Posts Tagged ‘freedom’
Monday Links!
* Just came across this card game as part of an editing project I’m working on: The Quiet Year.
The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a community living after the collapse of civilization, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every action is set against a backdrop of dwindling time and rising concern.
* The fact is that there is no excess in teaching critical analysis – in an era of increasing political propaganda and weakening democratic bonds it’s estimably necessary. We teach how to critically read culture – including movies, comics, and television – not because we don’t acknowledge the technical greatness of a Shakespeare, but in addition to it. Contrary to Douthat’s stereotypes, there’s not an English professor alive who doesn’t understand Shakespeare’s technical achievements when compared to lesser texts, but we understand that anything made by people is worthy of being studied because it tells us something about people. That is the creed of Terrence when he wrote that “I am human and I let nothing which is human be alien to me” – no doubt Douthat knows the line. Did I mention that he went to Harvard?
* How College Became a Commodity.
* Price of admission to Johns Hopkins just went up.
* William Gibson: We Are All Science Fiction Writers Now.
* Danger.
* Most people think capitalism does more harm than good, survey shows.
* Tech Companies Want to Run Our Cities. A Georgia town welcomed America’s largest coal plant. Now, residents worry it’s contaminating their water. Rich people live longer and have 9 more healthy years than poor people, according to new research. The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration. Climate change won’t result in a new normal but in constant, horrifying new disasters.
* The Vanishing Executive Assistant: The erosion of jobs that gave women without college degrees a career path happened in dribs and drabs but is as dramatic as the manufacturing decline.
* Virginia Braces for Arrival of Pro-Gun Militias Amid State of Emergency.
* Hunger Striker Nearing Death in ICE Custody: “I Just Want Freedom.”
* The trouble with crime statistics.
* There’s a reason why the royals are demonised. But you won’t read all about it.
* Yet the politically engaged have also taken to believing that electability is a stable and perhaps even measurable quality innate to the candidates themselves. This belief persists despite the victory, in that election, of a man who was widely considered one of the most unelectable candidates ever to seek the presidency. Now many of the sages who rendered that judgment have reconvened to tell us Donald Trump can only be beaten by someone matching a profile—white, male, moderate—that has not won Democrats the presidency in 24 years.
* If you’re going to listen to the endorsement of a neoliberal with terrible opinions, at least make it Matt Yglesias!
* I’m continually amazed that Hollywood as been so slow to adapt Vaughn’s comics, but Ex Machina is a good one and Oscar Isaacs will give it some real juice. Time to reread!
* News you can use: the forever war between “come” and “cum.”
* Real life horror stories: Symphysiotomy – Ireland’s brutal alternative to caesareans.
* Panicking About Your Kids’ Phones? New Research Says Don’t.
* I was way ahead of the game on this: Lego sets its sights on a growing market: Stressed-out adults.
* And a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Sunday Links!
* Nintendo Labo looks amazing. I’ve already preordered both kits…
* From the AAUP: A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics.
* Among the first-time nominees for the 1967 prize, writes M.A. Orthofer for Literary Saloon, are “future winners Saul Bellow and Claude Simon, as well as Jorge Amado, Jean Genet, György Lukács — and the (as best I can tell) last surviving nominee, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” Other names on the list include “Auden, Beckett, Ionesco, Kawabata, Mishima, Montale, Moravia, Neruda, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Simenon, and J.R.R.Tolkien.” Also on the list, writes Alison Flood for The Guardian, is “Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year,” 1968.
* The drought-stricken city announced on Thursday that it will begin marking 200 collection points where its 3.7 million residents will be required to queue for a rationed supply of water on “Day Zero” – currently forecast to be April 21. If it happens, Cape Town would become the first major city in the world to shut down entirely the supply of running water in all of its homes.
* Kylo Ren destroying the Millennium Falcon in the trailer is a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
* Break your phone addiction by turning your screen to grayscale.
* The sexual assault backlash is coming. Here’s how to respond.
* 14 on MSU staff got Nassar warnings over 2 decades.
* Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?
* Charter schools can never fail, they can only be failed.
* Too late, Delta tries to put the “comfort animal” genie back in the bottle.
* US border patrol routinely sabotages water left for migrants, report says. Deputy shoots, kills 16-year-old boy during scuffle at courthouse. This Is What a White Supremacist Department of Justice Looks Like.
* Within Reach: The transgender community fights for health care.
* New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy.
* Porn and the bomb, by the numbers.
* It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
* How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s.
* De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness at LARB.
* 9 Times People Were Actually Murdered By Their Clothes.
* What radicalized you? Calvin and Hobbes.
* And a happy, happy birthday to the Dax symbiont, born in 2018.
Monday Jr. Links!
* Who knew my politics has a name?
* Not Just Being Right, But Getting Free: Reflections on Class, Race, and Marxism. The incredible lost history of how “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.” What Was Postraciality?
* Detroit’s Underground Economy: Where Capitalism Fails, Alternatives Take Root.
* What coastal elites don’t get about heartland nihilism.
* Trump’s tax cuts would give the poor $40 each and the ultrarich $940,000.
* Jeff Sessions wants police to take more cash from American citizens.
* The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.
* The secret life of USC med school dean.
* The Horror Novel You’ll Never Have to Live is getting its dark, gritty reboot.
* An Oral History of The Simpsons’ Classic Planet of the Apes Musical.
* In Heaven, there is no pain.
* This podcast interview with Zeynep Tufecki on persuasion and control is pretty chilling, especially about the dystopian possibilities of microtargeted algorithmic messaging.
* George Lucas finally made a change to Star Wars I approve of.
* Weird Radio Signals Detected from Nearby Red Dwarf Star.
But if you’re getting the urge to invoke E.T., temper it: “In case you are wondering, the recurrent aliens hypothesis is at the bottom of many other better explanations,” Mendez wrote.
Get lost, buzzkill! This is happening.
July the 5th Be With You Links
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose “job hunt” turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my “individualized” health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* * The “mass graves” story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution.Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman’s name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we know her story?
* CTRL-F “rape” CTRL-F “slave” CTRL-F “Hemings”
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings’s slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
* Dear TNI Contributors, Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, too.
* In sum, here’s what they found: If you’re going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* ‘Beta Males’ Want To Kill Women Because They Can’t Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn’t? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don’t ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don’t worry folks; we’ve got this.
It’s called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of ’90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn’t die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don’t speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don’t speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don’t Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
Thursday Links!
* Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.
* Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio.
* Indeed, this kind of repression is perhaps more sinister because it ropes you into participating in your own silencing. You become the policeman in your own head. When considering whether to attend a demonstration, the powerful internal suggestion is that, even if you do everything “right”—even if you are being peaceful but just happen to be in the same vicinity as someone who isn’t—you could get caught up in a costly legal battle and face serious fines, even jail time. Your entire life could be turned upside down. You might be left alone. But it’s impossible to know—and the only way to be sure is to stay home. You still have the “freedom” to choose, but fully exercising that freedom amounts to playing Russian roulette with an entity all too eager to take that freedom away if you get caught standing near a smashed window. So, really, how much freedom do you have?
* The government is spying on journalists to find leakers.
* Not exactly happily, I found this AAUP unpacking of procedural issues in the recent John McAdams decision pretty persuasive.
* An oral history of “The Inner Light.” The second-best discussion of “The Inner Light” you’ll see this year!
* Monopoly vs. the Nazis: How British intelligence used board games to thwart the Germans.
* How Jalada Is a “Revolution Uniting African Literature.”
* Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting. Here’s why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner. More. Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation. They’re also looking into Trump’s personal attorney.
* Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules.
* “He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,” says someone who speaks with the President. “I see him emotionally withdrawing. He’s gained weight. He doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts.” This is the most relatable Trump has ever been.
* Rise and shine, campers, ’cause it’s coooooold out there today.
* Don’t put ground wasp nest on your vagina to tighten muscles, warns gynecologist.
* California Single Payer Is a No-Brainer.
* If you want a vision of every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.
* SMBC roundup! We discovered a new form of ethical animal consumption. The older you are, the more people you have to deal with, so the number of lies to tends to go up quadratically. The anti-status-quo society. But a strange thing happened. Quantum hypocrisy. Marine biology. Ontology and the barbecue. Neoliberal magic. No funeral. You too.
* Confidence. Never corner a teacher. Flirting and coquettery. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should. Or, Twitter.
* The visit is intended to focus attention on the estimated more than 230 military veterans deported from the U.S. and on the need for a more rigorous process to ensure legal residents recruited with promises of citizenship are naturalized.
* Man Faces Deportation After Failing to Pay Fare on Minneapolis Light Rail.
* “Fearless Girl” is rapidly becoming an entire syllabus in the theory of art.
* More Than One-Third of Teen Girls Have Experienced Depression, Study Finds. When you have numbers like this you have to conclude that the problem isn’t the girls.
* In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives comics’ dead women their voices back. Buy it here!
* Suffering Sappho! The Tortured History of Female Superheroes.
* If only there were an appropriate Marx quote for this.
* On taking candy from a baby.
* A vaccine for denialism? I’m skeptical.
* Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* 1 in every 4 children robbed of their childhoods.
* “Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.”
* The patent and copyright systems are clear examples of how the distribution of income is determined by the rules put in place as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the “free market.” There is nothing about the laws of the economy that says the government has to grant these monopolies, and it certainly was not a natural process through which their length and scope came to be extended in the last four decades.
* So you were buddies with a Nazi.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* And a smart think piece from the archives: Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context. More relevant now than ever…
Wednesday Links, Supplemental
* Dubious distinction watch: Marquette is once again one of FIRE’s top ten worst colleges for free speech.
* The “bunnies” survey from Mount St. Mary’s is apparently up at Scribd. It’s truly incredible to me that university lawyers signed off on this scheme, on the level of either theory or implementation, if indeed they did.
* What is a university, that faculty are not employees who can be fired in this way? What is a university, that students are not customers who can be dismissed when serving them is judged bad for the bottom line? What is a university, that administrators aren’t bosses to whom faculty and students have to answer? What is a university, that faculty—and their students—are the university, and not just those who work, and pay tuition, on its behalf?
* Dystopia now: Bosses Harness Big Data to Predict Which Workers Might Get Sick. Or Pregnant, But Who’s Counting.
* Elsewhere on the dystopia beat: A Hospital Paralyzed by Hackers. UC Says You Can’t Put a Price on Spying on Your Workers for No Reason. And just as the Founders intended: The FBI Is Using a 1789 Law to Force Apple to Unlock the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone.
* Could it be that imposing unelected kleptocrats on cities has a dark side?
* Interesting stuff via @reclaimUC: Public Research Universities: Understanding the Financial Model.
* The Lovecraftian sublime: What Happens When You Zoom in Too Much on Google Maps. Elsewhere in the mathematical sublime: What different novels look like with everything removed but punctuation.
* timezones are a lie good timezone truth
* Black and Latino Voters Sway From Clinton to Sanders. Sanders, Clinton in dead heat nationwide. But will Elbowsgate bring down Bernie? What he’s accomplished is genuinely incredible, even if I still can’t envision any scenario in which they would ever allow him to actually be the nominee.
* “Socialist snow on the streets / Socialist talk in the Maverick Bookstore / Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops.” When Allen Ginsberg Wrote a Poem about Bernie Sanders.
* Dream job alert:UMaine announces Stephen King professorship. But I think you’ll find the post comes with… certain unusual requirements.
* And the kids are all right: Lake Superior State University has eliminated 8 AM classes.
Thursday Links!
* I’ll be speaking next Thursday at “Between Activism and Apocalypse: The Work of Margaret Atwood” at Indiana University. The schedule for the symposium is here.
* CFP: Stage The Future 2: The Second International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre.
* SF short-short of the day: Isaac Asimov’s “Silly Asses.”
* Here’s the calendar of events for C21 this semester.
* “Things like computer vision are starting to work; speech recognition is starting to work There’s quite a bit of acceleration in the development of AI systems,” says Bart Selman, a Cornell professor and AI ethicist who was at the event with Musk. “And that’s making it more urgent to look at this issue.” AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds.
* Of course it’s already worse than you think.
* Elsewhere in mad billionaire news: Internet! in! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
* Gender Differences in the Road to the Doctoral Degree. Less support, more debt, more time to degree.
* Forbidden Planet reviews Richard McGuire’s incredible graphic novel Here.
* Hours After State Of The Union, Senate Targets National Parks. Once again, it’s always worse than you think.
* Saul Goodman, the last difficult man.
* A smart observation from Peter Paik: “Common Core teaches students that there is only one way to read a text (to glean information) but there are many ways to solve a math problem (the target of much outrage on social media).”
* Some Colleges Are Moving Past Eve Ensler’s “Cisnormative” ‘Vagina Monologues’ — And That’s OK.
* Milestone Media rides again.
* How ‘Harry Potter’ fans won a four-year fight against child slavery.
* English professors combine areas of study for new specialization.
The department, known for its expertise in disability and LGBT studies, is looking to newer faculty to blend the two topics into a common subject area.Robert McRuer, who chairs the English department, said he was the first scholar to combine LGBT studies with disability studies and call it “crip theory.” The theory looks at the histories of and issues within the LGBT and disabled communities, which have both faced marginalization. “Crip” is a term that people with disabilities have “reclaimed,” he said.
Personally I’d send that name back for another round of workshopping, but what do I know.
* Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia.
* I actually always thought Joss should have had a David Boreanaz cameo in the background of the Firefly pilot and then never mention it again.
* Marvel is teasing a big Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths-style reboot, for the first time in its history.
* Simon Pegg is co-writing Star Trek 3. [raises one eyebrow]
* And great news for KSR fans: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project.
* Violent crime on college campuses is decreasing, but the number of sworn and armed police officers on campuses continues to rise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics… Nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities operated full law-enforcement agencies in 2012, and 94 percent of those officers are authorized to use a firearm.
* Meanwhile, on the town and gown beat: NYU decided not to report an attempted murder to the police.
* Abolish college sports watch: Before Gary Andersen goes on, he wants to make one thing clear. A part of his surprising departure from Wisconsin had to do with admission standards.
* When choosing between doing good and doing evil, don’t forget there’s always a third option.
* Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
* And a reminder that SFFTV is looking for your submission for its “Star Trek at 50″ special issue.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction has a pre-order page! Open your wallets! Contact your local librarian! Get your Hugo nomination ballots ready!
* It’s a shame about Joan Rivers. The documentary about her is great. She was good on the Nerdist podcast too.
* Amazing, astounding: The Eaton Collection just got a $3.5 million gift.
* Through its increasing corporatization in the last two decades, the university in the United States has implemented an organizational ideology that has created a climate unfavorable for women faculty. By overvaluing and intensifying managerial principles, the university in the United States has strengthened discursive masculinity and has worsened women faculty’s likelihood of professional advancement. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of managerialism in higher education in the United States is a question of gender equity for the academic profession. Feminist educational scholars have been relatively quiet on the growth of managerialism in the university and its impact on gender equity. In particular, feminist scrutiny of managerialism’s discursive masculinity and its effects on gender equity in the university has been lacking. This conceptual article presents a feminist analysis of managerialism and its implications for women faculty in the United States; it examines how managerial culture and practices adopted by universities have revived, reinforced, and deepened the discourse of masculinity.
* inconsequential research kills don’t inconsequential research today
* The future’s just a little bit janky: Awesome Home-Built Elysium Exoskeleton Lifts 170 Pounds Like Nothing.
* The Freedom to Starve: The New Job Economy.
* California is the state of sunshine, movie stars— and Supermax prisons.
* This 3D-rendered Spider-Woman will haunt your dreams.
* People don’t like Spider-Woman’s butt because of Islam, says illustrator.
* The coming student debt apocalypse.
* The arc of history is long, but: Rams Cut Sam, First Drafted Openly Gay Player.
* In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.
* When police catch “contagious shooting.” Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don’t Count on Seeing the Footage. Police Body Cameras Don’t Address the Real Problem: Police.
* Cop Charged With Sexually Assaulting Eight Women Under Threat of Arrest.
* All about how airlines cancel flights. Okay, but listen, I’m still mad.
* Headlines from the Anthropocene: Drought-Stricken California Makes Historic Move To Regulate Underground Water For The First Time. Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?
* Cataclysm in suburbia: The dark, twisted history of America’s oil-addicted middle class.
* The Moon Landing Went Far Better Than the Practice Landing.
* A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Astronomers Discover A Planetary Impact Outside Our Own Solar System.
* And a radical communist provocation to shake your delicate sensibilities to the core: Shaking Down the Elderly for Student Loan Debt Should Not Be Allowed.
Wed!nes!day! Links!
* The greatest Tumblr of all time forever: Wes Anderson’s X-Men. Above: Bill Murray as sad Professor X.
* A Snowpiercer Thinkpiece, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously, But For Very Serious Reasons.
* Ours is truly an age of miracles: How to cut a bagel into two interlocking rings.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Cheered by tourists, tolerated by regulars, feared by those who frown upon kicks in the face, subway dancers have unwittingly found themselves a top priority for the New York Police Department — a curious collision of a Giuliani-era policing approach, a Bloomberg-age dance craze and a new administration that has cast the mostly school-age entertainers as fresh-face avatars of urban disorder.
* Feminist Science Fiction Is the Best Thing Ever.
* BREAKING: Law school is the absolute worst.
* The Ebola epidemic has reached Lagos. That’s horrifying.
* How NCAA’s Concussion Deal Affects Current, Former, and Future Athletes.
* Spending Shifts as Colleges Compete on Students’ Comfort.
* The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth owes $200,000 in damages to a professor of English who says she was denied a promotion based on her race and gender, a state equal opportunity board has ruled. That’s on top of the board-ordered back pay and promotion the university has already awarded Lulu Sun.
* Can World of Warcraft Save Higher Education? Can it? Can it?
* Write Your Own Irish Memoir!
* Yes we can: Sonic Cannons Are Going To Wreck US East Coast Ecology In Search Of Oil.
* There is ‘No Constitutional Right Not to Become an Informant.’
* The net affect of the ordinance is that most of Milwaukee is off-limits to sex offenders.
* Over the past few weeks the stories of child refugees fleeing unspeakable violence in Central America, as well as their uncertain fate in the hands of U.S. policymakers, has been the focus of headlines around the country. What has been more difficult to follow is what is happening to the influx of refugee mothers who have recently fled to the U.S. with their children, many just toddlers and babies. I went down to Artesia, New Mexico last week to see for myself what has become of these vulnerable families.
* On sticking to your guns: Hess’s Triangle.
* Kapitalism, With Kim Kardashian.
* And, alas, it’s not all good news: BP Oil Spill Is Much Worse Than People Think, Scientists Say.
London, 1772
At the present time, alas, the technology required to automatically collect the required information is beyond our capacity. But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I—one who knows nearly nothing—can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.
Gerry Canavan 