Posts Tagged ‘James Joyce’
Saturday! Morning! Links!
* CFP: Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions: Reframing Identity, Culture, and History.
* CFP: “Playing Utopia – Futures in Digital Games,” Game Studies Summit, Cologne, Germany.
* Climate change is creating a new kind of grief, and we’re completely unprepared for it.
Colleagues at a government-contracted shelter in Arizona had a specific request for Antar Davidson when three Brazilian migrant children arrived: “Tell them they can’t hug.”
The kids will be expected to perform some kind of work, typically extreme self-maintenance. Spotless rooms, bathrooms, etc. Early morning inspections. Questions for journalists are, what happens to kids who don’t comply?
* 1,995 children separated from families at border under ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Doctors Concerned About ‘Irreparable Harm’ To Separated Migrant Children. A fmr top CIA interrogator is training ICE’s deportation agents in interrogation methods, documents show. Everything You Need To Know About Trump’s Immigration Changes But Were Too Afraid To Ask. The House GOP says their new bill bans separating families at the border. That’s a lie. Previously undisclosed statements from two consular officers raise questions about the legality of the Trump administration’s third travel ban. A Theory of Animals. Just Say It’s Racist. Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border. Abolish DHS.
* Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes charged with fraud. A flashback: A Look Inside Theranos’s Dysfunctional Corporate Culture.
* Maine’s experiment in ranked-choice voting is a rare cause for optimism about our democracy.
* The asteroid rush sending 21st-century prospectors into space.
* The strange case of the missing Joyce scholar.
* The Politics of Incredibles 2 Are Incredibly Confusing.
* The Court’s Decision to Let AT&T and Time Warner Merge Is Ridiculously Bad.
* What could explain this improbable result? High cost of housing drives up homeless rates, UCLA study indicates.
* And for your new podcast watch: Game Studies Study Buddies.
Just 300 or So of the Most Important Links for This Friday Morning
* SFFTV 11.2 is out, a special issue on Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and women and sf, guest-edited by up-and-comers Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint! Check it out.
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* Spencer Ackerman explains Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men.
* Inside the (ultimately successful) campaign to recall the judge of the Brock Turner trial.
* Another report from the looting of Toys R Us.
* Norman, the world’s first psychopath AI.
* Water missing opportunity not to be wet.
* Mapping the Movement to Dismantle Public Education.
* My research suggests that those concerns are real, and millennials really are building wealth more slowly than the other working generations. But they are not insurmountable—as long as millennials are willing and able to work longer than their parents and grandparents did. Great can’t wait.
* Solo: A Star Wars Story & The Problem With Prequels. We need to talk about the woke droid. I Have No Mouth and I Must Solo. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves. What Solo could have learned from My Friend Dahmer. Disney manages to learn $50M on a Star Wars movie. Kelly Marie Tran has deleted all the posts off her Instagram due to months of harassment she has received for her character Rose in The Last Jedi. Racism, Misogyny & Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side. What if Star Wars never happened?
* Colonial Hottie: Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman and Brand Israel.
* Trump keeps making it harder for people to seek asylum legally. The Awful Spectacle of 200 Immigration Officers Raiding a Couple of Garden Stores. Former DACA recipient murdered in Mexico after deportation. The Heartache of a Migrant Boy Taken From His Father. Mom and 4 children forced to separate after seeking asylum in US. Cops are called when a senator tries to see kids taken from their immigrant parents. Yet another nightmare child separation story from the Chris Hayes podcast. ICE Agent Decides He Wants Kids After Seeing Incredible Love And Devotion Of Parents Begging Him Not To Take Their Child. Feds Deport Uncle of Six Orphans Whose Parents Died Fleeing ICE. UN office calls on US to stop separating families at border. U.S. sending 1,600 immigration detainees to federal prisons. Pizza Delivery Man Arrested By ICE Is Scheduled to Be Deported This Monday. A GoFundMe for Pablo and His Family.
* Jordan Peterson isn’t a good psychologist, either.
* University tutor died after ‘silently struggling’ with workload. Content warning: suicide.
* Taxi-Driver Suicides Are a Warning.
* How the media covers celebrity suicides can have life-or-death consequences.
* What gets muddled in this telling of the gig economy is the idea of control. An Uber driver can pick her hours, yes. But is she really her own boss, or is the boss the company’s algorithm? The algorithm, after all, determines where the driver will head next, who she’ll pick up, and how much she’ll be paid for that trip. In other words, many important features of the job are outside the driver’s control.
* Trump administration tells court it won’t defend key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration believes Obamacare’s preexisting conditions protections are now unconstitutional.
* Literally just letting coal barons write the laws.
* Huge, if true: America Is a Spiraling Corporate Contract Dystopia.
* Gaming it out: Would a Former President Get Secret Service Protection in Prison? Just kidding, Democrats are on the case. Meanwhile.
* Questions on Michigan’s Investment Tactics.
Recent scrutiny of investment practices by the University of Michigan is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and ethical lapses at colleges and universities seeking to increase their endowments.
Questions about Michigan’s investment practices were prompted by an investigation by the Detroit Free Press, which found that a large portion of the university’s nearly $11 billion endowment is invested in private equity, hedge and venture capital funds, and real estate investment firms run by top university donors and alumni investment advisers.
* Dystopian Bodies: Barbara Ehrenreich Attacks the Epidemic of Wellness.
* Poor road conditions cost Wisconsin drivers $637 each year.
* ‘Clear-sky’ flooding worsens across U.S. as sea levels rise, report says.
* Below are the two main written versions of Sojourner’s speech, the original, on the left, was delivered at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851. The full text of each speech follows the synopsis below so you can see the differences line by line. I have highlighted overt similarities between the two versions. While Frances Gage changed most of the wording and added the southern slave dialect to her 1863 version, it is clear the origin of Gage’s speech comes from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech.
* Hard pass: Howard Schultz steps down at Starbucks, may consider run for president.
* Without Interpreters, California’s Deaf Prisoners Are Getting Stuck Behind Bars.
* A major physics experiment just detected a particle that shouldn’t exist.
The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.
* The Enlightenment’s Dark Side.
* Rebuilding the Antinuclear Movement. How a little “working group” stopped Oakland from becoming a mini-fusion center for the Department of Homeland Security. Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.
* The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.
* Your schedule could be killing you.
* Nazis brauchen keinen Badespaß.
* Schopenhauer, come on. You promised to keep it together.
* Volkswagen Vows to End Experiments on Animals.
* Drones taught to spot violent behavior in crowds using AI. “The work has questionable accuracy rates, but it shows how AI is being used to automate surveillance.”
* Ways brands can celebrate Pride Month.
* Hacked: 92 Million Account Details for DNA Testing Service MyHeritage.
* It’s Ulysses! No, it’s Finnegans Wake! Who Can Tell?!
* Lovely Twitter thread on Dr. Apgar, who probably saved my daughter’s life, and maybe yours too.
* Body Positivity Is a Scam. “How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.”
* It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right; I hope you had the time of your life.
* And these recently declassified NSA posters make our authoritarian dystopia seem fun.
Don’t Fall Behind, Spring Ahead with These Sunday Morning Links
* The R.D. Mullen Fellowship is calling for applications. The deadline this year is April 2, 2018.
* Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: The Case for a New Public Sector.
* For Your Consideration: African Speculative Fiction Society Nommos 2018.
* I had a few bad parents during my time in One Hour, One Life but only one of them outright abandoned me. Most of them, even if they could barely care for themselves, tried to keep me alive. “We’re going to die,” one mother told me when I spawned into the game with her in the middle of a barren wilderness. We did, but she carried me with her every step of the way through our brief lives. ‘One Hour, One Life’: This Game Broke My Heart and Restored My Faith in Humanity.
* We Must Cancel Everyone’s Student Debt, for the Economy’s Sake.
* Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future.
* Despite their claim to be the champions facts, reason, and evidence the right-wing and alt-liberal figures have failed to understand a simple fact about universities: they’re not actually left-wing places at all.
* Fewer foreign students exacerbate financial challenges for some U.S. universities.
* What passes for intellectualism on the right.
* Unpaid internships are back.
* All The Movies I Didn’t See.
My guess is, having elected, much to their surprise, a lunatic as the most powerful man on the planet, a man who boasts of ‘his’ nukes being bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, a man who could actually be crazy enough to unleash a nuclear warhead on millions, the Americans are sorely missing a time when the white man did something right.
* A slow, cerebral, Miracleman depiction of Barry Allen losing all touch with his humanity Dr.-Manhattan-style seems like the only way for The Flash to proceed from here.
* Black Panther crosses $1 billion.
* “President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.”
* Echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in today’s immigration debate.
* We’ll Never See This Politically Themed Black-ish Episode Because of ‘Creative Differences.’
* How to Lose Your Job From Sexual Harassment in 33 Easy Steps.
* This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town.
* YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.
* Super Mario as it was meant to be experienced.
* The Singularity in theory and practice.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* I Felt Despair About Climate Change—Until a Brush With Death Changed My Mind. “Leukemia and climate change have more in common than you might think.”
* Remembering The Hobbit: The Text Adventure.
* And a much-too-long-delayed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The oceans are warming. It’s altering turtle reproduction so that the vast majority of offspring are female. It was mistake to drop acid with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Pure evil. I’ll do anything for a good grade. Dear science. Dr. Bees. On sequels. I have this nightmare where a giant monster chases me. I’m going to give you a pill that’ll double your intelligence. Welcome to robot heaven. Penguin have a much happier version of the Titanic story. Finegan’s Wake. You are watching The Nihilist Channel. Where do you think all these fossils come from? Get me a scientist! Purposelessness is the only real super villain. Daddy, can I ask you something? The fundamental kid utility function. And my whole life has been one string of failures. Please send help.
Friday Links!
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
So, So, So Many Wednesday Links!
* Just in time for my next trip to Liverpool, the research from my last trip to Liverpool five years ago is finally published! “‘A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration’: Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, and Totality.”
* Social Text interviews Fredric Jameson: “Revisiting Postmodernism.”
Is this sympathy for these arts of the past why in your recent work you returned to questions of modernism and realism?
The series you are alluding to [The Poetics of Social Forms] was always planned that way. I mean, I started with utopias, that is, science fiction and the future; then I went to postmodernism, which is the present, and so I’m making my way back into a certain past—to realism and then on to allegory and to epic and finally to narrative itself, which has always been my primary interest. Maybe indeed I have less to say about contemporary works than about even the recent past; or let’s say I have built up a certain capital of reading but am not making any new and exciting investments any longer. It’s a problem: you can either read or write, but time intervenes, and you have to choose between them. Still, I feel that I always discover new things about the present when working on these moments of the past. Allegory, for example, is both antiquated and surprisingly actual, and the work on museum pieces suddenly proves to make you aware of present-day processes that you weren’t aware of.
* George Saunders has finally written a novel, and I’d bet it’s not what you were expecting.
* Marquette will pilot a J-term.
* Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Relatedly: Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?
* The Tuskegee Experiment Kept Killing Black People Decades After It Ended.
* A Brief History of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses. Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Map of Ulysses.
* Donald Trump Far Behind Hillary Clinton in Campaign Cash. More. More. More! The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. Even the conservative NRO! Unraveling Con. The United States of Trump. Will Trump Swallow the GOP Whole? This number in Donald Trump’s very bad fundraising report will really worry GOP donors. The Weird Mad Men Connection. There is “Incredibly Strong Evidence” Donald Trump Has Committed Tax Fraud. And these had already happened before the FEC report: Ryan Instructs Republicans to Follow Their ‘Conscience’ on Trump. Scott Walker agrees! Top GOP Consultant Unleashes Epic #NeverTrump Tweetstorm. Donald Trump Agreed to Call 24 Donors, Made It Through Three Before Giving Up. And the polls, my god, the polls. There Is No Trump Campaign. If things go on this way, can the Democrats retake the House? Endgame for the grift, just as Alyssa Rosenberg tried to warn us. How to Trump.
But this one is still my favorite:
* Meanwhile, the DNC’s oppo file on Trump seems surprisingly thin. This Is the Only Good Oppo Research the DNC Has on Trump.
In a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 (which Buzzfeed actually discovered just under a week ago), Donald Trump reveals that he “doesn’t believe in reincarnation, heaven, or hell.” As far as the DNC is concerned, though, it’s Trump’s apparent lack of faith in God’s eternal kingdom, specifically, that’s damning enough for use as ammo.
* Read Sonia Sotomayor’s Atomic Bomb of a Dissent Slamming Racial Profiling and Mass Imprisonment.
* Cognitive dissonance watch: Could Congress Have Stopped Omar Mateen From Getting His Guns? Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power. How I Bought an AR-15 in a Five Guys Parking Lot.
* Anti-Brexit British MP Assassinated on the Street.
* Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.
* The TSA Is Bad Because We Demand That It Be Bad. One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’
* The hack that could take down New York City.
* Rethinking teaching evaluations.
* Study Finds 1 out of 10 Cal State Students is Homeless.
* What Are College Governing Boards Getting From Their Search Firms?
* How Not to Write About College Students and Free Speech.
* A map of North America, in Tolkien’s style. Keep scrolling! There’s many more links below.
* On Thursday, Philadelphia became the first major US city to adopt a tax on carbonated and sugary drinks. I’d rather see an outright ban than an attempt to turn it into a permanent revenue stream. New “soda tax” measures show just how narrow the liberal vision has become.
* It’s not the right question to ask “how do I get 200 students with laptops in a lecture hall to learn my course material?” Why are they in a lecture hall for 50 minutes, three days a week for 15 weeks or whatever the schedule is? Why do they need to learn the material in your course?
* The illusion of progress: Ditching the headphone jack on phones makes them worse.
* We’re All Forum Writers Now.
* Space Travel Has ‘Permanent Effects,’ Astronaut Scott Kelly Says.
* Sherryl Vint on China Miéville’s The Census-Taker, a book that wasn’t especially well-received by the other critics I’ve read.
* At the moment, Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st Century Fox. And for all the original shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries. Now that so many entertainment companies see it as an existential threat, the question is whether Netflix can continue to thrive in the new TV universe that it has brought into being.
* Waukegan group offers tours to raise awareness for proposed Ray Bradbury museum.
* What’s happening in Oakland is incredible.
* #TheWakandaSyllabus. Trump 101. A response to the Trump Syllabus.
* Secrets of my blogging: Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.
* Homeless in Seattle: five essays.
* Jay Edidin on How to Be a Guy: After Orlando.
* Cunning Sansa, or Dim Sansa? Game of Thrones’ bungled Arya plot explains why George R.R. Martin’s taking so long to finish the books.
* Presenting the world’s ugliest color.
* The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife. I want to believe!
* “People believe that a plane is less likely to crash if a famous person is among the passengers.”
* Such a sad story: Alligator Drags Off 2-Year-Old at Disney Resort in Orlando. My son turns two today, which is almost too much to bear in juxtaposition with this headline.
* The boys are back in town. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for all of us now.
* Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.
* The Microsoft founder and philanthropist recently said he would donate 100,000 hens to countries with high poverty levels, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but including Bolivia. Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
* “Why Chris Pine says you can’t make Star Trek cerebral in 2016.” Respectfully disagree. Meanwhile, sad news in advance of next month’s release of Star Trek Beyond.
* That Scrapped Star Wars TV Show Would’ve Starred a Sympathetic, Heartbroken Emperor. Sounds like they were aiming at a version of Daredevil‘s Kingpin plot.
* Laying down my marker now that Flashpoint won’t save The Flash from its downward spiral. Meanwhile, DC seems utterly spooked by the failure of Batman v. Superman and has opened the set of Justice League to reporters to try to spin a new narrative. Lynda Carter is your new POTUS on CW’s Supergirl. Syfy’s Krypton Show Already Sounds Goofy as Shit.
* There really was a creepy fifth housemate lurking in cult British TV show The Young Ones.
* Why NASA sent 3 defenseless Legos to die on Jupiter. Earth’s New ‘Quasi’ Moon Will Stick Around for Centuries. Astronomers say there could be at least 2 more mystery planets in our Solar System.
* Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages.
* True stories from my childhood having purchased the wrong video game system: 10 of the best Sega Genesis games that deserve a comeback.
* Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
* And Quantum Leap is back, baby! I have five spec scripts in my desk ready to go.
Spring! Break! Forever! Links!
* The Department of Special Collections and University Archives will host an upcoming talk by Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft March 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Raynor Memorial Libraries Beaumier Suites. Croft is the author of “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and ‘Anticipation’ in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy,” and has written on film adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. The talk will explore Tolkien’s “Hobbit Trilogy” in regards to audience expectations, the difficulties of filming a prequel after a sequel, and issues of anticipation in relation to character development.
* The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google.
* In Amsterdam, a revolt against the neoliberal university.
* The persistence of inequality.
* How A Traveling Consultant Helps America Hide The Homeless.
* Working-Class Women at the MLA Interview.
* Checking flights now: Kim Stanley Robinson Week at Ralahine.
* Using Science Fiction to Re-Envision Justice.
* Arab Sci-Fi: The future is here.
* ‘House of Cards’ is the worst show about American politics. Ever. On the perfunctoriness of House of Cards.
* Unarmed teenager shot by police in Madison. Students march.
* Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s sheriff wants attention.
* The Unfortunate Fate of Sweet Briar’s Professors. This headline really buries the lede:
Of course, faculty members aren’t the only employees who are taking a hit. Rainville suggested that nearly a third of the college’s hourly workers are descendants of the Fletcher plantation’s original slave community. Some of the staff members have worked at Sweet Briar their entire adult lives.
* Detenuring and its discontents.
* Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education.
* What Obama’s ‘Student Aid Bill of Rights’ Will — and Won’t — Do. Student Loans Viewed Differently Than Other Debt, Study Finds.
* Fear of a Muslim Planet. From TNI #38: “Futures.”
* Islamophobic Bus Ads In San Francisco Are Being Defaced With Kamala Khan.
* Finally, a technological solution to the problem of taking attendance!
* LARPing Hamlet at Castle Elsinore.
* These Photos Beautifully Capture the Complex Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters. These are really amazing. Many more links after the photo.
* Austerity won’t collapse under its own contradictions. We’ll need a movement for that.
* It’s a mistake to ask whether this is wealthy people defending their financial interests or wealthy people expressing their ideology, or which motivation is reallyin the driver’s seat. The triumph of modern conservatism is that it has collapsed the distinction. The interests of the wealthy are the ideology. Fossil fuels are the ideology. They’re bubbling in the same ethno-nationalist stew as anti-immigrant sentiment, hawkish foreign policy, hostility toward the social safety net, and fetishism of guns, suburbs, and small towns. It’s all one identity now. The Kochs (and their peers) are convinced that their unfettered freedom is in the best interests of the country. There’s no tension.
* What happens when Queen Elizabeth dies?
* Native language study at UWM.
* Judge Says University Failed to Shield Professor From Colleagues’ Retaliation. Yeah, sure sounds like it.
* It is now twelve months to the day that I set myself the task of, for one full year, reading books only by straight, white, middle-class, Anglopone, cis male authors. During that time I read 144 books. The things I learned in my year of selective reading made me pretty glad to have persevered.
Ph.D. students will receive 4 percent more in total compensation for their work as teaching assistants, bringing the average annual compensation up to approximately $36,600. The agreement also guarantees yearly minimum wage increases of 2.25 to 2.50 percent through 2020. For graduate employees at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, some of whom currently make only $10 an hour, hourly wages will increase to $15 next fall and reach $20 by 2020. Those employees will also receive a $1,500 bonus for work done over the past three semesters.
* Diving into the weeds: Is University of Oklahoma frat’s racist chant protected by 1st Amendment? 5 Ways Fraternities Are Wielding Major Influence Over University Administrations. A decade of bad press hasn’t hurt fraternity membership numbers. A Brief and Recent History of Bigotry at Fraternities.
* Flexible online education can never fail, it can only be failed.
* Small Private College Shuts Down, Donates Campus to the University of Iowa.
* Mass Firings in History at Boise State.
* The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?
* Florida Officials Ban The Term ‘Climate Change.’
* Climate Change Is Altering Everything About The Way Water Is Provided In Salt Lake City.
* The Desertification of Mongolia. Still not done, more links below.
* Introducing the Gawker Media SecureDrop.
* Buffy is old enough to go through that weird test they make Slayers go through when they turn 18.
* Is Scott Walker the most dangerous man in America?
* The troubled history of the foreskin.
* I’m honestly amazed the insurers were letting Harrison Ford fly small planes to begin with.
* In the U.S., a notary public does unglamorous legal drudge work. But in many Latin American countries, a notario is an ill-defined but powerful figure with broad legal authority, often someone with the connections needed to navigate bureaucracies that, while arcane, are also flexible. Unscrupulous notarios in the U.S. exploit these facts to con immigrants into believing that all it takes to finally get legal is the right person to file the paperwork.
* Emily Yoffe has another piece at Slate arguing against the current approach to sexual assault at colleges, this time framed around The Hunting Ground.
* English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet.
* Dystopia in our time: “Why Buzzfeed Is The Most Important News Organization in the World.”
* The end of cable: HBO is coming to Apple TV.
* I have altered the Expanded Universe. Pray I do not alter it further. But at least progress marches on.
* Gasp! Airbnb Is Making Things Worse for LA Renters.
* Meritocracy watch: Chelsea Clinton Absolutely Open to Running for Office.
* How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront.
* “A simple design fluke and marketing are afoot here. When Gard accidentally increased her breast size by 150 percent, the creative team insisted it was maintained. The parent company’s marketing team found this to be a boon to breaking through the noise that would buoy their success.”
* Porntopia: A trip to the Adult Video News Awards.
* In 1923, Daylight Saving Time Was Actually Illegal In Some States. It’s time to make daylight saving time year-round. PFT speaks.
* The salary you need to buy a home in 27 U.S. cities.
* These maps show where the world’s youngest and oldest people live.
* Ottawa doctors behind breakthrough multiple sclerosis study. This sounds amazing. I hope it’s true.
* Coming this October: Back in Time: The Back to the Future documentary.
* You know, like Ghostbusters, but Ph-balanced for a man.
* Scenes from the class struggle at NBC News.
* Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence. The Moral Philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes.
* Men make their own brackets, but they do not make them as they please. Marx Madness. Via MarxFi.
* And they say our culture is no longer capable of producing great things.
Lots of Thursday Links! The University in Ruins, How to Predict the Future, Lesbian Science Fiction, and More
* Five Katrinas A Decade? Warming Projected To Boost Extreme Storm Surges Ten-Fold.
* Cause of windfarm sickness identified: it’s spread by human mouth.
* “If our universe was a simulation you could totally tell. There’d be things like a fastest possible speed or a smallest possible size or a lowest possible temperature, or events wouldn’t actually be computed until they were observed by a player (you know, for computational efficiency).”
* Nicola Griffith recommends good lesbian science fiction novels.
“During a summer in the late 1960s I discovered an easy and certain method of predicting the future. Not my own future, the next turn of the card, or market conditions next month or next year, but the future of the world lying far ahead. It was quite simple. All that was needed was to take the reigning assumptions about what the future was likely to hold, and reverse them. Not modify, negate, or question, but reverse.”
* The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”
* Recent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years to Come.
* Wayne State University and the University of Michigan could lose 15 percent of their state funding if the schools ratify new union contracts that bypass Michigan’s new right-to-work law under a House Republican budget proposal introduced Tuesday.
* Backroom Financial Dealings of a Top University.
* It’s true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.
* In this sense, frighteningly, the MOOC seems like the next logical frontier in the increasing contingency and “adjunctification” of labor in higher education. Faculty unions in California are already arguing that MOOCs might do some serious damage to collective bargaining agreements, as some faculty have already agreed to assemble MOOCs for free. But to get even more apocalyptic than that, it seems like this specter of the cyberteacher – emerging from the shadows of the murky MOOC lagoon – is some dystopian icon of the brave new cost-cutting educational future. What better way to cut labor costs in higher education than to simply replace human educational laborers with software?
* “I believe we’re in the best basketball conference in the country right now. If you look at the history of the schools, the original seven plus the new three, it’s obviously an elite group,” Father Pilarz said. “The new conference offers a tremendous opportunity for all 16 of Marquette’s athletic programs to compete against mission-driven and like-minded institutions.”
* The Most Accurate Map of NCAA College Basketball Fandom. Brackets with just the colors and logos. An Oral History of Beating Duke. The NCAA: Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation.
* A minimum wage worker in California must toil about 130 hours a week in order to feasibly afford a two-bedroom rental, a new report found.
* Photos of Children From Around the World With Their Most Prized Possessions.
* But journalists deserve a share of the blame, too—and not only for the failure to question more skeptically the Bush Administration’s claims about Saddam’s non-existent WMD. Journalists failed, above all, to show the war as it was. Americans who did not serve may think that they have some idea of what the war in Iraq was like, but they’re wrong. The culprit here is a culture of well-intentioned self-censorship that refuses to show the real conditions of modern warfare.
* Klein doesn’t think a state invaded another state; he thinks “we” went to war. He identifies with the state. Whether he’s supporting or dissenting from a policy, he sees himself as part of it. He sees himself on the jeeps with the troops. That’s why his calls for skepticism, for not taking things on authority, ring so hollow. In the end, he’s on the team. Or the jeep.
The goal of the game, which will officially be launched on Feb. 5, is to show how hard and frustrating it was for an average person to simply do their shopping under the Communist regime in Poland. The game has been developed by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a Warsaw-based research institute that commemorates the suffering of the Polish people during the Nazi and Communist eras.
* Life advice from the Onion: Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life.
* The New Yorker Rejects Itself: A Quasi-Scientific Analysis of Slush Piles.
* Feedback from James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop.
* The kids aren’t all right: In Survey, Professors See a Lack of Professionalism Among Students
* Professional wrestling fans, we who are “smart marks” especially, are in many ways more sophisticated than the political junkies who populate political blogs and web sites (what are really fan boy and fan girl mark hangouts) like the Free Republic or The Daily Kos. They know that professional wrestling is a work and a game.
* Bradbury’s fan letter to Heinlein.
Sunday Links
(some shamelessly borrowed from you-know-who)
* Britain paid reparations for slavery? That’s fantast–oh god.
The true scale of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade has been laid bare in documents revealing how the country’s wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished.
* Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.
* The Ambition Gap: When researchers have studied the ambition gap, they’ve discovered something peculiar: It’s not there. Women do ask for more. They just aren’t rewarded for it. Via Feminéma.
* 7 Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature. Joyce! Twain! Woolf! Eliot! Shelley! Tolstoy! Wilde! 7 (More) Obscure Children’s Books by Famous “Adult” Lit Authors. Huxley! Stein! Thurber! Sandburg! Rushdie! Fleming! Hughes!
* Actually existing media bias: Glenn Greenwald on what’s become of MSNBC.
I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?
* Mentoring and cruel optimism.
* Rehabilitating Zero Dark Thirty.
Susan Sontag once wrote that every mass art form is practiced and experienced as “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Zero Dark Thirty’s critics, unwilling to understand themselves as the film’s intended audience, instead imagined that “real Americans” were being made tools of power through one of their most important social rites: moviegoing. What these critics did not confront was their own need to fend off anxiety. For Maya, as for many Americans, the anxiety has to do with the inadequacy of Osama bin Laden’s death as consolation for all of the disasters that preceded it. How else to explain the manic focus on proving that torture did not contribute to the search for bin Laden? It suggests a kind of desperation, a desire to hold up just this one episode as separate and different from the rest of the war. This desire is Zero Dark Thirty’s true subject, as well as the object of its critique.
* ‘Welcome to Dystopia’: We Are ‘Entering A Long-Term And Politically Dangerous Food Crisis.’
* The Princess and the Trolls: The Heartrending Legend of Adalia Rose, the Most Reviled Six-Year-Old Girl on the Internet. People are the worst. Jesus Christ.
* Texts from Pride and Prejudice. Texts from Don Quixote.
* George Saunders, lapsed Catholic.
Perhaps the classic expression of this idea belongs to none other than the outgoing pope, Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was asked on Bavarian television in 1997 if the Holy Spirit is responsible for who gets elected. This was his response:
I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. … I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.
Then the clincher:
There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!
* Hayley Schafer chose her dream job at the age of 5. Three years later, her grandmother told her that if she wrote it down, the dream would come true. So she found a piece of blue construction paper and scrawled on it with a pencil: “Veterianian.” “No one told me how to spell it,” she remembers. “They just said, ‘Sound it out.’ ”
At the age of 30, she still has the sign, which is framed on her desk at the Caring Hearts Animal Clinic in Gilbert, Ariz., where she works as a vet. She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.
* A brief history of the car cup holder.
* Oscar voters overwhelmingly white, male.
* Oscar Pistorius and the Media. The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp’s boyfriend. Inspiration porn and compulsory able bodiedness.
* Stay Free or Die Tryin’: Scenes from the student protests at Cooper Union.
* Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history.
Thursday Night Links
* Clay Shirky, getting right to the point: “MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree.” Okay, now we’re getting honest! Let’s have that conversation.
* Some people like to claim that minorities can’t take jokes; those people have never had to try to take a joke. The frat in question, incidentally, has already managed to be re-suspended.
* A brief history of the first eleven Lady Doctors Who.
* North Carolina Appoints Pre-School Opponent To Head Pre-School Services.
* The Tick That Can Make You a Vegetarian.
* It’s not you, it’s quantitative cost-benefit analysis.
* Average earnings of young college graduates are still falling.
* I’m extremely disappointed to report I haven’t read a single one of the 10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You’ve Never Read.
* The federal prison population has spiked 790% since 1980.
* The Master of The Master of Disguise has watched the Dana Carvey flop 21 times since November.
* Is marijuana the last, best hope for labor unions?
* Justice League starts from scratch.
* Fox News Claims Solar Won’t Work in America Because It’s Not Sunny Like Germany.
* And just to see if Tim Wientzen read down this far: when Joyce sketched Bloom.
NYE
* EU copyright on Joyce works ends at midnight. Who weeps for Stephen Joyce?
* As a Fortune 500 company’s fracking activities in rural West Virginia leave a polluted and drastically altered landscape, locals are fighting back. Via @zunguzungu.
* The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views. Of course Greenwald has a point, but at the same time it’s difficult to argue with this:
But (you might say) if the result is the same–if, whatever the twisted origins of his position, Ron Paul takes is on the side of the angels on certain narrowly framed issues–does it really matter how he gets there?
Short answer: yes. Slightly less short answer: hell yes. Longer answer: of course, because his opposition to (Federal) government overreach is inseparable from his opposition to Roe v. Wade and equal protection enforcement and environmental regulation and…well, every single goddamn thing that matters to liberals except the tiny set of narrow issues on which, in stopped-clock fashion, Paul has arrived at the right position through the wrong process.
* The Era of the Ron Paul Newsletters Isn’t Even Past.
During the Montgomery bus boycott, mainstream media outlets interviewed black folks who were against it and talked about how the boycott was misguided and hurt the local economy. The day after the boycott started, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story featuring the manager of the bus lines saying that bus drivers were being shot at and rocks were being thrown at them.
During the rest of the civil rights movement, protesters who were fire-hosed and otherwise brutalized were called “violent protesters” in the mainstream media, which again featured interviews with people saying that the protests were wrongheaded.
During the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the mainstream media portrayed protesters as out of touch, violent, and dirty. There was a picture in the San Francisco Chronicle of a guy who was throwing back a tear gas canister that had been shot at the peaceful crowd. This was shown as proof of protesters being wild, out of touch, and violent. The Black Panther Party had free breakfast programs and was beloved worldwide — but every mainstream media outlet that covered it, covered it negatively.
There has never been any strike, work stoppage, or union action that was supported by the mainstream media at the time that it was happening.
The mainstream press didn’t support the Anti-Apartheid movement and doesn’t support the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement for Palestine.
The mainstream press is always on the wrong side of history because it’s always on the side of the status quo, which is capitalist exploitation and oppression.
* And just because it’s New Year’s Even: The 40 Best Memes of 2011.
Thursday Links
* BREAKING: Weiner goes down.
* ’22 Elite College Sports Programs Turned a Profit in 2010, but Gaps Remain, NCAA Reports Says.’ Those “gaps” include the 98 Football Bowl Subdivision sports programs that lost a median $11.6 million last year, as well as losses at 100% of all Football Championship Subdivision programs and 100% of all Division I schools without football.
* Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in Al-Jazeera on the magical realism of body counts.
* Joan Walsh on the mirage of the Obama coalition.
* BREAKING: The “conservative movement” is a money-making scam.
Yesterday, Politico reported what an educated listener could’ve guessed: Right-wing radio pundits are paid by conservative organizations to mention them favorably. FreedomWorks pays Glenn Beck to talk about how great FreedomWorks is, Rush Limbaugh wholeheartedly endorses the Heritage Foundation because the Heritage Foundation pays him, and Mark Levin receives a check for telling you that donating to Americans for Prosperity will help defeat Obama.
* And confidential to Vancouver: really, it’s poor form to riot when you lose.
My New Favorite Story of All Time
Craig Venter codes a line from Joyce into the genome of a synethetic microbe—and gets cease and desist letter from the Joyce estate.
‘Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses,’ Long Island, 1954
This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.
Jeanette Winterson on “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses,” Long Island, 1954, via Bookslut. Happy Bloomsday, one and all.
Friday Night!
* This year’s answers to Infinite Summer are here: Insurgent Summer on the one hand and Ulysses Summer on the other. If I weren’t traveling then I’d do at least one.
* Rachel Maddow has been doing very good work on location at the oil spill. There’s more at her site.
* Will oil from Deepwater Horizon hit North Carolina beaches? Check back this July.
* Controversy at the Spelling Bee!
* And the World Cup reminds us why you should never take your eyes off the North Koreans, not even for a second.
Gerry Canavan 