Posts Tagged ‘home ownership’
Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!
* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”
* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.
* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?
* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.
* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.
* The market can’t solve a massacre.
And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”
* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.
* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.
* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.
* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.
* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.
* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.
* The rise of the prison state.
* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.
* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.
* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.
* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.
* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.
* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.
* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.
* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.
* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.
* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.
* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.
* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.
* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.
* Hate spree killings in Austin.
* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.
* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.
* Happy International Women’s Day.
* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.
* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance.
* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.
* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.
* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.
* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.
Spring! Break! Forever! Links!
* The Department of Special Collections and University Archives will host an upcoming talk by Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft March 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Raynor Memorial Libraries Beaumier Suites. Croft is the author of “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and ‘Anticipation’ in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy,” and has written on film adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. The talk will explore Tolkien’s “Hobbit Trilogy” in regards to audience expectations, the difficulties of filming a prequel after a sequel, and issues of anticipation in relation to character development.
* The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google.
* In Amsterdam, a revolt against the neoliberal university.
* The persistence of inequality.
* How A Traveling Consultant Helps America Hide The Homeless.
* Working-Class Women at the MLA Interview.
* Checking flights now: Kim Stanley Robinson Week at Ralahine.
* Using Science Fiction to Re-Envision Justice.
* Arab Sci-Fi: The future is here.
* ‘House of Cards’ is the worst show about American politics. Ever. On the perfunctoriness of House of Cards.
* Unarmed teenager shot by police in Madison. Students march.
* Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s sheriff wants attention.
* The Unfortunate Fate of Sweet Briar’s Professors. This headline really buries the lede:
Of course, faculty members aren’t the only employees who are taking a hit. Rainville suggested that nearly a third of the college’s hourly workers are descendants of the Fletcher plantation’s original slave community. Some of the staff members have worked at Sweet Briar their entire adult lives.
* Detenuring and its discontents.
* Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education.
* What Obama’s ‘Student Aid Bill of Rights’ Will — and Won’t — Do. Student Loans Viewed Differently Than Other Debt, Study Finds.
* Fear of a Muslim Planet. From TNI #38: “Futures.”
* Islamophobic Bus Ads In San Francisco Are Being Defaced With Kamala Khan.
* Finally, a technological solution to the problem of taking attendance!
* LARPing Hamlet at Castle Elsinore.
* These Photos Beautifully Capture the Complex Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters. These are really amazing. Many more links after the photo.
* Austerity won’t collapse under its own contradictions. We’ll need a movement for that.
* It’s a mistake to ask whether this is wealthy people defending their financial interests or wealthy people expressing their ideology, or which motivation is reallyin the driver’s seat. The triumph of modern conservatism is that it has collapsed the distinction. The interests of the wealthy are the ideology. Fossil fuels are the ideology. They’re bubbling in the same ethno-nationalist stew as anti-immigrant sentiment, hawkish foreign policy, hostility toward the social safety net, and fetishism of guns, suburbs, and small towns. It’s all one identity now. The Kochs (and their peers) are convinced that their unfettered freedom is in the best interests of the country. There’s no tension.
* What happens when Queen Elizabeth dies?
* Native language study at UWM.
* Judge Says University Failed to Shield Professor From Colleagues’ Retaliation. Yeah, sure sounds like it.
* It is now twelve months to the day that I set myself the task of, for one full year, reading books only by straight, white, middle-class, Anglopone, cis male authors. During that time I read 144 books. The things I learned in my year of selective reading made me pretty glad to have persevered.
Ph.D. students will receive 4 percent more in total compensation for their work as teaching assistants, bringing the average annual compensation up to approximately $36,600. The agreement also guarantees yearly minimum wage increases of 2.25 to 2.50 percent through 2020. For graduate employees at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, some of whom currently make only $10 an hour, hourly wages will increase to $15 next fall and reach $20 by 2020. Those employees will also receive a $1,500 bonus for work done over the past three semesters.
* Diving into the weeds: Is University of Oklahoma frat’s racist chant protected by 1st Amendment? 5 Ways Fraternities Are Wielding Major Influence Over University Administrations. A decade of bad press hasn’t hurt fraternity membership numbers. A Brief and Recent History of Bigotry at Fraternities.
* Flexible online education can never fail, it can only be failed.
* Small Private College Shuts Down, Donates Campus to the University of Iowa.
* Mass Firings in History at Boise State.
* The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?
* Florida Officials Ban The Term ‘Climate Change.’
* Climate Change Is Altering Everything About The Way Water Is Provided In Salt Lake City.
* The Desertification of Mongolia. Still not done, more links below.
* Introducing the Gawker Media SecureDrop.
* Buffy is old enough to go through that weird test they make Slayers go through when they turn 18.
* Is Scott Walker the most dangerous man in America?
* The troubled history of the foreskin.
* I’m honestly amazed the insurers were letting Harrison Ford fly small planes to begin with.
* In the U.S., a notary public does unglamorous legal drudge work. But in many Latin American countries, a notario is an ill-defined but powerful figure with broad legal authority, often someone with the connections needed to navigate bureaucracies that, while arcane, are also flexible. Unscrupulous notarios in the U.S. exploit these facts to con immigrants into believing that all it takes to finally get legal is the right person to file the paperwork.
* Emily Yoffe has another piece at Slate arguing against the current approach to sexual assault at colleges, this time framed around The Hunting Ground.
* English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet.
* Dystopia in our time: “Why Buzzfeed Is The Most Important News Organization in the World.”
* The end of cable: HBO is coming to Apple TV.
* I have altered the Expanded Universe. Pray I do not alter it further. But at least progress marches on.
* Gasp! Airbnb Is Making Things Worse for LA Renters.
* Meritocracy watch: Chelsea Clinton Absolutely Open to Running for Office.
* How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront.
* “A simple design fluke and marketing are afoot here. When Gard accidentally increased her breast size by 150 percent, the creative team insisted it was maintained. The parent company’s marketing team found this to be a boon to breaking through the noise that would buoy their success.”
* Porntopia: A trip to the Adult Video News Awards.
* In 1923, Daylight Saving Time Was Actually Illegal In Some States. It’s time to make daylight saving time year-round. PFT speaks.
* The salary you need to buy a home in 27 U.S. cities.
* These maps show where the world’s youngest and oldest people live.
* Ottawa doctors behind breakthrough multiple sclerosis study. This sounds amazing. I hope it’s true.
* Coming this October: Back in Time: The Back to the Future documentary.
* You know, like Ghostbusters, but Ph-balanced for a man.
* Scenes from the class struggle at NBC News.
* Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence. The Moral Philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes.
* Men make their own brackets, but they do not make them as they please. Marx Madness. Via MarxFi.
* And they say our culture is no longer capable of producing great things.
Sunday MLA Hangover Links
* Horrors and horrors: Missouri prosecutors say they are unable to bring rape charges in the brutal Maryville case, though one of the boys involved will be charged for abandoning the 14-year-old to die in the snow afterwards. The victim in the case attempted suicide last week.
* For the 20th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates.
* Run the university like a sandwich: The University of East London paid a total of £589,000 in settlement to three senior managers, including its former vice-chancellor, who resigned before news emerged that two overseas ventures had collapsed.
* A student’s request to be excused from course work on religious grounds so he would not have to interact with female peers has opened a fractious debate over how institutions navigate between competing human rights.
* A Bang, and Then a Whimper: Some Thoughts On the Death of Cooper Union.
* The Poverty Line Was Designed Assuming Every Family Had a Housewife Who Was a ‘Skillful Cook.’
* As many as 300,000 West Virginians have been warned not to use their water for drinking, cooking, or bathing following a massive chemical spill. The 6 Most Terrifying Facts About The Chemical Spill Contaminating West Virginia’s Drinking Water. Radio Disney’s pro-fracking elementary school tour sparks outrage. Freedom Industry.
Freedom means this happens constantly, a little bit. Freedom means sometimes it happens a great deal.
* With the implementation of tighter carbon emissions caps and more responsible household energy use, it is not too late to reverse the dire course of global warming, a panel of scientists who know full well that it is far too late and we are all doomed told reporters today.
* A Side Benefit of Legal Weed Is the Cops Go Broke.
* Public service announcement: These Twenty Cities Are Allowed to Complain About the Cold.
* I think I did this one before, but Google can’t find it: Population distribution of the US, as measured in Canadas.
* Poverty rates soar in US suburbs.
* Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500.
* Neat tech demo for a puzzle game premised on manipulating forced perspective.
* Horace Lamb said he’d have two questions for God. I’d have just one.
* Baby monkey reacts to the touch of cold metal.
* America gains yet another weird marriage status on its endless road to marriage quality: Obama Administration To Recognize Utah Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages.
* A series of unrelated events: College football and rape culture.
* Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women.
* No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States.
* Everybody knows it isn’t sweet and right to die for one’s country. But what this column presupposes is…
* Signs of the times: Tens of Thousands of Dead Bats Are Falling From the Sky in Australia.
* How the blind are socialized to understand race.
* Why having a woman’s body under patriarchy is a job in itself.
* Understanding white privilege.
* Norway is ludicrously wealthy.
* Antinomies of Ultimate Spider-Man. Does anyone know if the described theory of Miles Morales as at least partially anti-Sony flack has any evidentiary basis?
* Chewbacca Actor Peter Mayhew Unloads Stockpile of Star Wars Set Photos.
* Disney appoints a group to determine a new, official Star Wars canon. I hope to develop the first official heresy.
* Grantland rates every aspect of Bruce Springsteen’s career on an UNDERRATED, OVERRATED, PROPERLY RATED scale. See also a seven-part interview with the Boss from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
* Poetry Magazine has your Game of Thrones fanficpoetry of the week.
* And Steven Moffat says he never bothered to plot out Sherlock season three because he’s been too busy plotting out seasons four and five. Yay?
Gerry Canavan 