Thursday Morning Links!

* At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.

* If you got a call offering a free cruise, you might be entitled to at least $300. I did! Check your numbers.

* Artist’s Statement, by Kara Walker.

* The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.

* President Of Charlottesville Synagogue Recounts Scene During Weekend Rally. More Witnesses. More. Documentary.

"I'd rather have my child, but by golly if I gotta give her up we're gonna make it count." —Heather Heyer's mom.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) August 16, 2017

* Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist. All the President’s Klansmen. Goodbye, Pepe.

* Here are all the Republican members of Congress who have called out the president. Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity.’ Gwen Moore Calls for Trump’s Removal.

I signed up to fight Nazis 73 years ago and I'll do it again if I have to.

Hatred, bigotry, & fascism should have no place in this country.

— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) August 12, 2017

If you refuse to denounce these animals, you stand with them. If your elected officials won't call this what it is, they are unfit to serve.

— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) August 16, 2017

* Durham protester charged in Confederate statue vandalism. Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue. Virginia. Richmond! The Capitol. Even Robert E. Lee didn’t think Americans needed all those Confederate statues. Leave the Durham memorial on the ground. News you can use. Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost. Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely. Trump Blasts Critics Who Judge Neo-Nazi Groups By Most Extreme Members. Now you’ve gone and made Ron Johnson ‘not entirely’ comfortable. Poor guys.

* Do your duty.

* Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed. White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him. Disgusted Robert Mueller Eats 2 20-Piece Chicken McNugget Meals In One Sitting In Attempt To Get Into Trump’s Mind.

White House staffers, Cabinet members reported to be stunned and disheartened. But not one resignation. Not. One.

— Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) August 16, 2017

I can't help but marvel it's the other guys who believe their every action will be judged at the end of days by an all-knowing god of love.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2017

* They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported.

* The curious case of a man detained by ICE who can’t stay, but can’t be sent back either.

* Today in Millennials killing things.

* White racists and genetic testing. Doxxing White Supremacists Is Making Them Terrified.

* Today, Cloudflare reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and booted The Daily Stormer out from behind its DDoS protection service.

* Never Say Never Again.

* ‘Elder Orphans’ Facebook Group Creates Community For Adults Aging Alone.

* THE COURT: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

JUROR NO. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

* The Voter Purge Crusade That Preceded Trump’s Sketchy Elections Commission.

* A good year for television adaptations of black SF!

* The Patterns Around Octavia Butler.

* Superhero Comics’ Long History of Beating Up Nazis.

* WSU grad student designs map of precinct-level election results.

* Free Speech Year at Berkeley! I bet it goes great.

* Sonic Mania has a great mechanic for playing with a five-year-old, but I swear Sonic used to be faster.

* In an age without heroes.

* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?

* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.

Friday Night Links

* So the Romney campaign is imploding earlier than scheduled. Mitt Romney’s unnecessary lie. MeFi. Josh Marshall says we’ll know the story’s really turned when the former chair of the McCain campaign says release the tax records.

* The grammar news is that Dr. Elaine Stotko, from the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University, and her student, Margaret Troyer, have discovered that school children in Baltimore are using the slang word yo as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

* Dan Harmon talks to Marc Maron on Attack of the Show about what the hell happened.

* In Hell, “We Shall Be Free”: On Breaking Bad. 

At the heart of the social critique is a question of responsibility for “evil” and where to locate it (even though, of course, none of the series refer to “God” or any religious tradition at all). In The Wire, the responsibility lies with the “game” — the logic of the streets, the logic of politics, the “social facts” that weave an all-encompassing, interconnected web. The Sopranos suggests that the locus of responsibility lies in the unconscious of Tony Soprano; its explanation of “evil” is at heart Freudian. Mad Menlargely evades this question; its driving philosophy has little to do with “moralistic” questions of human responsibility but rather the individual’s abiding unhappiness, and how modern capitalism intensifies it. (That a group of libertarians recently threw a “Mad Men” themed party, unironically championing Don Draper as a hero of better times when corporations weren’t “ashamed” of themselves, only underscores the slippery-ness of Mad Men, the manipulability of its message. That, or these particular libertarians don’t know how to read.)

Within this quartet, Breaking Bad is most similar to The Wire, and indeed is its twin and mirror image. While The Wire explored how the drug trade decimated black urban America, Breaking Bad looks at how drugs infiltrate the other half: suburban white America. A unifying, coherent philosophy is possessed by each, and both execute it propulsively and faithfully. David Simon likened The Wire to a Greek tragedy, by which he meant that sociology is an omnipotent, merciless god that twirls with the fate of mortals. In Breaking Bad the villain is not sociology, but a human being; what destroys the mortals is not a system, but a fellow mortal. This is a human-centered vision of the origin of evil. It is Old Testament at its core.

* Just Another Princess Movie.

* What Terry Sullivan’s Reinstatement at U. Va Really Tells Us about the Future of Higher Ed.

* The headline reads, “Daniel Tosh Reportedly Scrambling to Find Non-Rape Joke Before New Show Premieres Today.” This story gets worse the deeper you go.

* World War Z fiasco watch: Brad Pitt refuses to speak to the director.

* Should the Nittany Lions get the NCAA “death penalty”? What a horrible mess.

* Is Amazon really going to launch same-day delivery? Sorry, Mom and Pop, but this doesn’t look good.

* And the “worst idea ever put forth by anyone, ever” contest has been reopened in light of the forthcoming Twins sequel.

News My Students Can Use

How to use a semicolon.

xkcd effects me

I’m not admitting that I do this, but I am admitting that I don’t not do it.