Posts Tagged ‘Guantánamo’
Surprise! Links
* Shakespeare in the state park: Why a group of Marquette students created an empowering outlet for creativity that provides students with summer jobs.
* CFP: Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures.
* A historian of concentration camps explains that this will only get worse.
* Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters. Botched family reunifications left migrant children waiting in vans overnight.
* It’s not just at Guantánamo. In a supermax facility on US soil, inmates are force fed — and barred from sharing their stories. An inmate breaks his silence for the first time.
* Earth’s carbon dioxide has jumped to the highest level in human history. Can the Paris Climate Goals Save Lives? Yes, a Lot of Them, Researchers Say. Climate change is will cause our third world war. Extreme weather has made half of America look like Tornado Alley. India roasts under heat wave with temperatures above 120 degrees. If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I’d plant a tree today.
* Meanwhile, the DNC has bravely decided to… forbid candidates from participating in any climate debate.
* Is Chernobyl historically accurate about the things that matter? HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Doesn’t Understand History.
* Learning The Shape Of Dungeons & Dragons in 2019.
* Understand the destruction of the UC system the reclaimUC way.
* Free speech on campus remains the last great mystery.
* The madness of school shooting drills.
* YouTube pivots to pedophiles.
* Not the Catholic Church’s best week.
* “And then he’d still be Captain America, instead of a lying, indolent, murdering sack of shit.”
* I for one welcome our new insect overlords.
* Tremendous wealth mysteriously producing tremendous poverty.
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices
* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.
* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.
* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.
* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.
* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.
* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.
* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.
* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.
* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.
* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.
* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.
* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.
* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.
* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.
* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.
* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.
* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.
* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.
* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.
* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.
* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.
* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.
* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.
* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.
* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.
* Know your branches of economics.
* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.
* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”
* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.
* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.
* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.
* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.
* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.
* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.
* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?
* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?
* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.
* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.
* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.
* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.
* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.
* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.
* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
* Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette. Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long. As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to discuss this all at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example on Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a campus and for the students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21: “Indigeneities.”
* Climate change comes to Shishmaref, Alaska. Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
* But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: “hands up” transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages—the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, “hands up” isn’t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one’s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other—deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black—become the objects of state violence. “Hands up” cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
* Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man. Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops. California Cop Tweets That He Will ‘Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill’ Protesters. Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality. UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’ Cops Off Campus.
* Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse — If You’re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
* Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
* Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built. They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years. Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase. ASU English by the Numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
* Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
* The ‘Job Market’ That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile: According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp! The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
* The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It’s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
* The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
* Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions, suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
* This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
* Five Stories About Addiction.
* Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It’s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so. On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA’s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
* The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
* Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
* All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
* Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
* 18 Badass Women You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand — a stern “hush hush” to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens’s claim that “our belief is not a belief” could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, “atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.” He claims being an agnostic would be “a truer liberation” since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming — a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett’s Hamm when he exclaims, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”
* The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing—It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k altogether.
For His Unwavering Devotion to Weekend Links, Gerry Canavan Has Been Awarded the Nobel Prize for Linkblogging
* Every so often the Nobel Committee accidentally picks a genuinely deserving, genuinely inspiring recipient of the Peace Prize. This year was one. A 2013 profile of Malala Yousafzai. A speech to Pakistani Marxists. What did one Nobel laureate say to the other?
* Every so often the Supreme Court accidentally makes a good decision. Last night’s overturning of Wisconsin’s voter suppression law was one.
* What would the twentieth-century history of English studies look like if we had thought to preserve the records of our teaching? How could that history be different if we had institutional archives of syllabi, student notes, lecture drafts, handouts and seminar papers, just as we have archives of journal articles, drafts of novels, recordings of performances, and committee meeting minutes? What if universities had collected classroom documents alongside other records and traces of the knowledge they create and culture that they value?
* Another lovely Chomsky rant on the university.
So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
* Recent cuts have unfortunately made future cuts inevitable: The University of Wisconsin System is about to do some wholesale, strategic belt-tightening, according to its president. But it’s not all absolutely miserable news:
Regent Janice Mueller noted that of the $1.6 billion total paid to unclassified staff on UW campuses, faculty accounted for $550 million, leaving more than $1 billion going to non-faculty. “That seemed a little out of whack to me,” Mueller said. “I would think faculty salaries would be the larger share.”
I didn’t think Regents were allowed to notice things that like.
* The Excessive Political Power Of White Men In The United States, In One Chart.
* Phil Maciak on the greatness of Transparent.
* Why we need academic freedom: On Being Sued.
* Neoliberalism is the triumph of the state, not its retreat. The case of Mexico.
* On the cultural ideology of Big Data.
* It Would Actually Be Very Simple To End Homelessness Forever.
* It seems that all of Pearson’s critical foundational research and proven classroom results in the world couldn’t get the question 3 x 7 x 26 correct.
* Federal spending was lower this year than Paul Ryan originally asked for. Ha, take that Republicans! Another Obama-led triumph for the left!
* But things will be different once Obama finally becomes president. Obama Plans to Close Guantanamo Whether Congress Likes It Or Not.
* Nightmares: Could Enterovirus D68 Be Causing Polio-Like Paralysis in Kids?
* NYC airport workers walk off job, protesting lack of protection from Ebola risks.
* SF in everything: Malware needs to know if it’s in the Matrix.
* Lady Ghostbusters will be a reboot, almost assuredly a terrible one.
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
* It’s happening again: Vastly Different Stories Emerging In Police Shooting Of St. Louis Teen. The Associated Press is On It:
* Teenagers in prison have a shockingly high suicide rate.
* Roger Ebert: The Collected Wikipedia Edits.
* The many faces of capitalism.
* The University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department issued an apology Wednesday after a list of safety tips posted to the department’s website was criticized for appearing to blame victims of campus crimes, particularly survivors of sexual assault.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings.
* Today in theology: Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church decided Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control.
By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.
* Two Bad Tastes That Taste Bad Together: The US Doesn’t Have Enough Railroads to Keep Up With the Oil Boom.
* For some unfathomable reason somebody handed Cary Nelson another shovel: A Civility Manifesto.
* Another piece on the law and Tommy the Chimp.
* And maybe there are some doors we just shouldn’t open: I’m Slavoj Žižek, AMA.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* On April 10th-12th, 2015, UF will be hosting its 11th annual Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media.”
* The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) announces an annual essay prize of $1,000 for the best paper on the subject of capital as power. Open to anyone who does not currently hold a Ph.D. (including current graduate students).
* Happy belated Labor Day: The True Story Of How One Man Shut Down American Commerce To Avoid Paying His Workers A Fair Wage. Labor Day against Work.
* Non-published, non-peer-reviewed study concludes that college football coaches must be worth the money because otherwise they wouldn’t be paid that much. Glad that’s sorted.
* So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde? According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991—when the Soviet Union fell. “The conservative movement replaced the ‘Red Scare’ with a new ‘Green Scare’ and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time,” argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.
* UIUC will forward Salaita’s appointment to the Board of Trustees after all. Sadly I suspect this is a CYA maneuver after realizing they were in material breach of their contract — though I suppose it’s for the lawyers to decide if they have take-backs on that issue or not.
* From the archives: How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps.
* The Darren Wilson fundraiser mystery.
* Guantanamo Defense Lawyer Resigns, Says U.S. Case Is ‘Stacked.’
* The terrifying true story of the garbage that could kill the whole human race.
* Man Nearly Dies In Ice Bucket Challenge After Plane Drops Water On Him.
* Are domestic airlines making money by fleecing consumers? No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!
* Archaeologists Confirm That Stonehenge Was Once A Complete Circle.
* The A.V. Club reviews David Mitchell’s latest, The Bone Clocks.
* I’ll give you this: Censoring the books your kid reads does seem pretty dystopian. “Divergent” and “Hunger Games” as capitalist agitprop. Utopia and Anti-Utopia.
* And Did Stan Lee Confirm a Black Panther Movie? Please?
Thursday Links!
* The big story in academia yesterday was the eleventh-hour preemptive firing of Steven Salaita from UIUC (which according to reports may have cost him his tenure at Virginia Tech as well). Especially disturbing in all this is the participation of former AAUP president Cary Nelson, on the side of the firing. Some commentary from Corey Robin, Claire Potter, Philip Weiss, and Electronic Intifada. A statement for the Illinois AAUP. A petition.
* Delayed gratification watch: This week I finally cracked and read Chris Ware’s Building Stories after nearly two years of anticipation. So great. I can’t wait to teach it. I may write more about this later, but for now I can tell you that my arbitrary path through the book told a beautiful story that began with the couple’s fateful move to Englewood and drifted backwards in time, Ulysses-like, to the day the couple met, before culminating in a quietly nostalgic trip to the eponymous building as it stood about to be torn down. So great. My friend Jacob’s review. “I Hoped That the Book Would Just Be Fun”: A Brief Interview with Chris Ware.
* Call for applications: Wisconsin Poet Laureate.
* Oak Creek, Two Years After the Sikh Mass Murder.
* On adjuncts and wildcat strikes.
* I was born too early: N.Y.U. to Add a Bachelor’s Degree in Video Game Design.
* I was born too late: MIT looking into paying professors by the word.
* College rankings, 1911. Class III! How dare they. #impeachTaft
* The conservative plan to destroy higher education by capturing accreditation.
* UMass-Dartmouth to Pay $1.2-Million to Professor in Discrimination Case.
* Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning.
* The country’s largest environmental group is profiting from oil drilling.
* NYPD sadly forced to arrest its critics.
* Medical Workers Say NYPD Cops Beat Man Shackled In A Stretcher. It Is Time We Treat Police Brutality as a National Crisis.
* The CIA Must Tell the Truth About My Rendition At 12 Years Old.
* State’s rights we can believe in: New Jersey drivers may be able to ignore other states’ speed cameras.
* Netflix Says Arrested Development Season 5 Is ‘Just a Matter of When.’
* Maria Bamford and the Hard Work of Acting Normal.
* Porn production plummets in Los Angeles.
* How Marvel Conquered Hollywood.
* The Lost Projects of Dan Harmon. In addition to Building Stories, I also cracked this week and finally started watching Rick and Morty. Now, granted, it’s no Building Stories — but it’s pretty good!
* The New Inquiry‘s “Mourning” issue is out today and has some really nice essays I think I’ll be using in the second go of my Cultural Preservation course next spring.
* Why Civilization: Beyond Earth Is The Hottest New Space Strategy Game.
* Disney Is Really Building A Star Wars Theme Park.
* You Are Given An Unlimited Supply Of Something. The One Catch? The Next Person Sets A Condition.
* Wikipedia’s monkey selfie ruling is a travesty for the world’s monkey artists.
* Apparently Kid for President.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Insurance Company Pays Elderly Man’s Workman’s Comp Settlement With $21,000 in Coins.
* Department of diminishing returns: The British Office: The Movie.
* And the kind of headline where I really don’t want any details: NASA: New “impossible” engine works, could change space travel forever. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning…
MLA’s Eve
* Timeline of the future: 1,000 years time to one hundred quintillion years.
* Link of the year: Teju Cole Wrote a Short Story on Twitter by Retweeting Others.
* How Grad Students Built the MLA Subconference.
* How much is college football worth to universities?
* How to Bust an Adjunct Union.
* Should faculty strike? Pro and con.
* One hundred years of Lovecraft. Via Student Activism.
* The state of exception: Court Upholds Willy-Nilly Gadget Searches Along U.S. Border.
* Can J.P. Morgan really go 2 years without breaking the law? I’ll take the under.
* Top Christie Staff Sought Lane Closings as Revenge. Wow. Wow.
* Notre Dame’s Moral Dilemma Over Birth Control. John Dear, Jesuit known for peace witness, dismissed from order. And from the archives: An Oklahoma high school suspended a 15-year-old student after accusing her of casting a magic spell that caused a teacher to become sick, lawyers for the student said on Friday.
* New York City Murders Are Twice As Likely To Be Solved When The Victim Is White Instead Of Black.
* Rampant Prosecutorial Misconduct.
* Dallas shock: It turns out a cop can get fired for something.
* Florida State University To Phase Out Academic Operations By 2010.
* “I am a gun owner. It happens.”
* Bad for the brand: Ex-Gitmo Detainee, Released by Bush, Is Suspected in Benghazi Attack.
* The New Inquiry’s issue on “Bloodsport” is unusually great.
* NFL Record Settlement for Traumatic Brain Injuries.
* The American Studies Association Goes to Politics.
* Nature Bombshell: Observations Point To 10°F Warming by 2100. This is why I think geoengineering is inevitable, for better or for worse.
* The last monolingual speaker of Chickasaw has died.
* And congratulations Milwaukee, the 10th worst-run city in the US.
The Monday Morning Links Market Is Ripe for Disruption
* This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it.
* Stanford Is Now Basically a Venture-Capital Fund With Some Dorms.
* Remaking the University: Rather than accept further gutting and the corporate solutions that are a domestic version of structural adjustment, we should work to meet our actual needs.
* Intellectual property and the struggle over value.
* The six ways we talk about a teenage girl’s age. “The ‘unreliable narrator‘ of Nabokov’s Lolita infuses our media and apparently permeates parts of our judicial landscape”:
When you consider the many ages of adolescent girls, it is clear that our cultural imagination encourages boys and men to think of young girls as fair game. By the time a girl is 12, she isn’t even seen as a whole human being, but regarded for her parts. She’s “forbidden fruit,” “a temptress,” “a man trap” and “asking for it.” All she has to do to be targeted sexually is go for a walk. If she wears skimpy clothes, is overly friendly with a teacher, dances with abandon, especially if she’s a girl or young woman of color, she might be blamed for her own assault. This is a male fantasy.
* Teaching naked, parts 1 and 2.
I had my students fill out mid-semester evaluations last fall. No big deal, just answer these four questions: 1) What am I doing to help you learn? 2) What could I be doing better to help you learn? 3) What are you doing to help yourself learn? and 4) What could you be doing better to help yourself learn? I had them turn the evaluations in anonymously to allow more genuine feedback.
Later that afternoon, I started going through the responses. It was encouraging to see that, in general, responses to the first two questions indicated I was getting better, which was gratifying given the amount of time and energy I spent re-developing the class. For the most part, students were surprisingly honest when responding to questions 3 and 4, showing they understood their responsibility in their progress, or lack thereof. Somewhere towards the end of the ~160 evaluations, I came across one that answered question #2 with: “Teach naked.”
* What’s Killing Poor White Women?
Most Americans, including high-school dropouts of other races, are gaining life expectancy, just at different speeds. Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare. “If you look at the history of longevity in the United States, there have been no dramatic negative or positive shocks,” Olshansky says. “With the exception of the 1918 influenza pandemic, everything has been relatively steady, slow changes. This is a five-year drop in an 18-year time period. That’s dramatic.”
* NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry.
* Anthology of “21st Century Science Fiction” Coming November 5.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden and David Hartwell have edited Twenty-First Century Science Fiction , a 250,000-word anthology of short fiction by writers who came to prominence since the turn of the century. The authors include “Vandana Singh, Charles Stross, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neal Asher, Rachel Swirsky, John Scalzi, M. Rickert, Tony Ballantyne, David Levine, Genevieve Valentine, Ian Creasey, Marissa Lingen, Paul Cornell, Elizabeth Bear, David Moles, Mary Robinette Kowal, Madeleine Ashby, Tobias Buckell, Ken Liu, Oliver Morton, Karl Schroeder, Brenda Cooper, Liz Williams, Ted Kosmatka, Catherynne M. Valente, Daryl Gregory, Alaya Dawn Johnson, James Cambias, Yoon Ha Lee, Hannu Rajaniemi, Kage Baker, Peter Watts, Jo Walton, and Cory Doctorow.
* Scientists are losing confidence that climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes. I’m sure the reporting on this will be balanced and responsible, dedicated to getting to the bottom of what’s really going on.
* Does the dog die? Check before you view.
* One of the First Known Chemical Attacks Took Place 1,700 Years Ago in Syria. Obama will appear on TV six times this week to hype the war, just like he did all those times to push the public option, economic stimulus, infrastructure spending, climate change legislation, closing Guantánamo…
* Bloomberg lets the mask slip. Yikes.
* Why Big Pharma should be scared of the gaming industry.
* Much of the height in Earth’s tallest towers is useless space.
* Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil.
* What Are Students Tweeting About Us?
* Prove me wrong, boy. Prove me wrong.
* And Angus Johnston concludes his series on the most important student activism stories to watch in 2013-2014: Part 3, 4.
Fourth of July America Links USA USA
* How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Military. And they say literary criticism is useless.
* DHS immediately begins implementing green cards to gay couples, without stalling or dragging its feet or needing to be sued. Amazing. I’d have never predicted it.
* Heat maps of poverty in US cities, 1980-2010. At right: Milwaukee in 2010. “Whites are in blue; blacks yellow; Hispanics green; and Asians red.”
So far this offseason, around 450 Division I basketball players have announced they’re changing schools. This turnover has imperiled the sport, says Marshall University basketball coach Tom Herrion, who calls it a “transfer epidemic.” Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski says that “[k]ids don’t stick to the school that they pick and they want instant gratification.” South Carolina’s Frank Martin agrees: “Kids are not being taught to stay the course, be patient, to learn how to work and improve.” Adds Alabama’s Anthony Grant, “I don’t think it’s something any coach will tell you is good for the game.”
GREEDY NCAA PLAYERS DEMANDING RIGHT TO CHOOSE WHICH GROUP OF MILLIONAIRES WON’T PAY THEM FOR THEIR LABOR PLEASE CALL POLICE
* India has officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons, whose rights to life and liberty must be respected. Dolphin parks that were being built across the country will instead be shut down.
* An Open Letter to New Teach for America Recruits.
Many of you no doubt believe you are joining a progressive education justice movement, that is the message TFA sells so well. But I want you to understand clearly, TFA is not progressive. The kind of limited data-driven pedagogy, the fast-track preparation, the union-busting, the forced exploitation of your labor, the deep-pocketed affiliation with corporate education reform are all very conservative, very anti-progressive ideas. Look no further than TFA’s list of supporters/donors. The largest donations are from groups like the Walton Foundation, of Walmart fortune, which has a vested interest in the status quo of inequality, breaking unions, and keeping wages low and workers oppressed. Or notice the many partnerships with JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, the very institutions which caused the financial collapse and threw millions of Americans-including your future students’ families-into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and deeper poverty. These organizations choose to donate to TFA because TFA supports their agendas. If TFA was truly pushing back on the status quo of educational inequality, these types of donors would not only refuse financial support, they would be attacking a group which threatens their earning potential.
* Meanwhile, making the rounds again: Gates Foundation Funding Wrist Bracelets to Monitor Teaching Effectiveness. How to Write a Conservative Article about Education.
* The Humanities, Declining? Not According to the Numbers. Well, you know, you can prove anything using facts.
* “This is text from an actual email from an actual coursera professor to actual coursera students.”
* More than 260 colleges and universities in 40 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have students who are more likely to default on their loans than full-time freshmen are to graduate, an analysis of federal data shows.
* Bummer Watch Lightning Round: Fox News adopts George Zimmerman. Kevin Clash’s (One) Day in Court. Gitmo Detainees to Be Force-Fed at Night Out of Respect for Ramadan. The street value of black market ivory in China — up to $1,300 a pound — rivals that of cocaine or gold. And, of course, North Carolina. Oh, North Carolina.
* In New York, Blasi said, his security personnel did not have the police’s powers of arrest and don’t have the power to arrest and shoot lawbreakers, and the city police did not believe they had the power to enter this private space. During the Zuccotti crisis, Blasi said he dreamed of turning on fire hydrants, letting loose German shepherds and deploying blow torches. Ralph Blasi is a director of security for a real estate company. Fire hydrants, German shepherds, blow torches.
* The marshmallow test became an important part of psychology canon. But a study in 2012 suggests that the children in the experiment did not necessarily differ in their ability to resist temptation. Instead, it was their trust in the researcher to return with the promised marshmallow that differed.
* And the headline reads: Human head transplants? Neurosurgeon says ‘we have the technology.’ All right, damnit, I’m in.
Tuesday Morning!
* The most important finding is that family formation negatively affects women’s, but not men’s, academic careers. For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high price. They are far less likely to be married with children. We see more women in visible positions like presidents of Ivy League colleges, but we also see many more women who are married with children working in the growing base of part-time and adjunct faculty, the “second tier,” which is now the fastest growing sector of academia. Unfortunately, more women Ph.Ds. has meant more cheap labor. And this cheap labor threatens to displace the venerable tenure track system.
* N.Y.U. Gives Its Stars Loans for Summer Homes.
* The US government has finally released the names of 46 men being held in Guantánamo under the classification of “indefinite detainees” – terror suspects deemed too dangerous to release or move yet impossible to try in a civilian or even military court for reasons of inadequate or tainted evidence.
* Bank of America whistle-blower’s bombshell: “We were told to lie.” Gasp!
* SCOTUSwatch: Win one, lose one.
* The lasting effects of the Vietnam draft lottery.
Vulnerability to the draft induced by the 1969 lottery not only structured attitudes toward the Vietnam War, but also provoked a cascade of changes in basic partisan, ideological, and issue attitudes. The breadth, magnitude, and, in some respects, persistence of these attitudinal changes illustrates how powerful self-interest can become when public policies directly touch our lives.
It seems to suggest how fundamentally arbitrary political attitudes are, however much we think we’re thinking things through rationally and proceeding by careful analysis of the facts.
* Science proves the humanities aren’t worthless!
* I thought Evan’s writeup on Mad Men was really great this week. Almost makes this season’s excruciating focus on Don’s mother issues seem interesting.
* Jesus wept: Vice re-creates female authors’ suicides for maximum trolling. Don’t even bother clicking, it’s absolutely as dumb as advertised.
* And just how much damage did Superman and Zod do to Metropolis?
Gerry Canavan 