Posts Tagged ‘James Franco’
Friday Links!
* CFP: In More’s Footsteps: Utopia and Science Fiction.
* CFP: The Comics of Art Spiegelman.
* In case you missed it: the syllabus for my summer science fiction course.
* Your official Mad Men finale odds sheet.
* Stop sanitizing the history of the run-up to Iraq War.
* In this small suburb outside Milwaukee, no one in the Menomonee Falls School District escapes the rigorous demands of data.
* Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Southern Maine.
* Bérubé and Ruth (and Bousquet) on their plan to convert adjunct positions to teaching tenure.
* Everything But The Burden: Publics, Public Scholarship, And Institutions.
* Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial.
* Honeybees (still) dying, situation ‘unheard of.’
* A brief history of the freeway.
* Britain is too tolerant and should interfere more in people’s lives, says David Cameron.
* Free market watch: Having everyone’s account at a single, central institution allows the authorities to either encourage or discourage people to spend. To boost spending, the bank imposes a negative interest rate on the money in everyone’s account – in effect, a tax on saving.
* In the last academic year, Rutgers athletics generated $40.3 million in revenue, but spent $76.7 million, leaving a deficit of more than $36 million. In other words, revenue barely covered half the department’s expenses.
* The crazy idea was this: The United States Army would design a “deception unit”: a unit that would appear to the enemy as a large armored division with tanks, trucks, artillery, and thousands of soldiers. But this unit would actually be equipped only with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake artillery and manned by just a handful of soldiers.
* The top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all kindergarten teachers in U.S. combined.
* I honestly found this a pretty devastating brief, though not everyone on Facebook found it as useful or persuasive as I did: The Progressive Case Against Public Schools, or, What Bleeding Heart Libertarians Should Say.
* Disney Spent $15 Billion To Limit Their Audience. But the news gets worse, friends: Disney under fire for fairytale film based on true story of American dad who claimed African land to make daughter a princess.
* Here’s Which Humanities Major Makes the Most Money After College.
* Jury Acquits Six Philly Narcotics Cops On All Corruption Charges. Wow.
* The Texas Prison Rape Problem.
* Honolulu Mayor Learns The Hard Way That Criminalization Isn’t The Answer To Homelessness.
* First Supergirl Trailer Really Does Feel Like An SNL Parody.
* The last of the renegade Nazis living in a self-sufficient lunar colony has died, aged 95.
* “It’s about this little girl who finds a little kitten”: Mark Z. Danielewski is back. Did Mark Z. Danielewski just reinvent the novel?
* The arc of history is long, but Harry Shearer is quitting The Simpsons.
* Same joke but Alex Garland confirms zombie sequel 28 Months Later is in the works.
* Not since Jewel’s A Night without Armor have we seen a poet like James Franco.
* The Agony of Taking a Standardized Test on a Computer.
* Bill O’Reilly: America will fall like Rome if the secular “rap industry” has its way.
* Georgia Man Arrested for Trespassing After Saving Dog From Hot Car.
* Group petitions White House to add Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
* Dean Featured in ‘Rolling Stone’ Article Sues Magazine for $7.5 Million.
* And it’s not all bad news: Telltale Promise Something ‘Major’ From The Walking Dead Franchise This Year.
Thursday Night Links
* This may shock you, but Thomas Friedman loves MOOCs. An Ad Hominem Attack Against Thomas Friedman. MOOCs R Us. MOOCs or BOOKs?
* Mother who stole son’s education gets 12 years in prison.
* Two bad tastes that taste good together: Rand Paul filibusters drones.
* Apocalypse now: The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees as many global leaders have hoped, new federal figures show.
* Planning for the Post-Income Economy. Fracking is starting to devour the US economy.
* Elephant Poaching Pushes Species To Brink Of Extinction.
* The entrapment defense rarely succeeds, both in terrorism cases and more quotidian (usually drug-related) prosecutions, largely because “entrapment” means something very different in a courtroom than it does in ordinary usage. For nearly a century, the federal courts have allowed a criminal defendant to dodge criminal liability by showing that the governmentinduced her to commit an unlawful act. Once the accused makes such a showing, however, the government still has the opportunity to prove that she was predisposed to commit the crime, even before government agents entered the picture. If a jury accepts the government’s characterization, other factors—the nature or size of the “bait,” the complexity of the government artifice, or the independent wherewithal of the defendant to commit the crime—basically don’t matter: the defendant is still guilty. This means that when entrapment is at issue, the personality, reputation, criminal history, and political or religious beliefs of the accused become the centerpiece of the trial. Post-9/11 juries have had little trouble concluding that the disaffected Muslims (and occasional anarchists) ensnared by the FBI have been sufficiently “predisposed” to engage in terrorism.
* Recovering Lolita. My students have been pouring over this collection of Lolita book covers thanks to @sselisker.
* #slatepitches: What SimCity Teaches Us About Real Cities of the Future.
* Ephemeral third ring of radiation makes appearance around Earth. If we lived in a comic book, I bet this story would be fifteen times as awesome.
* Detailed Floor Plan Drawings of Popular TV and Film Homes.
* See Stephen Colbert school James Franco on Tolkien mythology.
* A first look at The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* FBI Investigating Drone Near Miss with Jet at JFK.
* TPM’s papal contenders cheatsheet.
* Smile Time: Community is doing an all-puppet episode, with actual puppets.
* First Trailer for Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.
* Consequences of Repeated Blood-Brain Barrier Disruption in Football Players.
* And the latest issue of The New Inquiry posits time is the fire in which we burn.
‘So While a Lot of Actors Turn to Knitting, James Franco Is Becoming a Scholar, and I Suggest We Take Him Seriously’
After visiting Detroit, the thing I found myself wondering was not “How does James do it?” but rather “Why aren’t more Hollywood actors earning Ph.Ds?” James Franco’s advisor at Yale speaks.
Monday Morning
* Nemesis watch: Professor claims NYU fired him after he gave James Franco a ‘D.’
José Angel Santana said he slapped the “127 Hours’’ star with the bad grade because he missed 12 of his 14 “Directing the Actor II” classes while pursuing a master’s in fine arts.
Santana said he then suffered all kinds of drama — first from Franco, who publicly ridiculed him, then from his department, which axed him over the “D.”
“The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”
It’s almost enough to make you doubt a person can be a successful professional actor while simultaneously attending four separate graduate programs and succeeding at all of them.
* Via Facebook: College bowl system loots universities. Today’s case study: the University of Minnesota.
The bloodbath began the moment the contract was signed. Minnesota was obligated to write a check for 10,000 tickets, which were supposed to be resold to fans. Never mind that even the best of teams struggle to unload such sums. For middling squads like the Gophers, it was nothing more than a way for the men in funny yellow blazers who ran the Insight to grab piles of money from a public university.
Minnesota managed to sell just 901 seats. After kicking another 900 to the band, administrators, and cherished hangers-on, the school was forced to eat $476,000 worth of useless tickets.
The contract also required the team to show up a week early, if only to burn as much school money as possible at the restaurants and retailers of greater Phoenix.
One would think school administrators would protest such gall. But one would be wrong. They were quick to see the advantages of a luxury vacation on the school’s dime. So they happily signed off.
The school’s traveling party was larded up with 722 people, including players, band members, and faculty. Airfare alone ran $542,000. Toss in hotels and meals, and the school had blown $1.3 million before the opening kickoff.
The ballsiest part of all: None of it was necessary. Minnesota and Iowa State sit less than 200 miles apart. Their teams were providing the game. Their bands supplied the halftime entertainment. In fact, the Insight offered nothing—save for warm weather—that the schools couldn’t have done better themselves.
Had the game been played in Minneapolis, the teams could have sold more tickets and put on a profitable game, since Big 10 matches typically generate $1 to $2 million—not knee-bending losses.
* Kim Jong-Un Privately Doubting He’s Crazy Enough To Run North Korea. At America’s Finest News Source.
* From the New Yorker archives: two letters from North Korea.
* And Akim Reinhardt asks: How will we know what Occupy meant once it’s over?
Three for Tuesday
* New York Magazine profiles my nemesis, James Franco. I’m sorry, but the idea that one could be meaningfully enrolled in four graduate programs simultaneously is just… Forget it. Via MetaFilter.
* Black holes may contain mini-universes, and our own universe may reside inside a black hole somewhere. But I still think we’re all just shadow-like projections on the walls of Leonardo DiCaprio’s dreams.
* What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? From the New Yorker, with more at MetaFilter. I firmly hope suicide pills are legal and freely available on that far off day I need them; as with so many things, I can’t fathom why there isn’t already universal agreement on this point.
Late Night Links With Very Little Context
* James Franco, will you never cease your cruel mockery of my life?
* Pawlenty already going after Romney on health care. This should be fun to watch.
* Via Yglesias, John Holbo has the only critique of bipartisanship you’ll ever need.
* Bernie Sanders doesn’t like the climate bill.
* The Walking Dead will be a series.
* Barack Obama looking at awesome things.
* And, via Tim, this perfectly reasonable report: A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.
Gerry Canavan 