks.
JR: In the past you have said that you are a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Could you expand on this a bit: why are you pessimistic about the short term? What changes do you anticipate taking place between the near and far futures that change your pessimism to optimism?
IB: On a personal level, it’s damage limitation; a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we’ve got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren’t terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we’ll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia, in other words, muddling through despite ourselves.
* “Gamechanging” climate deal that seems radically insufficient to the scale of the crisis. What could go wrong?
* Think Progress has a good rundown on King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare. Eight Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About the Supreme Court’s Next Obamacare Case.
* The growth of auxiliary activities was the primary driver in spending increases by the schools, the report concludes. From 2005 to 2012, $3.4 billion was spent on instructional and research facilities. The cost for nonacademic auxiliary facilities was $3.5 billion from 2002 to 2012. Limit athletic fees, check construction to control college costs, study says.
* The State Funding Sleight-Of-Hand: Some Thoughts on UC’s Proposed Tuition Hike.
* The Vitae Adjunct Retirement Survey.
* ProQuest says it won’t sell dissertations through Amazon anymore.
* Why Wall Street Loves Hillary
* It’s a start: Massachusetts Town Proposes First Complete Ban On All Tobacco.
* Inside America’s inept nuclear corps.
* The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is under attack by critics who say academe is colluding with the mainstream media to push a feminist agenda in video games. How deep does this conspiracy go?
* When we think about the collapse of communism, we should emphasize and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy — not free enterprise.
* Can You Gentrify America’s Poorest, Most Dangerous City?
* Today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced through the New York Times that it may stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession, opting instead to issue tickets without detaining the suspect. This would feel like an important step toward reasonable weed policy if New York state hadn’t already mandated it 37 years ago.
* The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.
* One in every 8 arrests was for a drug offense last year.
* Milwaukee Public Museum’s Sci-Fi Film Fest gathers large audience.
* Running a school on $160 a year.
* Is Pre-K academically rigorous enough? That’s a real question this real article is asking.
* Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.
* Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this?
* Also on the subject of Lena Dunham: this is an extremely clickbaity headline, but the testimony from a juvenile sex offender is fascinating and horrible.
* Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.
* In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford. The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have. The result is a fearful society in which poorer parents are cast as threats to their own children.
* Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia.
* Scientists Have Finally Found The First Real Reason We Need To Sleep.
* Wes Anderson might be making another movie with puppets.
* In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation. One of these days, the crew will be dispersed. The Enterprise will be put in mothballs. Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in. But for now, their voyages continue.
* Peak Prequel: Sony Rumored to Be Prepping Aunt May Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie.
* And the best news ever: HBO Will Make Asimov’s Foundation With Interstellar‘s Jonathan Nolan. I may lose my mind over this show. I may even do a podcast. And a lot of what went wrong with Interstellar wasn’t even Jonathan Nolan’s fault!
Monday, Monday
* The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
* The exciting return of “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional,” and friends, this one could be a doozy. Here Is What Will Happen If The Supreme Court Strikes Down Obamacare’s Subsidies. And from the archives: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.
* It’s baaaaack: A totally legal, totally shady way that Republicans could ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
* The Quest for Restoration, or, Gone Girl and Interstellar Considered as the Same Film.
* As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying – from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola, or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we’re less accustomed to consider the risks of living long – of outliving our retirement savings.
* Is Serial problematic? Serial: listeners of podcast phenomenon turn detectives – with troubling results. What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much. Alas, I listened to this this weekend and got hooked despite all my critical detachment.
* Doritos-Flavored Mountain Dew Is Real, PepsiCo Confirms. This is unfathomable. There are some lines never meant to be crossed.
* Can anyone even remember postmodernism?
* World Cup Watch: North Koreans working as ‘state-sponsored slaves’ in Qatar.
* Against spoiler alerts, in the LARoB.
The rise of spoiler-free criticism seems like a move away from criticism as art — and a move toward criticism as an arm of fandom marketing. It’s fine to not want spoilers in your criticism. But there is something distasteful about the assumption that providing spoilers is some sort of lapse in ethics or etiquette. If you don’t treat art first as a consumer product, the spoiler-free doctrine seems to suggest, you’re being cruel and unfair. But critics really are not under any obligation to like what you like or to treat art with one particular kind of reverence. In the name of preserving suspense, the command to remain spoiler-free threatens to make criticism and art more blandly uniform, and less surprising.
* On artificial intelligence in board games.
* Wikipedia’s list of deleted articles with freaky or inappropriate titles.
* Tig Notaro, national treasure.
* For example, research in economics has shown that the wage gap between lighter- and darker-skinned African Americans is nearly as large as the gap between African Americans and whites. In our analysis of data from theNational Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we found that the darkest-skinned African American girls were three times more likely to be suspended at school than their lighter-skinned counterparts — a disparity that is again roughly equal to the gap between blacks and whites. Alternatively put, while African American girls are three times more likely to be suspended than white girls, the darkest-skinned African American girls are several times more likely to experience suspension.
* A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
* Frenzied Financialization: Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer. Finance as a New Terrain for Progressive Urban Politics.
* Former Football Player Sues UNC Over Fake Courses. A University President’s Comments on Rape. Brown University Student Tests Positive For Date-Rape Drug at Frat Party.
* Occasion #7 is all about debt.
* Cloud computing: the race to zero.
* Telepathy is now possible using current technology.
* Let me pause and say here: of course I love many literary dudes. They are not, all of them, smug and condescending. But let me say something else: I thought for a while that the really terrible ones were time limited — that they were products of the 1950s, of a particular time period, and that it really was a viable strategy to just talk about snacks until they all retired. But I have now realized this is not true; new terrible smug dudes are coming up through the ranks. Hydra-like, smug dude attitude keeps springing forth from itself.
* The corals that came back from the dead.
* Billboard ads are expensive to construct, maintain and rent, but they don’t serve any functional purposes — so Michal Polacek redesigned them to house the homeless. The next best thing to just abolishing homelessness.
* In 2012, DiMaggio released the results of his own Safe Routes to School program. Child pedestrian injury rates had plummeted, falling to half their original numbers. “We showed that kids can still be kids,” says DiMaggio. “They can walk and bike to school and be safe.” The project’s federal funding expired last year, however, and no plans exist to extend the initiative to areas beyond the immediate vicinity of the selected schools.
* Obama endorses net neutrality.
* Incredibly misleading ad placement at Amazon inside the book description makes every book seem like it was an Amazon Editors’ Favorite Book of the Year.
* “But a deep look at Mars One’s plan and its finances reveals that not only is the goal a longshot, it might be a scam.” No! No! I won’t believe it!
* How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in 2014’s Close Races?
Monday Morning Links
* Local police deploying SWAT teams against friendly poker games and barbering without a license. Insanity.
* Over the past year and a half, in the wake of Thomas Philippon and Ariel Resheff’s estimate that 2% of U.S. GDP was wasted in the pointless hypertrophy of the financial sector, evidence that our modern financial system is less a device for efficiently sharing risk and more a device for separating rich people from their money–a Las Vegas without the glitz–has mounted.
* Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business.
* How the University Works, 1965: Football Game Continues as School Burns. More links below the picture.
* Russian Billionaire Dmitry Itskov Plans on Becoming Immortal by 2045.
* I’m nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party.
The Ruling Party doesn’t represent the general electorate, but a special electorate: the Alien Invaders and their symbiotes, the consultants and contractors and think-tank intellectuals who smooth the path to acquisition of government contracts or outsourcing arrangements — the government being the consumer of last resort in late phase consumer capitalism — arrangements which are supported and made profitable by government subsidies extracted from taxpayer revenue and long-term bonds. The Ruling Party is under no pressure to conform to the expectations of the general electorate because whoever the electors vote for, representatives of the Ruling Party will win; the only question is which representatives, which is why they are at such pains to triangulate on a common core of policies that don’t risk differentiating them in a manner which might render them repugnant to some of the electorate.
* To make matters even worse for restaurant workers and diners, a spate of “preemption bills”—which bar localities from makings laws requiring paid sick leave—has been surging through state legislatures with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Restaurant Association, one of ALEC’s members. The first of these bills was passed in May 2011 in Wisconsin. Last week, Gov. Rick Scott signed Florida’s version into law, making it the eighth state to preemptively block paid sick leave for its workers (and the 13th to try) in just two years.
* A depiction of the logical (and historical) tendency of the capitalist system to collapse.
* Everything old is new again: Female inmates sterilized in California prisons without approval.
* A visual history of Bruce Springsteen.
* NSA Rejecting Every FOIA Request Made by U.S. Citizens. The innocent have nothing to fear…
* The Southwest’s Forests May Never Recover from Megafires.
* And another great Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I could post one of these every day.
And Somehow Even More Still for Friday
* Cut from the top to save UC.
The current University of California Office of the President, or UCOP, is a labyrinthine bureaucracy that takes money from the 10 campuses where actual teaching and research happen. Instead of investing more authority in a president whose ambit is already absurdly huge — an annual budget of $24 billion, 230,000 students, 191,000 faculty and staff — the regents should scale back UCOP and empower each campus to make even more of its own decisions.
* The case for S4 of Arrested Development as masterpiece.
* Why Didn’t the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To.
* And MetaFilter has a big post up about major universities running afoul of the Clery Act.
Monday, Monday
* In local news! @baylorstudio and @artmilwaukee win $50,000 Joyce Award to create original work of art in blighted neighborhoods.
* The next Kim Stanley Robinson novel! Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age.
* Is science fiction the future of the novel?
* Student loans: The next housing bubble.
* ‘We Ask That You Do Not Call Us Professor.’
* McSweeney’s: “I’m an English professor in a movie.”
* The University of British Columbia is striking a blow at gender inequity in professors’ pay, promising all tenure-stream female faculty a 2 per cent pay hike by the end of the month – a rare approach expected to cost the school about $2-million this year. I asked on Twitter and nobody answered — is this legal in Canada? I don’t think it would be here.
* Expelled Student Activist Wins $50K Court Judgment Against University President. The president is being held personally liable for his decisions.
An environmental activist expelled from Georgia’s Validosta State University (VSU) has won a $50,000 award in a lawsuit against the university president who kicked him out of school in 2007. In a dramatic rebuke to President Ronald Zaccari, the federal jury that heard the case found Zaccari personally liable for violating Hayden Barnes’ due process rights.
* Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o’clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. The department chair, a plant biologist named Gopi Podila, distributed a printed agenda. Bishop was sitting next to him, in a spot by the door. Inside her handbag was a gun.
* Scenes from the struggle for academic freedom in New York. Much more here.
* School closings are a popular method of cost-cutting for big-city districts, but critics say the savings are exaggerated. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing for up to 100 school closings this year. New York City just announced 26 planned closures.
But studies refute claims of savings. School buildings are difficult to sell. They cost money to maintain, and when vacant can become blights on their communities. Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools in 2008, claiming she would save $23 million—and instead cost the district $40 million.
* The Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S. Football’s death spiral. The Rarest Play in the NFL.
* Capitalism: rise of the machines.
* Being touched against your will has become a twisted rite of passage for American females. It’s a reminder that you’re never safe anywhere. That your body is not really yours—but instead public property, there to be rubbed against by an old man or pinched and videotaped by a young one.
* It was a startling assertion that seemed an about-face from church doctrine: A Catholic hospital arguing in a Colorado court that twin fetuses that died in its care were not, under state law, human beings.
* Communism! S&P To Face Charges From States, U.S. Over Wrongdoing Before Financial Crisis.
* John McCain: the mask slips.
* Our individual perception of global warming is matching up with reality.
* Occupy Buddhism. Relatedly: growing up a Lama in exile.
* The Institute for Centrifugal Research.
We believe that even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind can be diverted via human centrifugalization. Spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-Force will solve every problem.
* Canada ends the penny. This means the U.S. will start talking seriously about ending the penny in about fifty years or so.
* And the Big Picture blog visits the sky.
All the Wednesday Links
* The headline reads, “Student Loan Debt Delinquency Is Much Worse Than We Thought.”
We find that 27 percent of the borrowers have past due balances, while the adjusted proportion of outstanding student loan balances that is delinquent is 21 percent-much higher than the unadjusted rates of 14.4 percent and 10 percent, respectively
Meanwhile, college costs have sextupled since 1985.
* The Supreme Court looks prepared to rule that international law doesn’t apply internationally. Well done, sirs.
* Attorney General Eric Holder concludes no due process is a kind of due process. This whole “rule of law” thing is going great.
* Paul Pillar: We can live with a nuclear Iran. Of course we can.
The simple argument is that Iranian leaders supposedly don’t think like the rest of us: they are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred. On the campaign trail Rick Santorum has been among the most vocal in propounding this notion, asserting that Iran is ruled by the “equivalent of al-Qaeda,” that its “theology teaches” that its objective is to “create a calamity,” that it believes “the afterlife is better than this life,” and that its “principal virtue” is martyrdom. Newt Gingrich speaks in a similar vein about how Iranian leaders are suicidal jihadists, and says “it’s impossible to deter them.”
The trouble with this image of Iran is that it does not reflect actual Iranian behavior. More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one. They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behavior than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife. Iranian rulers may have a history of valorizing martyrdom—as they did when sending young militiamen to their deaths in near-hopeless attacks during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s—but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. In fact, the Islamic Republic’s conduct beyond its borders has been characterized by caution. Even the most seemingly ruthless Iranian behavior has been motivated by specific, immediate concerns of regime survival. The government assassinated exiled Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s, for example, because it saw them as a counterrevolutionary threat. The assassinations ended when they started inflicting too much damage on Iran’s relations with European governments. Iran’s rulers are constantly balancing a very worldly set of strategic interests. The principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.
On the other side, of course, we have the not-at-all-fascistic-sounding slogan “peace through strength.” Occupy Everywhere? What could possibly go wrong?
* Football: It’s worse than you think! Via MetaFilter, with more from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Matt Zoller Seitz on what makes Mad Men great.
* When Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa.
Marquez: Thank you very much. All things considered, I think that if I were Japanese I would be as unyielding as you on [the subject of the bomb]. And at any rate I understand you. No war is good for anybody.
Kurosawa: That is so. The trouble is that when the shooting starts, even Christ and the angels turn into military chiefs of staff.
* How Goldman Sachs does it: they’re on every side of every deal.
* Archie Comics continues to insist on its own relevance: now they’re giving Cheryl Blossom breast cancer.
* I give Colbert the edge over Stewart re: Rush.
* And exactly how long ago was a long time ago in a galaxy far away? io9 is there.
Great Unknown, Han and Chewbacca are forced to make a jump to hyperspace to flee Imperial attackers. (OK yes, we know it’s non-canonical, but this is a thought experiment so just bear with us.) The Millennium Falcon crash lands on Earth, where Han and Chewbacca are attacked by Native Americans. Han receives several arrow wounds in the process, and Chewbacca holds his partner as the last bit of life flees from him. The second half of the story leaps 126 years into the future, with Indiana Jones and Short Round searching for Sasquatch in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, only to find Chewbacca and the bones of Han Solo.
Blaspheme!
Gerry Canavan 