Posts Tagged ‘Fringe’
At Marquette Next Week: The Rise of J.J. Abrams!
POP CULTURE LUNCH #2: THE RISE OF J.J. ABRAMS
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 12 PM – 1 PM
TORY HILL CAFE (IN THE LAW SCHOOL)
In the second of three pop culture lunches this semester, we’ll be discussing the meteoric rise of J.J. Abrams. Abrams (in addition to creating beloved television series like Felicity, Alias, Lost, Person of Interest, and Fringe) has now put in charge of both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises — a pop culture singularity that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. (He’s also recently signed deals attaching him to Mission Impossible and the film versions of Half-Life and Portal. He’s taking over.)
Fans and detractors of all Bad Robot Productions welcome!
As always, this will be a conversation, not a lecture!
Please email me if you think you’ll be coming, just so I can have a rough head-count.
Weekend Links
* The Center for 21st Century Studies has announced its postdoc theme for 2013-2014: “Changing Climates.” Applications due March 1.
* What’s coming out with this UNC rape case is astounding. UNC’s Former Dean of Students Says She Was Forced to Underreport Sexual Assault Cases. And then this, from the assistant vice underprovost of sickening analogies:
“When I went to report my assault in 2007, I asked an administrator what the process would look like,” Clark said. “Instead, that person told me, ‘Rape is like a football game, Annie. If you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback and you’re in charge, is there anything that you would have done differently in that situation?’”
* Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only if They’re Male: A new study of history professors shows that married men get promoted faster than their single colleagues, while the opposite is true for women.
* The union at Kalamazoo Valley Community College launches a food drive for its own adjuncts.
* UC aims to bleed its grad students.
* “Fear and loathing in academia” and “Some historical notes on the decline of the universities,” from anthropologies issue 16: The Neoliberalized, Debt-plagued, Low Wage, Corporatized University. Also: Passing with Pills: Redefining Performance in the Pharmaceuticalized University.
* The CEO of Whole Foods is laughing at you.
* Naked Capitalism on Hayek’s Delusion: The Origins of Neoliberalism: 1, 2, 3. Via MeFi.
* As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the United States, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.
* Theater of Pain: Tom Junod on injury in the NFL.
The perspective of pain is what this story is about. For fans, injuries are like commercials, the price of watching the game as well as harrowing advertisements for the humanity of the armored giants who play it. For gamblers and fantasy-football enthusiasts, they are data, a reason to vet the arcane shorthand (knee, doubtful) of the injury report the NFL issues every week; for sportswriters they are kernels of reliable narrative. For players, though, injuries are a day-to-day reality, indeed both the central reality of their lives and an alternate reality that turns life into a theater of pain. Experienced in public and endured almost entirely in private, injuries are what players think about and try to put out of their minds; what they talk about to one another and what they make a point to suffer without complaint; what they’re proud of and what they’re ashamed by; what they are never able to count and always able to remember
* An oral history of Fringe: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Scandal in Lance-ville! Scandal in Gleetown!
* Well, it’s been a month since @dronestream started and we’re up to January 2011. Two years left.
* Claire Danes performs The Handmaid’s Tale.
* The kids are all right: Barbara Walters interviews a twelve-year-old transgender teen she first interviewed in 2007, when Jazz was six.
* A Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit.
* Rules for kids: The book, discovered by a 20-year-old Walmart employee, Raymond Flores, became an Internet sensation after Flores contacted the media to try to find its owner and its touching rules – including the rules “Don’t bite the dentist” and “If you’re going to wet your bed, wear a pull-up” – went viral.
* Two years before his death, legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov kicked off a TV pilot dedicated to exploring the faint and ever-shifting boundary separating science from science fiction.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, on robots.
More Thursday
* Fringe will get a fifth season.
* How much of the Moon’s surface did the Apollo 11 astronauts actually explore?
* Aside from the slave labor, why manufacture in China? Because that’s where the rare earth minerals are.
* Parks and Recreation creators preposterously claim The Wire as an influence.
* Science proves being bad at math makes you religious. I think I have that right.
* And tomorrow at Duke: the inaugural Novel conference, with Rebecca Walkowitz, Amitav Ghosh, Jacques Rancière, and more.
Friday Everything
* Ralph Nader has found an awesome new way to troll the nation: he will campaign to kill athletic scholarships.
* Fox has renewed Fringe. This is great news—but I still haven’t forgive them for Firefly.
* Vermont’s not green, it’s red: Vermot House passes single-payer health care bill. It’s also expected to pass the state senate, too, which means things are about to get very interesting.
* I haven’t put up anything about Fukushima in a while, but suffice it to say things still sound very bad. (UPDATE: More here.) Nuclear power advocates—who I seem to recall assuring me that nothing bad could possibly happen at Fukushima because of updated, failsafe reactor designs—have now begun assuring me that what happened at Fukushima could never happen again because of updated, failsafe reactor designs. Okay, that ship turned out to be sinkable. But this one…
* Great moments in abuse of power: A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters. Josh Marshall catches the most interesting angle: “the fact that he lists his 18 years of experience working in GOP politics as his experience for doing this sort of stuff.”
* Cheating scandal in the game of kings.
* Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language. It drives me crazy when people don’t speak it.
* And from Inside Higher Ed: Who’s in your fantasy research institute this season?
Tuesday Morning Catch-up Links
* Fringe was right! Our cosmos was “bruised” in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background. We must destroy the other universe at once.
* Victory declared in American class struggle.
* “The strategic mistake of the decade”: Democrats should have let the filibuster die back in 2005.
* How the Bush administration destroyed the planet: honeybee edition.
* Climate Change: a web comic.
* James Clifford on “The Greater Humanities.”
* The assassination of Yogi Bear by the coward Boo-Boo.
* 13 awesome and awful pilots for sci-fi series we never got to see, including longtime sentimental favorite Heat Vision & Jack.
* The picture above is from Emily’s great and prolific Tumblr blog, which posts something awesome every five minutes.
* And the New Yorker profiles the architect of all my dreams and nightmares, Shigeru Miyamoto. They had a really solid piece on fundamental flaws in the scientific method recently, too, but unfortunately it’s subscription-only.
Friday Night Links
* The U.S. government apologized today for deliberately infecting hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhea and syphilis without their consent during the 1940s.
* The Zionist media has fired Rick Sanchez for speaking truth to Jon Stewart.
* California decriminalizes it.
* The new federal guidelines for sex education now include actual sex education.
* How to catch up on Fringe, quickly becoming the best SF on TV.
* The Ally McBeal of the 2010s: David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman?
* And Ph.D. Comics captures the tragic tale of my last week.
Tough Out There for Nerds
SF Signal has your fall television preview. Fringe and The Walking Dead aside, it’s looking pretty bleak.
Geekfight
Geekfight: Whedon vs. Abrams. It’s true, Abrams has had the better year.