Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Review of Books’
Spooooooooky Friday the 13th Links!
* Exciting new anthology alert! A People’s Future of the United States.
* Cool job at UCSD in Media and Popular Culture.
* Hamilton and Laurens. As I mentioned a bit on Twitter, we actually talked about this quite a bit in my Hamilton class, including how some elements in the show point to queer possibility here and the likelihood that performances in the future will likely play the relationship as explicitly queer. And just for fun, also via Twitter: A countervailing view!
* A Theory-Fiction Reading List.
* Medieval studies groups say a major conference is trying to limit the number of diverse voices and topics. The debate is part of a bigger fight over whether medieval studies should remain a fundamentally European field. Whose Medieval Studies?
* Unpacking Murad Osmann’s #FollowMeTo Instagram Travel Series.
* Facebook Proves It Isn’t Ready To Handle Fake News.
* As the GOP base tries to find new ways to funnel money to its white, bougie, suburban base, bonkers tax policy like this proposed tax break for gym memberships will become more and more common.
* Marvel has run out of options and is finally going to do a Black Widow movie.
* This franchise keeps getting worse all the time.
* These woodchucks are heroes.
* There’s a reason employees stay at the Pantry for a lifetime: it’s one of the few restaurants in Los Angeles where the workers are represented by a union. Peña-Suarez is one of the 23,000 members of Unite Here Local 11, the service-workers’ union behind the Pantry and a number of iconic LA restaurants: Langer’s, Nate ’n Al Delicatessen, Philippe the Original, La Golondrina, and La Scala.
* Solid thread from Corey Robin on the political meaning of Kavanaugh’s debts.
* How the New Supreme Court Could Halt Climate Action.
* Forty-year-old Efrain De La Rosa, a Mexican national who was held in an ICE detention facility in Georgia, committed suicide and was pronounced dead late Tuesday evening, making him the eighth person in ICE custody to die in the 2018 fiscal year.
* ACLU: Fed Gov’t Not Giving Promised Notice As Immigrant Families Reunited.
* Asylum seekers, even those who do not present themselves at points of entry, are not “illegal”; under international law they are “irregular” and subject to an array of rights and protections, including immunity from punishment.
* Today’s US-Mexico ‘border crisis’ in 6 charts.
* Hey is it me or does this guy sound like a white supremacist?
* Since Trump was elected, more than 1,400 mayors have agreed to shift their cities to 100-percent renewable energy by 2035, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Last fall, St. Louis became one of the biggest cities so far to set that lofty goal. The city of Berkeley, California, went even further recently, declaring an “existential climate emergency” and aiming for net-negative emissions by 2030.
* The real reason the sound of your own voice makes you cringe.
* “I refuse to let Hollywood #whitewashout the Thai Cave rescue story.”
* Want to feel old? Jared Kushner still lacks security clearance level to review some of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence in White House role.
* When Trump’s dumb obsession with CNN accidentally leads to good policy.
* Leaked report exposes how unprepared FEMA was for Maria. I want to see the leaked report detailing all the many ways they’ve failed Puerto Rico in the year since the storm.
* Another #TheResistance rando turns out to have serious personality problems, first and foremost a pathological need for attention. Not unrelatedly: Liberals playing detective are missing an opportunity to engage in meaningful politics.
* Plastic straw bans are the latest policy to forget the disability community.
* The latest in the search for humanity’s origins in Africa.
* Why freelance writers are a fucking pain in the ass with broken brains.
* Can your god explain it? Marx can.
* Dark Horse Is Turning William Gibson’s Alien 3 Script Into a New Comic.
* Dune references signal shared knowledge to those in the know, and that’s about it. Dune fandom is an un-fandom.
* And I linked this yesterday, but do keep your eye on this. I’m officially calling shenanigans.
Wednesday Links!
* Really good news on the Trek front: Bryan Fuller will be showrunner.
* Bernie, basking in the glow of the victory. 21 Gifts For The Bernie Sanders Supporter In Your Life. Demographics, y’all. The last time someone won New Hampshire by 20 points and didn’t win the nomination. All uphill from here. Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias. How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants. Nice work if you can get it. And on the other side of the aisle: Never forget.
* Chaos at Mount St. Mary’s. “An Appalling Breach of Faith.” Sign the petition.
* Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins to ‘Part Ways.’
* Permanent emergency at Berkeley.
* Congress Again Scrutinizes Colleges With Big Endowments.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 25 3/4: “Residences.”
* Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever?
* Why Twitter Is Fundamentally Broken.
* A brief history of Marquette’s Joan of Arc Chapel.
* My Encounter with the Princeton Police and Its Aftermath.
* Twilight of Michael Jackson’s Chimp, Bubbles.
* Who planted drugs in the PTA mom’s car?
* The Supreme Court Just Gave The Finger To Obama’s Plan To Slow Climate Change.
* Mark Strand: “After Our Planet.”
* A Producer Is Tweeting Descriptions of Women from Movie Scripts and It’s Hilariously Awful.
* Inaccessible: what I should have said in my review of The Witness.
* When disabled people need not apply.
* Why and How DC Keeps Screwing Up Superman.
* I still don’t know if Ta-Nehisi Coates is right about Bernie and reparations, but I’m in for as many issues of Black Panther as he wants to do.
* And speaking of: How an Ex-Slave Successfully Won a Case for Reparations in 1783.
* Sabrina Alli on Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law.
* “Cold War modernism,” then, doesn’t refer to experimental artwork produced between the end of World War II and the Reagan administration, but to “the deployment of modernist art as a weapon of Cold War propaganda by both governmental and unofficial actors as well as to the implicit and explicit understanding of modernism underpinning that deployment.” And, given the archive from which Barnhisel works, this book doesn’t provide Cold War–flavored interpretations of individual modernist works. Instead, it offers an evenhanded explanation of the changing connotation of the term “modernism” as the federal agencies and private foundations listed above sought out an antonym for (Soviet) realism. With this in mind — the afterlife of modernism, instead of its genealogy — the Cold War modernists of the title do not seem to be the painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists who produced the original works, but instead the “governmental and unofficial actors” who produced the federally subsidized midcentury reinterpretation of both individual works and modernism in general, in the name of Cold War politics.
* Chicago’s troubled public school system on Wednesday had to slash the size of one of the biggest “junk” bond offerings the municipal market has seen in years and agree to pay interest costs rivaling Puerto Rico’s in order to lure investors into the deal.
* The controversy over J.K. Rowling’s new African wizard school, explained. Pottermania, round two.
* Jughead comes out as asexual.
* A player after my own heart: “This strategy involves the use of rules that many people don’t know about, and having the rulebook nearby will speed up the process of dealing with the numerous complaints you’ll receive during the game.”
* Wausau man arrested twice in child sex stings 3 weeks apart. Reminds me of a clip from To Catch a Predator that made the viral media rounds a few years ago.
* Cop who killed college student and 55-year-old mother sues for ‘extreme emotional trauma.’
* Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior, or, #academicjobmarket.
* “A good start”: FBI Arrests Nearly Every Single Elected Official In A Texas Town.
* Classic whoopsies on The Hateful Eight set.
* Of course you had me at “Lord of the Rings-inspired space opera wants to connect you with African mythology.”
* Truly a Road to Damascus moment: “66-Year-Old Man Struck By Lightning While Masturbating to Bible.”
* You thought 90s nostalgia had gone too far before, but it’s definitely too far now.
* Long Seventies Conspiracy Cinema: An Introduction.
* That Dragon, Cancer and how the digital age talks about death.
* Meet the New Student Activists. A Timeline of Black Activism on Campus.
* Birds of prey spread bush fires deliberately.
* Gender in the classroom. The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job A pplicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study.
* From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey.
* And let us now praise famous men: “3 siblings picking up their daily allowance of bottled water from the Fire Dept in Flint, MI.”
One Thousand and One Wednesday Links!
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and things are only going to get worse in the next few weeks. But for now, some links!
* I made a Twitterbot that I’m pretty pleased with: @LOLbalwarming. It’s the only authentic voice left to us in these tough times.
* Book plug: Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism is really good. It’s the #3 book you should buy right now after the longstanding #1 and #2.
* And while I’m hawking stuff on Amazon: they discontinued my Swiss Army canvas wallet, so I had to find a new one. It’s leather, alas, but this Fossil wallet is everything else I want. It’s great.
* Submitted without comment: Letters in support of John McAdams from FIRE and AAUP.
* The shame of America’s parental leave.
* Why, in this day and age, is there even a Save command in any application? Its very presence implies — indeed, guarantees — that the default state of the world is unsafe. This breaks the rule our ancestors learned over billions of years of interaction with the objective world: when you do something, it stays done, until undone. Saving considered harmful. After what happened to me the other week, I am 100% on board with this.
* Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.
* On Weird Fiction and the Interstitial.
* Chris Ware, The Art of Comics No. 2.
* Great job alert: Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured).
* Salaita Goes After University Donors in Lawsuit Over Job Loss at Illinois. UIUC responds.
* The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation.
* Against professors as mandatory reporters.
* Scott Walker budget cut sparks sharp debate on UW System. Deep cuts in Wisconsin. Anticipating budget cuts, nervous UW System tried to strike deal. Republican UW Professor Has Sharp Words For Walker Over Faculty Comment. Scott Walker’s State of Ignorance. A reckless proposal. A self-inflicted wound. Be skeptical. Chasing away UW’s stars. Cut athletics.
* Of course there’s time to kill primary and secondary ed, too.
* From the archives, apropos of absolutely nothing: Stalin, CEO.
* “No Crisis” is a Los Angeles Review of Books special series considering the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. A new installment to the series will be released at the beginning of each month through the fall of 2015. Our aim, as our introductory essay explains, is to “show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.”
* As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities. I want to suggest further that their disinterest is right and even salutary, because what I really mean is that undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.
* Exciting new degradations: Bill Would Allow Texas Teachers To Kill Students.
* Howard Middle School Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History.
* Detroit Cop Who Killed 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones While She Slept Walks Free.
* Texas school suspends 9-year-old for making ‘terroristic threats’ with magic ‘Hobbit’ ring.
Kermit Elementary Principal Roxanne Greer told the Odessa American that she could not comment on the suspension, because “all student stuff is confidential,” but Steward said that she told him that any and all threats to a child’s safety — including magical ones — would be taken seriously by the school.
* Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor tries to put a good spin on what for all the world looks like elder abuse.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15, Cont’d: “Wellness” and the Anti-Vaxxers.
* In France, police bravely defend liberal democracy from an eight-year-old boy.
* The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland.
* Why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?
* Grace has Type 1 diabetes, for which there is no cure. Now 15 years old, she has endured approximately 34,000 blood tests, 5,550 shots and 1,660 medical tubing injections to keep her alive.
* The War Photo No One Would Publish.
* On running and street harassment.
* Bring the Jubilee: Croatia Cancels Debts For Tens Of Thousands Of Its Poorest People.
* Boing Boing reviews David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* Understanding The Man in the High Castle.
In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick’s version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it’s a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death.” That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick’s novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it’s still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.
* Americans Are Working So Hard, It’s Actually Killing People.
* Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.
* Let’s politicize vaccines because why not.
* But friends, I’m here to tell you: it gets worse.
* Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they’d committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he’d committed 40.
* Great read about one of the founders of the Men’s Rights Movement, a former national feminist.
* Inside that creepy Nationwide ad. “Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun.”
* Which Racist UNC Building Are You Today? The University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam Statue Represents a Legacy of White Supremacy.
* Clergy Send In Photos To Replace Images Of Black Youth Police Were Using For Target Practice.
* Food Not Bombs Sues Fort Lauderdale Over Homeless Feeding Law.
* A brief history of the Star Wars expanded universe.
* A brief history of the Super Bowl points spread.
* The shame of the Patriots fan. They even managed to sneak in one more on their way to the championship last weekend.
* Study Links Playing Tackle Football Before Age 12 To Cognitive Impairment.
* Watching football after a traumatic brain injury.
* Florida says parents can’t opt out their kids from standardized tests.
* The Cops Don’t Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
* BREAKING: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.
* Propaganda has gotten way more sophisticated since the old days.
* Man Wakes Up From Bender With Financial Problems Solved.
* Consumption Of Buncha Crunch Reverently Paused During Unsettling Scenes Of ‘American Sniper.’
* Report: Most Americans Can’t Even Name Their State’s Shadow Lord.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Student evaluations are terrible, episode 281.
* Transgender Kids Identify With Their Gender As Completely As Cisgender Kids.
* Coming out as poor at an elite university.
* Probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I had that kind of cash, but: The Vatican Will Offer Free Shaves And Haircuts To Rome’s 3,276 Homeless People.
* Disability, the state, and minimum wage.
* Pettiness and the human condition.
* UVM Recognizes “Neutral” as a Gender Identity.
* Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
* How to tell if you are in a soft science fiction novel.
* Fun With Conspiracy Theories: Did the Chernobyl Disaster Cover Up Something Even Worse? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
* New York cooks up a special unit for kicking hippies.
* When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild.
* Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults.
* When you stare too long into the abyss.
* The #1 reason people die early, in each country.
* Useless but Interesting Facts About America’s Married Couples.
* No, you’re lonely and depressed and lack self-control.
* The United States is becoming a terrible place for air travel. “Becoming.”
* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is back.
* And you can always spot the children of sociologists.