Posts Tagged ‘human capital contracts’
Last Weekend Before Classes Links!
* CFP: Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Gathering. MLA 2019 CFP: Stephen King at 45. Call for applications: The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship.
* A special issue of Palimpsest on The Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.
* Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi. Parable of the Butler as an opera.
* Syllabus: Good Grief: Humor and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature.
* There has not in living memory been a better time to be a fascist. We live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Very nice long read in the Guardian on what depression is and isn’t.
* Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance.
* Black Mirror did this one already: Future biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner’s mind into thinking they have served a 1,000 year sentence, a group of scientists have claimed.
* The 90s, World War II, and the War on Terror. Great little bit of cultural analysis in comic form, derived from a Chris Hayes essay from 2006.
* Tiny books of the resistance.
* Can the humanities be defended? Well, it depends.
* The Fierce Urgency of “How.”
* Trump’s offshore drilling plan defies ‘wishes of every coastal state, city and county.’ Insurance after climate change. Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, Ground Zero in the Fight for Climate Justice. Climate change and the global south. A Radical New Scheme to Prevent Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise.
* UBI already exists for the 1%. A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem.
* 5 things to know about Puerto Rico 100 days after Hurricane Maria.
* But the most notable difference in the table is political: no public institution with a Democratic governor chose Vance; only one public institution with a Republican governor chose Coates (the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). Hillbilly Elegy is the kind of book you want parents and politicians to know students are reading to persuade white, Midwestern Republicans to feel good about releasing funds to support higher education. If you are running a flagship state university campus like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and your Republican governor and legislature have come after funding and tenure, you are more than happy to choose Vance’s book.
* The woman behind the “Shitty Men in Media” list. How I Learned to Look Believable. Why Dan Harmon’s sexual-misconduct confession is actually worth listening to.
* “Every single neighbor I’ve had has died of cancer.” This Town Is So Toxic, They Want It Wiped off the Map.
* This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love. On Liking Women.
* Justice Department Announces Court Order Revoking Naturalized Citizenship, Citing Fingerprint Issue. Washington state AG sues Motel 6 over giving ICE info on 9,000 guests. 200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection. Trump may deport thousands of Indian H-1B visa holders as they wait for green cards. To fulfill Trump’s vision on immigration, sheriffs are trampling over constitutional principles. The head of ICE is calling for mayors and local city councilmen to be arrested. Private Prison Continues to Send ICE Detainees to Solitary Confinement for Refusing Voluntary Labor. ICE to move forward with deportation of paraplegic boy’s caregiver. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence. Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words. And of course.
* This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.
* If the President Is Uniquely Dangerous, Treat Him That Way.
* Child protective services and artificial intelligence.
* The end of computer security. An amazing coincidence.
* How students pay for graduate school.
* Bringing back indentured servitude. Let’s let kids mortgage their social security while they’re at it.
* We Finally Know Why People Are Left- Or Right-Handed.
* The case for (and against) the tiger living on LSU’s campus.
* College football has the money to pay players. The College Football Playoff proves it.
* North Carolina gerrymander ruled illegal, again.
* You Won’t Live to See the Final Blade Runner Movie.
* Uh Oh—CRISPR Might Not Work in Most People.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* Police departments nationwide agree: guns officially have more rights than people.
* Solo, oh no. Star Wars fatigue is real. Why So Many Men Hate The Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why. The Last Jedi and fandom. The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen. Poe Dameron apologetics.
* Teaching the controversy the Duke way.
* Marxism and Nintendo? I love my Switch, so anything that keeps me from not feeling too bad about owning it… Nintendo’s Resurgence Was the Best Tech Story of 2017. More at MetaFilter.
* Airline travel has become so safe even I’m barely afraid of it anymore.
* Southwest Flips on Big Three Airlines in Cartel Case.
* Boomeranging the boomerang effect.
* Web comic of the month: “Three Jumps.”
* The Handmaid’s Tale after Margaret Atwood.
* Flight of the Conchords forever.
* Stop speculating about Trump’s mental health.
* The end of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Era? We’ll see.
* Hamilton in London. Hamilton in Milwaukee. Next up: Saga, the Musical?
* As for the bots themselves, #R2DoubleD and #TripleCPU are indeed a very cool sight to behold but (in my opinion) don’t come close to anything ever approaching “arousing.”
* Carrie Fisher’s private philosophy coach.
* Updated rules for Settlers of Catan.
* Choose Your Own Adventure, in graph form. Interactive map of every Quantum Leap time jump.
* What happens to the mind under anesthesia?
* And you’ve already seen it, but just for the record. Almost been one year. Trump Has Created Dangers We Haven’t Even Imagined Yet. There’s no way out.
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.
Thursday Night Links!
* Did you know Jaimee Hills’s incredible How to Avoid Speaking has started to ship? Buy it today! Hear her on Lake Effect!
* Presenting the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence. Will “decoherence” be the doom of American democracy?
* The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Race Is Always the Issue.
* The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us about freezing brains and reanimating human minds. A Dying Young Woman’s Hope.
* The Caine Prize after “emergence.”
* The Nine Dumbest Things in the Rutgers Report on Kyle Flood.
* The Internet after Ad Blocking. Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web.
* Inside the Brains of Happily Married Couples.
* Friends don’t let friends write clickbait confessionals.
* The feminist think piece industrial complex.
* Twilight of the Elites and the rise of a global left. Even Yglesias is on board!
* We enter into something of a contract as a faculty member: we trade income for autonomy and security. If we do not use the latter, we enter a fool’s bargain. This is why I stay, and why being ready to quit is an important part of staying.
* Inside the Battle for Cooper Union.
* Doing the Lord’s work at GOG.com.
* Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.
* 30 Questions to Ask Your Kid Instead of “How Was Your Day?”
* These 25 schools are responsible for the greatest advances in science. Go Spartans! #11.
* If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism.
* Tased at the Harris Teeter. After an often torturous tenure at the helm of the Durham Police Department—including, most recently, last week’s controversial Tasering of an unarmed black man at a Durham Harris Teeter—Chief Jose Lopez Sr. is out.
* Fraternities are pretty bad.
* “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
* The NFL and the military: a love affair as strange and cynical as ever.
* God save Title IX from its champions.
* Memo to Clinton-world: It might be time to start panicking.
* Ahmed Mohamed and the “Freedom to Tinker.”
* How to screw up the Muppets in one easy step.
A spoiler-free example: The Miss Piggy-Kermit relationship has always worked because of how unfathomable it is, both in terms of species and temperament. These people don’t belong together, but somehow they’ve formed a decadeslong pairing, one that always felt buoyed by Miss Piggy’s stronger affections and a submissive aspect to Kermit. But discovering that Kermit is dating another pig now, perhaps a slightly more docile pig, inverts the whole dynamic of the relationship. Now Kermit just has a fetish, so has he always been playing hard-to-get with Piggy as part of some role-playing that we haven’t previously established? Once you open the window a crack, you’re gonna have to throw open the doors eventually. And within the same dynamic, Miss Piggy’s affections for Kermit, even affections tempered by occasional abuse, have always been a key softening factor for Miss Piggy. We tolerate her awfulness because of her love for Kermit and the love we believe Kermit has for her. Without that core, the risk of Miss Piggy spiraling into an untenable sty of callus words and consistent mistreatment of subordinates is all too real.
* What’s it like to take Jim Henson’s place?
* Don’t Have Sex With Robots, Say Ethicists.
* Nemo iudex in causa sua, but, you know, the opposite.
* Utilitarianism, y’all. Also: the Singularity.
* What Happens When A Parent’s Grief Goes Viral?
* At WeWork, an Idealistic Start-Up Clashes With Its Cleaners.
* Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art.
* “The Long Emancipation” offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists.
* Students’ Requests for Trigger Warnings Grow More Varied. Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine. How Salaita Was Fired: One Year Later. Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data. Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down. Colleges Flush With Cash Saddle Poorest Students With Debt. No Child Left Behind Goes to College. Is College Tuition Really Too High? The Uberification of the University. The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University. Tacit knowledge and graduate education. Can’t afford to eat at a college sitting on over $9 billion? There’s an app for that. The Whistleblower Effect. The entire Japanese public university system attempts a massive queen sacrifice. There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts. Are College Lectures Unfair? Microaggressions and good manners. The coming human capital contract nightmare.
* In 1997, the ETS announced that the SAT could not properly be labeled a scholastic assessment test, either; the initials now stand for nothing.
* Maybe the best description of what it is I think I’m doing I’ve ever seen: He said that his best professors “took texts that seemed complicated, made them look simple, and then made them complex again.”
* “We couldn’t imagine Oregonians’ turning their backs on higher education, but they did.”
* Some have called Harvard a Hedge Fund with a school attached, because it has over $36 billion in its endowment, but the UC holds over $100 billion in its retirement funds, endowments, and working capital funds. This large amount of money can be used for good, or it can be used for darker purposes, but one thing for sure, it makes the university an important global finance player. Of course, we should all ask what it means when a public university enters global finance.
* Jerry Brown’s University of California Perma-Temp Problem.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 22: Collaboration (part 2 of 2).
* The rise of the woman comic book buyer.
* Studies in Cruel Optimism, Bernie Sanders campaign edition.
* Yes. Yes. Embrace your hate.
* This week, the site enabled hosts of events to determine who has actually seen the Facebook invites they’ve sent out but not replied, making the simple act of viewing of your notifications a horrifying social contract you can’t escape.
* Nice work if you can get it: How I Felt After 70 Days of Lying in Bed for Science.
* If We Burn All the World’s Fossil Fuels, We’ll Melt Antarctica & Flood the Earth. Right, that’s the plan. Climate Apocalypse and/or Democracy. PS: Almost Half of the World’s Ocean Life Has Died Off Since 1970.
* Markets in everything! Refugees bring in big business in Europe.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* And some news you can use: The IRS Will Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
Gerry Canavan 