Posts Tagged ‘Louie’
Weekend Links!
* Malcolm Harris reviews Ivory Tower.
Speaking for the elite private liberal arts school is Wesleyan President Michael Roth, who argues for small classes, a balanced education and a lot of contact with professors. “Ivory Tower” gives Roth a fair hearing, but he can’t avoid coming off like a huckster of humanities when pitching the $60,000-plus annual price tag to the parents of potential students. (Hell, for 60 grand you could rent an apartment in Brooklyn and your own post-grad fellow.) The cost of this kind of education makes it both a model of learning for learning’s sake — yes, a high cost but a priceless reward — and totally inaccessible to most young people.
* Massive data dump on academic employment.
* Vladimir Nabokov’s Unpublished Screenplay Notes For Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Lolita.’
* Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Ian Bogost, when the walls fell.
* Let’s pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. No More Imperial Crusades.
* Prosecutors closing in on Chris Christie and Scott Walker. How the State of Wisconsin alleges Scott Walker aides violated the law, in 1 chart.
* Aren’t You A Little Short To Be A Stormtrooper? The Passing of the Armor to A Bullied Little Girl. Fighting bullies with stormtroopers.
* The golden age of girls’ running.
* Higher Ed Pays a High Price for Mediocrity.
* James Madison University Punished Sexual Assault With ‘Expulsion After Graduation.’ Department of Education Offers Proposed Campus Sexual Assault Regulations. Rape Victims At Fundamentalist Christian College Say They Were Told To Repent For Their Sins.
* “Turn Detroit into Drone Valley.” Sigh.
* “The death of a great American city: why does anyone still live in Detroit?”
* “By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water.”
* What we Yo about when we Yo about Yo.
* In celebration of Juneteenth.
* I’m losing hope for Episode 7, but Episodes 8 and 9 have promise.
* One more on Louie: This isn’t a model for romance. It’s a blueprint for abuse.
* Labor and the Locavore shows that our society’s tendency to idealize local food allows small farmers to pay workers substandard wages, house them in shoddy labor camps, and quash their ability to unionize to demand better working conditions.
* “It’s a much bigger, more powerful question to ask, If today we are using management techniques that were also used on slave plantations,” she says, “how much more careful do we need to be? How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?”
* The secret history of Chief Wahoo.
* Pennsylvania Instructed Its Employees To Ignore Residents Sickened By Drilling. Duke Energy Was Warned About Potential For Dan River Spill Decades Ago, Documents Show.
* Marriage, kids, college, and class.
* Great moments in governance.
In Kansas, 9-year-old Spencer Collins has been told by authorities that he must stop sharing books with his neighbors, and close the little free library–honestly, it’s just a bookshelf–in his yard.
* The sixth season of The Twilight Zone we almost had.
* And Better Call Saul already has a second season. We just have to wait to see if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
What to a Blogger Is the 5th of July?
* By request, I made a Storify (my first!) of our conversation about Louie 3.1.
* Next up in the “definitive takedown” series that has made An und für sich so rightly famous and so terribly feared: the ontology of Aaron Sorkin.
One could criticize Sorkin’s ontology for lacking depth and nuance and view the family structure as artificial and forced, but that is not a flaw so much as the entire point. Every Aaron Sorkin show starts from the same radical subtraction and carries the same basic axioms to the same absolutely rigorous conclusion. Sorkin’s universe is one in which a repeated reassertion of a rudimentary structure is the sole alternative to absolute chaos. Given the absolute lack of inherent “character traits” or “motivations,” their stereotyped relationships are the only thing keeping the “characters” from descending into a total — albeit clever — glossolalia.
* Pennsylvania looks to disfranchise 10% of its population to prevent voting fraud it can’t prove has ever happened. Why not just have the military install Romney as king and get this over with? It’d be quicker and more honest.
* I’m an academic, I don’t do it for the money: In Defence of Unpaid Academic Positions. Note: not actually a defense!
* What this means is that in graduate school we get used to working for nothing, even as we’re expected to invest heavily in expensive professional development activities. By attending conferences, we pay for the opportunity to present our work to our (future) peers, who are the primary “gatekeepers” to academe. This system helps to perpetuate privilege because only “those who have afforded to work for free will get jobs. The vicious circle is maddening” (Ernesto Priego, July 2, 2011, Twitter).
* Of course, there are perks: Drunk professor forces students to sit through 23-hour-long science exam.
* Another study shows for-profit university students earn less, default more.
* This time our New Four Horsemen–who claim to be market-oriented Republican justices–struck at an approach supported by the market-oriented Republican presidents who appointed them, thought up by market-oriented Republican ideologues to be the market-oriented Republican approach to keeping the market-oriented health insurance system from collapse. Fred Rodell understood that supreme court justices are for the most part moral and political actors first and text- and precedent-oriented legal technicians second.
* Here come the new Obamacare challenges.
* Inconceivable! States Bucking ‘Obamacare’ Are Among Those With Highest Rates Of Uninsured.
* And on the actually-existing-media-bias beat: just don’t mention the science.
The White Father of Two White Girls
I spent about an hour on Twitter talking through @millicentsomer’s Dear Television piece on the Louie premiere with @zunguzungu and @angusjohnston (as well as Lili herself). Check it out. My only note about the piece is that I think it leaves out what is probably the intended reading: Louie’s ex-wife is a white woman, played by a black actress.