Today, batshit jobs are more widespread than ever. You’re likely doing a batship job if you’re working in advertising trying to maintain mass consumption, in air traffic, industrial farming and forestry, in mining, in the car industry, and first of all if you’re working in oil drilling, fracking, coal mining.
To become dilligent batshit workers we have to be trained, and we have to be able to block out the harm that our work participates in. The beauty of the school strikes is that a generation of young people are preparing themselves to refuse batshit work.
Posts Tagged ‘Indiana Jones’
Tuesday Links, Plus a Very Canavan Podcast!
* There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson. The latest in my irregular series of conversations with KSR. The transcript is just the highlights — for the full effect you’ll have to listen.
* Extrapolation 60.1 is out! Articles on rape motifs in contemporary fantasy, Japanese print SF, and Nihād Sharīf’s The Conqueror of Time.
* Endgame ephemera! Avengers: Endgame, or, why this is all your fault. Avengers and the Endgame of Liberalism. And the Russo brothers are on a quest to make sure you know that Endgame being good had nothing to do with them.
* The Night King? Never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. Bonus appearance by the coffee cup! If these are the final two choices, the only way to win the Game may be not to play.
* Watch The Wandering Earth on Netflix!
* Ted Chiang has a new book, why haven’t you bought it yet?
* A new climate change story from Paolo Bacigalupi at MIT Technology Review. Killer ending.
* Human society under urgent threat from loss of Earth’s natural life. One million species at risk of extinction, UN report warns. Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace. An open letter to David Wallace-Wells. We are ruled by psychopaths.
* Greta Thunberg, autism, and climate activism.
* For roughly 18 months, AirPods play music, or podcasts, or make phone calls. Then the lithium-ion batteries will stop holding much of a charge, and the AirPods will slowly become unusable. They can’t be repaired because they’re glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell. Instead, the AirPods sit in your drawer forever. AirPods Are a Tragedy.
* It’s time to speak about batshit jobs.
* It seems to me that anyone who considers this for more than ten minutes has to recognize that “student demand” is a construct: it is the product of a pervasive, cross-institutional pedagogy in social and educational value in which students are immersed from (at least) primary school onward. If students are demanding STEM in record numbers, this is a because they have been systematically invited to embrace a number of interlocking beliefs: that
- STEM fields matter to the welfare and future of human societies more than other fields — that social problems respond best to technocratic solutions;
- college is a course of career training;
- college is an investment that ought to be maximized in order to yield the highest possible return in the form of lifelong higher income;
- STEM fields represent areas of continuing high-growth, recession-proof employment.
“Student demand” is a fact insofar as it reproduces these assumptions, which are already endemic to the privatized, market-driven university. Other forms of “student demand” (for example, demands for a more racially and ethnically diverse faculty that better reflects regional and national demographics) are routinely ignored.
* Marquette Academic Senate calls for administration neutrality on unionization.
* Measuring the tenure-track success of pre-2009 Ph.D.s is like measuring the ice stability of Greenland’s glaciers before industrialization. Researcher’s suicide reflects bleak prospects for post-Ph.D. life. Adjuncts and Freelancers: Reading Signs of Eventual Destruction.
* Turning Point USA’s dark coup on college campuses.
* A lot of older academics will point to the 1970s or the 1990s to say that crisis has always been the default, and there’s truth to this. But they didn’t have the same debt loads back then.
* “Second Chance: Life without Student Debt.”
* For Colleges, Climate Change Means Making Tough Choices.
* People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps.
* What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right. As capitalism starts to crumble, hate finds a familiar foothold.
* Liberalism: the other God that failed. The Senate is a much bigger problem than the Electoral College. Here’s how many millennials get help from their parents to pay rent and other bills. Twitter users answer the question: “When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system?” 42% of Americans are at risk of retiring broke.
* If the president does it, it’s not obstruction.
* This seems heathy. This too! Things are great.
* The forgotten history of how Abraham Lincoln helped rig the Senate for Republicans.
* Dialectics of Milwaukee: ‘It’s clear that the secret is out about Milwaukee,’ increased tourism spending shows. There seems to be a surge of unsettling things happening on the Milwaukee education landscape, some of them just more of the same (low student achievement, divisive politics) and some of them not so typical (corruption). Glendale would provide $37 million to help redevelop struggling Bayshore — with $57 million debt paid off.
* Sandra Bland, It Turns Out, Recorded Her Own Video of Traffic Stop Confrontation. ICE provides local police a way to work around ‘sanctuary’ policies, act as immigration officers.
* On April 30, my Liberal Studies class, framed as Anthropology and Philosophy of Science, was the site of a horrific event. Two of my students were killed while four more were injured.
* Study: Therapy dogs reduce children’s fear, anxiety during dentist appointments.
* Aging baby boomers are about to push Alzheimer’s disease rates sky high.
* The Saga Of ‘Star Citizen,’ A Video Game That Raised $300 Million—But May Never Be Ready To Play.
* Dystopia watch: Oh Good, a Subway System Is Making Riders Stare at Ads Before They Can Buy a Ticket. Amazon’s staffing up a news vertical full of crime stories designed to scare you into buying a spying, snitching “smart” doorbell. We’ve lived so long that the founding of Amazon Prime is something we can be nostalgic about now.
* Who Owns the Moon Watch: Why the Moon Is Suddenly a Hot Commodity.
* How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dismissing UFO sightings.
Thursday Links!
* * The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it’s increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they’ll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. Charlie Stross predicts the 21st century.
* My colleague C.J. Hribal’s essay “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” has won a Pushcart Prize.
* Sure! Why not.
* We did it! Eighties Babies Are Officially the Brokest Generation, Federal Reserve Study Concludes.
* CFP: Indiana Jones and the Edited Collection. CFP: Blackness and Disability. CFP: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop Role-Playing, and Fandom.
* WISCON 42! “Doing Justice To The Archive: The Octavia E. Butler Papers.”
* There is only one Trump scandal.
* Stolen election pays big dividends.
* No one could have predicted this shocking turn of events.
* I’ll belabor a few other issues that reduce philanthropy’s net returns to the University. Fund-raising cost indices suggest that the overhead for raising a dollar is about 20 cents, so initial net is perhaps 80 percent of the gross figures we publish. Many gifts leverage matching funds from the University, so the true net after costs is quite a bit less than that, or even negative (UCLA’s Luskin Center received a generous donation of $40 million for a project with overall costs of $162 million). There are other subtractions: the doubling of UC fundraising needs to cover nearly 30 percent more students with inflation lowering the take another 20 percent over that ten year period. There are institutional burdens: the donor model has spawned hundreds of school, program, and department-level fundraising programs across the UC system, whose costs in time, money, and loss of resources for the educational core have not been calculated. More indirectly, talking up private funding may encourage the state not to rebuild public funding to 21st century requirements. (This is a feedback loop that, given years of inadequate annual general fund increases, UC officials should consider seriously.) And this is not an exhaustive list of issues.
* Profession: The Sky Is Falling.
* Scandal after scandal focuses scrutiny on USC leadership, culture.
* The Best Question To Ask on the Last Day of Class.
* ‘Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay’: the rise of the religious left.
* Traditional Disobedience: Renewing the Legacy of Catholic Activism.
* After decades of dwarfs and elves, writers of color redefine fantasy.
* Magic: The Gathering and capitalism.
* Killing All Humans: A Flowchart.
* David Foster Wallace was terrible to women.
* The Two Crucial Filmmaking Elements Causing All Your Movie Feuds.
* Arrested Development season five has been managed so badly by Hurwitz and Netflix that it’s practically begging to be boycotted. More here.
* Marvel and the End of Counterprogramming.
* HBO’s Watchmen series sounds worse than I imagined.
* What Deadpool 2’s fridging controversy says about comics culture’s gender gap.
* Two Americans were detained by a Border Patrol agent after he heard them speaking Spanish. Gay Army chaplain struggles to save husband from deportation. Trump Gang Dragnet Caught a Teen Who ICE Said Looked Like He Was in MS-13. He Wasn’t. “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”
* Breaking #MAGA: A man posed for months as an ICE agent. A traffic stop led his girlfriend to unravel the truth.
* Jordan Peterson, The Intellectual We Deserve.
* Shock: 2013 Chicago School Closings Failed To Help Students.
* The Privacy Scandal That Should Be Bigger Than Cambridge Analytica. Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system.
* Milwaukee cops abuse NBA star Sterling Brown. New York Jets chairman, brother of Trump ambassador, says he’ll pay fines for team players who protest during anthem.
* He went to an in-network emergency room. He still ended up with a $7,924 bill.
* Immortality. Statement of teaching philosophy. Can YOU hit the bullseye?
* And huge, if true: America’s Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy.
Sunday Morning Links!
* 6 minutes 30 seconds. The Parkland Manifesto. Photos.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet.
* Toward an Ecologically Based Post-Capitalism: Interview With Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Star Trek: Discovery‘s tour through poorly thought-out Trek arcana looks ready to tackle Section 31 next. The biggest shock here is that they may actually be able to get Michelle Yeoh back.
* CFP: Context is for Kings – An Edited Collection on Star Trek: Discovery.
* Britain: Universities on Strike.
* Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors. Our research shows they’re biased against women. That means using them is illegal.
* Amazing how a CHE piece specifically focused on a college president’s flamboyant anti-faculty rhetoric is still totally agnostic as to whether anything he says is true or whether anything he proposes will work.
* How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students.
* In a Historic Vote, Renowned Art School Cooper Union Commits to Bringing Back Free Tuition For All.
* Why Relentless Administrative Turnover Makes It Hard for Us to Do Our Jobs.
* These Are the 100 Most Militarized Universities in America.
* The reviews for Isle of Dogs are coming in and they’re pretty mixed, with a lot of attention to the film’s aggressive cultural appropriation. Who could have predicted!
* None dare call it genocide: It’s been almost six months since Hurricane Maria, and Puerto Ricans are still dying.
* Bad Games, Broken-World Playing, and the Scholarship of Repair.
* 1977: Semiocapitalism and the Real Subsumption of Fantasy.
* Kurt Vonnegut Festival to Feature Father John Misty, Waxahatchee, and More.
* As reported by the Kansas City Star, the indictment—which you can, and should, look through for yourself right here—reads like a slowly mounting horror story, as owner Jeff Henry, park manager Tyler Miles, and ride designer John Schooley (described as lacking “any kind of technical or engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety”) apparently did everything in their power to make Verrückt a tragedy waiting to happen. Los Angeles Times correspondent Matt Pearce highlighted a number of the most chilling moments from the indictment on Twitter, including excerpts showing the ride’s rushed design and construction, secret failed bouts of testing, willful destruction of safety reports, and even an incident in which Miles allegedly sent lawyers in an effort to intimidate teenage employees from blowing the whistle on the park. Nationalize water parks.
* “If you are seeking a sentence of 3 years incarceration, state on the record that the cost to the taxpayer will be $126,000.00 (3 x $42,000.00) if not more and explain why you believe the cost is justified.” Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He’s Exceeding Expectations.
* Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash. I was completely willing to give the automated cars the benefit of the doubt before I saw the video, but it’s clear this technology is not ready and these trials should be suspended until it is.
* A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy.
* Facebook is enmeshed in another controversy, this time over accusations that the firm Cambridge Analytica abused Facebook data to help Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. But this is a big deal fundamentally because of a larger and more fundamental problem: Facebook is bad.
* White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households. Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys.
* Unarmed black man shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
* The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever. The immediate criticism of this article I saw on Twitter: the outfit requires women to get almost entirely naked to go to the bathroom, change a tampon, or nurse.
* An Arbitrary Number of Theses on Donald’s Trump.
* The United States of Amnesia, again and again. 15 Years. More Than 1 Million Dead. No One Held Responsible.
* Underground network readies homes to hide undocumented immigrants.
* Immigrant mom arrested in front of kids and accused of human smuggling is released without charges.
* ‘Where’s Mommy?’: A family fled death threats, only to face separation at the border.
* The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches across 617,000 square miles of the northern Pacific Ocean, based on their survey, and plastics make up 99.9 percent of the trash in the patch.
* U.S. Military Is World’s Biggest Polluter.
* Humanity’s Meat and Dairy Intake Must Be Cut in Half by 2050 to Avoid Dangerous Climate Change. Why It’s Time for America to Tax Meat.
* Destruction of nature as dangerous as climate change, scientists warn.
* Utah just legalized what parenting was like in the 1980s.
* Behold, the famous efficiency of capitalism.
* Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism.
* Welcome to Powder Mountain – a utopian club for the millennial elite.
* My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data.
* Jack Kirby’s 1979 concept sketches for “Science Fiction World”, a proposed theme park.
* Analyzing the Crazy, Complicated Credits of Avengers: Infinity War.
* My estimates regarding the average revenue generated by major-conference football and basketball players are based on varying assumptions, ranging from very conservative to relatively liberal, regarding the effects of big-time college sports on fund raising. Yet even the low-end estimate suggests that, if players were compensated on the model employed by professional sports leagues when they divide revenue, major college football and basketball players should receive an average of $750,000 annually. Note that this figure would still result in these nonprofit — and therefore largely untaxed — universities retaining revenues generated by football and basketball that would equal their entire athletic operating budgets just a decade ago.
* Punishing Women for Being Smart.
* So in 2014, the Tampa Bay Times set out to count every officer-involved shooting in Florida during a six-year period. We learned that at least 827 people were shot by police — one every 2½ days.
* When Police Officers Use Sexual Assault to Terrorize Vulnerable Communities.
* If it’s anything like the comics, this could be really good: ‘Astro City’ TV Series Based On Comics In Works At FremantleMedia North America.
* What in God’s Name Happened to Ricky Gervais?
* I’ll certainly hear the asteroid out.
* The Fermi Paradox and the miracle of life.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And of course you had me at Dungeons and Dragons creatures, generated by neural network.
Weekend Links!
* Extrapolation 58.1 is out! With articles on Octavia Butler, Aldous Huxley, Neal Stephenson, and Celu Ambsterstone. I’ll give a special endorsement to Donawerth and Scally’s Butler article, which is not only the first article to cite my book (that I know of) but also a truly great study tracing Butler’s footsteps research Kindred in Maryland. Check it out!
* CFP: Utopia, Now!
* Jeff VanderMeer in conversation with Cory Doctorow.
The result is “Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity.
Mr. Gibson never set out to write a sequel, but the plots of “Agency” and “The Peripheral” converged unexpectedly last fall. He had spent about a year writing “Agency” when the 2016 election rendered the fictional world he had created obsolete. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. But when he tried tinkering with the draft, he realized that the world had changed too drastically for him to plausibly salvage the story. “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing,” he said.
* The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in.
* Wes Anderson’s latest, Isle Of Dogs, gets a release date and poster. Warm up your power rankings now!
* I’m Wes Anderson, and I’m Directing This FBI Investigation into Russia and the Trump Campaign.
* If the police do it, it isn’t murder: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail.
* Purdue Has Bought Kaplan — for $1. The weird fall of Burlington College. Rand Paul Stealing My Bit. When 51 Years Experience Isn’t Good Enough.
* CBS is apparently fully committed to ruining Star Trek: Discovery in every possible way.
* More on the Cal audit that reveals massive administrative blight.
* Tracking White Collar Crime Zones.
* The March for Science wasn’t.
* Charter schools as corporate perk.
* What’s the matter with Nintendo?
* Apple’s Promise to End Rare Earth Mineral Mining Is ‘100 Percent Unattainable Today.’ Haters! Apple can do anything.
* 25 percent of young Britons have lied about reading Lord Of The Rings, poll reveals. I want to know how many have said they didn’t read it when they did!
* Corbynism or barbarism. Inside Corbyn’s Office.
* We May Have Uncovered the First Ever Evidence of the Multiverse.
* Trump Wants to Send a Man to Mars During His Presidency. The next launch window isn’t until the 2030s, so this is a worrying declaration indeed. Here’s the plan.
* Record-breaking climate events all over the world are being shaped by global warming, scientists find. What will Earth look like when all the ice melts?
* I Got Hacked So You Don’t Have To.
* Artist attaches Trump’s quotes about women to sexist 1950s ads and they fit too well. Into the shadows in Trump’s America. A GOP Lawmaker Has Been Revealed As The Creator Of Reddit’s Anti-Woman ‘Red Pill’ Forum. How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump. Killing Obamacare, Again (with an asterisk). In the richest country that has ever existed. We all gonna die. And the worst news yet: US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports.
* We Asked ICE About the Prank Calls to Their Anti-Immigrant Hotline and They Kind of Lost Their Shit. 100 Days of Democratic Rage. Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again. Trump supporters are the most overrated force in American politics. The Anatomy of Liberal Melancholy. Could Your Teen’s Meme Be a Red? Texas Is The Future.
To clarify: it is perfectly possible that some collusion between Trump’s agents and Russian hackers did indeed occur. But at this point, the empirical question of whether or not it happened is secondary to the deeper psychological need for media pundits, policy wonks, and the professional-managerial strata to maintain their sense of self when the objective historical conditions in which they flourished are being actively dissolved. For liberals, the continued libidinal investment in the drama of the as-yet invisible Trump-Russia scandal actively blocks any realization that the neoliberal order they are trying to restore is already dead on its feet, and that Trump is the uniquely bizarre American expression of a visible worldwide trend: the virulent, deepening nationalist backlash against a financially-integrated global economy based on the relatively free movement of commodities and people. His ascent is a death knell for an entire era and the basic assumptions about economic and political life that shape the worldview of contemporary liberals.
* Organize. Syllabus prep. The Tenure-Track Professor. Should I Go to Grad School? Ikigai. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Against buckraking. But what does Obama’s willingness to take the money in the first place say about progressive centrism, if we stipulate (as I think MY would likely agree) that Obama is probably as good as progressive centrists are likely to get? The left neoliberal hit against standard liberal-to-left politics in the 1980s was that it fostered sleazy interest groups and tacit or not-so-tacit mutual backscratching between these interest groups and politicians. If the very best alternative that left neoliberalism has to offer is another, and arguably worse version of this (Wall Street firms, unlike unions, don’t even have the need to pretend to have the interests of ordinary people at heart), then its raison d’etre is pretty well exploded.
* Disney will just take all your money, thanks.
* Building blocks of our weird future: artificial wombs.
* Warner Brothers Might Have to Pay $900 Million If It Can’t Prove Ghosts Are Real.
* More bad press for United. It’s like they’re trying to go bankrupt.
* “Twitter” is an oversimplification. There are many twitters, which is also part of the problem: my twitter and yours are different, but they can come into contact with each other and overlap, and do. We can each think the other person is a holographic projection into our living room, and the rooms are similar enough that we can overlook the ways they are different (and then blame the other person for coming into our house and acting like an asshole). But this also means that talking about what “twitter” is or isn’t, or does, or doesn’t, is a similar exercise in polemic misunderstanding. If the underlying structure of the program is a constant, the conversational norms and practical methods we bring to it will vary, radically and dramatically. Some of the problem is the latter thing: people not only use twitter differently, but they sometimes regard other people’s use of it as illegitimate or wrong. Policing other people on twitter can become particularly heated and vicious, if a police from one jurisdiction comes into another, without knowing it, and attempts to apply one set of laws to someone who thinks they’re operating in another. It rarely ends well. And yet if we keep pretending that there is one twitter (ours), we’ll keep crashing into each other and insisting that it’s the other car that came into my lane. Twitter road rage.
* Oh, I see the problem: Americans don’t read.
* And I know things seem dark, darker than they’ve ever been, but Illinois fixed it. Kudos.
Sunday Night Closing All My Tabs
* My review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s (excellent!) New York 2140 is finally up at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Utopia in the Time of Trump.
Where most contemporary histories of the future imagine climate change as either an annoying irritation or else the end of history — the disaster that will end civilization — in New York 2140 Robinson cuts more of a middle path. Climate change does indeed prove utterly catastrophic in this novel, laying waste to the coastal cities where a startling percentage of the world’s population currently lives, and devastating a huge amount of infrastructure and fixed capital, costing trillions of dollars — but humans are incredibly versatile problem-solvers, and we adapt. Technical solutions like sea walls and skybridges are really only the start of what would be necessary in a flooded Manhattan. Think of the immense social changes, the legal, economic, and architectural structures that would need to be innovated when huge areas of major cities are permanently underwater, or indeed become part of the intertidal zone. Even by 2140, nearly 100 years after the start of the crisis, the long work of retrofitting civilization to rising sea levels goes on, and not all of it is even that unhappy; it’s no secret that the capitalists use the same phrase to denote both crisis and opportunity, creative destruction….
* Don’t worry, kids, it’s just a story.
* More Hugos lists! Octavia E. Butler is actually listed on a few of these! Keeping my silly Hugo dream alive.
* Also at LARB: A Mark Fisher memoriam and a review of his last book, The Weird and the Eerie.
* Getting ready for Marquette’s big Buffy at 20 conference: Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ranked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games, ranked from best to worst. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist parable for everyone – including Anthony Stewart Head. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest show in the history of television. The Enduring Legacy. Genocide of the Vampires. How Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Most Hated Season Became Its Most Important. On “The Body.” Twenty years later, the world needs Buffy more than ever. A few more at MeFi. And from the archives, David Graeber.
* CFPs at Science Fiction Studies on climate change fiction and Frankenstein.
* And don’t sleep on the CFP for SFRA 2017, due at the end of the month.
* Marquette: a university on the… grow?
* Want To Know About Racially Motivated Policing? Ask Literally Any Person of Color in Milwaukee.
* Data Draws Link Between Metro Milwaukee’s Segregation and Poverty.
* 50th Anniversary of the Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches.
* #4.
* This isn’t a complete picture — it is too nostalgic for a lost age of exclusion, and misses completely the despair caused by the total collapse of the profession — but all the same I found it a powerful critique of the university today: Our Hallways Are Too Quiet.
* Probably the best piece of art criticism ever written: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection.
* More Lovercraft from the great Ali Sperling! H.P. Lovecraft’s Weird Body.
* The New York Times reviews Lower Ed by the great Tressie McMillan Cottom.
* Sold! Wild New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships.
* Think Twice About Escaping Earth to an Exoplanet. Trappist-1 is already ruined.
* On zeitgeist: Ozymandias statue found in mud.
* What will the 25th Century Call the 21st?
* The Handmaid’s Tale in the Age of Trump.
* A Women’s Strike Syllabus. And another.
* U.S. Colleges: Where Does The Money Go?
* Rutgers also diverted $11 million in student fees and $17.1 million from its general fund to cover the athletic shortfall. The average undergraduate now pays more than $300 in activities fees exclusively for the university’s N.C.A.A. teams.
* Gotta spend money to explain why you aren’t spending money.
* Bodies on the Gears at Middleburg. And from the right: Middlebury Reckons With a Protest Gone Wrong. From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America.
* Ideology of the March for Science.
* Are the Democrats totally screwed? The Democratic Party Seems to Have No Earthly Idea Why It Is So Damn Unpopular. Outsmarted: on the Liberal Cult of the Cognitive Elite. There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble. The SEIU at the end of the world.
* Trump can’t even do a standard thing like firing all the US Attorneys without turning it into a train wreck. But here’s how he can turn it around. Why the Russia Story Is a Minefield for Democrats and the Media. Descent into Liberalism. Fantasizing about President Pence. Of no fixed address. Here’s How Much ‘Trumpcare’ Fucks You, Based On How You Get Your Insurance Now. Who wins and who loses under the Republicans’ health care plan. A Trumpcare flashback. Truly, freedom isn’t free.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You’re rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You’re a Democrat.
* This is so evil: Bill Would Let Employers Demand Workers’ Genetic Tests.
* In the future, everyone will publicly beg for health care for 15 minutes.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Perils of the New, Shiny George W. Bush.
* The Revolutionary Force of Stupidity: A Conversation with Matt Taibbi.
* Enemies of the People: How hatred of the masses bridges our partisan divide.
* Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is heaven — for spies!
* The Great Lakes Are Sicker Than You Think. Editorial: Don’t slash funding for the Great Lakes.
* Towards a Unified Theory of Why Men Send Dick Pics. Obviously, more research is required.
* Neonazis! I hate these guys. Indiana Jones and the Okay Fine We’ll Try Again.
* Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine.
* Twenty-First Century Headlines: Radioactive Boars in Fukushima Thwart Residents’ Plans to Return Home.
* Brain activity recorded as much as 10 minutes after death.
* West Virginia county sues drug distributors over opioid crisis.
* Today in the massive screwed-uppedness of American democracy.
* George Republicans Pass Mid-Decade Re-Gerrymander Just in Case.
* Purple America Has All But Disappeared.
* Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?
* Star Trek: Discovery announces exciting “the captain is probably evil and in any event will die at the end of the season” arc.
* Knives out for Marvel: they finally made a mistake big enough to be noticed. More from Noah Berlatsky.
* Study: Hillary Clinton’s TV ads were almost entirely policy-free.
* Officials with Alberta’s environment agency inspected the water lines on Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed it safe, while the town completed the required repairs by the end of day. Town’s Water Turns Pink In Horrifying Ghostbusters Throwback.
* Requiem for a Dil. We’re Looking for People with Management Potential. An Experiment to Determine if Rats Can Be Made to Hate Thanksgiving. It’s Not So Bad. Sad Truths: Mythological Creatures Edition. I wish human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. We all have our struggles.
* Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers.
* Review is back, thank heaven.
* Nostalgia for the childhood you never had: The Japanese opening for the X-Men Animated Series.
* Inside the cruellest RollerCoaster Tycoon park ever created.
* The arc of history is long, but Rookie Doctors Will Soon Be Allowed To Work Up To 28 Hours Straight.
* Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia.
* “King Kong” and American Cultural History.
* 20 million at risk of starvation in world’s largest crisis since 1945, UN says.
* Interesting: The New Avatar Theme Park Is a Giant Spoiler.
In an interview conducted inside the park, Cameron said that the park is set in a timeline after the five movies. A time when the war between humans and Na’vi is over. A time when the Na’vi have begun to welcome humans onto their planet with opens arms.
* How the 20,699-word iTunes T&Cs became this year’s hottest graphic novel.
* Should California lower its voting age to 17? Yes.
* And dibs on the screenplay: Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen individuals or entities, plus the nation of Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A house burned down. Three people filed for bankruptcy. One man alleges having been kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the men involved say that the emerald is hellspawn but they also can’t let it go.
Don’t Let Them Know What You’re Against or What You’re For
* Saturn devours his young: President Trump.
* So weird to see Donald Trump going through all the traditional rituals of assuming the presidency, like the ceremonial settling of your $25 million fraud cases.
* When Mike Pence Went To See Hamilton. (UPDATE: God forbid me, I don’t think this is absolutely insignificant.)
* The Problem of Judas in Amos Oz’s new novel.
* Film analysis minute: Indiana Jones and the collaborators.
* Dan Berger in Jacobin: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.
* Suicide contagion in the Age of Trump. The Banality of Trump. While You Weren’t Looking, Donald Trump Released a Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges. Hey, just out of curiosity, are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?
* Let me tell you a story about a major party’s nominee for President of the United States.
* I come to you now, at the turn of the tide: Finally, the MLA speaks.
* What the: Minnesota Woman Sues Her Trans Teenager for Transitioning Without Her Consent.
* Pokémon originalism is a thing now.
* What kind of New Jersey accent do you have? What’s the most New Jersey thing you can think of?
* Two days after Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the Canadian government quietly tweaked our immigration system to make it easier for many Americans to move to Canada.
Spriiiiiiiing Breaaaaaaaaak! Links
* Don’t miss the CFP for my upcoming Paradoxa special issue on “Global Weirding”!
* Of course you haven’t read Canavan until you’ve read him in the original French.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Today in the end of our lives’ work. Delaware State cuts more than a quarter of its majors. But don’t worry, we’ve finally got the solution.
* Chairing a humanities department at the end of the world.
* Trying to put a number on adjunct justice.
* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied.
* I think you’ll find every possible jaundiced, post-academic riff on this story has already been made: French woman aged 91 gets PhD after 30 years.
* All about the SF sensation of SXSW, Dead Slow Ahead. And more!
* Great moments in unenforceable contracts.
* Ten Years after the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A prison interview with the accuser.
* Reminder: NCAA Amateurism Is a Corrupt Sham, We Are All Complicit. March Madness means money – it’s time to talk about who’s getting paid. And here’s how to gamble on it.
* The trouble with people who lived in the past.
* Inside the Protest That Stopped the Trump Rally.
* How to steal a nomination from Donald Trump. The Pre-Convention. There is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party. I can’t be contrarian about Donald Trump anymore: he’s terrifying.
* Meet the Academics Who Want Donald Trump to Be President.
* I do agree that presidential term limits make little sense, though my solution would be to abolish the office entirely.
* The oldest man in the world survived Auschwitz.
* What if Daylight Saving Time never ended?
* Teach the controversy: Richard Simmons May or May Not Be Currently Held Hostage by His Maid.
* As temperatures soar, new doubts arise about holding warming to 2 degrees C.
* The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go. Game Two. Game Three. Game Five. But we got one!
* How The TV Show of Octavia Butler’s Dawn Will Stay True to Her Incredible Vision.
* Take your Baby-Sitters’ Club cosplay / fanfic blog to the next level.
* Photoshopping men out of political photos.
* Scenes from Iconic Films Hastily Rewritten So They Pass the Bechdel Test.
* Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.
* Paul Nungesser has lost his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia.
* Chris Claremont visits Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men.
* Paging Lt. Barclay: Science proves the transporter is a suicide box.
* The Untold Tragedy of Camden, NJ.
* J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish.
* Scientists discover ‘genderfluid’ lioness who looks, acts and roars like a male.
* Always a good sign: Star Trek Beyond Is Reshooting and Adding an Entirely New Cast Member. Meanwhile: Paramount lawyers call Star Trek fan film’s bluff in nerdiest lawsuit ever.
* Jacobin reviews Michael’s Moore Where to Invade Next. Jacob Brogan reviews Daniel Clowes’s Patience.
* From our family to yours, happy St. Patrick’s Day.
* Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along.
* And because you demanded it: What if James Bond Was a Chimpanzee?
Wednesday Night Links
* The Utopia symposium in the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is especially good, if I do say so myself. Featuring Raffaella Baccolini, Troy Bordun, Catherine Constable, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carl Freedman, Lisa Garforth, Dan Hassler-Forest, Veronica Hollinger, Alexis Lothian, Roger Buckhurst, Tom Moylan, Sharon Sharp, Steven Shaviro, Debra Benita Shaw, Rebekah Sheldon, Imre Szeman, Phillip E. Wegner, and Rhys Williams…
* Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes.
* Fear of an Ill Planet: On the Importance of Sickness and the Demands of Otherness.
* I think maybe every literally academic I know has been talking about this story.
* The Scalia obituaries keep coming: 1, 2, 3.
* Huge cuts to ethnic studies at SFSU.
* The Troubled Academic Job Market for History.
* Never in my worst dreams about the future of the university could I have imagined such a thing was possible: Chicago State University Cancels Spring Break.
* David Milch, the storied mind also behind ‘Deadwood,’ changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: “He’s brilliant.”
* Yay, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. Booooooo, Bernie Sanders’s radical past. In any event.
* Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime.
* “There no longer are any rules in the Supreme Court nomination process.” I’ll do you one better!
* Usually this sort of mythologizing isn’t caught fast enough to be traced: The Evolution of the Myth of the Sanders “English Only” Chant.
* Social media, the new mind control.
* Polls and Trump’s Supporters. My word.
* Elsewhere in dystopian backstory: The Virginia Senate has passed legislation that would transform all law enforcement agencies in the commonwealth into secret police, quite literally, a dangerous step in the direction of unaccountable and non-transparent government. No other state has gone as far as the Senate bill would take Virginia into the realm of secrecy where it concerns state and local police.
* When the Public Defender Says, ‘I Can’t Help.’
* Nobody, but nobody, can trip over their own feet like Obama.
* The Huntington Tumblr has a few pictures up from one of Octavia Butler’s horse stories.
* The contested legacy of Stan Lee.
* A People’s History of #CancelColbert.
* Nice work if you can get it: Rutgers president gets a $97,000 bonus.
* The Oscars Forgot to Nominate The Force Awakens For Best Picture.
* Why Professor Indiana Jones Never Published His Research.
* Ok, sold: Margaret Atwood’s Next Book Is a Prison-Bound Take on The Tempest.
* Well, that doesn’t sound so bad… Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
* Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist.
* On the plus side, we are living through a golden age of theme parks.
* Rosemary G. Feal will step down as executive director of the Modern Language Association next year after 15 years in that job, the group announced on Wednesday.
* Fermi Paradox watch: maybe life is that rare.
* But mostly Fuller House evokes a smut-free porn parody, with sexualized adult versions of characters who, in the collective psyche, are frozen in amber as children. Elsewhere on the Onion‘s Full House porn parody beat.
* “Dogs and Certain Primates May Be Able To See Magnetic Fields.” Tell no one my secret.
* Breastfeeding is probably really not that big a deal.
* Winning the lottery can also bankrupt your neighbors.
* Twilight of saying “Aycock” at Duke and UNCG.
* KSR coverage in American Literature: “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, theMars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change.”
* Why Is Inver Hills Banning Union Activist From Campus?
* The Problematic, Sexist Subtext of Laughing at Hitler’s Alleged Micropenis.
* Lev Grossman on Narnia and grief.
* The best news I’ve gotten all year: Milwaukee’s Air and Water Show postponed until 2017.
* Blade Runner 2 is an abomination that should never have been made, but I am interested to see how they deal (or don’t) with the Deckard/replicant issue.
* And Philip K. Dick is just straight-up writing our reality now.
Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links
* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.
* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.
* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.
* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.
* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.
* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”
* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.
* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.
* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:
* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.
* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.
Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.
* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.
* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.
* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.
* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.
* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.
* No capital projects but the end of capital.
* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!
* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.
* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.
* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.
* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.
* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.
* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.
* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.
* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.
* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.
* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.
* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.
* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.
* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.
* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.
* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.
* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?
* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.
* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.
* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?
* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.
* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”
* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.
* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.
* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.
* And, finally, MTV is ready to tell my story.
Meanwhile, Some Links
* Marquette has a new president, the first lay president in its history. His farewell message to UWM.
In closing, I would like to thank everyone at UWM for your efforts to make this a great university. I have been proud to serve as your leader for the last three and a half years, and I am confident that UWM will continue to make significant strides to become a top-tier research university that is a great place to learn and work. I will continue to promote UWM and spread the word about the great things being accomplished by our campus even after I am no longer Chancellor. I will also work hard to strengthen and build partnerships between UWM and Marquette, as I believe that by working together, Milwaukee’s two largest four-year academic institutions will help address many of Milwaukee’s problems, drive growth within the region and increase the prestige of both universities.
* Dia/lectics of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
* It Seems More and More Certain That We Live in a Multiverse.
* Texas Congressman Wants National Parks Opened To Drilling. US House votes to allow dumping of coal mining waste into streams. Escape the Devastation of Future Earth on a Luxurious Space Mayflower.
* Roughly .02 Percent of Published Researchers Reject Global Warming.
* An American Utopia: Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley Aronowitz. This is the army-as-utopia piece I was going on about last week, if you were curious about it.
* What Life Will Be Like for Girls’ Hannah at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
* What I’m Learning on a Simulated Mars Mission.
* Harvard University has discovered three books in its collection are bound in human hide. Come now, only three? Don’t be coy, Harvard…
* Amy Acker joins Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because of course she is.
* Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponised against us. And so it is likely to remain until the left, which claims to speak for labourers, begins to think seriously and strategically about what most labour actually consists of, and what those who engage in it actually think is virtuous about it.
* Inside UFO 54-40, the Unwinnable “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
* In sum, this so-called “data-driven” website is significantly less data-driven (and less sophisticated) than Business Insider or Bloomberg View or The Atlantic. It consists nearly entirely of hedgehoggy posts supporting simplistic theories with sparse data and zero statistical analysis, making no quantitative predictions whatsoever. It has no relationship whatsoever to the sophisticated analysis of rich data sets for which Nate Silver himself has become famous. The problem with the new FiveThirtyEight is not one of data vs. theory. It is one of “data” the buzzword vs. data the actual thing. Nate Silver is a hero of mine, but this site is not living up to its billing at all.
* Why was Charlotte’s absurdly corrupt mayor doing the bag drops himself? Amateur hour. He’s going to be so mad when he finally gets around to seeing American Hustle.
* Clickbait publication says stop talking so much about clickbait.
* Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan.
* And nothing gold can stay: Bradley Cooper is rumored to take over Indiana Jones.
The Tuesday Links
* It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.
* So, to recap, nationalization of the health insurance industry in 2009 would have cost no more (and almost certainly a lot less) than $240 billion. The savings in waste resulting from replacing the health insurance racket with an extension of Medicare would have resulted in no less than $158 billion a year. That’s an annualized return on investment of 66 percent. The entire operation would have paid for itself in less than 18 months, and after that, an eternity of administrative efficiency for free. And, of course, happy shareholders.
* The owners of Kiko, Hercules and Leo could not be reached Monday night.
* Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.
* Academia as horror show: The Chronicle‘s 2013 “Influence” List.
* The end of tenure at Kean University?
* BREAKING: MOOCs don’t work.
* Brad DeLong says save Berkeley by “(partially) transforming it into a finishing school for the superrich of Asia.” What could go wrong?
* The latest numbers on PhDs with job commitments at graduation.
* A vote being held tomorrow and Wednesday could secure union recognition for New York University graduate students, which the administration withdrew and then withheld from them — with help from congressional Republicans and Obama’s now-Treasury Secretary — for the past eight years. If the United Auto Workers emerges victorious in the vote, NYU will become only private sector U.S. university to bargain collectively with graduate student teachers and researchers — though such workers will remain excluded from U.S. labor law.
* “This comic is shaping up to be, in many ways, a departure from the sometimes light-hearted series.” He’s taking, impossibly, about the Serenity comic followup Leaves on the Wind.
* There’s a 1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections.
* Good news! FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light. 1984 as instruction manual.
* The NSA has been spying on World of Warcraft.
* Inept ATF Uses Children and People With Low IQs In Sting Operations.
* Texas Student Asks Campus Cop, “You Gonna Shoot Me?” So Cop Shoots Him. Dead.
* Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, 2312, and Shaman) debates the merits of utopian thinking with Aeon Magazine’s Marina Benjamin and political theorist Alex Callinicos.
* Nice work if you can get it: Fox News Paid Fired Executive $8 Million to Keep Quiet.
* The trailer for season five of Community is out.
* And Disney can now ruin Indiana Jones, too. This is the darkest timeline.
Thursday Morning Link Transmission!
* American says no to MOOCs. So does SFSU.
* Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University says no to tenure.
“We want to be a leading university, and we wanted to attract faculty who think out of the box, and who are ambitious and creative,” said Ghazi Darkazalli, vice president of academic affairs. “We don’t want them to be worrying within the first five or six years whether they’re going to be tenured or not.”
Far better for them to spend those five or six years trying to get a TT job at another school.
* Scenes from the Fitness Palace at Purdue.
* In practice, however, that doesn’t happen. The scholarships go towards “merit aid”, which is often, dismayingly enough, a polite way of saying that the college is helping to pay for wealthy kids to attend, even if they’re not particularly smart. Some 20% of students with GPAs below 2.0, for instance, receive merit aid. And at the same time, the “need aid” is carefully calibrated so that poor kids won’t take the colleges up on their offers… See also: Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students as Aid Funneled to Rich.
* The Troubling Viral Trend of the “Hilarious” Black Neighbor. And its equally unhappy, equally exploitative shadow.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to cut student interest rates to near zero.
* Food service workers in St. Louis have gone on strike. So might adjuncts in Chicago. Amazon workers sue over mandatory post-shift search. Cooper Union Students Occupy President’s Office To Protest Tuition.
* Why Cops Bust Down Doors of Medical Pot Growers, But Ignore Men Who Keep Naked Girls on Leashes.
* NYC Considering Allowing Non-Citizens To Vote. Good!
* “Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression,” a new study that will appear in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that aggressive behavior is tied to competition, not violence, in videogames and gambling, according to Forbes.
* Scientists also say that guns are bad, glass is not a liquid, and the Toba catastrophe may not have happened.
* This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter From TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl).
* Here’s another example — I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (several times) and I never noticed that Riker doesn’t know how to use a chair. When the guy sits down he pulls the chair back and dramatically slings his leg over the back of it like he’s mounting a freakin’ horse. He apparently does this all the time, regardless of the situation. It’s nuts.
* Lucas wanted Indiana Jones 2 to be a dinosaur movie. I honestly can’t decide if this is the best or the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Gerry Canavan 