Posts Tagged ‘Jessica Jones’
Monday Morning Links!
* My superhero identity has finally been scooped.
* Lots of people are sharing this one, on hyperexploited labor in the academy: Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech. As with most of this sort of adjunct activist some of its conclusions strike me as emotionally rather than factually correct — specifically, it needs to find a way to make tenured and tenure-track faculty the villains of the story, in order to make the death of the university a moral narrative about betrayal rather than a political narrative about the management class’s construction of austerity — but it’s undoubtedly a powerful read.
* I did this one already, but what the hell: Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
* Bring on the 403(b) lawsuits.
* On being married to an academic.
* It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe: Nobel academy member calls Bob Dylan’s silence ‘arrogant.’
* Eugenics and the academy. Racism and standardized testing. Whiteness and international relations.
* Language Log reads the bookshelf in the linguist’s office set in Arrival (out next month!).
* After years of neglect, public higher education is at a tipping point.
* Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th.
* Springsteen and Catholicism.
* White masculinity as cloning.
* Parenting is weird. If God worked at a pet store, He’d be fired. Part Two. It’s a mystery!!! Wooooooooooh! The Fox and the Hedgehog. Science and technology have reached their limit. Self-destructive beverage selection: a guide. Motivational comics. Has the media gotten worse, or has society? Understanding the presidency. The oldest recorded joke is from Sumeria, circa 1900 B.C. There’s a monster under my bed.
* Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty.
* Trump’s Milwaukee Problem. Let’s Talk About the Senate. From Pot To Guns To School Funding: Here’s What’s On The Ballot In Your State. Todd Akin and the “shy” voter. The banality of Trump. The latest polls indicate the possibility of a genuine electoral disaster for the GOP. A short history of white people rigging elections. Having not yet won it back yet, Dems are already getting ready to lose the Senate (again) in 2018. The Democrats are likely to win a majority of House votes, but not a majority of House seats. Again. Today in uncannily accurate metaphors. This all seems perfectly appropriate. Even Dunkin Donuts is suffering. But at least there’s a bright side. On the other hand.
Slavery: Colorado
Yes, you read that right. There is a vote on slavery in 2016. The Colorado state constitution currently bans slavery and “involuntary servitude” … except if it’s used as punishment for a crime. This amendment would get rid of that exception and say that slavery is not okay, ever.
* And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.
* Speaking of endless refrain: Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi is now pierced by bullet holes.
* District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
* On Anime Feminist. (via MeFi)
* Today in the Year of Kate McKinnon: ten minutes of her Ghostbusters outtakes.
* Jessica Jones’s Second Season Will Only Feature Female Directors.
* I don’t really think they should do Luke Cage season two — or Jessica Jones for that matter, as Daredevil proved already — but just like I’d love to see a Hellcat series with Jessica Jones as a supporting player I’d love to see Misty Knight guest starring Luke Cage.
* The Case against Black Mirror. I haven’t been able to tune in to the new season yet but the backlash surprises me. This was one of the best shows on TV before! What happened?
* Famous authors and their rejection slips.
* How much for a hotel on AT&TTW? AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion.
* “This is still the greatest NYT correction of all time imo.”
* This is [chokes] great. It’s great if they do this.
* This, on the other hand, is unbelievably awful: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war. Everyone involved in trying to claw back this money should be ashamed of themselves.
* Gee, you don’t say: U.S. Parents Are Sweating And Hustling To Pay For Child Care.
* I’ve discovered the secret to immortality.
* And there’s a new Grow game out for that mid-2000s nostalgia factor we all crave. Solution here when you’re done messing around…
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
Tuesday Afternoon Links
* A new page at Marquette: a $96 million residence hall development.
* And then there’s that old page.
* There’s more than one way to brand a college. Like at least three or four.
* No-confidence vote by UW faculty passes overwhelmingly.
* Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines Living There.
* “Why Is Westeros So Fucked Up?” “In conclusion, Game of Thrones is a franchise of contrasts.”
For the television series, it’s more complicated. The crucial question is this: How do you take a story that’s written as a deliberate repudiation of 1990s fantasy norms and make it work, twenty years later, with an audience that didn’t necessarily grow up with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan novels? The story is generally strong enough that it’s managed to survive and thrive; the failures of the Starks are not just reversals of fantasy convention but overall storytelling convention. But the longer the series goes, the less able it is to draw upon such clear subversions.
* Don DeLillo’s back and I’m pretty excited about Zero K.
* Hamilton, the musical you may be tired of hearing about because it is literally impossible to get tickets to see it until 2047, made Tony history Tuesday morning, scoring a record-breaking 16 nominations.
* It’s Illegal to Possess or Distribute This Huge Number.
* Photo Essay: Fracking Communities.
* Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920. More Evidence for Lead Poisoning as Key Crime Driver.
* Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus.
* Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data.
* google it should have been steph curry truth
* Jessica Jones season two is doomed watch: Trouble On The Set Of Jessica Jones Season One Was Calmed By David Tennant.
* You just can’t win: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight.
* High school football player faces 70 criminal charges for yearbook picture prank.
* “Poet & Vagabond”: Roberto Bolaño’s business card.
* Like the lady said: the goal should be a society without classes! Fights on planes 400% more likely when there’s a first class section.
* Here’s yet another surprise David Bowie left for us on Backstar.
* Famous last words watch: Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
* Society of synthetic linguists explain to court, in Klingon, why Klingon shouldn’t be copyrightable.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly disappointing Star Trek (2009) sequels every three years, forever.
Remember, Sunday Is Procrastination Day, Always Procrastinate Safely
* CFP: The Science Fiction Research Association Annual Conference, June 2016, Liverpool, England. I’ll be there, talking in some way or another about the world of the great Wisconsin SF writer Clifford D. Simak.
* CFP: In More’s Footsteps: Utopia and Science Fiction.
* #altac: Seattle to pay poet to live in a bridge.
The poet cannot actually live in the bridge… the room where the “living” would take place is not well heated and there is no running water.
* The very weird Dem primary is really heating up. Face It: A Vote for Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for War. That Clinton hasn’t easily put away Sanders should be very worrying for the people assuming she can defeat anyone the Republicans put up.
* Elsewhere on the 2016 election beat.
2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices). Telepathy, unfortunately, turns out to not be all about elevated Apollonian abstract intellectualism: it’s an emotion amplifier and taps into the most toxic wellsprings of the subconscious. As implemented, it brings out the worst in us. Twitter and Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers and public execution spectators. It can be used for good, but more often it drags us down into the dim-witted, outraged weltanschauung of the mob.
* How These 5 Famous Billionaires Are Dismantling Black Public Schools.
* NASA Has Opened a Planetary Defense Office to Protect Earth from Cosmic Collisions.
* The New Marvel Universe and Afrofuturism.
* I think I’d rather it was Hellcat, but I’ll take it.
* Springsteen covers “Rebel, Rebel.” Returning a favor, as he says in the video: The real find for that link is probably the Bowie cover of “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.”
* And another one I fear I may have done before: The Soviet Hobbit (1976).
2016 Links!
* This Man Is Claiming To Be Able To Bring The Dead Back To Life By 2045. That’s good news, because Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Perhaps relatedly.
* So tragic: These parents cryonically froze their toddler in the hope she might live again.
* More bad news for my particular demographic.
* I’m at MLA this week, giving a paper on Saturday evening on Richard McGuire’s fantastic graphic novel Here for a panel on “The Anthropocene and Deep Time in Literary Studies.”
* The Year of the Imaginary College Student.
* Facebook ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back.’
* Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 24: Sullen. Also, here’s John Pat’s current syllabus on Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept.
* I think this one is old, but maybe it’s not old to you: Soc 710: Social Theory through Complaining.
* This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick.
* That’s when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed an amended lawsuit against the two companies, this time asking for them to give back all the money they made in New York State, to give it back to those who lost money and to pay a fine of up to $5,000 per case.
* I Studied Oregon’s Militia Movement. Here’s 5 Things You Need to Know.
* What Writing Shared World Fiction Taught Erin M. Evans About Worldbuilding.
* 12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system.
* Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels.
* David Harvey on Consolidating Power.
* No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape.
* Some Last Words on Pessimism.
* New Heights (Lows?) in Philosophy Job Application Requirements.
* The Far-Out Sci-Fi Costume Parties of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
* When a prison closes, what happens to the prison town?
* Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits againstUber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws.
* Tufts in the news! Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans.
* The novelistic sublime: Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline for Catch-22.
* If Google is a school official, I wonder if it’s a mandatory reporter.
* Tom Lutz and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* Through the looking glass: Game of Thrones author George RR Martin misses last TV deadline for new book.
* On reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On reading Ten Little Indians.
* Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes.
* Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
* The Sherlock special “The Abominable Bride” was terrible. Has this show completely lost its way? My DVR, in a noble effort to save my sanity, opted not to record it.
* It’s all happening again: Infinite Winter. A flashback.
* What I learned not drinking for two years.
* Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection.
* Harvard’s Find of a Colonial Map of New Jersey Is a Reminder of Border Wars.
* What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word?
* U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List From The Cold War Declassified For The First Time.
* This Asian Time Travel Thriller Could Be Next Year’s Breakout Action Movie.
* An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday.
* When Gene Roddenberry’s computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. Here’s how this tech mystery was solved.
* Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added.
* The rising academic field of David Bowie Studies.
* A Brief History of Farting for Money. (via)
* Hybrids. Uncanny Valley. And then there’s the weirdest, most unbelievable SF short film I’ve ever seen.
* Barbasol presents Disney’s James Cameron’s Avatarland.
* And of course there’s always more Star Wars links: The Feminist Frequency Review. Editing The Force Awakens. Listening to Star Wars. The Original Star Wars Concept Art Is Amazing. A Not-So-Brief History of George Lucas Talking Shit About Disney’s Star Wars. Is Han Solo Force-Sensitive? The Bigger Luke Hypothesis. Cross Sections of TFA Spaceships and Vehicles. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate. Are droids slaves? Rey & BB8. Reading Anakin Skywalker after Jessica Jones. If you want a vision of the future.
Star Wars Day Links! Yay!
* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).
* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.
* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“
* Running the Red Cross like a business.
* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.
* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.
* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.
* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.
* The law school collapse continues.
* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.
* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?
* My life story: Tsundoku.
* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.
* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?
* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.
* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.
* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.
* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.
* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.
* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.
* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.
* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.
* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).
* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?
* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.
Finals Week Links!
* ICYMI: The CFP for the 11th Annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference ends tomorrow.
* College sports’ fastest-rising expense: Paying coaches not to work.
* Huge, if true: While university presidents earn millions, many professors struggle.
* Shakespeare, by the numbers.
* Soviet Science Fiction Christmas Cards.
* The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad.
* In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels. “A long-shot chance to save the planet.” And on the neg: Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments.
* The climate movement as peace movement.
* In a security video obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Strickland is seen in handcuffs, barely conscious and being dragged along the floor by officers, while a prison nurse standing close by does nothing. Even as he lies face down on the floor, near death, guards can be heard shouting, “Stop resisting.”
* Police restraint saves lives.
* Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement.
* For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. “We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!” laughed Miller. “So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.’” And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. “She’s a real stickler for that,” said Miller. “And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.”
* Roar Magazine #0: The Potential of Debtors’ Unions.
* Jacqui Shine at LARoB reviews We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.
* MST3K breaks Kickstarter records, secures 14 new episodes. Let the backlash commence!
* We’re apparently getting two China Miéville novels this year, and the second one sounds incredible.
THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS is an intense and gripping tale set in an alternative universe: June 1940 following Paris’ fall to the Germans, the villa of Air-Bel in Marsailles, is filled with Trotskyists, anti-fascists, exiled artists, and surrealists. One Air-Bel dissident decides the best way to fight the Nazis is to construct a surrealist bomb. When the bomb is accidentally detonated, surrealist Cataclysm sweeps Paris and transforms it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic.
* He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.
* The Senate is so crazily designed it would be literally illegal for a US state to copy it.
* Dilbert minus with too much Dilbert.
* The lost Marxists: what happened to the academics made jobless by communism’s collapse?
* Mockingjay Part 2: Let’s talk about that epilogue.
* Teach the controversy: The sealed mausoleum believed to be a fully-functioning time machine.
* A brief history of trying and failing to impeach Supreme Court justices.
* The Indo-European and Uralic Language Families.
* Your short of the week: “Lost Property.”
* Jessica Jones, Buffy season six, and rape.
* The Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, updated for 2015.
* And rest in peace, Benedict Anderson.
Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices
* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.
* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.
* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.
* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.
* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.
* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.
* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.
* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.
* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.
* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.
* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.
* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.
* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.
* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.
* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.
* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.
* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.
* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.
* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.
* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.
* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.
* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.
* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.
* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.
* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.
* Know your branches of economics.
* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.
* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”
* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.
* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.
* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.
* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.
* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.
* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.
* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?
* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?
* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.
* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.
* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.
* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.
* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.
* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.
* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.
Thnksgvn Links
* Once again, this year as every year, we give thanks.
* CFP: SFRA 2016, in Liverpool, UK.
* The first space age was about politics. The second space age was about science. The third space age is about money.
* How to Read Žižek on the Refugee Crisis.
The basic dynamic here is that ostensibly left-wing parties have put the right wing in the driver’s seat and have no strategy other than to denounce the very right-wing racism that their preferred policies actually stoke. The refugee article aims to unmask a similar dynamic in more radical leftist circles. Among leftist commentators, academics, and online activists as well, there is an abdication of any responsible policy-making that takes actual-existing reality into account. In its place, we find only empty rhetoric aimed at guaranteeing the speaker’s ideological purity.
* xkcd has another supersize edition. Here’s what we know so far.
* Officially outsourcing all my political commentary to John Kasich.
* Meanwhile! Arrests Made After Protesters Destroy Part of City Christmas Tree.
* Police killings since Ferguson, in one map.
* The Statue of Liberty Was Originally a Muslim Woman.
* Teach the controversy: Life on Mars was ‘destroyed by nuclear attack’, says physicist – and we could be next.
* Baba Yaga’s Guide To Feminism.
* The Fragile Framework: Can Nations Unite to Save Earth’s Climate? Spoiler alert: I have some terrible news.
* Disability and science fiction fandom.
* Jessica Jones is a Primer on Gaslighting, and How to Protect Yourself Against It. How Jessica JonesAbsorbed the Anxieties of Gamergate.
* Kinsey Was Wrong: Sexuality Isn’t Fluid.
* How Chicago Tries to Cover Up a Police Execution.
* In a Crazy Turn of Events, Viral Sensation “Phuc Dat Bich” Says It Was All a Hoax. Is nothing sacred?
* Neil Blomkamp wants to fix the biggest mistake in the Aliens franchise: the death of Newt.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits rich and poor alike to sleep outside.
* Every Hint and Clue Hidden in the Captain America: Civil War Trailer.
* And today in data visualization: The Magnificent Bears of the Glorious Nation of Finland.
Gerry Canavan 
