Posts Tagged ‘Luke Skywalker’
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
First Day of School Links!
* Some late but very nice press for my Octavia Butler book: I was on an episode of the nationally syndicated radio show Viewpoints Radio this week, and the book had a lovely review in LARB!
* CFP: Artificial Life: Debating Medical Modernity (April 19-21, UC Riverside).
* $75 million dollars to philosophy at Johns Hopkins.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
* 12 People Face Misdemeanor Charges for Giving Food to The Homeless in El Cajon.
* A girl-power moment for Medieval Times, where a woman has the lead for the first time. I have wanted to take my kids to Medieval Times ever since listening to the Doughboys episode about it a few months ago.
* Like the story about the sexual assaults of the US gymnastics team, there is something about Eliza Dushku’s story of being abused as a child by adults who were trusted with her care that is just so heartbreaking.
* Meanwhile, McKayla Maroney is facing a $100,000 for violating her NDA with USA Gymnastics.
* ‘Every day I am crushed’: the stateless man held without trial by Australia for eight years.
* ICE Keeps Raiding Hospitals and Mistreating Disabled Children. Feds planning massive Northern California immigration sweep to strike against sanctuary laws. DHS and DOJ Want to Arrest Mayors of Sanctuary Cities.
* How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’ and caused a wave of panic. America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era. These are fascinating but I still have every confidence that the explanation we have been given for this event is bullshit and that the truth will come out in a decade or so. Pandemonium and Rage in Hawaii.
* “Wisconsin school apologizes for slavery homework assignment.”
* Foxconn boondoggle nearing $4.5 billion.
* “Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn. It has haunted her ever since.”
* Activists charged with Confederate statue toppling no longer face felonies.
* Chelsea Manning files to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland.
* The True History of Luke Skywalker’s Monastic Retreat.
* Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea.
* How the Female Stars of The Breakfast ClubFought to Remove a Sexist Scene, and Won.
* And of course you had me at “Gorgeous Images of the Planet Jupiter.”
Thursday Morning Links!
* At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.
* If you got a call offering a free cruise, you might be entitled to at least $300. I did! Check your numbers.
* Artist’s Statement, by Kara Walker.
* The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.
* President Of Charlottesville Synagogue Recounts Scene During Weekend Rally. More Witnesses. More. Documentary.
* Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist. All the President’s Klansmen. Goodbye, Pepe.
* Here are all the Republican members of Congress who have called out the president. Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity.’ Gwen Moore Calls for Trump’s Removal.
* Durham protester charged in Confederate statue vandalism. Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue. Virginia. Richmond! The Capitol. Even Robert E. Lee didn’t think Americans needed all those Confederate statues. Leave the Durham memorial on the ground. News you can use. Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost. Trump Warns Removing Confederate Statues Could Be Slippery Slope To Eliminating Racism Entirely. Trump Blasts Critics Who Judge Neo-Nazi Groups By Most Extreme Members. Now you’ve gone and made Ron Johnson ‘not entirely’ comfortable. Poor guys.
* Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff frustrated and dismayed. White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him. Disgusted Robert Mueller Eats 2 20-Piece Chicken McNugget Meals In One Sitting In Attempt To Get Into Trump’s Mind.
* They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported.
* The curious case of a man detained by ICE who can’t stay, but can’t be sent back either.
* Today in Millennials killing things.
* White racists and genetic testing. Doxxing White Supremacists Is Making Them Terrified.
* Today, Cloudflare reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and booted The Daily Stormer out from behind its DDoS protection service.
* ‘Elder Orphans’ Facebook Group Creates Community For Adults Aging Alone.
* THE COURT: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.
JUROR NO. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.
* The Voter Purge Crusade That Preceded Trump’s Sketchy Elections Commission.
* A good year for television adaptations of black SF!
* The Patterns Around Octavia Butler.
* Superhero Comics’ Long History of Beating Up Nazis.
* WSU grad student designs map of precinct-level election results.
* Free Speech Year at Berkeley! I bet it goes great.
* Sonic Mania has a great mechanic for playing with a five-year-old, but I swear Sonic used to be faster.
* Why is Star Wars trying to make us hate Luke Skywalker?
* And a perennial reblog: The Soviet Hobbit.
Sunday’d Reading!
* Presenting the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
* On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest.
* A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* So old I can remember when Eric and Donald Jr. were going to run the business and not have a political role. (January.)
* Cool, thanks for looking into it.
* Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI.
* The Republicans Broke American Politics, and Media Elites Are Blind to It. A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.
* The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It’s too late, of course, the cultists will believe in it for all time.
* Horrific hate crime in Portland. Seems to be part of a disturbing trend.
* New Orleans principal loses job after wearing Nazi-associated rings in video. Glowing 2015 profile.
* Meanwhile, in Arizona. In New Jersey.
* New Jersey not doing great in my newsfeed today generally. Though this was good.
* U.S. Airstrike Killed Over 100 Civilians in Mosul, Pentagon Says. The U.S. Is Helping Allies Hide Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria.
* ‘Mostly Toddlers’ Among 31 Drowned.
* A spectre is haunting Goldman Sachs.
* Trump going to the mattresses.
* How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative.
* Democrats doing much better, still can’t win a damn thing. The only answer is to keep offering them nothing and telling them they’re stupid, until they finally come around. Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment. Donald Trump Is A Big Reason The GOP Kept The Montana House Seat.
* Remember how terrible the AHCA is?
* Sheriff Clarke and some totally appropriate, not at all batshit insane behavior.
* A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance.
* A 31-year-old undocumented Honduran bicyclist, Marcos Antonio Huete, was hit by a car in Key West, Florida, on his way to work. The policeman’s camera shows him inquiring about the victim’s immigration status before offering medical assistance. He was later detained by the Border Patrol.
* “We want you to think Luke is bad” is an awfully large part of Last Jedi hype. I have to think that means they won’t actually do it…
* Title IX Policy shift at the University of Oregon: Faculty members at the University of Oregon will no longer be required to notify campus authorities when students confide in them that they’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed but say they don’t want the information reported.
* Wealth, I realized, is the adult version of magic: an incredibly powerful but ultimately arbitrary resource that transfers primarily through inheritance. It has some logic to it— but also enough randomness that those without can hope for a spontaneous windfall in the form of an improbably lucrative investment or a secret inheritance.
* Unexpected and interesting: Joss Whedon isn’t just finishing Justice League; he’s been working on it for a while.
* Truly, ours is the darkest timeline.
* A chance meeting with Mr. Rogers.
* If you’d bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you’d be worth $35M.
* Uber: a cheap scam all the way down.
* Original draft of Revenge of the Sith actually treated Padme as an interesting character.
* Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.
* These birds have the right idea.
* This one cuts me. When you’re in your thirties. Call CPS. #TheResistance.
* Everything was connected, and I was fucked.
* Can someone please explain the physics of Casper?
* And N6946-BH1 is all of us right now.
Tuesday Links!
* Reminder: the deadline for abstracts for SFRA 2016 is the end of the month. MLA CFP: Science Fiction Comics. CFP: “Academic Insecurities: Precarious Labour and the Neoliberal University.”
* Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Sara Goldrick-Rab, the outspoken University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who vowed after tenure protections were changed by state lawmakers last year to leave Wisconsin, announced on her blog Monday night that she has accepted a job at Temple University and will start July 1.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Huge, if true: Universities Run Into Problems When They Hire Presidents From The Business World.
* Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Why Do Colleges Still Use Grades?
* No other discipline of comparable size in the humanities is as gender-skewed as philosophy. Women still receive only about 28% of philosophy PhDs in the United States, and are still only about 20% of full professors of philosophy — numbers that have hardly budged since the 1990s. And among U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving philosophy PhDs in this country, 86% are non-Hispanic white. The only comparably-sized disciplines that are more white are the ones that explicitly focus on the European tradition, such as English literature.
* Northwestern University students who qualify for financial aid no longer will have to borrow to pay for their education, part of a plan announced Thursday to make the school more affordable and prevent students from being saddled with debilitating debt.
* How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?
* Rowling explores the magical history of America.
* My deep wound is video games. In the same way Bell “pretended to be someone else whenever [he] stepped outside of the house” and learned “to never talk about computer games in class or on the school bus,” I learned that my love for video games was excessive and embarrassing. I was swept away by those worlds in a way that nobody else seemed to be, and I walked around with my head full of pixels and quests and ideas. Video games made me very happy and very lonely.
* Case Western in the ne– oh.
This isn’t the first time that an idea in psychology has been challenged—-not by a long shot. A “reproducibility crisis” in psychology, and in many other fields, has now been well-established. A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked for misconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.
* Marquette in the — oh come on.
* How a mistranslation made you think your tongue had ‘taste zones.’
* This simulation helps show you what it’s like to have dyslexia.
* Maps Show Where Bloomberg Aides Thought He Would Have Been Competitive.
* Meritocrats and Egalitarians.
* Reparations isn’t a political demand.
* Some Birds Are Just As Smart As Apes.
* The Future Of Telltale Games.
* “Some supporters of Rubio say bad strategy, poorly run campaign killing his chances.” What do the rest of them think is killing his chances?
* Meanwhile: Report Raises New Questions About Trump’s Ties To N.J. Mob-Linked Figure. Yes, Mitt Romney Could Actually Become The Republican Presidential Nominee.
* The remarkable persistence of the Green Man.
* “What I wish I’d known before I had gender-affirming surgery.”
* Daughter of Civil War vet still getting a pension.
* Actually existing media bias: The Washington Post ran 16 negative stories about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours. Going for the record!
* The Problematic Rape Reporting On ‘This American Life.’
* We want dead bodies to be in the right place. Caring for the dead is a foundational human activity, and so the wrong dead body in the wrong place, or bodies abandoned or desecrated, is considered an affront to the moral order. Why We Need the Dead.
* Mr. Spock and the autism spectrum.
* This is for you: an oral history of The Golden Girls.
* Rise of the hiking game: The Witness and Firewatch.
* What could go wrong? U.S. military spending millions to make cyborgs a reality.
* The neoliberal university will grind us down until there’s nothing left. Choose solidarity.
* Three Thoughts on Westerosi Political Economy.
* Slavoj Žižek and The Twilight Zone.
* And I don’t know about the other two law, but the third law of politics here is pretty much literally the predicament academia and most other public institutions find themselves in in 2016:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Gerry Canavan 