Posts Tagged ‘Jay Leno’
Friday Night Links
* “The worldwide triumph of capitalism … secures the priority of Marxism as the ultimate horizon of thought in our time”: Benjamin Kunkel reviews Fredric Jameson in LRB.
* Archie Comics will soon be introducing its first openly gay character, “strapping, blond Kevin.”
* If you were trying to persuade me to support the climate bill, you picked the absolute worst possible approach.
* The ACLU explains everything that’s wrong with Arizona’s brazenly unconstitutional documentation legislation.
* Julian Sanchez has been doing an influential series of posts about epistemic closure on the right.
* Meanwhile, Glenn Beck continues his slow-motion breakdown, GOP unanimity seems to have lost its mojo, and Chris Christie is the right wing’s crush of the month.
* Chicken-to-medical-procedure currency converter.
* And some breaking news: Jay Leno sucks.
Monday Night
* Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to donations to the Republican National Committee. But they really weren’t supposed to say that last part out loud.
* The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted its annual report on violent extremism on the right. Via MeFi. Immigration reform should be just the thing to cool these tempers down.
* Oscar-winning animated short “Logorama.”
* Benen and Klein remind everyone who needs reminding that health care reform is a major progressive victory. There’s never a final end to struggle; we take what’s here and start again.
* Lessons of a $618,616 death.
What I couldn’t know then was that the thinking behind my request—along with hundreds of decisions we made over the years—was a window on the impossible calculus at the core of today’s health-care dilemma. Terence and I were eager to beat his cancer. Backed by robust medical insurance provided by a succession of my corporate employers, we were able to wage a fierce battle. As we made our way through a series of expensive last chances, like the one I asked for that night, we didn’t have to think about money, allocation of medical resources, the struggles of roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, or the impact on corporate bottom lines.
Terence’s treatment was expensive. The bills for his seven years of medical care totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. Still, no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life.
* Elections have consequences: “Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly.”
* Every “Holy ______, Batman” from Burt Ward’s Robin.
* Conspiracy theory of the night: Did Leno add a laugh track to Sarah Palin’s appearance? Related: Was Palin indoctrinated as a child while receiving medical treatment from Canadian communofascists?
* And the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace. Book your flights now.
Other Stuff
* Details on the U.S. operation of Port-Au-Prince’s last working airstrip from Crooks & Liars, a possible (or partial) answer to complaints about its allocation. A second airport is now working at Jacmel, administered by tiny American charity Joy in Hope. From Ryan, I see the Caribbean is still at risk for more earthquakes.
* Yahoo News is hiring bloggers.
* Gawker has your roundup of clips from the ongoing NBC late-night fiasco.
* Louis Menand and how to rescue the professoriate from professionalization.
The ultimate problem is this: How do you create a system for the production of knowledge that is, on the one hand, rigorous and peer-reviewed and, on the other, committed to aims and obligations beyond its own survival? The professoriate itself is well aware of the dilemma, Menand observes, and has enthusiastically promoted what sounds like a solution: “interdisciplinarity.” The hope is that if professors join in conversation with one another, they’ll remember to be interesting to people outside their building.
Theoretically, this solves everything. The disciplines are still accountable only to themselves, but they’re also engaged with something broader—i.e., other disciplines. They are still autonomous without being hermetic. Except that, Menand explains, interdisciplinarity finally does nothing to alter the ways in which the individual disciplines produce their professors. Rather than a therapy for academic neurosis, interdisciplinarity is in fact yet one more symptom of it. “Interdisciplinary anxiety,” he writes, “is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
Misc.
* A stage production of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski is already in the works.
* Asheville, NC, is one of the gayest cities in America.
* You said it: “The Senate is just a pain in the ass to everybody in the world as far as I can tell.”
* And if NBC screwed over Conan because they wanted me to watch his monologue on YouTube every day, mission accomplished.
