Posts Tagged ‘high school football’
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin
older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:
-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019
What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci
— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will
— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/gGpowtXKGP
— Ree 🍯🍭 (@TTPrettyInPink) December 13, 2019
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 16, 2019 at 2:26 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2019, abortion, academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American Gods, animal experimentation, anti-Semitism, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, BDS, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Boots Riley, Brexit, bullshit jobs, Burisma, CFPs, charity, charter schools, chimpanzees, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, comics, Confederate monuments, corporations, critical thinking, cyborgs, dark side of the digital, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, ectopic pregnancies, Elizabeth Warren, empire, Episode 9, extinction, fandom, fascism, fatphobia, Finland, futurity, gay rights, gender, Generation Z, glaciers, Goldman Sachs, Google, grad student nightmares, graduate student movements, graduate students, Greenland, Greta Thunberg, HBO, health insurance, high school football, How the University Works, HR, Hunter Biden, ice sheet collapse, Infinite Jest, Instagram, intergenerational struggle, interviews, Israel, J.J. Abrams, Jacobin, Jaimee, Japan, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Joker, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Labour, Lube Man, lunch debt, Mario Maker, McKinsey, medicine, Michael Hardt, military-industrial complex, millennials, monkeys, my media empire, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nietzsche, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, one-book classes, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paw Patrol. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, podcasts, poems, poetry, politics, privacy, Proxima Centauri, PTSD, public health, race, racism, Randolph, religion, rich people, Richard Jewell, San Francisco, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Science in the Capital, self-help, SFFTV, Silent Sam, socialism, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, Stephen Miller, superheroes, taxes, Terminator, the 2010s, the archives, the Arctic, the economy, the fantastic, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the oceans, the university in ruins, They Live!, TikTok, Ukraine, UNC, United Kingdom, Utopia, Vietnam, volcanoes, voter suppression, war on education, Watchmen, web comics, white supremacy, William Gibson, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984, YouTube
Tuesday Links! Just for You
* My review won’t appear in The New Inquiry for a couple weeks, but Liu Cixin’s Death’s End is finally out today. I read it this summer and it’s great. Go get it!
* A local talk I’ll be giving this Saturday afternoon at the Milwaukee Public Library: 150 Years of H.G. Wells in Milwaukee.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee Public Library beat! Milwaukee Public Library to forgive fines for patrons who visit the library.
* CFP: Flannery O’Connor and Popular Culture. CFP: Modern Fiction Studies: The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies. CFP: Essays on the Evil Dead Anthology. CFP: ICFA 2017.
* Star Trek: Discovery Has Been Delayed Until May 2017. I never saw how they’d make January, even before it was nearly October and they didn’t have a cast yet.
* Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won’t Outearn You Forever.
* Professor Cottom’s Graduate School Guidance.docx
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* Too Much and Too Little: A History of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
* With outcomes so uneven, it is no wonder that MFAs are the bastard children of English departments.
* Saint Louis University must pay $367,000 in damages to a former professor who alleged she was denied tenure because of her gender. That’s what a Missouri court decided late last week following a trial by jury. The university says it’s “disappointed” in the verdict and is reviewing its options.
* What does it cost to run a department at UCLA for a year? or, who will pay the salary of the English department?
* This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program’s criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament.
* New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity.
* Haitian-American Roxane Gay Becomes First Black Woman Writer for Marvel Comics.
* From 2014: The Future According to Stanisław Lem.
* Parenting and moral panic, 2016.
* If You Change a Baby’s Diaper in Arizona, You Can Now Be Convicted of Child Molestation.
* “Very pessimistic.” The idea that they could actually somehow manage to blow the lead they’d built up over the summer is horrifying.
this is fine https://t.co/zGp0PVwqX6
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 15, 2016
* It Sure Seems Like Hillary Clinton’s Tech Guy Asked Reddit for Email Advice.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Defendants who can’t afford bail more likely to plead guilty as a way out, studies show.
* Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester. After court threat, state of Michigan removed Flint’s power to sue. WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer). 37 Years in Solitary Confinement and Even the State Can’t Explain Why. Nation’s largest police union endorses Trump. And right here in Milwaukee: An Inmate Died Of Thirst In A Jail Run By A Loudly Pro-Trump Sheriff.
* A Prison Literature Syllabus.
* The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.
* How the failed politics of “humanitarian intervention” were born in 1980s Afghanistan.
* Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.
* Romeo and Juliet in Wisconsin.
* The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult ‘trash.’
This is the most important news of the year. https://t.co/D7o4PddWH0
— Gabriel Baumgaertner (@gbaumgaertner) September 19, 2016
* “I await an apology from Chancellor Dirks, and Dean Hesse,” explained Hadweh. “The university threw me under the bus, and publicly blamed me, without ever even contacting me. It seems that because I’m Palestinian studying Palestine, I’m guilty until proven innocent. To defend the course, we had to mobilize an international outcry of scholars and students to stand up for academic freedom. This never should have happened.”
* I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke.
* The Woman Who Is Allergic to Water.
* Feral Cats and Ecological Disaster.
* The name of the character in the excerpt, GBW Ponce, comes actually from the Ponzi scheme, among other things. There’s a Thomas Frank piece that I once read somewhere (I think it was Harper’s), where he said that civilization is basically a gigantic ponzi scheme. With our obsession with data and with predicting the future, it’s as if we were trying to cancel the future and its uncertainties, in order to make the present feel safer. The IMF has projections for the growth of EVERY economy on the planet which stretch to two-three-four and even more years: why let reality run its course when we can model it and predict it, right? So, the idea behind that character was that by “scientifically” predicting every inch of life, it’s as if we borrowed against our unknown future to live the present with fewer uncertainties and anxieties. But that’s precisely what causes more anxiety, this idea of a life that could fit entirely in an Excel spreadsheet.
* Moderator Announces Topics for First Presidential Debate.
America's Direction
Achieving Prosperity
Securing America
America's Prosperity
Securing Direction
Securing Prosperity
America's America— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 20, 2016
* Definitely, definitely, definitely aliens.
* All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. Shame to get all the way through 312 and then swap #1 and #2…
* Elsewhere in the numerical sublime: Every He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figure, ranked.
* Teach the controversy! “Peter Thiel Would Make A Great Supreme Court Justice.”
* The Bonkers Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe.
* Someone Removed The Music From ‘Dancing In The Street’ And I Can’t Stop Laughing.
* Run it like a sandwich: After Texas high school builds $60-million stadium, rival district plans one for nearly $70 million.
moreover, wealthier school districts are reducing taxes (that have to be shared) and spending more via bond-funded projects (that don't).
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 19, 2016
* Class size matters a lot, research shows.
* Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?
* Page B13: Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates.
* And never forget that the Monkees are DCU canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 20, 2016 at 8:32 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, actuarial science as politics, alcohol, aliens, allergy, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, austerity, ban the box, Berkeley, Big Data, Black Panther, boondoggles, Bowie, C.M. Punk, canon, cats, CFPs, charity, charts, Chyna, Cixin Liu, class size, class struggle, climate change, college budgets, college majors, comics, D.C. Comics, Dancing in the Streets, David Foster Wallace, David Simon, Death's End, debates, digital humanities, digitality, distant reading, diversity, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Snowden, emails, English departments, English majors, Evil Dead, fandom, fans, Flannery O'Connor, Flint, football, futurity, gender, general election 2016, graduate school, H. G. Wells, He-Man, high school football, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, invasive species, Israel, Jesuits, journalism, journamalism, kids today, library fines, literature, lobbying, lockouts, Long Island University, luxury boxes, marijuana, Marvel Comics, MFAs, Michigan, Mick Jagger, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Library, misogyny, moral panic, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, New York, novels, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, Philip K. Dick, Pluto, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, polls, popular culture, pot, prison, prison literature, prison-industrial complex, professional wrestling, race, racism, Reddit, rich people, rising sea levels, Rolling Stones, Romeo and Juliet, Roxanne Gay, scams, science fiction, sexism, sexting, Should I go to grad school?, socialism, solitary confinement, spreadsheets, Springsteen, St. Louis University, stadiums, Stanislaw Lem, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, strikes, superheroes, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the courts, The Dark Forest, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, the Mediterranean, the Monkees, The Pale King, The Three-Body Problem, The Wire, Thunder Road, torture, toys, Tressie McMillan Cottom, unions, USSR, Wakanda, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, Washington Post, water, Who is going to pay the salary of the English department?, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, x-rays
I Just Can’t Believe It’s December Links
* Over the weekend, of course, we celebrated the first Star Wars Trailer Day in a decade. Your shot-for-shot dissection. A deeper look. Digging deeper still. The George Lucas Special Edition. Elsewhere on the Star Wars beat: Physicist Proves That R2D2 Is Lighter Than Styrofoam.
* English and foreign language jobs are down nearly 10% again, down almost 40% since 2007.
* New NEH Grants Will Promote Popular Scholarly Books.
* Call for Papers: Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor.
* Why colleges haven’t stopped binge drinking.
* Donors getting bold in Illinois: U. of Illinois Could Lose Big Gift by Rehiring Adjunct.
* A long, interesting piece on an anti-bullying measure passed by Madison faculty.
* When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths. Black Friday, Or the Circulation of Commodities.
* In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.
* Afrofuturism: The Sonic Companion.
* Putting The Sidekick In The Suit: Black Captain America, Female Thor, And The Illusion Of Progress.
* Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question.
* But where does it come from? My new answer: nobody builds a megadungeon. Megadungeons build themselves. They are the guilty conscience of rulership; the truth commission against power. Great power corrupts, and absolute power does what we’ve been told. Even those who want to rule well feel the attraction of expedient murder and petulant torture, the convenience of imprisoning one’s enemies without trial, buying off the priesthood and covering it all in a glaze of ceremony and pretty words. On this world, this eventually provokes its own reaction. Beneath the seats of power – castle; trading house; senate building – the accumulated sins happening above begin to literally undo the foundations. Dungeons grow. It might not be so tidy as: 60 starved prisoners in the last few decades means 60 skeletons, with hallways for them to roam through; 20 goblins and some rooms for them to squat in appear as a direct result of last year’s punitive expedition against the recalcitrant border villages; one ghoul for each speech in which you cloak your appetites in the honeyed words of dead philosophers, etc.
* How many people are locked up in the United States?
* Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid. The video that caught the cops lying about Tamir Rice. White Cops File Suit, Claim They Are Punished Too Much For Shooting People.
* Grand Jury Won’t Indict Officers In Ohio Wal-Mart Shooting, Either.
* Missouri almost out of money to attack Ferguson with. St. Louis police officers’ group demands Rams players be disciplined for ‘hands up, don’t shoot. Ferguson: Message from the Grassroots. No healing.
* Why Every Struggle Is Now a Struggle Against the Police.
* Similar cases yield very different results in Wisconsin prison system.
* Georgia’s Top Court Reins In Private Probation Firms For Illegally Extending Sentences. Reined in! The arc of history is long, but!
* Full Nihilism: “Six Reasons I’m Thankful for a Republican Congress.” Two of the six were “I’m bored.” Media professionals!
* One of the worst “errors” of the Obama presidency was the pivot to deficit reduction, when literally no one cares about deficit reduction.
* Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. Amway Journalism.
* Officials with a Northern California school district expelled a live-in nanny’s 9-year-old daughter after hiring a private investigator to ascertain where she lived, the Contra Costa Times reported. Having been caught, the school district has now reversed itself.
* Life after people: Someone Flew a Drone Through Chernobyl and the Result Is Haunting.
* Science proves people who still read fiction really are just better.
* How Often Do “Disruptive” Business Practices Actually Mean “Illegal” Business Practices? The Uberiest thing Uber’s done yet.
* Philanthropic Poverty: Bono and other philanthropic capitalists push charity to defend property.
* When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.
* The Super Mario 64 Goomba Nobody Has Ever Killed. The Coin That Took 18 Years to Collect.
* The real roots of midlife crisis, or, the second decade of this blog is going to be a shame. At least we have Charlie Stross’s thought experiments to comfort us.
* How Not to Get Away with Murder.
* My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK.
* An Open Letter to the Administration of Vassar College.
* This TNR piece on the Rolling Stone UVA exposé actually raises some relevant journalism questions, but my sense is this happens entirely by accident in the course of a kneejerk attempt to discredit the story.
* The false rape accusation as witchcraft.
. CTRL-F revenue, CTRL-F income, CTRL-F profit: Vox Media Valued at Nearly $400 Million After Investment.
* The 22-year-old appeared to have killed himself, police said. A handgun was found near his body inside the dumpster. The text he sent said he was sorry, “if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all f—ed up.”
* Even a single season of high school football might have harmful impacts on the brain.
* Your panel-by-panel breakdown of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Watchmen pastiche Pax Americana #1, this year’s instant-classic comic book.
* You don’t have to beg, borrow, or steal anymore: Black Mirror is finally on Netflix.
* Wanderers. Time Trap. Five Minutes.
* And finally, we get to the meat: Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 2, 2014 at 10:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, academic publishing, activism, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, alcohol, aliens, apocalypse, austerity, baptism, Barack Obama, Big Coal, binge drinking, Black Friday, Black Mirror, Bono, books, bullying, California, capitalism, Captain America, carceral liberalism, Catholicism, CEOs, CFPs, charts, Chernobyl, chilling visions of things to come, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, coal, college, college football, college sports, comics, concussions, consumerism, disruption, disruptive innovation, donation, drones, dungeons, Dungeons & Dragons, eldercare, English, Episode 7, Ezra Klein, Ferguson, film, football, Frank Quitely, games, George Lucas, Georgia, Grant Morrison, grants, guns, high school football, How the University Works, journalism, labor, liberalism, Life After People, Marvel, Marx, Marxism, megadungeons, midlife crisis, misogyny, Missouri, MLA, murder, music, NCAA, NEH, neoliberalism, nihilism, Nintendo, nursing homes, outer space, Pax Americana #1, philanthropy, physics, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison-industrial complex, prisons, privatization, protest, R2-D2, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reading, religion, Republicans, resistance, rich people, science, science fiction, sexism, short film, sidekicks, St. Louis, Star Wars, suicide, Super Mario, superheroes, Tamir Rice, tenure, Thanksgiving, the Constitution, the courts, the debt, the deficit, the Force, the law, the Pope, the Senate, The World Without Us, Thor, time travel, trailer, U2, Uber, University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, UVA, Vassar, Vox, Watchmen, why we can't have nice things, Wisconsin, writing, zombies
Thursday Morning Links
* Your poem of the day: Tracy K. Smith, “Sci-Fi.”
* Philosophical science fiction, 1, 2, 3. Via MeFi.
* Science fiction as white supremacist fantasy.
* Charlie Stross on why he thinks he’ll be writing more urban fantasy than science fiction in the coming years.
* If you want a vision of the future: Tenure-track jobs in YA lit and science fiction studies at the University of Calgary.
* Feces on the Philosophy of History! A Manifesto of the MLA Subconference.
* For Safety’s Sake, Get Rid of Campus Cops.
* This is not to diminish the exuberant commitment of the participants. At the same time, we must reckon with the fact that pop culture really likes to be agreeable along with its thrills. It likes to say yes, and makes endless conciliations to do so. It is safer to say yes. Yes can be deeply pleasurable. History is made by those who say no. Extinction Pop.
* David Graeber has published the piece comparing Rojava to the Spanish Civil War that he and I argued about on Twitter the other day. I have to say I find Richard Seymour’s take much more persuasive.
So if we have no way to make the slogan effective, what is it for? If it is genuinely intended to pressure imperialist states to “arm the Kurds”, then it is at best unthinking sentimentality. At its most sophisticated, though, the idea could be to ‘intervene’ in an argument taking place in imperialist countries around the region’s uprisings and military intervention, to attack the weak points in the dominant ideology and open a space in which a leftist argument can be made to a popular audience. In this view, Kobane represents both the most progressive front of struggle in the region at the moment, and the weakest point ideologically for imperialist ruling classes who have no desire to see the PYD/PKK prevail. In this sense, the demand to “arm the Kurds” is a sort of feint, akin to a ‘transitional demand’ in that it is both seemingly ‘reasonable’ in light of the dominant ideology and also impossible for the ruling class to deliver.
* Malcolm Harris remembers the Milgram experiments.
“Post-post-colonial” — and that’s just because I can’t think of something wittier right now — I think is a new generation of, well, new-ish generation of writers, where we’re not driven by our dialogue with the former mother country [the United Kingdom]. The hovering power for us when growing up in the ’70s and ’80s was not the U.K. It was the States, it was America. And it wasn’t an imperialistic power, it was just a cultural influence. I’m sure if this book was written in the ’70s or the ’60s, the characters would have ended up in London. They wouldn’t have ended up in the Bronx.
For us [as opposed to the post-colonial writers], for example, identity is not necessarily how to define ourselves in the relation of colonial power, colonial oppressor — so now it’s a matter of defining who you are as opposed to who you’re not.
* Remember: Obama cannot fail, he can only be failed.
* BREAKING: Wall Street is still looting the whole country.
* Big news for a small number of academic writers and artists: Judge Overturns IRS on Artist Tax Deductions.
* Open-Carrying Guy Has His Brand-New Pistol Stolen at Gunpoint.
* One high school’s insane quest to make students print “Redskins.”
* Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich—Then Vegas Made Them Pay.
* The battle to make Tommy the chimp a person.
* Here’s exactly how much monetary damage Calvin and Hobbes did together.
* Here’s the plot, in a nutshell: Sinatoro follows a necronaut who is sent into the afterlife to save Earth from destruction. It draws influences from the western genre and the classic American highway Route 66. It’s something Morrison considers his magnum opus of sorts, and we’re glad he’ll finally get a chance to tell it.
* Thomas Friedman is paid an incredible amount of money to write this dreck.
* This is literally unbelievable: Fracking company teams up with Susan G. Komen, introduces pink drill bits “for the cure.” I find it difficult to even conceive of anything more absurd than this.
* And judging from the resounding crickets that followed this announcement this feels like a year that maybe I really could have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 9, 2014 at 7:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, America, animal personhood, animals, anti-anti-imperialism, anti-imperialism, art, Barack Obama, breast cancer, Calgary, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, Charlie Stross, chimpanzees, class struggle, CNN, comics, David Graeber, debt, Ebola, empire, football, gambling, Grant Morrison, guns, hazing, high school football, hydrofracking, ideology at its purest, IRS, ISIS, Kojave, Las Vegas, literature, manifestos, Milgram experiment, misogyny, MLA, MLA Subconference, morally odious morons, Nobel Prize, Patrick Modiano, philosophy, pinkwashing, poetry, police, politics, postcoloniality, racism, Rojava, science fiction, Sinatoro, Spanish Civil War, sports, taxes, tenure, the Anthropocene, Thomas Friedman, trolls, urban fantasy, Wall Street, Walter Benjamin, Washington Racial Slurs, white supremacy, young adult literature
Weekend Links!
* I liked this brief addendum to my academic job market as “game” piece from the other day.
One thing I might add is that the game metaphor also helps us see the job market as something that could be improved. If we view the market as a system of pure luck, then there’s nothing we can do to fix it. And if we think of it as a meritocracy, then we don’t have any reason to. But if the job market is a game, structured, as Canavan says, by “a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair,” then those in positions of power in the academy (including people on hiring committees) could work to change the rules. In large and small ways they could work to make it a more rational and fair game.
I agree the game framing suggests change is possible in a way that neither merit nor lottery does. I’d hoped I made that point at the end (“make alliances, change the rules, overturn the table”) but perhaps I could have put more emphasis on it.
* I’ve always been really skeptical of Rolling Jubilee, so I’m a sucker for any time Naked Capitalism dumps on it.
So while it is impressive to hear of the large amounts of debt being forgiven, the fact is that the people who are finding their debts erased more than likely won’t care much because they are either no longer under any legal obligation to pay the note and have long since forgotten about it, or never intended to pay the note in the first place, and never would! So these borrowers won’t likely be gushing with praise and thanks, and frankly won’t be helped much if at all by the repurchase of the debt. I suspect that people learning of their debt being purchased and erased were, instead of relieved and grateful, were more perplexed as to why anyone would go to the trouble of clearing up debt that they themselves had forgotten about long ago! By far, the happiest participant in these transactions, are the banks/collection companies who are thrilled to get anything for the loans!
* But the elusive nomads who wander that desert say California was once a paradise.
* Courts do not give justice, because they do not try. They follow a formal procedure, at best.
* Run the university like a business, you know, have such radically lax oversight that one person can steal $700,000.
* When I was talking the other day about the similarities between my childhood plan to become a priest for the free housing and lifetime tenure and my current profession as a secular monk performing textual exegesis at a Catholic school, 1, 2, 3, 4, I guess I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.
* The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.
* Cutinella is the third high school football player to die in less than a week.
* On the life of PhDs working outside the US and Europe.
* Capitalism in 2014: “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”
* At least they got to waste all that money first: MOOC fever has broken.
* A gender-neutral pronoun is taking over Sweden.
* Elsewhere in the-Scandinavian-kids-are-all-right: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play.
* Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien. No Milwaukee, but he did do Cleveland, Boston, and DC. Many more links below the image; you’re not getting off that easy.
* I can’t figure out if Ascension is let’s-do-BSG-with-a-competent-showrunner or let’s-do-BSG-on-the-cheap. Mad Men in Space, though, so fine.
* Museum of Science Fiction Selects Design for Preview Museum.
* We Still Don’t Know If This Tribe Discovered In The ’70s Was Real.
* An Apple Store employee has written the follow-up to I Am Legend.
* Ideology watch: “Let. Her. Go.” movie supercut.
* America was founded as a white supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Here’s a lawsuit that seems deliberately calibrated to freak everybody out: Black sperm incorrectly delivered to white lesbian couple.
* Talking White: Black people’s disdain for “proper English” and academic achievement is a myth.
* D.C. Attorney May Use FBI Headquarters As Leverage In Statehood Lawsuit.
* People are saying Homeland might be good again, but don’t you believe it. That’s exactly what they want us to think.
* Elsewhere in ideology at its very very purest. Mad Men: Lady Cops.
* BREAKING: Startup Funding Is Given Almost Entirely To Men.
* Just imagine what England might accomplish if it ever gets a second actor.
* Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Controversial, really? Can’t imagine why.
* Freedom’s just another word for a $1200 machine that lets anyone manufacture a gun.
* Human civilization was founded as a human supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Earth crosses the walrus threshold.
* Paid leave watch: Florida cop placed on leave after using taser on 62-year-old woman.
* Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
* Please be advised: Jacobin 15/16 looks especially great.
* Even baseball knows baseball is dull.
* And a UF study suggests peanut allergies could soon be a thing of the past. That’d be pretty great news for a whole lot of people I know.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2014 at 7:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, allergies, America, animal personhood, animals, anthropology, artificial insemination, Ascension, babies, baseball, Benedict Cumberbatch, Boston, business, California, capitalism, Catholicism, Chicago, Christopher Nolan, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, concussions, cop shows, debt, desertification, dolphins, drought, ebonics, ecology, empire, England, Finland, flexible online education, football, FSU, games, gender, guns, high school football, Homeland, How the University Works, I Am Legend, ideology, ideology at its purest, internships, Interstellar, Jacobin, justice, language, let her go, Mad Men, maps, misogyny, MOOCs, Museum of Science Fiction, museums, my life as a secular monk, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Occupy, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, payment is on an unpaid basis, Peanuts, pedagogy, pharmacy school, play, plucked from obscurity!, police brutality, police violence, politics, priests, race, racism, religion, Richard III, Rolling Jubilee, school, science, science fiction, Sea World, sexism, space colonies, sperm donors, startups, Sweden, SyFy, tasers, teaching, the courts, the fifty states, the kids are all right, the law, they paved paradise, Tolkien, torture, uncontacted tribes, venture capitalism, walruses, war on drugs, Washington D.C., water, white privilege, white supremacy, whiteness, women, words, zombies, zunguzungu
All The Links
* CFP reminder: “SF/F Now” and “Irradiating the Object” at the University of Warwick, August 2014. Proposals due March 31.
* Legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois once said that the job of a science fiction writer was to notice the car and the movie theater and anticipate the drive-in – and then go on to predict the sexual revolution. I love that quote, because it highlights the key role of SF in examining the social consequences of technology – and because it shows how limited our social imaginations are.
* Median Salaries of Senior College Administrators, 2013-14.
* Where and When You Can See The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* The New Yorker covers fusion power.
* We need to update our nightmares: Zeynep Tufekci on the Internet.
* Unreal: Dartmouth Student Says She Was Sexually Assaulted After Website ‘Rape Guide’ Named Her. Campus Rape and the Rise of the Academic Industrial Complex.
* 800-year-old castle torn down in Ireland.
* $60 million high school football stadium, built in 2012, torn down.
* Curators at the new art museum at Kennesaw State University had some last-minute work to do before its grand opening Saturday night. They had to quickly pack up an installation — one the art museum had commissioned — after university administrators ordered it killed for being insufficiently “celebratory” for the event.
* The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics. Man.
* …one of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.
* Agamben, horror, and the 90s.
* Universities being used as proxy border police, say UK academics.
* But at least one university says it has already begun denying admission to “risky” applicants — those who don’t meet the institution’s typical minimum standards for SAT scores and GPA — over fears of how it would be rated under the Obama ratings proposal.
* How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit.
* “That hurt.” On being Chevy Chase.
* Hitting rock bottom: they’re rebooting Santa Claus.
* And just one Oscar link is all you need: Lupita Nyong’o.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 3, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, Agamben, Amazon, bananas, Barack Obama, Black Panthers, BPA, castles, CFPs, Chevy Chase, class struggle, college rankings, conferences, corruption we can believe in, cultural preservation, Dartmouth, FBI, FEMA, film, full communism, fusion power, high school football, Hollywood, horror, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, immigration, Ireland, Lupita Nyong'o, museums, New Yorker, nuclear energy, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oscars, plastics, poliitcs, rape, rape culture, reboots, Santa Claus, science fiction, stadiums, superexploitation, surveillance society, Taylorism, Texas, the 1990s, the Cold War, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Holocaust, the Internet, Wes Anderson, what it is I think I'm doing
Friday Links
* Mother Jones on “the White House’s private outrage at former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu’s impromptu decision to talk about climate change while visiting an island nation uniquely threatened by it.” How dare he…
* Six women filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday alleging that Vanderbilt University, a prestigious school in Nashville, has failed to adequately respond to incidences of sexual assault on campus.
* Boston Adjuncts Ask: Is There Life After Bentley U.?
* Contingency and the Psychic Wage.
* Baby Sent to Foster Care for 57 Days Because Parents Are Blind.
* Here come the ACA scammers. Meanwhile, in Obamacare follies: the “administrative fix.” The shorthand explanation for what’s going on here is that everybody — the insurance companies, members of Congress, and Obama — is bullshitting.
* There is plenty of violence in the world of hunter-gatherers, though it is hardly illuminated by resorting to statistical comparisons between the mortality rates of a tiny tribal war in Kalimantan and the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust. This violence, however, is almost entirely a state-effect. It simply cannot be understood historically from 4000 BC forward apart from the appetite of states for trade goods, slaves and precious ores, any more than the contemporary threat to remote indigenous groups can be understood apart from the appetite of capitalism and the modern state for rare minerals, hydroelectric sites, plantation crops and timber on the lands of these peoples. Papua New Guinea is today the scene of a particularly violent race for minerals, aided by states and their militias and, as Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism shows, its indigenous politics can be understood only in this context. Contemporary hunter-gatherer life can tell us a great deal about the world of states and empires but it can tell us nothing at all about our prehistory. We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.
* Should your child play football? Poll: 40 Percent Say Tackle Football Should Be Banned Before High School. Former KU fullback Chris Powell sues NCAA over head trauma.
* The Eighth Doctor finally gets his sendoff in a prequel to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.
* Malcolm Harris against the unpaid internship for credit. I think there’s still a place for educational internships, but at nothing like the rates we see today, and it should never be used to displace waged workers or make the company money.
* The lives and deaths of hard drives.
* Shocked that Google Books is fair use. College and university administrators, take note!
* How to Talk to Your Daughter About Her Body.
* And I took so long posting this link dump the latest Andy-Kaufman-is-alive hoax has already fallen apart.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 15, 2013 at 10:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, administrative fixes, Andy Kaufman, Barack Obama, blindness, bodies, bullshit, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, computers, contingency, Doctor Who, ecology, football, gender, girls, Google, Google Books, health care, high school football, high school sports, hoaxes, How the University Works, internships, islands, Jared Diamond, kids today, NCAA, parenting, politics, primitivism, rape culture, science fiction, slavery, Steven Chu, television, the Cabinet, Vanderbilt, violence, Won't somebody think of the children?
Saturday!
* Malala Yousafzai charms Jon Stewart, confronts Obama, advocates socialism.
* Just another massive early-autumn blizzard in South Dakota, nothing to see here.
* New drug could prevent cell death from Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.
* This Is Your Brain On Poetry.
* Professors and Adjuncts Unite, Win Raises, Job Security in First Contract.
* There’s No Crying at the Pee Wee Super Bowl: The Rigors of Youth Football. High School Football Coach Encourages Player To Shake Off Cognitive Impairment.
* Finally: House Members Announce New Path Forward to Open the Government through a Discharge Petition. Shutdown’s Quiet Toll, From Idled Research to Closed Wallets. But the first thing we do, let’s kill all the mice.
* Old continuity or I crash the economy: Bob Orci is reportedly talking to CBS about a new Star Trek TV series.
* Comedian pranks TedX at Drexel University.
* France’s Ban On Fracking Is ‘Absolute.’
* Living Man Told He Is Legally Dead By Court.
* I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss,.
* While we celebrate the ghouls and goblins of October, Elaine M. Will’s webcomic Look Straight Ahead depicts a different sort of horror. High school senior Jeremy loses his connection with reality as he falls into the grips of bipolar disorder.
* …for the true and democratically minded critic, “technology” is just a slick, depoliticized euphemism for the neoliberal regime itself. To attack technology today is not to attack the Enlightenment – no, it is to attack neoliberalism itself.
* I’m taking a quick break from ignoring Glenn Beck to note how terrible a person Glenn Beck is.
* And a New California Law Will Allow Children More Than Two Legal Parents. As long as none of the parents is Glenn Beck, I’m on board.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 12, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, Alzheimer's, America, Bangladesh, Barack Obama, bipolar disorder, brain, California, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, cognitive science, comics, Daily Show, drones, ecology, football, France, Glenn Beck, government shutdowns, guns, high school football, How the University Works, Huntington's disease, hydrofracking, Jon Stewart, kids today, labor, Malala Yousafzai, mice, neoliberalism, parenting, Parkinson's, politics, religion, science, sex offenders, socialism, South Carolina, South Dakota, stand your ground, Star Trek, suicide, sweat shops, technology, TED talks, television, the courts, the law, The Onion, unions, Won't somebody think of the children?, zero tolerance
Teaching Links
Should I Stop Assigning Homework? The Case Against High-School Sports. This Job Can Kill You. College Can Be Free.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 20, 2013 at 12:05 pm
More Monday Night Links
* “Too few questions were asked, too many assumptions were allowed to go unchallenged, too many voices of doubt were muffled or rejected in a toxic atmosphere of patriotism, ignorance and political fear.” No, he’s not talking about the Obama administration’s current policy of ubiquitous drone-backed assassination! He’s talking about Iraq.
* Slaughter critically reviews the history of the AAUP, and finds that since its inception in 1915, it has failed either to claim in theory, or to defend in practice, a concept of academic freedom sufficiently robust to ensure even the basic civil liberties of faculty in the “danger zone” of politically sensitive scholarship in the social sciences, let alone their ability to develop research in these fields without fear of politically motivated reprisals. Even one AAUP president, William Van Alstyne, has stated that the AAUP’s standards of professional accountability for public statements restrict faculty utterances in ways that would be unacceptable in the context of the constitutional law of civil liberties. Slaughter also argues that the AAUP has placed excessive emphasis on tenure, bargaining away other aspects of academic freedom to obtain job security, and that the tenure-review process itself is the principal mechanism by which conservative biases in the faculty are perpetuated, particularly in times of financial exigency when the refusal to grant tenure to young radical faculty can be rationalized as non-political.
“I think about it,” Westbrook said Friday. “I think everybody has their own personal battles, own personal demons. So I think Junior was not only dealing with concussions but he was also dealing with other things. But I often wonder the long-term effects of everything — playing with the bad knee, playing with the ankle, and of course the concussion situation. I think about it all the time, every time I wake up and can’t remember the name of someone I once knew. I always think about it.”
* Nate Silver has solved the NCAA tournament. You’re welcome. More here.
Marquette, meanwhile, is almost certainly the weakest No. 3 seed this year, and has about a 35 percent chance of being upset by No. 14-seeded Davidson in its opening game. Instead, a Round of 16 game against No. 4 Syracuse in Washington could be Indiana’s toughest test.
You bastard.
* Coming of Age, Slowly, in a Tough Economy.
* Idea for a movie in which aliens invade the Earth and fix the economy.
* World successfully hypnotized into thinking that Cyprus really is unique.
* Sometimes the most radical ideas are those which at first sound most banal. For example, when Detroit Emergency Manager (EM) Kevyn Orr and Michigan governor Rick Snyder describe the citizens of Detroit as “customers,” it barely registers as a platitude. At first glance, it’s just another example of how marketing-speak has encroached on the language of politics; similar to how a candidate for higher office might say that government ought to be run like a business, or compare the president to a CEO.
But the description of citizens as customers—an analogy repeatedly invoked by Snyder to justify suspending the powers of Detroit’s local government and putting the city under Emergency Management—is different. It refers not only to citizens, but to the fundamental character of the government’s relationship with its citizens.
* Steubenville, actually existing media bias, and the view from nowhere. The Egregious, Awful and Downright Wrong Reactions to the Steubenville Rape Trial Verdict. Steubenville and the misplaced sympathy for Jane Doe’s rapists. Steubenville Shows the Bond Between Jock Culture and Rape Culture. On Rape, Cages, and the Steubenville Verdict. Why Does Steubenville’s Football Coach Still Have His Job? What the hell is wrong with CNN?
* Lawsuits Over Job-Placement Rates Threaten 20 More Law Schools.
* Gates McFadden’s Beverly Crusher Action Figure Tumblr. I can’t even begin. Via MetaFilter.
* You don’t know all the secrets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer yet.
The United States government totally collapsed during season 4. At least, that’s what a prop newspaper created for use during “Hush” claims — apparently the United States House and Senate both dissolved as governing bodies, replaced by a shadowy group known only as “The Surviving Members of Queen.” Even though Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon and “digitally enhanced voice samples of Freddie Mercury” might not actually have U.S. citizenship. Meanwhile, then-President Clinton faced another scandal after he tested positive for presidency-enhancing drug Crovan.
* Alyssa Rosenberg is doing a Veronica Mars viewing club.
* 12 Very Special ‘Very Special Episodes.’
* And the RNC autopsies what went wrong.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2013 at 10:34 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Barack Obama, Buffy, Bush, charts, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CNN, college basketball, college sports, concussions, consumer culture, Cyprus, Detroit, drones, football, general election 2012, Great Recession, high school football, How the University Works, Iraq, Joss Whedon, law school, Marquette, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, NCAA, neoliberalism, NFL, politics, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Star Trek, Steubenville, television, tenure, the economy, the kids aren't all right, TNG, Tumblr, underemployment, unemployment, Veronica Mars, very special episodes, war on terror, worst financial crisis since the last one