Monday Links!

* CFP: SFRA 2015.

* From the archives: the inaugural issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Ephemera 11.4: “Work, Play, and Boredom.” And in the mail: Science Fiction Film and Television 7.2, all about Doctor Who.

* Pro-Sports Moochers and the True Cost of “Student Athletes.”

* Existential Comics recaps France vs. Germany.

* Today in things that won’t get a policeman thrown in jail, much less fired: Video Catches Highway Cop Punching Woman On The Side Of The Road.

* What If America Had Lost the Revolutionary War? U.S. Flag Recalled After Causing 143 Million Deaths.

* The past is another country: Black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow south – except on Independence Day.

* Today in the surveillance state. If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance.

* Jedediah Purdy at Politco: 238 years after its first birthday, America is in deep denial.

* The Democratic Party is an inside job.

* “There’s $300 billion worth of gold in the basement, but the real money is on the ninth floor.”

* Here’s the Lawless Hellscape Colorado Has Become Six Months After Legalizing Weed.

* TSA Now Mandating That All Phones Be Turned On Before You Fly. Up is down! Black is white!

* Let’s redesign parking signs.

* Children left to play alone achieve more. So that’s my secret!

* 10 Words Every Girl Should Learn.

* Jaws Is Ridiculous, Say Kids Who Owe Everything to Jaws.

* This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting.

* Researchers Discover the Meaning of Over 60 Words Used by Wild Chimps.

* Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem.

* Presenting the absolute worst people in the world: the coal-rollers.

* Introducing TV’s Best Female Monster Yet.

* Batman v. Superman only seems terrible because they got Kevin Smith to write a fake script to fool everyone. Well it certainly accounts for all the known facts.

* On Maleficent, Disney’s first rape-revenge film.

* And the new rules for Dungeons & Dragons are free; you’ll note for historical purposes that race is still real, but sex and gender aren’t.

Wednesday Links

* Tomorrow’s crimes today: man arrested for attempting to steal five tons of glacial ice in Chile.

* Parlor game of the day: French Toast. Via Alex, via MetaFilter.

* Major birth control pill recall. Bring on the lawsuits! Wow.

* Worst idea in comics history confirmed.

* Cary Nelson on fighting for the humanities.

We take it for granted that scientific knowledge must advance, that there is much we do not know and much that we will live out our lives without knowing. Knowledge of the physical universe beyond the solar system and the galaxy remains so limited that it is hard even to calculate its partiality. The nature of life elsewhere in the universe remains beyond our grasp, as does knowledge of the human body that would enable us to control diseases like cancer.

And yet we often—unreflectively, uncritically, and in a learned form of self-deception—assume that we largely know ourselves and our history. Through its institutions and the norms of social life, human culture immerses us in collective understanding that is often deceptive or false.

The task of the humanities is not only to show us the ways that artists and others have penetrated our illusions by creative acts both modest and grand but also to try to discover when human cultures as a whole have seen through a glass darkly.

* Somebody in Stockholm finally noticed that the commander-in-chief of the biggest military on the planet is an odd choice for a peace prize.

* A Kinseyan gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

* Abolish the dollar bill! For freedom!

* The headline reads, “India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President.”

* Science uncovers the high cost of bad handwriting.

* Freddie deBoer on divorce rate hokum.

* And why do you have two nostrils instead of one giant hole in the middle of your face? io9 reports.

Tuesday!

Tuesday!

* Five Amazing Buildings of the Future (And How They’ll Kill You).

* Also via Gravity Lens: the death of handwriting!

* David Cronenberg will film DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.

* Nicholson Baker says the Kindle 2 isn’t all that. I think I’m going to stick to fantasizing about the hilariously expensive Apple tablet coming this winter.

* Also in the New Yorker: an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about The Left Hand of Darkness.

* And The Daily Show says goodbye to Sarah Palin.