Posts Tagged ‘Instapundit’
Please Enjoy Weekend Links!
* Get your abstracts in! CFP: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. And a CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction.”
* The schedule of classes for Marquette English is up at Spring 2017. I’ll be on research leave, if you’re wondering why I’m not listed…
* Best Tumblr in forever: Sad Chairs of Academia.
* How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe.
* How Skin-Deep Judgments of Professors Might Influence Student Success.
* The extent to which Trump is floating absolute gibberish cannot be undersold. Even Costanza is superseded in his time. Once more with feeling: On Bullshit.
* What did Trump lie about at the debate, mondo-hugeo chart edition. Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. Prince Georging, Meflection, and Gobbing: A brief guide to Trump’s rhetorical tricks. A Trump Glossary. You’ll get ’em next time, buddy. What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump. This May Be The Most Horrible Thing That Donald Trump Believes. When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped. How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media. How to bait Donald Trump. Gray’s. Sports. Almanac. How to evade your taxes the Trump way. More. Even more! Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money. Cuba! I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. Donald Trump and the truth about race and real estate in America. America is already great. There’s still heroes in the world. And then there’s what happened just this morning.
* The most American-democracy thing that’s ever happened: But Republicans said the White House didn’t make a forceful case, putting themselves in the awkward position of blaming the president for a bill they enacted into law over Obama’s veto.
* Beyond Clinton or Trump: Nuclear Weapons and Democracy.
* Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November. What a shocking and unexpected consequence of these well-intentioned, commonsense laws.
* Note: The original headline for this piece was “George W. Bush is Not Your Cuddly Grandpa. George W. Bush can rot in hell.”
* Five questions we need to answer before colonizing Mars. Elon Musk’s spectacular plan to colonise Mars lacks substance. Fun and exciting, not boring and cramped! Is Elon Musk’s Crazy Mars Plan Even Legal?
* What could possibly go wrong? UVM Medical College to Eliminate Lectures.
* No Punishment for ‘Run Them Down’ Tweet.
* Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby.
* Why New Jersey’s Trains Aren’t Safer.
* Nicholson Baker goes to school. Reader, I bought it.
* Another review of Alice Kaplan’s book on The Stranger.
* “Liberalism is working”: Teen accused of stealing 65-cent carton of milk at middle school to face trial.
* Measles are gone from the Americas.
* On Premier League Fantasy Football.
* How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School.’
* The 25 Best Superpowers in the Superpowers Wiki.
*Wonder Woman Writer Greg Rucka Says Diana Has ‘Obviously’ Had Relationships With Women. She was on an island of only women for millennia! So yeah.
* The world passes 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. Permanently.
* And yet, looking back at The Jetsons intro sequence today, I wonder where the icecaps are in that little illustration of earth. Is some land missing from Central America? Has the North gained land mass? Such questions become more troubling in the context of current concerns about global warming and, once asked, open the floodgates for similar observations. In the intro sequence, flying cars convey the Jetsons and other families from their floating bungalow to other floating buildings like The Little Dipper School, Orbit High School, Shopping Centre, and Spacely Space Rockets Inc. What was once a cute innovation—why not live in floating cities?—becomes troubled by its energy costs and its purpose. Why do the Jetsons and other families live in orbit? What has happened below to force them into the skies?
* Today in on-the-nose metaphors: NASA Is Sinking Into the Ocean.
* Every society gets the post-apocalypse it deserves.
* There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Yes, I suppose they would be.
* Codex Silenda, A Handcrafted Puzzle Book With Pages That Must Be Solved to Unlock the Next One.
* Cheating in school as communism.
* Today in neoliberal consumerism: Want to Make Ethical Purchases? Stop Buying Illegal Drugs.
* The Dark, Gritty Tick goes to series. Spoon! But like a dirty, chipped spoon, a spoon that really reflects the darkness of our society and our souls.
* Emulator lets you turn NES games 3D.
* U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel.
* Striking Prisoners Say Their Guards Have Joined In.
* The Longreads Reading List on Utopias.
* Die a hero, or… Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?
* It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave. I wonder how many are actually caring for or financially supporting un-, under-, and unable-to-be-employed parents and siblings.
* Let’s Stop Talking About Stranger Things Season Two Before We Ruin It. Friends, I have some terrible news.
* There’s bad luck, and then there’s: Man Bitten On Penis By Spider For The Second Time This Year.
* Today in terrible ideas I could not denounce more strongly: Is it time for Star Trek: The Next Generation to go Kelvin?
Thursday Morning!
* A major new report suggests serious underemployment among liberal arts majors, affecting as many as 50% of recent graduates in some majors.
* Liu Cixin has an essay on Death’s End up at Tor: Chinese Literature and Apocalyptic SF: Some Notes on Death’s End (and has a review up already as well). My review probably won’t be published for another few weeks, so I’ll just say again: just buy it!
* Once more, with feeling: Student evaluations are useless.
* CFP: The Job Market. CFP: Loanwords to Live With. I know some of the editors of the Loanwords project and I think it looks really exciting. CFC: A Marxist Game.
* Congratulations to Claudia Rankine on her MacArthur grant.
* The New Republic reviews Alice Kaplan’s new book on The Stranger.
* David Fahrenthold’s reporting on Trump’s foundation has yielded a major scoop, evidence of self-dealing in public documents that would appear to be trivially against the law. Even wilder: this is their defense.
* America: taste the rainbow.
* Instapundit has been suspended from Twitter for a tweet about the Charlotte protests. The tweet in question seems pretty indefensible to me, though Reynolds tries at the link, and regardless of its defensibility suspending him for it seems likely to have very bad consequences both for Twitter and for left academics on a pragmatic level. 9:04 AM UPDATE: He’s already back on.
* “Actuaries shamelessly, although often in good faith, understate pension obligations by as much as 50 percent,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary and economist, in a speech last year at the M.I.T. Center for Finance and Policy. “Their clients want them to.”
* Seven charts that speak volumes about the opioid epidemic.
* Since the dawn of time, man has fought the rat.
* From Back to the Future II to Stephen King’s saving-JFK novel 11/23/63, the lesson one learns again and again is that trying to improve the world through time travel is a fool’s game, creating far worse problems than whatever you’d hoped to fix. Most of time travel fiction these days is one way or another designed to help us swallow the bitter pill that this life is the one we’re stuck with, that trying to make things better will only backfire.
* Cut-throat academia leads to ‘natural selection of bad science’, claims study.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The bear who fought in World War II.
* Stranger Things spinoff greenlit.
* Going to go ahead and greenlight this one too: Family flee home after finding spiders which can cause four-hour erection followed by death in ASDA bananas.
* AI will eliminate 6 percent of jobs in five years, says report. Yes, even yours!
* Greenland’s huge annual ice loss is even worse than thought.
* A Massive Sinkhole Just Dumped Radioactive Waste Into Florida Water.
* In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups, the police and the police.
* Teaching the controversy: “Should police officers be required to provide medical aid to people they’ve shot?”
* Slate vs. Stone re: Snowden.
* The Internet and the end of porn.
* Contradictions of Capital and Care.
* The end, one hopes, of Anthony Weiner.
* “Karen Gillan Promises There’s a Reason Her Jumanji Character Is Dressed Like That.”
* Been there: Child’s Loose Grasp On Balloon Only Thing Between Peace And Anarchy At Restaurant.
* School lunch worker forced to throw away student’s hot meal decides to quit.
* Save the Day, from Joss Whedon.
* Take that, every authority figure in my personal history! A new study finds that fidgeting — the toe-tapping, foot-wagging and other body movements that annoy your co-workers — is in fact good for your health.
* Political correctness run amok.
* These are the most lewd-sounding town names in each state.
* And now, truly, more than ever: “Tonight the Character of Death Will Be Played by Brad Pitt.”
Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly
* In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.
* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.
* A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!
* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:
* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.
* Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.
* What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?
* Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:
* 19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.
* So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.
* New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.
* Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.
* Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.
* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.
* Science Fiction: For Slackers?
* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.
* How to be a fan of problematic things.
* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.
* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.
* Can Americans update their ideas about war?
* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?
* The Political Economy of Enrollment.
Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.
* UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.
* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.
* Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.
* How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.
* How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.
* What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.
* Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.
* A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.
* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.
* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.
* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.
* This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.
* Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.
* Stunning photos of the California drought.
* The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.
* Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?
* Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.
* Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.
* Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.
* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.
* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.
* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.
* The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.
* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.
* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.
* Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.
* U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.
* The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.
* 10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.
* So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…
* Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.
* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.
* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.
* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.
* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.
* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.
* Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.
* The Proof That Centrism is Dead.
* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.
* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.
* Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.
* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.
* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.
* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.
* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.
* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.
* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.
* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.
* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.
* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.
* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.
* The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.
* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.
* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Gerry Canavan 