Posts Tagged ‘Louis C.K.’
Return of the Son of Linkblogging: The Return!
With some new responsibilities post-tenure, a new work-childcare schedule that I’m still getting used to, and some intense end-of-the-summer deadline crunches, I haven’t had the time to do a link post in a while. As most of you know, I use this blog primarily as a research aid for myself; it’s a big compendium of more or less everything I’ve found interesting or useful on the Internet in the last fifteen years, and for that reason I like to keep it as complete as possible (even if that sometimes means the link posts get very long). That said, I had about 400 tabs open among my devices — it might be more than that! — and there’s just no way I can put everything I’ve looked at since August on here. So today’s format constraint was supposed to be that I have to brutally limit myself to as many links as there were days since I last posted, and close every other tab; that didn’t really work in practice, but at least now all the tabs are closed and I can move on with my life. Here goes!
* CFP: Crafting the Long Tomorrow. CFP: Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies. CFP: But now, we must eat! Food and Drink in Science Fiction. CFP: Terms of Service: Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. CFP: Surreal Entanglements: The Fiction of Jeff Vandermeer. CFP: ICFA 2019. CFP: DePaul Pop Culture 2019, A Celebration of Disney. CFP: Star Wars TV. CFP: Fandom and Tourism.
* Job Announcement: The Future of the Human Being.
* Cool syllabus: Science Fiction, Empire, Japan.
* Somewhere in there, SFRA #325 was released, the first from new editor Sean Guynes-Vishniac, with a lovely review of my Octavia Butler book!
* And somewhere in there the Hugos were awarded, including N.K. Jemisin’s historic threepeat.
* Cixin Liu, China, and the Future of Science Fiction. This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction.
* The secret science fiction inspiration behind Jimi Hendrix’s music.
* David Foster Wallace in the #MeToo Era.
* Marquette Wire has a writeup of the Sable Elyse Smith show at the Haggerty right now. She was kind enough to speak to my Afrofuturism class last week, which was terrific (as is the show).
* I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult.
* Minecraft Mod Adds Climate Change, Carbon Tax.
* Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics.
* “Higher elevation properties are essentially worth more now, and increasingly will be worth more in the future,” according to Harvard’s Jesse Keenan. Elsewhere in Miami news: Miami’s Other Water Problem.
* Sea level rise already causing billions in home value to disappear.
* 6 Years Ago, North Carolina Chose To Ignore Rising Sea Levels. This Week It Braces For Disaster. What will happen when Hurricane Florence hits North Carolina’s massive pig manure lagoons?
* Puerto Rico after Maria: “Water Is Everything.”
* Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals. The Big Melt. Halfway to Boiling. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Climate Change Is Becoming A Major Workplace Hazard. The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here.
* No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth.”
* Just another headline here in hell.
* The rule of law is a curious thing.
* Why Science Fiction Is The Most Important Genre.
* The story of Q. We analyzed every QAnon post on Reddit. Here’s who QAnon supporters actually are.
* An ICE attorney forged a document to deport an immigrant. ICE didn’t care until the immigrant sued. ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened. ICE Detains Man Driving Pregnant Wife To Hospital To Deliver Baby. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. ICE Handcuffs Immigrant Kids on Their 18th Birthdays, Drags Them to Jail. Aurora parents fighting to stop legally adopted 4-year-old daughter from being deported. How many migrant children are still separated from their families? ICE is trying to deport a disabled man who has been in the U.S. for 35 years. A Toddler’s Death Adds To Concerns About Migrant Detention. Kansas woman told birth certificate wasn’t enough to prove citizenship for passport. The U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question. Citizenship service conspired with ICE to ‘trap’ immigrants at visa interviews, ACLU says. Bad Paperwork. “Yo me quiero morir,” the boy says. “I want to die.” 13,000 kids. Will anyone ever be held accountable?
* How the Trump Administration Is Remaking the Courts. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.
* Long read on the professor who destroyed his career by faking a job offer from another institution.
* When Academics Defend Colleagues Accused of Harassment.
* Meltdown of the Nobel Prize committee.
* How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters.
* Feeling Suicidal, Students Turned to Their College. They Were Told to Go Home.
* Tis the season: How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring. The Way We Hire Now. The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual.
* Admitting Significant Mistakes, Maryland Accepts Responsibility for Football Player’s Death. The Tragedy of Maryland Football Is a Symptom of College Football’s Rotten Culture.
* “Purdue University Global is a For-Profit Masquerading as a Public University.”
* Ken Starr keeps finding new ways to disgrace himself.
* When the facts don’t matter: UW System is major driver of the Wisconsin economy.
* Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong. A message from President Daniels to students on the humanities. Oh, the humanities!
* U. of Akron Will Phase Out 80 Degree Programs and Open New Esports Facilities.
* Activists at UNC pull down Silent Sam.
* The tyranny of the majority isn’t a problem in America today. Tyranny of the minority is.
* When did parenting become so fearful?
* The US has a student debt problem. Generation Underwater. The Next Hot Millennial Trend: Never-Ending Labor in Dystopian Warehouses.
* Down with the Philosophy Factory.
* The man who was fired by a machine.
* The Labour Movement in 2018.
* How Milwaukee Teachers Beat Back Cuts and Busywork.
* Decolonizing Virtual Worlds. Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Greenlit for a movie and two sequels: What Would Happen If a Hurricane Hit an Erupting Volcano?
* Soul Murder. Ghosts of the Orphanage. Meanwhile, at Marquette.
* The most extreme bodily modification is pregnancy.
* Shock! White Americans support welfare programs — but only for themselves, says new research.
* Lead is useful; lead is poison.
* College admissions vs. the shy.
* “I don’t believe in aliens anymore.”
* What could possibly go wrong? US Navy wants to fire a slime cannon at boats to stop them escaping.
* “Mount Everest is a ‘fecal time bomb.’ Here’s one man’s idea for handling 14 tons of poop.”
* I guess this is the coastal elitist in me, but I don’t think a small cabal of unaccountable rich guys should be running the VA in secret without legal authorization in exchange for their cash payments to the President. Shadow Rulers of the VA.
* The way we live now: DHS to train high schoolers in “proper bleeding control techniques” in preparation for “mass casualty events.”
* Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore. Real US wages are essentially back at 1974 levels, Pew reports.
* Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America’s jails.
* ‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE.’
* John McCain, The Man Who Never Was. The political establishment needed a war-hero fetish object—and so it invented one.
* Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale. An Oral History of the Death and Return of Superman. An Oral History of BoJack Horseman. Vice interviews @dril.
* Interactive (non)fiction from the Los Angeles Times: You’ve been arrested by a dishonest cop. Can you win in a system set up to protect officers? I spent 136 days in jail, having lost my job, with Officer Smith still on the street — and that was a win.
* Want a long, healthy life? Don’t be poor.
* Fascinating: are cities making animals smarter?
* Too Frail To Retire? Humans Ponder The Fate Of Research Chimps.
* Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.
* Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic.
* Beating the odds: Study: Children of Divorce Less Likely to Earn Degree.
* All the Ways It Doesn’t Matter… and the One Way That It Does. When You Discover, as an Adult, That You Might Have Autism.
* Serial again. Veronica Mars again.
* The Village Voice is officially dead.
* Even 98.6 turned out to be just another a lie.
* I know what the years that are coming are going to be like, and I am so sorry.
* God Mode. Ethics. Meat. Souls. Cryogenics.
* The robot cars don’t work, and of course it’s our fault.
* What happens when you let computers optimize floorplans. Bots that teach themselves to cheat.
* Can Wes Anderson redeem himself?
* And a pointed but respectful counterpoint: I don’t ever want to die.
Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!
* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!
* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…
* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.
* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.
* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.
* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.
* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.
* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.
* This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.
* Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.
* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.
* The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.
* Death at a Penn State Fraternity.
* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.
* African Science Fiction, at LARB.
* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.
* Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.
* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.
* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.
* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.
* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.
* This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.
* A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.
* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.
* “Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”
* They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.
* When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.
* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.
* Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.
* How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.
* What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.
* Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.
* * ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!
* Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.
* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.
* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”
* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.
* We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!
* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’
* An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.
* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?
* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.
* Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.
* The Digital Humanities Bust.
* We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.
* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?
* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.
* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.
Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.
That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.
* Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.
* Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.
* Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.
* The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
* In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.
* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.
* Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.
* The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.
* I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.
* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.
* I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”
* An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.
* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.
* The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.
* The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!
* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
Tuesday Is Soylent Green Day Links
* Exciting news! My book, Octavia E. Butler (the latest in the University of Illinois’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction series) has a November 1 publication date and a pre-order page on Amazon!
* Some upcoming events at Marquette English this month: “Resume Doctor and Interview Bootcamp” and a Pop Culture and Pizza Night on Hamilton: An American Musical. There’s also MuHuCon this weekend and the Marquette/UWM joint conference next weekend.
* And speaking of Hamilton: Google Hamilton truth! A little more from LGM and William Hogeland.
* Though the rumors are that they may actually have learned something from their mistake.
* Kim Stanley Robinson’s Next Book, New York 2140, Will Feature a Half-Submerged Manhattan.
* This Church Believes Humans Can Live Forever on Earth. Sold!
* We’re running out of water, and the world’s powers are very worried.
* University of Kansas Acquires 1,000 Zines from a Defunct Radical Library.
* This Is What Really Happens to Your Brain When You’re Tripping on LSD.
* In a case showing the reach of college sports corruption, a former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi instructed his assistants to complete junior college course work for recruits.
* The Creative Writing of the Internet’s Premier White Supremacist Forum.
* Welcome to Night Vale: Two percent of humans can hear the Hum, a mysterious, low rumble in the distance. It might exist. It might be imaginary. It might be both.
* Diabetes watch: Are full-fat dairy foods better for you after all?
* Can this election get stranger? How Gen. James Mattis could become the unlikeliest U.S. president in history. I don’t know anything about Mattis, and doubt that he’s the guy, but I still think sabotaging the Electoral College by running one or more regional candidates in order to throw the election to the House is the only GOP strategy left that has any chance of success.
* No matter how you measure it, Bernie Sanders isn’t winning the Democratic primary.
* Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life.’
* Louis C.K. Has Millions in Debt Thanks to “Horace and Pete.”
* Attawapiskat declares state of emergency over spate of suicide attempts.
* The most and least meaningful jobs.
* This Is How Long Sex Should Actually Last. Science.
* The finding that launched a thousand sexist jokes: Men May Be Able to Avoid Dementia by Marrying Intelligent Women, Researchers Say.
* “I think that porn has the power to do what Bruce Springsteen can’t”: Porn Site Bans North Carolina Users Due To State’s Anti-LGBT Laws.
* No one knows why they remained healthy, Friend said. But DNA from such people could one day provide insight into ways to prevent or treat such catastrophic disorders. “Instead of looking at people with disease, you need to look at people who should have gotten sick,” said Friend.
* There’s an insanely well-hidden Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Easter egg.
* How precious is a longtime family dog? As valuable as an heirloom vase or family photographs? A Wisconsin appeals court says no.
* Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others: After 50 years of animal-welfare legislation, rats and mice are still left out in the cold.
* A major perk of the job for New York State corrections officers may soon be off the table: The ability to be as brutal as they’d like with prisoners without having to worry about facing any serious consequences.
* Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were.
* Why Hollywood studios are taking a stand against an anti-revenge-porn bill.
* I want to believe: The Warriors Have A 93 Percent Chance Of Hitting 73 Wins.
* Huge, if true: Planet X to really cause mass extinction this month?
* And I know I say this a lot, but sometimes a thing really is ideology at its purest.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fear of Stigma Lingers About Use of Family-Friendly Policies. Should You Have a Baby in Grad School?
* Don’t Drink Starbucks Free College PR Stunt, Full of Bees. Some details.
* Sun Ra: jazz’s interstellar voyager.
The remaining 5 percent are my greatest concern. These trustees can cause real damage to the institutions they serve by acting in dysfunctional ways. They play petty politics with almost everything; try to micromanage the institution; attempt to go around the president and lead from the shadows; they tend to be critical of faculty but not knowledgeable or curious about faculty life and offer simple solutions to complex and sticky challenges.
Over the past several years, I have talked with many presidents who believe this small group of toxic boards is growing in size and impact and migrating north towards 10 percent of all boards. We simply cannot afford this.
* In my defense, though, anyone following the humanities death watch for the last 600 years would be struck both by its recurring characters and its disconnect from objective fact. Burton wrote in the age of Shakespeare, when the remarkable growth of literacy drove the first golden age of vernacular literature. Whittemore wrote while English as an academic discipline was in the midst of a meteoric rise, climbing from 17,240 BA degrees granted in 1950 to 64,342 in 1971. After a steep drop in the 1980s, English is now back to a robust 53,767 degrees granted per year, and 295,221 students per year graduate with humanities degrees—more than any field except business.
* NLRB revises Columbia College Chicago decision to the benefit of administration, by a factor of about 30X.
* Austin and segregation. Milwaukee and Scott Walker.
Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind.
* In Milwaukee and U.S., hospitals follow money to suburbs.
* World Cup minute! Crunching the US’s chances of advancing out of its group. Meanwhile: Ghana has to ration electricity just so everyone can watch the World Cup.
* Louie, creep. Game of Thrones and the female gaze. HBO Explains Why They Failed To Make An American Gods TV Show. Read George R. R. Martin’s 1963 Letter To Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
* How Marquette brought in its first lay president.
* Totally outrageous: Indiana Punished Inmate With More Time Behind Bars For Doing What Prison Staff Told Him To Do.
* California Prison’s ‘Pay-To-Stay’ Option Offers ‘Quieter’ Rooms For $155 A Day. Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose.
* Father Of The Bride sequel about gay marriage reportedly in the works.
* A team of Harvard scientists believe the remnants of an ancient Earth, dating to the time another planet collided with ours to produce the moon, may still be lodged deep within the Earth’s mantle. Earth may have underground ‘ocean’ three times that on surface. Dibs on the screenplay.
* Circles within circles, rings within rings: I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. As some of our operatives have been compromised, my commander has given me permission to make some of their conversations on twitter public. We want to let the PoOs know that we have infiltrated them so that they begin to accuse each other of being Lollipop operatives.
* Our long national nightmare &c: Duke will rename Aycock.
* Gasp! Missile defense still a giant boondoggle!
* The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth, warns New York Times. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning has an op-ed.
* Understanding commencement speakers at SMBC.
* American meritocracy, Chelsea Clinton edition.
* The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
* The Grand Budapest Hotel, as it was always meant to be seen.
* We’re never going to get to Mars.
* A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961.
* And Greenpeace lost 5 million dollars gambling. FFS.
Happy Monday
* Secret origins of gonzo journalism: “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” by Hunter S. Thompson.
* What’s so frustrating about really upper class kids who go on to become elite pundits and write stupid stuff about this topic is that, had they any self-awareness whatsoever, they should know all about intergenerational class entrenchment. In most cases, their parents have done everything they can to make sure social mobility remains a myth.
* When a campus building is named for a famous white supremacist. Oh, hi, Duke!
* The Melancholy, Crumbling Remains Of Great Socialist Murals.
* The failures of Title IX. How a Title IX Complaint Is Processed.
* Which states have the highest levels of student debt?
* How Athletic Departments (And The Media) Fudge The Cost Of Scholarships.
* Partisan politics, segregation, and Milwaukee.
* I worry a bit that giving the 1% the option to become literal vampires might not work out great.
* Samuel R. Delany reviews Star Wars.
* A collision of greed, neglect, and mismanagement is endangering young people in America’s college capital while enriching some absentee investors — landlords who maximize profits by packing students into properties — and universities that admit many more students than they can house.
Where the show has faltered — and where it comes up against its contradictions — is when it attempts to look at those who are no longer living in the Before. So effective in detailing the quiet terrors of the old order, it has been largely unable or unwilling to present anyone who stands for this challenge in a serious way.
* Today in the rule of law: The Harris prohibition has resulted in law enforcement agencies using the stingrays without obtaining a court warrant, because the agencies have interpreted the contract to mean they cannot even tell a judge about their intent to use the devices.
* Milwaukee officer shoots man after struggle at Red Arrow Park. Drunk NYPD Officer Allegedly Shot a Stranger 6 Times.
* Meanwhile people are just straight-up setting up murder traps now in Stand Your Ground states.
* The Incidental State: Coercion in the Age of Big Data.
* But it turns out that if you consider the facts reported; he wasn’t a genius. His violations of anti-trust law were obvious crimes. Instead, his key characteristic was the one we always emphasize is critical about the most fraudulent CEOs – audacity. Jobs had gotten away with committing so many crimes that he came to believe he was immune from prosecution.
* On crafting a nonwhite Spider-Man. Spider-Man execs kill our dreams of seeing Miles Morales on the big screen. They must really hate money.
* To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand.
* Want to Go to Mars? It’s Not That Expensive.
* Vulture: Is television art yet?
* Path to student loan debt relief for adjuncts just got a little easier–but still a long way to go.
* Ross Douthat hates your loose libertine morals so much he’ll even become a communist to oppose them.
* Gun That Can Only Be Fired By Owner Exists but No One Will Sell It Because of New Jersey.
* How Much Source Material Does HBO’s Game of Thrones Have Left to Work With? The worst news is: it seems like it’s all Jon Snow stuff…
* For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role.
* The secret history of White Coke.
* Louis C.K. versus the Common Core.
* The Ocean Floor Is Littered with Humanity’s Garbage.
* “Let It Go” was inspired by Prince, who also contributed its most memorable line.
* Should we be teaching him civics at such a young age?
* The oldest man on earth lives on the Upper West Side. Take that, Okinawa!
* Fanwanking a reason why there doesn’t seem to be many women in the Star Wars universe.
* Presenting the Wes Anderson cruise.
* And Slate celebrates the world’s best statues.
Tuesday Night Wrapup
* From the too-good-to-check file: Samuel Beckett Used to Drive André the Giant to School, All They Talked About Was Cricket.
* This scandal has everything! Jeb Bush caught up in LEGO-related corporate corruption.
* The new UC logo may be done with Aaron Bady, but Aaron Bady is not yet done with the UC logo.
* Today in Kirk/Spock slash: On “The Footnote.”
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Not ever having to fill out this questionnaire.
* Chicago Sets Record For Consecutive DaysWithout Snow.
* Study finds half of those shot by police are mentally ill.
* To be a philistine, before we dismiss the possibility of major public support for the humanities, we need to picture ourselves with money. Humanities faculty, I suggested in Austin, should then come together to design the proper infrastructure–staff research support, research-learning undergraduate courses, the copy writing, editing, and printing facilities, the relationships with institutional advancement, the distribution channels, travel and meetings, conference circulation and return invitations, the whole ensemble of people and activities that define healthy, modern, and socially valuable research divisions. We need to cost it out at each of our institutions. Then we need to enlist chairs, deans, and administrations to develop a multi-year plan to make this redevelopment happen.
* Every day, offenders are sent out to perform high-risk police operations with few legal protections. Some are juveniles, occasionally as young as fourteen or fifteen. Some operate through the haze of addiction; others, like Hoffman, are enrolled in state-mandated treatment programs that prohibit their association with illegal drugs of any kind. Many have been given false assurances by the police, used without regard for their safety, and treated as disposable pawns of the criminal-justice system.
* Michigan is your next flashpoint for the war on labor.
* Things From Thomas More’s Utopia That Have Come True Today.
* It’s not that I think liberals support torture. No, I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. What liberals want is ultimately to do what conservative hawks want to do, but only after experts and leaders assure them that they have no choice. They want extreme events to make the choice for them.
* Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested.
* ‘The despair that I felt was overwhelming’: on teaching in a New Orleans charter school.
* SEK: Against (the late) Springsteen.
* “A lot of us are campaign officials — or campaign professionals — and we want to do everything we can to help our side. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines — whatever it may be,” Tranter said with a laugh.
* Is an education crisis good for business? As the Ed Week reporter cited above pointed out, “There are market trends that support that theory. The commercial education market grew significantly in the past four years, but no segment grew faster than instruction and services. Companies like the virtual learning providers K12 Inc. and Connections Academy, or the publishers-turned-service-providers Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, fit that bill.”
* Bill Clinton concedes the drug war hasn’t worked. Gasp!
Louis C.K. as Rorschach Test
Louis CK’s appearance on the Daily Show last night confirms for me that the guy is some kind of comedy Rorschach test. What I heard was a man talking with sensitivity about rape culture on national TV, which is something that is exceedingly rare, much less from a male comedian. It’s true he used some lazy “humorless feminist” and “nagging women STFU” tropes along the way, but I honestly just filtered those out as standard comedy boilerplate and ignored them. The final STFU, in particular, I found so outlandish as to obviously mean the opposite, especially in context of the conversation he and Jon had just been having. Alyssa Rosenberg, who started all this, had the same reaction as me.
Talking with others in the MeFi thread, or on Twitter, though, I see tons of people taking the exact opposite points away from the C.K. appearance. That he acknowledged the existence of rape culture is barely adequate to the situation, they find, and the way he did it was minimizing and aggressive to the point of misogyny. I see their point, absolutely. On the merits I’ve come around and think they’re probably right. But I took (and I think I still take) everything he said the other way.
I’m going to go ahead and declare that the problem is comedy itself. Why can’t people just articulate clearly and simply exactly what they mean? It would make all this a lot easier.
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.
Gerry Canavan 
