Posts Tagged ‘Fun Home’
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Sunday Links!
* The science fictional sublime: the art of Penguin science fiction.
* From the syllabus of my wonderful Cultural Preservation class: “Can Auschwitz Be Saved?” and “The Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.”
* Great moments in the law school scam. Wow.
* Fraternity expels 3 linked to statue noose, suspends Ole Miss chapter.
* Where the money goes: what $60,000 tuition at Duke buys you.
* The Definitive Guide to Never Watching Woody Allen Again.
* Pedophiles Are Still Tearing Reddit Apart.
* The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet.
* The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will launch in 2015.
* Always worth relinking: StrikeDebt’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
* On most policy questions of any importance, there are enough academics doing work to generate far more policy ideas than can seriously considered by our political system. When it comes to systemic risk, we have all the ideas we need–size caps or higher capital requirements–and we have academics behind both of those. The rest is politics. What we really need is for the people with the big megaphones to be smarter about the ideas that they cover.
* Milwaukee’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program running out of money. Income inequality grew rapidly in Milwaukee, study finds.
* Actually, climate trolls, January ended up being the fourth-warmest on record.
* EPA moves to toughen pesticide safety standards for the first time in 20 years.
* Scientists are appalled at Nicaragua’s plan to build a massive canal.
* South Carolina Legislators To Punish College For Assigning Gay-Themed Fun Home Comic To Freshmen.
* A sequel film for Farscape is in the early phases of development.
* NBC officially giving up, bringing back Heroes.
* How wrong is your time zone?
* Presenting the lowest possible score in Super Mario Brothers.
* The Amtrak Writers Fellowship.
* And now they’re saying the Voynich Manuscript might not be a hoax after all. Oh, I hope so.
Thank God It’s Thanksgiving Week Links
* While the Nazi totalitarianism strove to give the masses a sense of collective power and strength, Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through joy”), inverted totalitarianism promotes a sense of weakness, of collective futility. While the Nazis wanted a continuously mobilized society that would not only support the regime without complaint and enthusiastically vote “yes” at the periodic plebiscites, inverted totalitarianism wants a politically demobilized society that hardly votes at all.
* In a book coming out this spring, Goffman, now a 31-year-old assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, documents how the expansion of America’s penal system is reshaping life for the poor black families who exist under the watch of its police, prison guards, and parole officers.
* Durham police defend lack of public information in teen’s death. I am continually amazed and horrified by the police stonewalling on this story. How can they not be required to admit how the teenager died?
* For racking up a record that has veered from unethical conduct to staggering incompetence, CREW’s voters awarded Gov. Walker the title of Worst Governor in America.
* Toxic Lakes From Tar-Sand Projects Planned for Alberta.
* The Insanity of Our Food Policy.
* India Confronts the Politics of the Toilet.
* Federal Student Loan Profits Help Duncan Cut Education Spending To Lowest Level Since 2001. What a sickening spectacle.
* Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions. So we’ll only have to sue 90 companies into oblivion? That seems pretty manageable.
* Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User. Via this piece on the culture of overwork in academia.
* Creatin’ a legal marijuana economy ain’t easy.
* No war in Iran? Unhappy warmongers, just pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off, and try again next decade.
* The Long Shadow of Chinese Blacklists on American Academe.
* MetaFilter post on the only musical I ever need to see: Fun Home: The Musical.
* Bill de Blasio gives cold shoulder to education reformers as he prepares to choose a chancellor.
* And did I do this one already? An Upworthy Generator. Now you can be inspired by heartwarming stories on your own timetable…
Sunday Reading™
* Babies born this year are the best babies. Fact.
* Gingrichmania! Republicans in disarray! How he did it. Nate Silver:
But South Carolina’s seeming rejection of Mr. Romney goes beyond cultural or demographic idiosyncrasies. Mr. Rtaxomney was resoundingly defeated by Mr. Gingrich, losing badly among his worst demographic groups and barely beating Mr. Gingrich among his best ones. Had you extrapolated the exit poll cross-tabulations from South Carolina to the other 49 states, Mr. Romney might have lost 47 of them. Moreover, the decline of Mr. Romney was almost as significant in national polls as it was in South Carolina.
Now poor Romney has to release his tax returns. Onward to Florida!
* Great moments in Fox News: Newt Gingrich’s repeated betrayals of the people closest to him suggest he’ll make a trustworthy president.
* 11 Lesser-Known 2012 Presidential Candidates.
* “One of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.” Via zunguzungu.
* When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke,President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
* Steve Shaviro reviews Carl Freedman’s The Age of Nixon. I actually bought this one just on the strength of the author and title.
* Another absolute must-have: Alison Bechdel’s followup to Fun Home, Are You My Mother?
* David Graeber: The Political Metaphysics of Stupidity.
* Michael Greenberg: What Future for Occupy Wall Street? Also on the OWS tip: diluting the 99% brand.
* They’re still trying to make a movie out of Jeff Smith’s Bone.
* And the Chronicle of Higher Education has an obituary for Dean Jo Rae Wright. I only knew her over email, but I was very sad to hear this. She was a very generous supporter of graduate projects at Duke.