Posts Tagged ‘Ian McKellan’
Weekend Links!
* Nice treat: my LARoB piece got namechecked in an Unexpected Stories review at NPR.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine the polar vortex making it unseasonably cold, forever.
* New Data Says Huge West Virginia Chemical Spill May Have Been More Toxic Than Reported. But don’t worry: Freedom Industries has been fined a whopping $11,000.
* The OECD says the party’s over.
These are that growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will increase massively; and that there is a big risk that climate change will make things worse.
* Here’s what the world would look like if we took global warming seriously.
* A Brief History of the Humanities Postdoc.
* On the huge screwed-uppedness of “studies show.”
* An oral history of LucasArts.
* A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
* What disapproving friends don’t understand about cesarean births.
* If A Man Takes Paternity Leave, His Coworkers Will Probably Take It Too.
* For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
* Analysis: Over Half of All Statements Made on Fox News Are False. I sincerely hope they included statements like “I’m Bill O’Reilly” and “You’re watching Fox.”
* Five Thirty Eight and screwing up predictions.
The measurement error in the World Cup case was simple: FiveThirtyEight and other sites had marked Brazil as having a strong defense, and a solid offense anchored by its star, Neymar, as measured by a statistical amalgamation called Soccer Power Index. In reality, Brazil had been aggressively fouling its way as a means of defense, elbowing and kicking its way, and not getting called for it by referees. I’m not just making this up as a day-after-big-loss armchair analysis: pretty much most punditry on soccer had been clear on this before the game.
In other words, the statistics were overestimating how good a team Brazil really was, and the expert punditry was fairly unified on this point.
In other words, this time, the hedgehogs knew something the fox didn’t. But this fox is often too committed to methodological singularity and fighting pundits, sometimes for the sake of fighting them, so it often doesn’t like to listen to non-statistical data. In reality, methodological triangulation is almost always stronger, though harder to pull-offs.
* What happened to the super-rich of yesteryear?
If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
* Let this AskMe post from an academic spouse ruin your morning!
* College Graduates and the Great Recession by The Numbers.
* Over Duke U.’s Protests, Estate of ‘the Duke’ Asks Court to Approve Use of ‘Duke.’
* The next-generation F-35, the most expensive plane ever built, may be too dangerous to fly. Why is Congress keeping it alive? What could possibly explain it!
* “Superhero stories are really about immigrants.”
* Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?
* Change.org petition inviting Department of Labor investigation into adjunct labor. I’m very skeptical there’s anything actionable here, unfortunately.
* Having Your Sleep Interrupted May Be As Bad As Not Getting Any at All.
* Losing to Germany Wasn’t Actually the Worst Thing to Happen to Brazil This World Cup.
* Colorado’s legal pot market is bigger than anyone anticipated. First person to legally purchase pot in WA fired after being seen on local news buying it.
* DEA Officials Responsible For Nearly Killing College Student, DOJ Watchdog Finds. Daniel Chong is the entirely predictable result of dehumanizing drug offenders.
* In ‘sexting’ case Manassas City police want to photograph teen in sexually explicit manner, lawyers say. You’ll be glad to know police have withdrawn the request.
* Two hundred years into the social experiment of modern imprisonment, and 40 years into the expansion of what is frequently called “mass incarceration,” America’s system of jails and prisons arguably constitutes the most prodigious system of torture the world has ever seen.
* …while Swartz’s death was a mistake, destroying him as a lesson to all of us wasn’t a mistake. It was policy.
* Tough Louisiana Catholic Church case goes to the heart of mandatory reporting law.
* The Atlantic has a challenging piece on helping intersex children, albeit with an absolutely terrible headline.
* What the Potato Salad Kickstarter Campaign Says About Tech, Silicon Valley, and Modern Life.
* On giving Title IX teeth. It does surprise me that no school has ever received a Title IX sanction for its approach sexual violence.
* SMBC on kind aliens. XKCD on a wraith called Timeghost. The adventures of Process Man.
* Predicting the end of Game of Thrones from George R. R. Martin’s repeated requests for a big-budget epic finale.
* Ideology at its purest is ripe for disruption: “Inside tech’s latest management craze.” Meanwhile: Silicon Valley wage fixing: Disney, Lucas, Dreamworks and Pixar implicated.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* 16-Year-Old’s Rape Goes Viral Because Human Beings Are Terrible. Awful story.
* Syfy orders a pilot for its adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
* The wisdom of markets: Social Network With No Revenue or Assets Somehow Worth $4.75 Billion.
* When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, Sebald said, “No serious person thinks of anything else.” On still trying to come to terms with the Holocaust.
* Trigger warning: breakfast. A confessional comic about the night after the artist’s rape.
* A Webcomic About A Time Traveler Trying To Comprehend Terminal Illness.
* A Field Guide To Unusual (And Hilarious) Harry Potter Patronuses.
* And Ian McKellan just won’t leave any franchise un-awesomed. He simply won’t!
Gerry Canavan 
Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!
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* ICYMI: My new syllabi for the fall! Infinite Jest and Alternate History. There’s also a new version of my “Video Game Culture” class, set for a new eleven-meeting schedule and with a “Capitalism” week added centered on Pokémon Go (what? oh, that thing). Relatedly: Milwaukee County Parks are trying to remove Pokemon Go from Lake Park.
* The NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities can unionize. How letting grad students unionize could change the labor movement and college sports. The NLRB Columbia Decision and the Future of Academic Labor Struggles. The Union Libel: On the Argument against Collective Bargaining in Higher Ed. But elsewhere in academic labor news: Adjuncts in Religious Studies May Be Excluded From Religious College Unions.
* Are PhD Students Irrational? Well, you don’t have to be, but it helps…
* Colleges hire more minority and female professors, but most jobs filled are adjunct, not tenure track, study finds.
* This morning everyone’s fighting about academic freedom and trigger warnings at the University of Chicago.
* I thought I was the only prof who didn’t really care about deadlines. But apparently there are dozens of us!
* That’ll solve it: Replace college instruction with Ken Burns movies.
* A New Academic Year Brings Fresh Anxiety at Illinois’s Public Colleges.
* Poor and Uneducated: The South’s Cycle of Failing Higher Education.
* Actually, I’m teaching these kids way more than they’re teaching me.
* I’ve dreamed about this since I was a kid: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star. Time to teach The Sparrow again…
* Philosophical SF.
* CFP: Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, University of Florida.
* Cuban science-fiction redefines the future in the ruins of a socialist utopia.
* Puppies, Slates, and the Leftover Shape of “Victory.” On that Rabid Puppies thing and my Hugo Award-winning novella Binti.
* It was a long time before anyone realized there was something not the same about her.
* From all indications, the next X-Men movie will hew closer to Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix story than the previous cinematic effort. But any sense of authenticity it achieves will only arouse and prolong the desire for closure of the loss not only of a treasured character who might have lived endlessly in the floating timeline, but also of the very narrative finitude in which this loss could only happen once. Comic Book Melancholia.
* Bingewatching vs. plot.
* A new book series at Rowman and Littlefield explores Remakes, Reboots, and Adaptations.
* Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi.
* Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.
* The real questions: How Long Would It Actually Take to Fall Through the Earth?
* How did an EpiPen get to costing $600? Earned every penny. A Case Study in Health System Dysfunction. But, you know, it’s all better now.
* Amazing study at Duke: Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds.
* The Epidemic Archives Of The Future Will Be Born Digital.
* How One Professor Will Turn Wisconsin’s Higher-Ed Philosophy Into a Seminar.
* Becoming Eleven. Concept Art Reveals Barb’s Original Stranger Things Fate and It Will Depress You. We Will Get ‘Justice for Barb’ in a Second Season of Stranger Things. This Stranger Things fan theory changes the game.
* Arkansas City Accused Of Jailing Poor People For Bouncing Checks As Small As $15. An Arkansas Judge Sent A Cancer Patient To ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Over A Few Bounced Checks.
* And elsewhere: Drug Court Participants Allegedly Forced To Become Police Informers.
* The times of year you’re most likely to get divorced. Keep scrolling! We’re not done yet.
* Are these the best films of the 21st century? I’m not sure I enjoyed or still think about any film on this list more than I enjoyed and think about The Grand Budapest Hotel, though There Will Be Blood, Memento, Caché, and Children of Men might all be close.
* CBS is bound and determined to make sure Star Trek: Discovery bombs.
* Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.
* An Instagram account can index depression.
* After neoliberalism?
* Parenting and moral panic.
* How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains.
* The technical language obscured an arresting truth: Basis, which I had ordered online without a prescription, paying $60 for a month’s supply, was either the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work.
* Nazis were even creeps about their horses.
* Mapping the Stephen King meganarrative.
* Good news for Dr. Strange: Dan Harmon wrote on the reshoots.
* My colleague Jodi Melamed writes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on white Milwaukee’s responsibility.
* The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Translated from the Icelandic.
* Saddest postjournalism story yet: “Vote on the topic for a future Washington Post editorial.”
* Katherine Johnson, the human computer.
* I arrived at my friend’s party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.
* Uber loses a mere 1.2 billion dollars in the first half of 2016. Can there be any doubt they are just a stalking horse for the robots?
* It’s been interesting watching this one circulate virally: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.
* William Shatner Is Sorry Paramount Didn’t Stop Him From Ruining Star Trek V. Apology not accepted.
* Hillary Clinton will likely have a unique chance to remake the federal judiciary. How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America.
* Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State. You don’t say… 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling.
* Does he want a few of mine? Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of His Own Book.
* Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump. Hey, that was my bit!
* Oh, so now the imperial presidency is bad.
* Good news, everyone!
* At least Democrats are currently on track to retake the Senate.
* Scenes from the richest country in the history of the world: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. Raw sewage has been leaking into Baltimore’s harbor for five days, city says. It appears aquatic life — the moss that grows on rocks, the bacteria that live in the water and the bugs that hatch there — are the unexpected victims of Americans’ struggle with drug addiction. Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds.
* No Man’s Sky is like real space exploration: dull, except when it’s sublime.
* A.J. Daulerio, bloodied but unbowed. How Peter Thiel Killed Gawker. Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself. Gawker Was Killed by Gaslight. And if you want a vision of the future: A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker.
* Greenlit for five seasons and a spinoff: The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates from Miami came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars — one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.
* Also greenlighting this one.
* The legacy board games revolution.
* 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks.
* The millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income because of climate change. The children of millennials will lose tens of trillions.
* When Icon fought Superman.
* Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks.
* An Exciting History of Drywall.
* Title IX: still under serious threat.
* And it’s not a competition, but Some Turtles See Red Better Than You Do.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, adaptations, adjunctification, adjuncts, Agustín de Rojas, alcohol, allergies, Alpha Centauri, alternate history, America, Arkansas, artificial intelligence, assisted suicide, austerity, automation, Baltimore, binge watching, Binti, books, cancer, capitalism, CBS, CFPs, children, climate change, Clinton Foundation, college sports, color, Columbia, comics, commentary tracks, content notes, content warnings, crystal meth, Cuba, Curt Schilling, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, DEA, deadlines, debt, Democrats, depression, disability, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, drugs, drywall, Duke, DVDs, dystopia, ecology, EpiPen, euthanasia, extrasolar planets, fantasy, films, first as tragedy then as farce, fountains of youth, futurity, games, Gandalf, Gawker, graduate student movements, Harry Potter, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, horses, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, Ian McKellan, Iceland, Icon, ideology, if you want a vision of the future, Illinois, imperial presidency, Infinite Jest, infrastructure, Instagram, Jean Gray, Jodi Melamed, journamalism, Katherine Johnson, Ken Burns, legacy board games, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, meganarratives, melancholy, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, mortality, my pedagogical empire, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, NLRB, Nnedi Okorafor, No Man's Sky, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, philosophy, places to invade next, plot, Pokémon Go, polls, post journalism, prison, private college, Proxima Centauri, Rabid Puppies, race, racism, ramen, rape, rape culture, rationality, raw sewage, reboots, religious studies, remakes, Republicans, robots, Ron Johnson, Sad Puppies, science, science fiction, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, siblings, slavery, sobriety, space travel, Star Trek, Star Trek V, Star Trek: Discovery, Stephen King, Stranger Things, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, swords, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, the South, the sublime, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, Title IX, transgender issues, trigger warnings, true crime, turtles, Uber, University of Chicago, University of Florida, Utopia, Vox Day, war on drugs, Washington Post, water, Wes Anderson, white people, William Shatner, Wisconsin, writing, X-Men, Yale, Yoss, you and I are gonna live forever