Posts Tagged ‘Jon Hamm’
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Marquette University, with a generous grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, is pleased to announce a request for proposals on the topics of “The Self, Motivation, and Virtue,” Approximately ten research proposals at $190,000 each will be funded through this initiative. The grant competition has four primary aims…
* If you’re going to MLA and are a graduate student or contingent faculty member, don’t forget to apply for travel support.
* We are ruled by maniacs: West Virginia Plans To Frack Beneath Ohio River, Which Supplies Drinking Water To Millions.
* The Great Death: Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF.
* California’s Ongoing Drought Linked To Climate Change.
* Perhaps the job market news isn’t so bad, and graduates are right to think college mostly worked for them. Arum and Roksa then turn to the high share of young graduates still living with their parents. At 40 percent, it’s twice the rate of the 1960s. Another third of recent graduates live with friends, and 70 percent of young graduates get some money from their families — as do 75 percent of all 18-25 year olds. But again, is this really the fault of college? Further, how do we know that these living situations are bad? Are these graduates really adrift, or are they showing self-discipline by cutting expenses in a bad economy? There is one clear tie to college: we know that this generation is servicing students debt of a size that their parents can barely imagine, and that this may be dampening home buying. We also know that the reigning “new economy business model” promises them neither job security nor stable income growth. So rather than missing the “markers of adulthood,” these cautious at-home students are more likely hitting them. They are the markers of Great Recession adulthood — house sharing, public transportation, deferred buying, and reliance on family.
* The Score: Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink.
* Late last year I started a series called “The Thick Blue Line,” based on documented, widespread, and ongoing police impunity in the United States. At the end of each month (here are the first, second, and third installments) I compiled national “no charges against police officer” cases verbatim from reported incidents.
* How to read Star Wars, by way of David Fincher: I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.
* The sad decline of Barack Obama, American exceptionalism edition.
* Paranoia and the Zimmermans.
* Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.
* German universities are now tuition-free again. “Only the super-rich benefit from the fees and loans system, in which 17-year-olds must sign up for massive debts in adulthood.”
* Student Organizing, Student Government, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
* UMass police helped keep student’s addiction secret. Crazy story.
* The Hidden Costs of E-books at University Libraries. I hate this trend.
* Steven Salaita: U. of I. destroyed my career.
* BREAKING: the banks regulate the regulators, not the other way around.
* BREAKING: North Carolina Governor Doubts Value of Some Degrees.
* DC Comics still aggressively making it impossible to support anything they do.
* ‘Time-Outs’ Are Hurting Your Child. Well, that was the last thing that wasn’t.
* The CIA Still Redacts How Much It Paid for PCs in 1987.
* Teachers are among the most dedicated, passionate and hardworking professionals – a few of the qualities that make the best Uber partner drivers.
* Movie quotes by way of iOS 8.
* Confessions of a former internet troll. It used to be about the art, apparently.
* Data in everything: Statistician Creates Model To Predict What’s Next In Game Of Thrones.
* And Jon Hamm will be on the Black Mirror Christmas special, which is the best news I’ve heard in years.
Four for Friday
* Adam Scott And Jon Hamm Star In The “Greatest Event In Television History.”
* Adrian Chen outs Reddit super-creep Violentacrez.
When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.
“My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,” he said. “I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.”
* 100-pound, 20,000-LEGO brick Batcave took 800 hours to build.
* Anonymous v. Wikileaks. Whoever wins, we lose…
Tuesday Night Links
* Community is back March 15, but NBC still hates you; they’re putting Parks & Rec on hiatus instead.
* 46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday. Via MeFi.
* Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of World War II. I feel certain Indiana Jones was involved in each of these.
* “How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries.”
* A literary history of erasure.
* When Jon Hamm met Miss Piggy.
* Cory Doctorow reviews Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional-conventionalist One Way Forward.
* ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.’ A brief history of the money shot.
* Canadians: They’re Just as Bad as Us!
* And of course you had me at 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. Via Kottke.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
Monday Links!
* Fredric Jameson previews his new book, Representing Capital.
You will now have understood that this distinction between politics and economics, between the achievable Utopia of the Utopian planners and the deep unconscious absolute Utopian impulse, is one between the social-democratic moment and the moment of communism. Communism can only be posited as a radical, even unimaginable break; socialism is an essentially political process within our present, within our system, which is to say within capitalism itself. Socialism is capitalism’s dream of a perfected system. Communism is that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt.
* Unexpectedly, grad school lowers your blood pressure. It doesn’t seem right to me either.
* The GOP thinks not enough people are unemployed. Calculated Risk has a brief history of the current catastrophe.
* Wisconsin has some buyer’s remorse.
* More on hydrofracking: How radioactive is Pittsburgh’s drinking water? What’s fracking going to do to New York?
* First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.
* Trailer for the American remake of The King’s Speech.
* Scientists in Hollywood. The focus is on Natalie Portman and Mayim Bialik.
* And Jon Hamm, Superman. I’m sure yet another version of the origin story will be great, though.
Happy MLK Day Links
* American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Via MeFi.
* Tim Wise on the disappearance of the real MLK.
So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about Dr. King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African American History; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man: locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.
Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels — abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation — merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.
* But let us never forget that the civil rights movement was completely unnecessary in the first place; a “truly free market” would have ended segregation on its own.
* Martin Luther King in science fiction.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Jon Hamm is just too damn old to play Superman.
* Schwarzenegger says being governor cost him 200 million dollars. You’re welcome, California.
* When assassins get results: Arizona law could force Gabrielle Giffords out of her seat within months.
* The Edge Question 2011: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s toolkit? There are some good nominations, but for a twenty-first century civilization teetering on the brink of ecological suicide there’s only one right answer: TANSTAAFL.
* Towns for losers: the highway’s jammed with broken heroes fleeing the ruins of New Jersey. Let’s hope Chris Christie isn’t next to make the big move to D.C.
* And naturally you had me at Soviet workplace safety posters. Via MeFi.
Friday!
* First, the big news: Casey Affleck has admitted I’m Still Here is a hoax. Shock! Terror!
* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold “competing” rallies on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to restore sanity and keep fear alive respectively. I think this is a good idea and I’m glad they’re doing it, but it’s frustrating to once again see legitimate criticism of Bush equated with totally insane criticism of Obama in the name of “balance” and “moderation.”
* Our long national nightmare is finally over: Karl Rove has surrendered to Christine O’Donnell.
* Science has proved Facebook causes flu and little kids have been mocking us this whole time.
* Understanding the Tea Party, from Glenn Greenwald. A good pullquote: Given all that, I’d really like to hear what it is about Christine O’Donnell, or Sharron Angle, or any of these other candidates that sets them apart from decades of radical right-wing elected officials who came before them? They seem far more similar to me than different. When was this idealized era of GOP Adult Reasonableness?
* The first Earth-like planet orbiting another star will be announced in May next year, if the discovery of extrasolar planets continues at its present rate, say researchers Samuel Arbesman from Harvard Medical School in Boston and Gregory Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
* The U.S. poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Matt Yglesias:
Melissa Boteach, my colleague who focuses on poverty issues, points out that congress has the opportunity to act before things get even worse:
In just two weeks a job-creation engine known as the TANF Emergency Fund will expire, forcing states to begin shutting down successful partnerships with the private sector that have already created nearly a quarter-million jobs for low-income families. Congress must act before September 30 to extend the TANF Emergency Fund for another year and allow this innovative jobs program to continue.
Unfortunately, congress is typically more interested in the tax burden of millionaires than in the welfare of the poor and near-poor.
* Self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing, the Baby Boom generation at last has the chance to step out of the so-called Greatest Generation’s historical shadow. Boomers may not have the opportunity to save the world, as their predecessors did, but they can still redeem themselves by saving the American economy from the fiscal mess that they, and their fathers and mothers, are leaving behind. Via the latest MetaFilter post on the ongoing Third-Worldization of America.
* Making puppets with Jim Henson. Also via MetaFilter.
* And All-Star Superman will be made into animated movie. I don’t know why it hasn’t been green-lit for the next live-action Superman yet. Jon Hamm could kill it.
Links for Tuesday
* This compilation of “near-misses” is pretty spellbinding, even if in some cases it’s clear that some people have been seriously injured or killed off-screen, and in others we’re dealing with thrill-seeking asshats who don’t deserve the attention. (via)
* Ernest C. Withers, a famed photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement in photographs and was able to sit in on some of the most sensitive strategy meetings, also worked as an informant for the FBI, Memphis’ Commercial Appeal reports.
* Jon Hamm as Superman? I could live with that.
* Harry Potter and winner-take-all capitalism.
* Eight of the Most Toxic Energy Projects on the Planet. Deepwater Horizon isn’t even one of the eight.
* A comprehensive Wonk Room survey of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate finds that nearly all dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight global warming pollution….
Remarkably, of the dozens of Republicans vying for the 37 Senate seats in the 2010 election, only one — Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware — supports climate action. Via Steve Benen. I feel torn between hoping Castle loses today so Democrats have a shot at winning the seat, and hoping Castle wins today so at least the seat won’t go to O’Donnell. But Kevin Drum isn’t torn at all:
I’m rooting for O’Donnell with no quiet mourning for Castle at all. I’m not sure at this point why Dionne still wonders “if” there’s room in the modern GOP for guys like Castle, since that seems about as clear to me as anything could possibly be. The answer is no, and Castle’s fate won’t change that one way or the other. The die has been well and truly cast here for some time: the GOP is irrevocably committed to the undiluted Fox/Limbaugh/Drudge party line, and there’s no going back. They’re either going to stand or fall on that. So I say: let ’em do it. No excuses, no scapegoats. Finish up the Texification of the Republican Party and see how it goes. Only then is there any hope of a return to common sense.
* If you don’t call it high fructose corn syrup, it’s suddenly healthy again. Fact.
* And your crazy blast from the past: Feldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a “massive dose” of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car. While the aborted scheme to murder Anderson has been reported—and disputed—before, Feldstein found new corroboration: A confession before his death by ex-White House “plumber” Howard Hunt.
Gerry Canavan 