Posts Tagged ‘Howard Zinn’
Weekend Links!
* Coming soon in DC: Anthony Thwaite and Jaimee Hills.
* The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The MetaFilter thread is almost always the best resource for these things. And here she is on Chernobyl.
* Please, though, don’t champion work. That is, not a sense of academic life as just work. Work is everywhere in the age of neoliberalism. Advocate for something bigger. Push for community.
* Don’t believe what you read at the Wiki or at the Chronicle: there are basically zero fake searches.
* CFP: Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.”
* Who Speaks at Meetings? Find Out with GenderTimer.
* Third Annual MLA Subconference: Between the Public and Its Privates.
* Coming this month to the Milwaukee Ballet: Dracula.
* You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization.”
* This isn’t a fairy tale. Economic historians call the post-war years, 1950 to 1973, the Golden Age because those were the years the US and world economy grew faster than ever before or since. Neoliberalism’s dirty secret is that its policies don’t work that well. It isn’t just since the financial crisis that growth has been stagnant. Even the boom was mediocre. The best year since the election of Ronald Reagan was 1999, when the economy grew an impressive 4.8 percent. Sounds good until you realize that economic growth was higher in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Even the 1970s, a byword for stagflation and economic turmoil, saw better growth than any decade since.
* Miserablism and Resistance at the American Studies Association.
* Great story for my Lives of Animals class: Uplift, Inc.
* Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer.
* The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.
* Matt Yglesias: Hillary Clinton Is Our Cheney, and That’s Okay. More on this subject here. In some sense I don’t even disagree with him; American democracy really is doomed, and the project of the liberal-left at this moment (as I’ve said before!) should be actively and deliberately seeking to build its replacement through the construction of a new constitution.
* The problem with the Old Republic was the lack of a strong minority party. No, the problem with the Old Republic was the Jedi.
* What Does My Brain Tumor Mean for My Life as a Mother?
* Rick Moranis Isn’t Retired (He Just Doesn’t Know How to Change His Wikipedia Page).
* Beautiful study of UFO sightings from ancient history.
* Jacobin: Want to improve animal welfare? Focus on bettering the conditions of the people who work with them.
* She was checking on her sons — then ages 11, 9 and 5 — by looking out the window every 10 minutes, she said. But when a passer-by saw the Felix kids, along with a 9-year-old cousin, she assumed they were unsupervised and called the state’s Department of Children and Family Services hotline.
* Class action lawsuit filed against DraftKings and FanDuel. How Daily Fantasy Is Changing the Game. You Aren’t Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football. Why I’m Quitting Fantasy Baseball.
* Playing in the Dark: On Gaming’s Blind Protagonists.
* Unsung songs of the Golden Age of Television: Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
* Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies.
* How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports.
* I want to believe: Fargo season two.
* New Civilization: Beyond Earth Expansion Finally Feels Like Sciene Fiction.
* What financializing pensions hath wrought: California Teachers Have Been Financing Evictions.
Five for Sunday Night
* True Crime murder pamphlets, 1600-1800.
* The tunnel people of Las Vegas.
* Bill Moyers delivers the first Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University.
* The death of the university, LSU edition.
* And Texas Republicans are actually talking about killing Medicaid in their state.
Satnight
* We now have Howard Zinn’s FBI file.
When the FBI again took an interest in Zinn in the 1960s, documents show the bureau evidently tried to have the historian fired from his job as professor at Boston University.In a document from the Boston FBI office (see PDF file here), an FBI “source,” whose name was redacted from the publicly released documents, was quoted as being outraged over Zinn’s comment at a protest that the US had become a “police state” and that prosecutions of Black Panther Party members were creating “political prisoners.”
The bureau’s Boston office then indicated it wanted to help the source in his or her campaign to unseat Zinn. “[The] Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [name redacted] with public source data regarding Zinn’s numerous anti-war activities … in an effort to back [redacted] efforts for his removal.”
* Surprising no one, North Korea is doing the World Cup wrong.
* In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.” The MetaFilter thread is rife with speculation about what might be in the file; about whether the government has been given the key, or indeed if Assange knows there really is an NSA-backdoor in AES256 after all; about who is and isn’t incentivized to murder Assange as a result of this upload; and about which classic cyberpunk writer this whole storyline was stolen from.
* The latest in the $45/$200,000,000 Ansel Adams negatives saga: the interesting copyright issues involved have been short-circuited by the revelation that the negatives are probably the work of someone’s Uncle Earl.
* Science—well, Nature—says we wouldn’t miss mosquitoes.
* And RSA Animate animates Slavoj Žižek on charity and consumerism. Charity degrades and demoralizes. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property… Via MeFi.
‘A People’s History of American Empire’
I haven’t seen many people talking about the recent Howard Zinn comic adaptation A People’s History of American Empire. It’s a good read, though its contents probably won’t shock very many people who already read this blog. Al Hart and Gary Huck have a few excerpts at the tail end of their review, while YouTube has a video narrated by Viggo Mortensen.
Gerry Canavan 