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.

GAME OF THRONES never seems more Tolkienesque than when listening to the HARDCORE GAME OF THRONES podcast.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 3, 2016

* 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.

* ‘I Just Don’t Find American Literature Interesting’: Lit-Blog Pioneer Jessa Crispin Closes Bookslut, Does Not Bite Tongue.

* 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.

* Rebooting Stephen Colbert.

* google it should have been steph curry truth

"Justin Lin to direct a LOONEY TUNES movie" is the way I've chosen to selectively hear/understand today's film news.

— Tom Elrod (@tbelrod) May 2, 2016

* 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.

Weekend Links 2: Even Weekendier!

* A beard, said Whitman, is preferable in a man as “a great sanitary protection to the throat.” Walt Whitman’s lost advice to America’s men: meat, beards and not too much sex.

* If defendants had well-funded, effective representation, our adversarial system would do what it is intended to do. What we have right now, however, simply is not adversarial: relatively well-funded, well-staffed prosecutor offices square off against public defenders whose caseloads defy imagination.

* Hell’s Kitchens: Privatized Prison Mess Halls.

* The end of Howard University.

* Everyone poops, and everyone pees, but no one should be stigmatized or criminalized when they answer nature’s call.

* Bring on the climate trials: When kids sue the government for failing to protect future generations against climate change, it’s a long shot. But on Friday, in King County, Wash., Superior Court Judge Hollis R. Hill ruled in favor of eight Seattle-area youth petitioners: The Washington State Department of Ecology must deliver an emissions reduction rule by the end of this year.

* Living at the Edges of Capitalism.

* The best podcasts, Ted Talks and academic papers about Beyoncé.

* The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don’t Know (But Should) About Doctoral and Faculty Life.

* Oddly enough, the late novelist David Foster Wallace, a friend of Franzen’s, appears to cast a shadow over the portrayal of Andreas, whom Franzen endows with personality traits he saw in Wallace — especially the idea that he was “unworthy” of love. Over his lifetime, Wallace suffered from various addictions and struggled with depression for years; like Andreas, he ultimately committed suicide. In his essay “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude,” Franzen says that he “loved a person who was mentally ill.” Franzen attributes Wallace’s suicide, in large part, to the fact that Wallace felt there was something wrong with him and he was unworthy of love; “[a]nd this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide.” Inaccessible on his private island of self-laceration, believing there was something wrong with him, Wallace could never reach a farther shore, and nobody could reach him. Ultimately, Franzen speculates, his suicide was designed “[t]o prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved.”

* Lake Chad in the Anthropocene.

Lake Chad was one of largest lakes in world, but 90% of it has vanished in past 50 years #climatechange @NASAGoddard pic.twitter.com/A8iM3rebYN

— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) April 30, 2016

* Yahoo, when looked at in a certain way, is worth approximately -$8 billion.

* Who owns Klingon?

* Life in the 21st century: Fearing a nuclear terror attack, Belgium is giving iodine pills to its entire population. Creeps Are Using a Neural Network to Dox Porn Actresses. Black Teenage Boy Charged With Possession of Child Porn for Sexting With White Girlfriend. Julia Ioffe profiled Melania Trump. Then she started getting calls from Hitler.

* The Untold Story of Canadian Super Heroes.

* A Japanese Map of European Stereotypes.

* We must mine redheads for the secret of their immortality gene.

* That’ll solve it: “Crisis-hit Venezuela to push clocks forward to save power.”

* How many friends can a person have?

* For the first three decades of the film industry’s existence, American “courts were not yet ready to consider motions pictures as speech worthy of constitutional protection.” And local and state governments were not ready to give up censorship as a form of good government. “In addition to the moral uplift, the logistics of film regulation were attractive. Regulation was a revenue generator; boards charged distributors for examination and approval and charged theaters for permitted exhibitions.”

* Daniel J. Berrigan, Defiant Priest Who Preached Pacifism, Dies at 94.

* dontbepartoftheproblem.tumblr.com

Thursday Night Links

* Qapla’ we can believe in: Klingon-Speaking Candidate Could Complicate NC Senate Race.

* Milwaukee’s really taking me on a roller coaster ride this week.

10 Unhappiest Metropolitan Areas With a Population Greater Than 1 Million1. New York, NY
2. Pittsburgh, PA
3. Louisville, KY
4. Milwaukee, WI

* Wisconsin police given $28 million in surplus military gear.

* Elementary teacher suspended for asking white student ‘cops’ to shoot black ‘Michael Browns.’

* “Persistent inequality”: America’s Racial Divide, Charted.

* Convicting Darren Wilson Will Be Basically Impossible.

* Ferguson and the Modern Debtor’s Prison.

You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”

* The view from the far left: Love Me, Ferguson, I’m a Liberal. In Defense of Looting.

* Could you be seated on a jury? I was bounced because I was perceived as too sympathetic to the defense, which is… weird.

* And at last some real talk: Why academics really use Twitter.

How Do You Say “Forbidden Experiment” in Klingon?

I was pretty ready to call “criminal child abuse” on this story about a linguist speaking to his infant child only in Klingon, but upon discovering this link I’ve concluded the claim is probably just a publicity stunt for his translation software.