Posts Tagged ‘Ghana’
Tuesday Links!
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People’s History of the Gray Force.
* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People’s History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fear of Stigma Lingers About Use of Family-Friendly Policies. Should You Have a Baby in Grad School?
* Don’t Drink Starbucks Free College PR Stunt, Full of Bees. Some details.
* Sun Ra: jazz’s interstellar voyager.
The remaining 5 percent are my greatest concern. These trustees can cause real damage to the institutions they serve by acting in dysfunctional ways. They play petty politics with almost everything; try to micromanage the institution; attempt to go around the president and lead from the shadows; they tend to be critical of faculty but not knowledgeable or curious about faculty life and offer simple solutions to complex and sticky challenges.
Over the past several years, I have talked with many presidents who believe this small group of toxic boards is growing in size and impact and migrating north towards 10 percent of all boards. We simply cannot afford this.
* In my defense, though, anyone following the humanities death watch for the last 600 years would be struck both by its recurring characters and its disconnect from objective fact. Burton wrote in the age of Shakespeare, when the remarkable growth of literacy drove the first golden age of vernacular literature. Whittemore wrote while English as an academic discipline was in the midst of a meteoric rise, climbing from 17,240 BA degrees granted in 1950 to 64,342 in 1971. After a steep drop in the 1980s, English is now back to a robust 53,767 degrees granted per year, and 295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degrees—more than any field except business.
* NLRB revises Columbia College Chicago decision to the benefit of administration, by a factor of about 30X.
* Austin and segregation. Milwaukee and Scott Walker.
Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind.
* In Milwaukee and U.S., hospitals follow money to suburbs.
* World Cup minute! Crunching the US’s chances of advancing out of its group. Meanwhile: Ghana has to ration electricity just so everyone can watch the World Cup.
* Louie, creep. Game of Thrones and the female gaze. HBO Explains Why They Failed To Make An American Gods TV Show. Read George R. R. Martin’s 1963 Letter To Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
* How Marquette brought in its first lay president.
* Totally outrageous: Indiana Punished Inmate With More Time Behind Bars For Doing What Prison Staff Told Him To Do.
* California Prison’s ‘Pay-To-Stay’ Option Offers ‘Quieter’ Rooms For $155 A Day. Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose.
* Father Of The Bride sequel about gay marriage reportedly in the works.
* A team of Harvard scientists believe the remnants of an ancient Earth, dating to the time another planet collided with ours to produce the moon, may still be lodged deep within the Earth’s mantle. Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface. Dibs on the screenplay.
* Circles within circles, rings within rings: I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. As some of our operatives have been compromised, my commander has given me permission to make some of their conversations on twitter public. We want to let the PoOs know that we have infiltrated them so that they begin to accuse each other of being Lollipop operatives.
* Our long national nightmare &c: Duke will rename Aycock.
* Gasp! Missile defense still a giant boondoggle!
* The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth, warns New York Times. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning has an op-ed.
* Understanding commencement speakers at SMBC.
* American meritocracy, Chelsea Clinton edition.
* The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
* The Grand Budapest Hotel, as it was always meant to be seen.
* We’re never going to get to Mars.
* A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961.
* And Greenpeace lost 5 million dollars gambling. FFS.
Gerry Canavan 