Saturday Morning Links!

* Milwaukee writer finds prize-winning drama in personal story of pain, healing. Marquette’s own CJ Hribal.

* What It Means to Be on the Left. Left of the Dial.

* Why Capitalism is Just Shitbag Science.

* Looking past Stone’s intricate play-by-play to the wider context, it’s hard not to view Uber and Airbnb as a new iteration of the upheaval and consolidation Taplin describes. The difference is that while Amazon, Facebook, and Google tighten their control over the entertainment we consume, the personal details we share, and the information we uncover, Uber and Airbnb want to stake a claim on how we move through the material world. Kelly describes this state of affairs as a new form of socialism untethered from the state, “designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization.” To me, it sounds more like Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-themed planet in the Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action.” It’s a world that, though torn apart by gang wars as the Enterprise arrives, is made to run smoothly when Captain Kirk inserts himself and his superior phaser technology into the conflict on behalf of the Federation, declares himself the victor, and then withdraws to allow the society to rule itself … as long as the Federation gets its cut. Kirk promises that money would be reinvested back into the planet — but that works mainly because the post-scarcity Federation can afford to treat Sigma Iotia II as an extended, world-sized experiment in developmental sociology.

* U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel. 43 Senators, 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats. Incredible.

* Internal EPA records obtained by ProPublica show that the Radford plant is one of at least 51 active sites across the country where the Department of Defense or its contractors are today burning or detonating munitions or raw explosives in the open air, often in close proximity to schools, homes and water supplies. The documents — EPA PowerPoint presentations made to senior agency staff — describe something of a runaway national program, based on “a dirty technology” with “virtually no emissions controls.” According to officials at the agency, the military’s open burn program not only results in extensive contamination, but “staggering” cleanup costs that can reach more than half a billion dollars at a single site.

* Sessions! Sessions! Spicer! Spicer! Saramucci! Kushner! Mueller! Manafort! Tillerson! And the rest.

* McCain.

* President Trump is considering pardoning himself. I asked 15 experts if that’s legal. Nixon’s Justice Department warned that the president can’t pardon himself. Yes, Trump can legally pardon himself or his family. No, he shouldn’t.

* Watching ‘Fox & Friends,’ Trump Sees a Two-Way Mirror. Trump Keeps Failing to Destroy Obama’s Legacy, as Aides Assure Trump All Is Fine. Same.

* Nothing about the Trump presidency is normal. Keep remembering that.

* That Times interview. Man.

* Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in.

* Host a Mueller Firing Rapid Response Event. Are we heading toward a constitutional crisis? “Set aside Putin and follow the money”: a Russia expert’s theory of the Trump scandal. Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort. Oppo research! It’s probably a lot worse than we thought.

* Thus, we have multiple pathways forward, none of them look good.

* The one area where Trump has been wildly successful. We’re going to be living with the consequences of this trainwreck for a long time.

* I hope this happens to him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life.

* Undocumented Dad Says Tearful Goodbye to His Kids Before Being Deported in Heartbreaking Video.

* A Deportation at MIT.

* Google Glass, but for making work even more miserable.

* Data analysis of 34,476 comic book characters reveals they’re sexist as hell.

* Volumes like Platform Capitalism and Ours to Hack and to Own should convince careful readers that our current, barely regulated gig economy is not sustainable. Subjecting workers to a national (or even global) reverse auction of wages and work conditions—where they are under constant pressure to perform tasks faster, and for less, than rivals will—is a recipe for exhaustion and poverty for those unlucky enough to be trapped in the platform matrix. Moreover, it is also a prelude to deflation and economic collapse, as precarious work provokes a twenty-first century revival of Keynes’s paradox of thrift.

* 2017 is so unexpectedly warm it is freaking out climate scientists.

* The Trouble With Sex Robots.

* Wes Anderson Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films.

* When Bachman was King.

* Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book is one of the studio’s only upcoming movies that’s not a follow-up or a remake.

* White Women in Robes: Race and The Handmaid’s Tale. I thought a lot about this while teaching the book this summer and still think Adam’s post on Gilead and ISIS is the best explanation beyond “semi-woke producers trying to avoid negative thinkpiece coverage” I’ve seen.

* Elizabeth Moss, “Accidental Activist.”

* No thanks. The Producers of HBO’s Confederate Respond to the Backlash and Explain Why They Wanted to Tell This Story.

* Philosophy and the Cold War.

* Teen Vogue‘s Guide to Anal Sex.

* Defendants Can’t Be Jailed Solely Because of Inability to Post Bail, Judge Says.

* Gasp! What a shocking, one-time-only transgression from a uniquely bad apple.

* It’s Time For Democrats To Stop Defending Obamacare And Start Replacing It.

* The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked.

* Eugenics in America.

* “In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress,” Yvonne Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, said on Friday.

* How Fake Cops Got $1.2 Million in Real Weapons.

* Being Sansa Stark.

* We Asked People What Childhood Moment Shaped Them the Most.

* New MIT Study Suggests Sonic The Hedgehog Might Be Living In Computer Simulation.

* “Here was a story that asked the reader to actively oppose a cowardly hero, to drag the character against his will into conflict with a monster that turns out to be himself.”

* Robots: they’re just like us!

* Burn, baby, burn.

Wednesday Links

* Marquette English’s medievalist search closes today! Get your applications in!

* Advice for academics: how to write a research statement.

* The digital humanities and the MLA JIL.

* Junot Diaz on academic freedom and Palestine.

* The Plot Against Public Education.

* Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance.

* Yet another roundup on the death of the faculty.

* Holy picket lines, Batman! Marxism and superheroes, part two: the struggle.

* Same-sex marriage crossed the 50% threshold yesterday, as it became legal as many as 30 states due to SCOTUS inaction.

* The right to die: Terminally Ill 29-Year-Old Woman: Why I’m Choosing to Die on My Own Terms.

* Is Rick & Morty the best cartoon since The Simpsons season four? Probably! You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty. Seriously.

* Google Glass and facial recognition.

* American Empire, by the numbers.

* An open access book: Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.

* Understanding reparations.

4. The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

5. But because the claimants are dead, it is said that nothing can be done. Society shrugs, moves on, because, uhm, black on black crime.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

* War is a racket, Prophet Samuel edition.

* Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion.

* The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past. Yet at least since the 1970s, most professional historians – that is, most historians holding doctorates in the field and teaching in universities or colleges – conducted most of their research on timescales of between five and 50 years.

* We’re probably teaching math wrong.

* Daria Morgendorffer’s Reading List.

* Hey, you, get your damn hands off her.

* Venus Green, who was 87 when she was handcuffed, roughed up and injured by police, will receive $95,000 as part of a settlement with Baltimore City. The quote doesn’t even reflect the most bananas part: Woman, 90, locked officer in basement, settles with police.

* Ga. Cops Who Blew Off Toddler’s Face With Grenade Won’t Be Charged.

* Did I do this one already? Infinite Jest, as it was meant to be read.

* Stay informed: Nicolet National Forest is Milwaukee’s “zombie safe zone.”

* National Adjunct Walkout Day Planned.

* The gum you like is going to come back in style.

* And that gum you like is going to come back in style.

* Startups Did Not Get Last Month’s Memo To Stop Burning All Their Money.

* MIT researchers are developing a “second skin” space suit lined with tiny coils that contract when switched on, tightening the garment around the body. The coils (image below) in the “BioSuit” are made from shape-memory alloy that “remembers” its shape when bent and returns to its original form if heated.

* Marvel will finally try to make some money off the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

* Boston Review on vulture capitalism.

* MetaFilter mega-post on sex work and consent.

* The United States and alcoholism. Some anti-big-data-journalism pushback.

* And now at last we see the violence inherent in the system.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/8LS8TRMkAo

— congress-edits (@congressedits) October 7, 2014

Friday Links!

* I’ve pointed out before that even as academic institutions are more and more distrusted, professors oddly retain a good deal of public respect. We have it because we’re free: free to say the unpopular thing, free to teach the passionate course, free to study what we think needs studying. To be free means we have to occupy the whole possibility space that waits for our explorations, and take not just our students but our publics along for the ride. We have to keep a trust as well as walk the paths we see before us.

* Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist.

* On Campus, Grenade Launchers, M-16s, and Armored Vehicles.

At least 60 institutions have acquired M-16s through the program. Arizona State University holds the most, with 70 in its arsenal, followed by Florida International University and the University of Maryland with 50 M-16s each. Central Florida received its grenade launcher in 2008; Hinds acquired its in 2006.

* In a never-before-released thesis, Reagan’s FEMA director discussed the potential internment of millions of blacks in concentration camps.

* The Islamic Roots Of Science Fiction.

* Here’s How Global Warming Is Already Worsening Extreme Deluges In The U.S. Trees Are Dying From ‘No Obvious Cause’ In Rocky Mountains, Report Says. A Major Accounting Firm Just Ran the Numbers on Climate Change.

* On ISIS: Where Is Obama’s Exit Strategy?

Once again our country is invited to support the “long war” described by key Pentagon officials as lasting as long as 50 to 80 years. It’s probably both unwinnable and unaffordable, but no president and few politicians have the political ability to acknowledge failure and end it.

So they escalate enough to pass it along to their successor. War on an installment plan.

* Every American President in the past quarter century has now gone on television during prime time to tell the nation and the world that he has decided to bomb Iraq. Last night was Barack Obama’s turn, and it was a vexing performance.

* What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? We cannot champion Network Neutrality without admitting that the Internet is no Utopia.

* Reddit made over $100,000 off stolen celebrity nudes.

* U2, Apple and rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail. There’s really only one cure.

* Update: All Clear. The suspect has been located and the reported weapon has been identified as an umbrella.

* A Brief History of Typographic Snark and the Failed Crusade for an Irony Mark.

* The kids are all right: Millennials Are Reading More Books Than You Think They Are. Why Indie Bookstores Are on the Rise Again.

* Congressional Hearing Slams Feasibility Of Commercial Asteroid Mining. “The American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space Act.” You dicks.

* Everyone Knows Hedge Funds Are a Ripoff.

* Scientists warn of faulty Wisconsin wolf estimates. Learn to count, wolves!

* “Why English Majors are the Hot New Hires.”

* What Is Hope? Alex Trebek Is Bringing Back His Mustache.

* Dutch Girl Fakes a Trip to South East Asia.

* Archaeologists Have Made An Incredible Discovery At Stonehenge.

* The Cold War University is back! The Real Story Behind Canada’s Sudden Interest In Arctic Archaeology.

* The Soviets sent stray dogs to conquer space. This is what happened next.

* China Is Mass-Producing Islands To Extend Its Strategic Borders.

* What Happens to “Holdouts” Who Refuse to Sell Their Homes to Developers?

* Here’s What’s Becoming Of America’s Dead Shopping Malls.

* Wearable tech as triumph for bosses.

* Interview With a Time Traveler.

* So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights.

* Another roundup of all the many things that are more likely to kill you than a terrorist.

* And Comedian Joe Mande remembers brands remembering 9/11. Never forget.

Spring Break So Close You Can Taste It Links

* Sing to me, Muse, of Fredric Jameson. I’ve never understood the “worst writer” slam against Fred; alongside all the other good things I’d have to say about his work I think he’s actually very clear and precise.

* CFP for the 2014 Marxist Literary Group at the Banff Centre: Energy, Environment, Culture.”

* CFP: Bruce Springsteen Studies.

* Once upon a time in America this was called advocating for justice. But in today’s America, it’s deemed a miscarriage of justice.

* Meanwhile. My god. And my god. And my god. And my god. The US courts are just a bottomless nightmare.

* Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims. Yes we can!

* Freddie deBoer on the unbearable lightness of always voting Democrat.

* The unbearable whiteness of Project X.

* 25 Years of Declining State Support for Public Colleges. Many Colleges ‘Hoard’ Endowments During Rough Economic Times. The Rising Cost of Not Going to College.

* Service, Sex Work, and the Profession.

* The SATs have been provably racist and classist for decades with no improvements; Canavan’s Razor would suggest that’s the entire point. But this time…

* The “trigger warning” has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped? Content Warnings and College Classes. The Trigger Warned Syllabus. We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings.’ I think this kind of “trigger warning” — and even offering alternative assignments when circumstances warrant — is very often good pedagogy on the level of the individual classroom; I did so this semester when teaching Lolita, somewhat reluctantly, but I’d come to feel it was necessary. I’m very skeptical it would ever be a good idea at the level of administration or policy.

* An Elegy for Academic Freedom.

* 10 Unintentionally Horrifying Statues of Famous People.

* Tendrils of the invisible web: the undersea cables wiring the Earth.

* “Wearing Google Glass automatically means that all social interaction you have must be not just on yours, but Google’s terms,” Adrian Chen wrote at Gawker almost a year ago, when we all first cringed in fear.

* You know every cop is a criminal: David Cameron’s porn-filter advisor arrested for possession of images of sexual abuse of children.

* Child in wet bathing suit made to stand in -5F weather because school policy forbade her from waiting in teacher’s car.

* The Civ V files: Never Move Your Settler?

* The Fetishization of Lupita Nyong’o.

* Who owns the Oscar selfie?

* Zombie Studies in the WSJ.

* Why Sweden has so few road deaths.

* Durham school board joins teacher tenure lawsuit.

* According to a New Study, Nothing Can Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.

* Activists Erect A Monument To Rape Survivors On The National Mall.

* How Gun Violence is Devastating the Millennial Generation.

* Sea Level Rise Threatens The Statue Of Liberty And Hundreds Of Other Cultural Heritage Sites. Chipotle Warns It Might Stop Serving Guacamole If Climate Change Gets Worse. But don’t worry! President Obama’s New Budget Is Peppered With Efforts To Tackle Climate Change. Peppered!

* Milwaukee shuts down Little Caesars for day over rodent droppings. A whole day! That’ll show ’em.

* Cheerleader Sues Parents for Refusing to Pay College Tuition. Gambler sues, says he lost $500,000 playing drunk. Having not heard any of the evidence or consulted any of the relevant laws, Canavan Court rules in favor of both plaintiffs!

* How do you remember a massacre?

* How did DC manage to cast anyone but Bryan Cranston as Lex Luthor — much less Jesse Eisenberg? It’s a crime.

* Pretty mediocre hoax. Everyone knows Mattel has had working hoverboards since the 80s anyway.

* A Letter From Ray Jasper, Who Is About to Be Executed.

* And I try not to get sucked into the wingnut-said-something-crazy! scene anymore, but every once in a while: my god.

All the Friday Night Links!

* We are ruled by fools: The amount of airtime granted to climate change on both the Sunday shows and the nightly news was up, too — to a total of 27 minutes, and an hour and 42 minutes, respectively, for the entire year.

* So long and thanks for all the fish: Freedom Industries has declared bankruptcy.

* “Why Is The Rest Of The Country Fixated On A New Jersey Traffic Jam And We Have No Clean Water?”

* Fracking Chemicals In North Carolina Will Remain Secret, Industry-Funded Commission Rules.

* Judge Rules Detroit Is Trying To Give Banks ‘Too Much Money.’

* Remember that most of the “steps” any insurance company or pharmacy makes you go through are pretty much nothing but hoops, in the purest sense of the word. These are obstacles being placed in your path in hopes that you will become discouraged and give up—and they won’t have to pay for your medication or treatment. Show them that you are not going away.

* The headline reads, “Six Years After Chemical Ban, Fewer Female Snails Are Growing Penises.”

* TFA isn’t working.

* Every Scary, Weird Thing We Know the NSA Can Do.

* The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History.

* Total Disaster as Springsteen Tries to Sell Recordings of Live Shows.

* The rule of law still has a few bugs in it.

* Star Wars retcons we can get behind.

* Someone stop J.J. Abrams before he kills again.

* BREAKING MUST CREDIT CANAVAN’S RAZOR: The point of the STEM push is to lower STEM wages, not help people get jobs that don’t exist.

* BREAKING: Comedians are psychopaths psychotics. See comments.

* Johnson’s No More Formaldehyde Baby Shampoo.

* Even half of Utah supports marriage equality.

* Turns out California wrote their don’t-use-Google-Glass-while-driving law in a way that’s seemingly impossible to enforce.

* The Myth Of The Absent Black Father.

* UNC Stops Professor Mary Willingham From Researching Athletes’ Low Reading Levels.

* Rob Nixon is giving a talk at UWM’s Century for 21st Century Studies next Friday.

* Wisconsin may eliminate ban on 7-day work weeks. Workers will be allowed to “volunteer” for extra work.

* This medieval manuscript curses the cat who peed on it.

* This transphobic publication hounded a woman to suicide. You’ll never guess what happened next.

* Pope Benedict Defrocked 400 Priests For Molesting Kids.

* We Would Have Eliminated Poverty Entirely by Now if Inequality Hadn’t Skyrocketed.

* They almost put Disney World in Saint Louis.

* And Lex Luthor: Hero!