Posts Tagged ‘Kindle’
Thursday Noontime Links!
* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.
* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.
* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.
* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.
* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.
* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* Deported for doing journalism.
* If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.
* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.
* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.
* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.
* America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.
* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.
* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?
* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.
* Snikt!
* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…
* Money is speech. It’s better actually.
* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?
* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.
* But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.
* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.
* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.
* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
* Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.
* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.
* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.
* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.
* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?
* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.
* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.
* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.
* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
Thursday Links
* America, I just want you to know there’s still time to stop this.
* Really got our number here: All Possible Humanities Dissertations, Considered as Single Tweets.
RT @gerrycanavan: This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.
* Scholarly Associations Defend Tenure and Academic Freedom in Wisconsin.
* Now Cooper Union’s president is out, too.
* Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this. Fascinating, frightening read.
* Unhappy career advice from the Chronicle: “You might not be ready for promotion.”
* UNC gets put on one-year probation for its recent student-athlete scandals. In other news, accreditation is a joke.
* 11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents.
* History is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake George R.R. Martin.
* Clever girl: Reviewer From The Guardian Says Jurassic World Passes Bechdel Test Because of Female Dinosaurs. See also.
* Teach all girls self-defense.
* Bold new horizons in student debt moralism.
* The history of America, as seen through the Census.
* Doogie Howser, M.D. gets the gritty reboot you never knew it needed.
* Harriet Potter and the Very Dedicated Parent. There really should be an app for this.
* Male film critics are apparently unable to understand the explicit, surface text of Goodfellas.
* Alanis Morissette, before Jagged Little Pill.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* This is close, but I for one believe the hottest take is still out there.
* And I guess some people just see farther.
Thursday Links
* New dystopian novella from Margaret Atwood. It’s a $2.99 Kindle single.
* A spring heat wave like no other in U.S. and Canadian history peaked in intensity yesterday, during its tenth day. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many temperature records broken for spring warmth in a one-week period–and the margins by which some of the records were broken yesterday were truly astonishing. Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, commented to me yesterday, “it’s almost like science fiction at this point.“
* Some student loan borrowers with the biggest debt loads didn’t fully understand what they were getting into when they borrowed the money, a survey of those borrowers has found. I’m shocked, shocked!
* Disney taking a bath on John Carter.
* …let’s start by setting forth two uncontroversial propositions. The first proposition is that the health care law is constitutional. The second is that the court could strike it down anyway.
* George Orwell reviews Mein Kampf.
Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation “Greatest happiness of the greatest number” is a good slogan, but at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
* Stand Your Ground and Vigilante Justice.
* Vernor Vinge Is Optimistic About the Collapse of Civilization. At least that’s one of us!
Every Financial Bubble Begins with a Disturbance
There’s another name for what happens when people start to make money out of speculation and hype: it’s called a bubble. Like the dotcom bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the credit bubble and the derivative trading bubble before it, the DIY epublishing bubble is inflating around us. Each of those other bubbles also saw, in their earliest stages, a great deal of fuss made over a “new” phenomenon, which was then over-hyped and over-leveraged.
From the comments on the last post: Ewan Morrison on “the self-epublishing bubble.”
Gerry-Built Monday Links
* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.
* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.
* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.
* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.
* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.
* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”
* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.
* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.
Please Stow All Portable Electronic Devices
“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.”
Hugos
The Hugo awards were announced last night. Boing Boing has the list, including Ted Chiang’s characteristically excellent novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” I haven’t read the winning Connie Willis novels but I did just impulse-buy both for my Kindle.
I’m also glad to see Lev Grossman won Best New Writer for his very good (especially the first two-thirds) The Magicians; I got the chance to interview Lev recently about his excellent followup, The Magician King, which should be in this week’s Independent Weekly. We mostly talked about fan fiction, building off his defense of the genre in Time here. Look for that soon.
Leavin’ on that Midnight Train Links
* Here comes the second act: Progressives Target GOP State Senators In WI With Recall Threat.
* Hard to think of a better encapsulation of America’s warped priorities than the chart at right. More here.
* February 21, 2009: My working assumption has been that the GOP’s biggest names—Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, god-help-us Sarah Palin—would sit out 2012 to take on the winner of the open Democratic field in 2016. (I’ve actually thought for a while that 2012′s Bob Dole would be Newt Gingrich; someone who’ll lose handily but won’t get creamed.) Ladies and gentlemen, we’re halfway there: Newt Gingrich is running for president.
* Julianna Baggott on answering the illegal question in academic job interviews.
* Ron Rosenbaum on asking the forbidden question in nuclear silo training. (Thanks, Sam!)
* The study found that of those fellowship winners with white male dissertation advisers, 37 percent landed faculty jobs at research universities — jobs that many Ph.D.s want and that are very difficult these days for most to get. Of those who had all other dissertation advisers (white women, minority men or minority women), only 7 percent landed such jobs.
* New David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
* Self-publishing in the age of the Kindle.
* The headline reads, “Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?” But Grist offers some good reasons to be skeptical about the Berkeley Earth project.
* PhysOrg has an article detailing dozens of unethical medical experiments on nonconsenting human subjects in the U.S.
* That’ll fix everything: the Gates Foundation wants to raise class size to “spread around [the] effectiveness.” Sounds foolproof! (Thanks, Ben!)
* Beyond parody: Ohio Senate committee schedules unborn child as witness during upcoming abortion bill hearing.
* And RaShOmoN of course you had me at German science fiction covers.
Is ‘Freedom’ the Novel of the Century?
The Week investigates. The hype machine persuaded me to buy the digital edition on my Kindle, so mission accomplished there. I’ll let you know what I think if I ever get around to reading it.
Bad News Saturday
* The top kill has officially failed.
* Rest in peace, Dennis Hopper.
* Most Likely to Kill is a blog that posts famous people’s yearbook pictures and juvenilia. It is officially the blog I least want to ever wind up on.
* The American military on Saturday released a scathing report on the deaths of 23 Afghan civilians, saying that “inaccurate and unprofessional” reporting by a team of Predator drone operators helped lead to an airstrike this year on a group of innocent men, women and children…. “The strike occurred because the ground force commander lacked a clear understanding of who was in the vehicles, the location, direction of travel, and the likely course of action of the vehicles,” General McHale wrote. Oh, is that all?
* Art from the Hermit Kingdom in Vienna.
* A recent study has found a link between the autism spectrum and non-teleological thinking.
* Good news Saturday: Moving video of an eight-month-old deaf baby hearing sound for the first time after receiving a cochlear implant. Via MeFi, where an interesting discussion about opposition in deaf communities to cochlear implants ensues.
* For my fellow Kindle users: Top 250 Public Domain Kindle Books.
* And the Garden State goes green: medicinal marijuana is legal in New Jersey on July 1.
Up Too Early Central Timezone Blues
* The paper on ecological debt I’m giving at the Debt conference at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies today is pretty indebted to Naomi Klein’s recent work on the subject, which can be found at YouTube, Democracy Now, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. I may try to put this talk up as a podcast at some point.
* The oil spill disaster in the Louisiana has turned out to be much, much worse than originally thought: “a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more.” The final devastation will likely be worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster. The White House says BP will pay the costs of cleanup. Related: Obama Administration Learns That Oil Leads to Oil Spills. At least they’ve quietly reinstated the federal moratorium on offshore drilling as a result of all this. Hope it stays that way.
* Can reconciliation work for climate like it worked for health care? Ezra Klein says not really.
* Ten states, including my beloved North Carolina!, are now considering Arizona-style document laws.
* Speaking of North Carolina, here’s the Independent Weekly voting guide for Durham County. The primary is Tuesday, May 4.
* It turns out the measurement fallacy Cory Doctorow was speaking about in my class’s interview with him has a name: Goodhart’s Law.
* Grad School Necessary To Maintain U.S.’s Global Position. Take that, The Simpsons.
* Republican consultant on Republican 2012 presidential field: “We Have Real [Expletive] Problems.”
* Calling out the real judicial activists.
* Socialphobes of the world unite! Against the telephone.
The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting.
* Books: still greener than e-readers.
* I can’t believe I forgot to celebrate Explicit Legal Pants Day. The rest of the post, on heterosexual privilege in Mississippi, is good too.
* Inevitable District 9 sequel coming in two years.
* I’m so old I can remember when the GOP was against involuntary microchip implantation. It was like a week ago.
* And YouTube has the trailer for the feel-good movie of the year.
Tuesday!
Tuesday!
* Five Amazing Buildings of the Future (And How They’ll Kill You).
* Also via Gravity Lens: the death of handwriting!
* David Cronenberg will film DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.
* Nicholson Baker says the Kindle 2 isn’t all that. I think I’m going to stick to fantasizing about the hilariously expensive Apple tablet coming this winter.
* Also in the New Yorker: an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about The Left Hand of Darkness.
* And The Daily Show says goodbye to Sarah Palin.
Gerry Canavan 