Posts Tagged ‘John Hughes’
Friday Morning Links!
* ICYMI! SFFTV CFP: “When the Astronaut is a Woman: Beyond the Frontier in Film and Television.” At the link there’s also details for SFFTV’s year-round reading period.
* Climate Scientists Warn That All Super Mario Levels Will Be Underwater by 2025.
* Okay, but it’s only barely half.
* Ethnic cleansing remains the one arena of policy where this White House can focus. Emboldened by Trump, U.S. Border Officials Are Lying to Asylum Seekers and Turning Them Away.
* Trump Lawyer Marc Kasowitz Threatens Stranger in Emails: ‘Watch Your Back , Bitch.’
* I sincerely hope the lawsuits associated with this pronouncement bankrupt Anthem.
* Game of Thrones fan fiction getting serious now.
* At the end of the second Obama administration, there seemed to be more time and world in which to noodle around with those questions than there is today. In this new age of anxiety and emergency, existential threats seem very close indeed. Our own game of thrones has taken a terrifying turn. Winter is other people.
* It is ridiculous how beyond debate the collusion case has become and how little it matters anyway.
* Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?
* SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (dir. John Hughes, 2017). This will definitely hold up in court. I hope this is still legally binding. At this point I’d at least hear them out. When you stare too long into the abyss. From A to Z.
* The war on drugs goes speculative.
* Income Inequality Will Survive the Nuclear Apocalypse.
* And Here’s Your First Look at an Insanely Detailed Model of Disney’s Star Wars Land.
More Friday!
* This teen is suing the state of Alaska because climate change threatens his home.
* For-Profit Fiasco: California Public Colleges Turn to Web Courses.
Replying to the doubters, one Coursera “financier” told the Times that “monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point.” What is important, he said, is that “Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use.” Potential investors should therefore “invest with a very long mind-set.”
The MOOCs were invented by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan…
* More than 40 of the world’s 100 most reputable universities and colleges are American, according to the Times Higher Education’s 2013 world reputation ranking of colleges and universities. Just because it’s the envy of the world doesn’t mean we shouldn’t melt it down and sell it for scrap.
* What’s happening at UW-Eau Claire?
* The anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society’s artifacts for future generations.
* Maryland to repeal the death penalty.
* Pot-Hating New York Politician Cited for Having Pot.
* What happens when Game of Thrones runs out of books to adapt?
* And Star Wars as a John Hughes movie.
Lots of Monday Links
* Thanks for the kidney, and you’re fired.
* Someone in the New York Times is stealing my ideas: How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death.
* In the comments on Friday my friend b scolded me for being flip about New York’s genuinely terrible state assessment exams. Today Gawker has more.
* 53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed.
* It’s great to see Harvard pushing open-access academic publishing, but there’s something deeply absurd about them crying poverty to do it.
* I’m already deeply nostalgic for Cavendish bananas. The Goldfingers look terrible.
* Academic freedom watch: Jammie Price, a tenured professor of sociology at Appalachian State University, was suspended last month after showing a documentary about pornography in her introductory sociology class.
Price said the film, which she checked out from the university library, was graphic at times but academically relevant to that week’s topic of gender and sexuality. A Wheelock College professor who helped make the movie said it was “ludicrous” to discipline an instructor for showing the documentary, noting that interviews with gender studies scholars figure prominently in the film, which is critical of the porn industry but also includes brief explicit scenes of porn.
* Actually existing media bias: The Liberal Media has consistently given more positive coverage to likely Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney compared to President Barack Obama, according to a new survey of media coverage from the Pew Research Center’s Excellence in Journalism Project.
* Elizabeth Drew games out 2012 in the New York Review of Books.
* Alas, Wisconsin: Wisconsin Saw The Largest Decrease In Employment In The Last 12 Months.
* 33 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies that Could Rock Your Summer. Spoiler alert: more like five.
* mightygodking: Why the Silver Age Was Better.
* What better way to fulfill Brando’s legacy and promote Native American rights than with a $250 million Lone Ranger remake/reboot about mystical werewolves murdering people? I really can’t on any level believe this is actually being made.
* Joss Whedon, John Hughes, and Torture Porn.
* A brief history of the late, unlamented revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up.
* Salk wept: American Airlines to air anti-vaccination programming in-flight.
* The regime for the poor and those within the criminal justice system is both policed and punitive and–in accordance with behavior that exists outside natural, market ordered society–heavily regulated and ordered by the state. Welfare and aid programs become a disciplinary mechanism for the working poor, with government monitoring and sanctioning taking an increasing role in guiding behavior. According to law professor William Stuntz, the courtroom has become a factory for processing; 95 percent of criminal convictions now come from a guilty plea, avoiding a trial. Arrests have risen almost sevenfold with only 60 percent more prosecutors needed. Meanwhile, prosecutors have been able to pull off the impressive trick of increasing the number of plea bargains while also raising the average length of imprisonment during this time period. The lived experience of prisons is also more punitive. Our current prison system is characterized by severe overcrowding, inadequate medical care, infection rates for HIV, Hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and staph far higher than on the outside world, the degradation of the custodial experience, high costs of keeping social ties intact, punitive long-term isolation, and the ever-present threat of violence and rape.
The extensive government regulation of behavior extends after the prison. As UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich argues in “Creating the Permanent Prisoner,” those leaving prison enter into a dense web of government management, simultaneously punitive and neglectful. People who leave prison face “[b]ans on entry into public housing, restrictions on public-sector employment, limits on access to federal loans for higher education, and restrictions on the receipt of public assistance… The American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section recently embarked on a project to catalogue all state and federal statutes and regulations that impose legal consequences on the fact of a felony conviction. As of May 2011, the project had catalogued over 38,000 such provisions, and project advisers estimate that the final number could reach or exceed 50,000.” Together, these create a new kind of subject, someone who exists permanently on the outside of our civilization, never meant or able to reintegrate back into our social spaces.
* And In Focus has your pictures of Earth from above.
Links for a Thursday without Joy
Links for a Thursday without joy.
* Don’t forget about him: John Hughes has died.
* The Big Picture visits Hiroshima 64 years ago today.
* Long Vanity Fair profile of Mad Men and Matthew Weiner. Best show on TV. Via Kottke.
“Matt wants real,” said Charlie Collier, president of AMC. For Weiner, Collier continued, “it’s not television; it’s a world.” Perhaps the only other producer as committed to the rules of his imagined universe is George Lucas. “Perfectionism” is a word the show’s writers tossed around when I asked a group of them about working with Weiner. “Fetishism” was another. Alan Taylor, who has directed four episodes of Mad Men, labeled Weiner’s attention to detail “maniacal.” Call it what they will, it is a charge that is largely embraced. “We’re all a little bit touched with the O.C.D.,” Robin Veith, one of the writers, told me, describing how she and her colleagues have researched actual street names and businesses in Ossining, the suburb where Don and Betty live; checked old commuter-train schedules, so that they know precisely which train Don would take to the city; pored over vintage maps to learn which highways he would drive on.
* Towards a four-day work week.
* And Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed, 68-31, making her the first Latina woman racist on the Supreme Court.
Gerry Canavan 