Posts Tagged ‘John McCain’
Tuesday Links!
* Eric Schneiderman will probably have resigned by the time this post goes up. (UPDATE: He did!)
* She likened the National Collegiate Athletic Association to overseers of a system similar to slavery or prison. Those are the only other models in which laborers aren’t compensated for their work, Carter said. The NCAA and its member institutions buy the talents of athletes but don’t let them share in the money, she said.
* Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?
* Climate-Change Deniers Are a Cult.
* A battle is brewing between Milwaukee and paint industry over lead poisoning of Milwaukee children.
* Privacy Is Dead. Here’s What Comes Next.
* A death. A cover-up. An immigrant meets a terrible end in the Bronx.
* ‘Hamilton: The Exhibition’ by Lin-Manuel Miranda and his team will debut in Chicago in November.
* This recut of Groundhog Day from Andie MacDowell’s perspective is weird as hell.
* Mimi Mondal, India’s first Hugo nominee.
* Snikt.
* Nintendo Switch launches the cloud service it should have had all along, but shut up and take my money anyway.
* You might say I’m the reverse.
* And gas up the #problematic hashtag: Arrested Development returns at the end of the month.
Monday Morning Links!
* Mary Karr Reminds the World That David Foster Wallace Abused and Stalked Her, and Nobody Cared.
* They Revealed Harassment Claims Against a Professor, and Were Disciplined.
* The Real Free-Speech Crisis Is Professors Being Disciplined for Liberal Views, a Scholar Finds.
* Millennials Are Way Poorer Than Boomers Ever Were.
* America’s teachers on strike: ‘We are done being the frog that is being boiled.’
* The think piece doesn’t so much diminish art as render it wholly incidental. The mere existence of a work—and the contemporary proliferation of work after work after work—is enough to justify the think piece. The fundamental problem with so much contemporary criticism is that the prospective critic is structurally encouraged to not care, to treat the value of one-or-another book/TV episode/movie as wholly irrelevant to the task of writing about it. Sontag wrote that desperate, interpretive searches for meaning constitute “the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius.” (One thinks of Henry James’s yearning lit-crit protagonist.) The think piece effectively inverts this formulation. Now it is more common to see genius (or perhaps “genius,” the work of people who, to nip a phrase from the controversial and cuttingly mean critic Armond White, “think they think”) pay compliments to mediocrity. The clarity of critical judgment alights on every rotten movie, grating pop singer, or paperback book written for awkward adolescents alive in the throes of their protean horniness, and dissolves, ultimately, into a sprawling field of meaninglessness. It’s not that, following Sontag, erotics has replaced bloodless hermeneutics. It’s that we’re now subject to soft, dopey forms of both. Enormously erudite and intelligent expositions about extremely stupid things have degraded both the standard for writing about serious things and the seriousness of those serious things themselves.
* Yeah, you better run: China bans Peppa Pig because she ‘promotes gangster attitudes.’
* University apologizes to Native American students detained on college tour.
* The man who cracked the lottery.
* Misreading the manufacturing statistics.
* A team of scientists undertakes an ambitious experiment which could change thinking about welfare.
* “In America, you can be too poor to die.”
* And if you follow me on Facebook, you know that I’ve been raving all weekend about Nintendo Labo. Believe the hype! It’s truly great. Like Calvin’s magic cardboard boxes came to life. It’d buy three more kits if they were available, and might eventually buy a second robot one so my kids can play the Vs mode….
Monday Afternoon Links!
* At a time when the United States is in the grip of an opioid epidemic, many insurers are limiting access to pain medications that carry a lower risk of addiction or dependence, even as they provide comparatively easy access to generic opioid medications.
* An inside look at the hunt for fentanyl, the deadly opioid driving the overdose crisis.
* America’s slow-motion military coup.
* Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer.
* And the trend appears to be continuing. “Every new cohort made less in median lifetime income than the previous one,” Mr. Guvenen said.
* Paging China Miéville: Instead of Trump’s Wall, Why Not a Binational Border City?
* Everything old is still old.
* RIP, Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.
* I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like what’s happening in Iceland.
* Beyond the grave. Outsourcing. Specifically bad. Animal intelligence. Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking. Imagine a world with people like him in charge. Quorf. Thanks, Literature! This sucks.
Midday Monday Links!
* ICYMI from earlier this morning: SFFTV is once again looking for reviewers of DVDs and TV series. And of course I posted about a million links yesterday too.
* Scandal as performance of Julius Caesar depicts sitting president.
* Senate Intelligence Committee Post-Show Discussion of Hamlet.
* Binghampton mayoral candidate pulls out of race citing death threats.
* It’s terrible when actors read reviews and pitch their performance to the critics.
* Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.
* The Spy Who Funded Me: Revisiting the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
* The physics of bullets vs. Wonder Woman’s bracelets. Given what is depicted in the film we must be dealing with some sort of magnetic attraction as well, and possibly a forcefield. #teachthecontroversy
* Mysteries of the war on terror: A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules.
* 51 stars? Puerto Rico overwhelmingly votes for statehood.
* The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning.
* Obamacare is probably dead. Here’s what will probably happen.
* Nevada, with little fanfare or notice, is inching toward a massive health insurance expansion — one that would give the state’s 2.8 million residents access to a public health insurance option.
* Seen in this light, the tax cut is not simply a billionaire giveaway. It is part of an evangelical campaign for the restoration of a conditional, paternal philanthropy that runs contrary to the principle of unqualified access to health care that is represented by the ACA’s inclusion of people with “pre-existing conditions” in the insurance markets it regulated. Unqualified access means spreading the cost and risks of ill health and therefore sharing the benefits of maintaining good health. For those evangelicals who view health and disease through the lens of a moral economy, spreading the costs of health care is tantamount to facilitating moral hazard, or encouraging sinful behavior and usurping God’s judgment.
* Questions James Comey Should Be Asked About the FBI While He’s Under Oath.
* 41-year-old adoptee deported after 37 years in the U.S.
* All The Wrong People Are Asking All The Wrong Questions About Fidget Spinners.
* The case for prescription heroin.
* And from the archives! The Periodic Table of Nonsense.