Posts Tagged ‘immigrants’
Catching Up on My Open Tabs After an Incredibly Slow News Week in Which Nothing World-Historically Bonkers Happened
* CFP: And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python.
* CFP: The Films of Wes Anderson.
* Three on Dylan, Nobel Laureate. The Guardian reports.
After much consideration my position on this event is that I’m formally opposed, but nonetheless personally delighted.
* Barack Obama for first president of the Federation.
* Le Guin in the Post, the Nation, and the New Yorker.
* PKD and the Problem of 2-3-74.
* An adjuncting career, by the numbers.
* Idiots Who Run Harvard Let Their Low-Wage Workers Go On Strike.
* 4 Professors Involved in Philosophy Brawl Find Feces in Their Mail.
* With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices.
* Why a Controversial Palestinian History Class at Berkeley Was Cancelled, Then Reinstated.
* I make a brief appearance at the end of this CBS58 story on Marquette’s incredible Tolkien collection. I also pop up in this review of the first few episodes of Westworld.
* The Trouble with Thanksgiving.
This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.
* Arrested Development Season Five (not really). Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. All of Donald Trump’s Accusers: A Timeline of Every Alleged Grope and Assault. Gerrymandering helped Republicans take control of Congress, but now it’s tearing them apart over Trump. A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House. Here’s the math. Inside the Bunker. Inside the Meltdown. How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall. Let’s never forget what a terrifying thing we almost did. Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat. I guess I need a new surgeon. If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections. The Evan McMullin Century. A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two. Even the Humane Society. Teach the controversy. Thank you for your idea about a political thriller but unfortunately we find the plot preposterous. Michelle Obama for President. And because we’re all still asking: What Happens If Trump Drops Out?
* Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.
* New Jersey Transit, a Cautionary Tale of Neglect.
* “We’d at least like to have it said of us that we tried”: Marvel and the civil rights movement.
* How Rock and Roll Became White.
* “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”
* Department of Precrime, CIA edition.
* The search for a true blue M&M.
* Whatever this is for, I am so completely in.
* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.
* The four types of board games.
* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.
* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.
* The end of Devin Faraci and the end of The Canon podcast (for now). There’s more at the Mary Sue.
* Huge, if true: Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.
And on the subject of deranged tech madmen: Simpsons did it.
* Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad.
* The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever.
* The coming fight over “nonlethal neuroweapons.”
* What’s the Longest Humans Can Live? 115 Years, New Study Says. Challenge accepted.
* Now, I may have to move first.
* The kids are all right: Only 1 in 5 Millennials Have Ever Tried a Big Mac.
* On Delany’s Dark Reflections.
* App of the week: Really Bad Chess.
* The Perils of Becoming a Meme.
* Finally my condition has a name.
* And I told you, Mom: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.
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 