Posts Tagged ‘looksism’
Happy First Day of School Links!
* The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere. What Were Blogs?
* Phew, that was a close one: In a new book, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith argues there’s no such thing as time wasted online.
* …successful universities – surely including the University of Chicago – are congeries of safe spaces that factions of scholars have carved out to protect themselves from their intellectual enemies. More concretely – the University of Chicago has both a very well recognized economics department and a very well recognized sociology department. There is furthermore some overlap in the topics that they study. Yet the professors in these two departments protect themselves from each other – they do not, for example, vote on each other’s tenure decisions. They furthermore have quite different notions (though again, perhaps with some overlap) of what constitutes legitimate and appropriate research. In real life, academics only are able to exercise academic freedom because they have safe spaces that they can be free in.
* Graduate Students Are Workers: The Decades-Long Fight for Graduate Unions, and the Path Forward.
* Median income vs. public university tuition, 2000-2016.
* What Colleges Can Do Right Now to Help Low-Income Students Succeed.
* Secrets of my success: Yes, Students Do Learn More From Attractive Teachers.
* Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.
* The long, strange history of John Podesta’s space alien obsession.
* With a shift in martial arts preferences, the rise of video games — more teenagers play Pokémon Go in parks here than practice a roundhouse kick — and a perception among young people that kung fu just isn’t cool, longtime martial artists worry that kung fu’s future is bleak.
* The Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers Who Have Been Written Out of Christianity’s Early History.
* All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?
* Paris Is Redesigning Its Major Intersections For Pedestrians, Not Cars.
* Vice: All the Evidence We Could Find About Fred Trump’s Alleged Involvement with the KKK.
* Louisiana, for instance, made headlines earlier this summer when it was revealed that the state had spent more than $1 million of public funds on legal fees in an attempt to defend its refusal to install air conditioning on death row at Angola prison — even though the air conditioning would cost only about $225,000, plus operating costs, according to expert testimony. That astonished U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson. “Is this really what the state wants to do?” Jackson asked, calling the bill “stunning.” “It just seems so unnecessary.”
* The deep story of Trump support. The New York Times And Trump’s Loopy Note From His Doctor. Donald Trump has a massive Catholic problem. Trump might already be out of time. It’s Too Soon For Clinton To Run Out The Clock.
* When Steve Bannon ran BioDome.
* The Welfare Reform Disaster.
* Obama the Monument Maker. Obama Just Quadrupled The World’s Largest Natural Sanctuary.
* Tumblr of the year: The Grad Student. Keep scrolling! School hasn’t started yet.
* The Average Joe Accused of Trying to Sell Russia Secrets.
* The short, unhappy life of the Soviet Jet Train.
* The first theory of evolution is 600 years older than Darwin.
* Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
* They say the best revenge is a life well-lived. There’s a study out this year that suggests Frenchmen can feel pain. I don’t wanna be one of those people who think everything got worse around the time he hit his mid-twenties.
* My statement of teaching philosophy.
* Happy 101st, Alice Sheldon. Kirby’s 99th.
* Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.
* “No Man’s Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game.”
* Great moments in FOIA requests.
* Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery.
* Big data, Google and the end of free will.
* The logistical sublime: A Map Showing Every Single Cargo Ship In The World.
* Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Dakota Oil Pipeline Blockade.
* Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End.
* Replication projects have had a way of turning into train wrecks. When researchers tried to replicate 100 psychology experimentsfrom 2008, they interpreted just 39 of the attempts as successful. In the last few years, Perspectives on Psychological Science has been publishing “Registered Replication Reports,” the gold standard for this type of work, in which lots of different researchers try to re-create a single study so the data from their labs can be combined and analyzed in aggregate. Of the first four of these to be completed, three ended up in failure.
* Under pressure to perform, Silicon Valley champions are taking tiny hits of LSD before heading to work. Are they risking their health or optimising it? I reject the premise of the question.
* A special issue of Transatlantic devoted to “Exploiting Exploitation Cinema.”
* So last night, on a whim, I started collecting links to doctoral dissertations written by members of the House of Commons, and posting them on the Twitter.
* The Guardian reviews the new edition of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium.
* Missed this somehow in June: rumors of the four-point shot in the NBA. I’m not much of a sports person, but this fascinates me just as a lover of games.
* Le Guin honored by the Library of America (while still alive).
* King Camp Gillette introduced his safety razor, with disposable double-edge blades, around the turn of the 20th century. But before he was an inventor, Gillette was a starry-eyed utopian socialist. In 1894, he published “The Human Drift,” a book that, among other things, envisioned most of the population of North America living in a huge metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. Production would be fully centralized, making for the greatest efficiency, while all goods would be free to everyone. That’s the only way Gillette saw to ensure that the benefits of technological development would be shared. “No system can ever be a perfect system, and free from incentive for crime,” he wrote, employing a prescient metaphor, “until money and all representative value of material is swept from the face of the earth.” His blade was a model socialist innovation: Gillette replaced toilsome sharpening labor with the smallest, most easily produced part imaginable. The very existence of the Gillette Fusion is an insult to his memory.
* The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies.
* Soviet sci-fi movies in English online.
* Your one-shot comic of the week: Ark.
* And, finally, my story can be told.
Off to MLA Links!
* CFP: Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
* “Man who changed name to Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop faces 5 years in prison on drug charges.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson Receives 2016 Robert A. Heinlein Award.
* Your daily dose of pop culture art.
* GOP lawmakers call for firing of Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle.’ Wheaton College seeks to fire Christian professor over view of Islam. Florida Atlantic Fires Sandy Hook Denier. Professor Removed From Course Over Vulgarity Waiver.
* Oregon and the Injustice of Mandatory Minimums. Libertarian Fairy-Tales: The Bundy Militia’s Revisionist History in Oregon.
* How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks.
* “This is the United States of America and we have private property here. This is not a communist country. We own land, and land use is an attribute of property ownership,” he says. “Food doesn’t stay on the farm it was grown on. We share our food, we share our energy, we share our oil and gas. I can sell land to anybody. Why would I treat water any differently?”
* Shelters near capacity in Milwaukee County.
* Wisconsin schools earn a B-, over the nation’s gentleman’s C.
* As it happens, these new Star Wars comics are good comics precisely because they are restricted by the Star Wars franchise. Rather than engage in the default marketing narratives of mainstream superhero comics — killing off a character, or staging a world-changing event, or redesigning costumes, all ways of fooling readers who know better into thinking that things will actually change in significant ways — these comics tell serial stories aimed at no specific resolution. They promise nothing but play. Sure, okay, but where is your God now? More LARB Star Wars: Making Things Right: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.”
* The Secret Origin of The Force Awakens’ Adorably Angriest Stormtrooper. (It’s canon.) What the Seven Star Wars Films Reveal about George Lucas. All the Backstory You Desperately Want to Know About The Force Awakens.
* Jacob Brogan reviews The Census-Taker.
* Elsewhere on the Brogan beat: What’s the Deal With Geoengineering? Your Geoengineering Cheat Sheet.
* “The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.”
* Really, though, how did this happen? We are all complicit.
* Social Justice Warrior (level 2).
* Presenting the sperm switch.
* Gene Editing Cures Animal Of Genetic Disease For The First Time.
* Today in unholy abominations.
* Today in the 2016 election: Former U.S. attorney: Clinton could face criminal indictment. Why this social feminist is not voting for Hillary. A warlock in Mexico has predicted that Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of America.
* What not to wear to your MLA interview.
* Grading abolition watch: Better-Looking Female Students Get Better Grades.
* Student evaluation abolition watch: Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness.
* When Your Curriculum Has Been Tumblrized.
* The CEO of your company has probably already earned your 2016 salary this year.
* …according to the state of California, ten-year-olds should also know enough to “voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently” waive their right to remain silent before they are interrogated by police, so the statements that they make are admissible, should there be further criminal proceedings, in a court of law.
* Get this traffic camera a Pulitzer.
* Twitter announces plan to ruin the whole point of Twitter.
* WSJ covers one of my favorite sites on the net.
* That Dragon, Cancer: A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever.
* The Death Penalty’s Last Stand.
* A people’s history of Blossom.
* I’m about to have seen things you people won’t have believed.
* The sad core of the gun debate.
* Deadwood Reunion Movie ‘Is Going to Happen,’ Promises HBO President. THAT’S LEGALLY BINDING.
* And of course you had me at Gruesome and Surreal Surgical Illustrations from the 15th–19th Centuries.
Weekend! Links!
* Program for the 2014 MLA Subconference, January 8-9 at Columbia College Chicago.
* CFP for “Joss Whedon: A Celebration” at DePaul University this May.
* The New Yorker considers Kim Stanley Robinson: Our Greatest Political Novelist?
Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
* It is an open question as to whether academics today, in their heart of hearts, still realize that the choice between the employability agenda or the death of universities actually means the death of universities through the employability agenda.
* Our football team here at Purdue went 1-11, losing the final ten games in a row by an average of almost 25 points and going 0-8 in Big Ten play, including a 20 point blowout to arch-rival Indiana. The lone victory on the season came through a nail-biting 20-14 performance against Indiana State… an FCS school… who themselves went 1-11. If beating the doormat team of the Missouri Valley Conference is the highlight of your season, it’s perhaps time for a reevaluation of priorities. After ranking 122nd in points scored a game and 114th in points against a game, making a legitimate case for being the worst team in FBS football, the campus is buzzing about how long a rebuild will require and whether first-year coach Darrell Hazzell is the man to lead it. With the season’s “One Brick Higher” slogan now seeming like a sad joke, my message to the Purdue community is simple: don’t rebuild. Retreat. The best path forward for Purdue University is to dismantle its football program altogether.
* I also liked Freddie’s piece on how the permanent squabble between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty plays directly into the hands of administrators.
* This Thousand-Year Institution Could Really Learn Something from These Fly-By-Night Scams: Forget Academia. Startups Are the Future of Knowledge.
* Invisible Rituals: Pre-Graduate School Programs and Developing Diversity.
* “If you haven’t been in a hen plant, you don’t know what hell is”: Animal rights activists vs. the agribusiness industry in Rolling Stone.
* Liberalism is a game the rich play with themselves. They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen: Liberalism in the tank.
* Aaron Bady considers Mandela, all of him.
If you’re a president, it probably feels good to think about this, about how a revolutionary came to defend the stability of the society he once threatened to overturn. It probably also feels good to think of him as historical, as past: like Nkrumah or Lumumba, he is no longer our problem, no longer our responsibility. Instead of a defiant refusal to stop short of victory and a refusal to compromise or negotiate on principles, he can represent the passing away of that very thing.
* Want the best person for the job? Don’t interview.
* Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?
* Jackson’s Hobbit II so little resembles the book, it may as well be called Some Further Adventures in Middle-earth. The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction.
* Here’s Every Time Paul Rudd Has Shown the Same Movie Clip on Conan.
* Jaws retold as Peanuts comic.
* Everything in the oceans is dying.
* The Economy Looks Good Because The Data Has Been So Bad For So Long.
* No Civilian Leadership for NSA After All.
* Ph.D.s With and Without Jobs.
* Please excuse Davontaye, he suffers from povertenza.
* Belgium took a big step on Thursday to becoming the first country to allow euthanasia for incurably ill children, after the upper house of Parliament voted by a large majority to extend to minors a 2002 law legalizing the practice for adults.
* A national study being released today in book form found that those who are attractive in high school are more likely than those with just average or below average looks to go on to earn a four-year college degree.
* Take that, conventional wisdom! Study: Long Distance Relationships Can Work.
* Whether you agree with the ASA’s boycott of Israeli state institutions or not, I think we can all agree that to boycott Larry Summers.
* The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal.
* America, 2013: No charges after man pulls gun on ‘b*tch’ with disabled kid over Walmart parking delay.
* Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million. The Lottery Is a Predator and You Are Its Math-Illiterate Prey.
* Space Race back on! China lands on the Moon!
* Hollywood finally goes too far.
* And Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation. Overflow Error: Abort, Retry, Fail….
The Good-Looking Are Different from You and Me
IT’S NOT your imagination: Life is good for beautiful people. A drumbeat of research over the past decades has found that attractive people earn more than their average-looking peers, are more likely to be given loans by banks, and are less likely to be convicted by a jury. Voters prefer better-looking candidates; students prefer better-looking professors, while teachers prefer better-looking students. Mothers, those icons of blind love, have been shown to favor their more attractive children…
Having just taught Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary” to my SF class, I couldn’t pass up this article from the Boston Globe on looksism.
Friday!
* When writer AD Harvey invented an 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, it was for years accepted as fact. So why did he do it – and why did he also create a series of fake academic identities? Following up on this classic from the Times Literary Supplement.
* Academia’s Pink-Collar Workforce.
* Accreditor Approves Competency-Based Degree at U. of Wisconsin.
* Aaron Carroll draws our attention today to a new study in JAMA that compares American health outcomes with those in other rich countries. Overall, we’re now in 28th place, sandwiched in between Chile and Poland. The massive chart below shows how we do on treating specific diseases. We’re 31st on diabetes, 16th on breast cancer, 32nd on COPD, and (in our best showing) 8th on colon cancer.
* The country has cheaper medical care, smarter children, happier moms, better working conditions, less-anxious unemployed people, and lower student loan rates than we do. And that probably will never change. Finland vs. the U.S., in the Atlantic.
* Fracking: basically comically evil.
* Google: basically comically evil.
Google, which prides itself on building a “better web that is better for the environment,” is hosting a fundraiser for the most notorious climate change denier in Congress, it has emerged.
* Unpopular opinion: I’m a sex-negative feminist.
* Visualizing the Bechdel test.
* Drones in Niger. Prison hunger-strikers in California. Food stamps in New Jersey. Violent crime in Milwaukee this year is highest since ’08. Unemployment Rate For Black Women Higher Now Than Four Years Ago.
* If jobs mean maturity, not everyone gets to grow up.
Saitō ventured a count: There were 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or hikikomori, about one percent of the Japanese population. Eighty percent of them were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, not the name of an illness,” and “there has been no sign that the number of cases will decrease.” His book became a best seller in weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death from overwork) as a loan word in English to describe a new social phenomenon that at first appeared uniquely Japanese.
* And the thin get everything.
Academics who interview graduate school applicants systematically favor thinner candidates, according to a study.
Poor bastards.
Gerry Canavan 