Posts Tagged ‘male privilege’
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.
Monday Morning Links!
* My superhero identity has finally been scooped.
* Lots of people are sharing this one, on hyperexploited labor in the academy: Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech. As with most of this sort of adjunct activist some of its conclusions strike me as emotionally rather than factually correct — specifically, it needs to find a way to make tenured and tenure-track faculty the villains of the story, in order to make the death of the university a moral narrative about betrayal rather than a political narrative about the management class’s construction of austerity — but it’s undoubtedly a powerful read.
* I did this one already, but what the hell: Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
* Bring on the 403(b) lawsuits.
* On being married to an academic.
* It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe: Nobel academy member calls Bob Dylan’s silence ‘arrogant.’
* Eugenics and the academy. Racism and standardized testing. Whiteness and international relations.
* Language Log reads the bookshelf in the linguist’s office set in Arrival (out next month!).
* After years of neglect, public higher education is at a tipping point.
* Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th.
* Springsteen and Catholicism.
* White masculinity as cloning.
* Parenting is weird. If God worked at a pet store, He’d be fired. Part Two. It’s a mystery!!! Wooooooooooh! The Fox and the Hedgehog. Science and technology have reached their limit. Self-destructive beverage selection: a guide. Motivational comics. Has the media gotten worse, or has society? Understanding the presidency. The oldest recorded joke is from Sumeria, circa 1900 B.C. There’s a monster under my bed.
* Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty.
* Trump’s Milwaukee Problem. Let’s Talk About the Senate. From Pot To Guns To School Funding: Here’s What’s On The Ballot In Your State. Todd Akin and the “shy” voter. The banality of Trump. The latest polls indicate the possibility of a genuine electoral disaster for the GOP. A short history of white people rigging elections. Having not yet won it back yet, Dems are already getting ready to lose the Senate (again) in 2018. The Democrats are likely to win a majority of House votes, but not a majority of House seats. Again. Today in uncannily accurate metaphors. This all seems perfectly appropriate. Even Dunkin Donuts is suffering. But at least there’s a bright side. On the other hand.
Slavery: Colorado
Yes, you read that right. There is a vote on slavery in 2016. The Colorado state constitution currently bans slavery and “involuntary servitude” … except if it’s used as punishment for a crime. This amendment would get rid of that exception and say that slavery is not okay, ever.
* And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.
* Speaking of endless refrain: Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi is now pierced by bullet holes.
* District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
* On Anime Feminist. (via MeFi)
* Today in the Year of Kate McKinnon: ten minutes of her Ghostbusters outtakes.
* Jessica Jones’s Second Season Will Only Feature Female Directors.
* I don’t really think they should do Luke Cage season two — or Jessica Jones for that matter, as Daredevil proved already — but just like I’d love to see a Hellcat series with Jessica Jones as a supporting player I’d love to see Misty Knight guest starring Luke Cage.
* The Case against Black Mirror. I haven’t been able to tune in to the new season yet but the backlash surprises me. This was one of the best shows on TV before! What happened?
* Famous authors and their rejection slips.
* How much for a hotel on AT&TTW? AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion.
* “This is still the greatest NYT correction of all time imo.”
* This is [chokes] great. It’s great if they do this.
* This, on the other hand, is unbelievably awful: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war. Everyone involved in trying to claw back this money should be ashamed of themselves.
* Gee, you don’t say: U.S. Parents Are Sweating And Hustling To Pay For Child Care.
* I’ve discovered the secret to immortality.
* And there’s a new Grow game out for that mid-2000s nostalgia factor we all crave. Solution here when you’re done messing around…
Sunday Night Links!
* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.
* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.
* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.
* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.
* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
* Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.
* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.
* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.
* Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.
* “Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
* We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.
* Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.
* We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed. In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.
* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.
* America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’
* It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.
* Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.
* The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.
* Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.
* six months tops
* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.
* What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
* “Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.
* Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.
* A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.
* The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.
* Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.
* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.
* Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.
* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.
* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.
* Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.
* The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.
* How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.
* 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.
* Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.
* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.
* Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.
* Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.
* The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.
* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.
* “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.
* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.
* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.
* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.
* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.
* New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.
* Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.
* Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.
* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?
* I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.
* Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.
* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.
* The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.
* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.
* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.
* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.
Thursday Links
* America, I just want you to know there’s still time to stop this.
* Really got our number here: All Possible Humanities Dissertations, Considered as Single Tweets.
RT @gerrycanavan: This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.
* Scholarly Associations Defend Tenure and Academic Freedom in Wisconsin.
* Now Cooper Union’s president is out, too.
* Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this. Fascinating, frightening read.
* Unhappy career advice from the Chronicle: “You might not be ready for promotion.”
* UNC gets put on one-year probation for its recent student-athlete scandals. In other news, accreditation is a joke.
* 11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents.
* History is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake George R.R. Martin.
* Clever girl: Reviewer From The Guardian Says Jurassic World Passes Bechdel Test Because of Female Dinosaurs. See also.
* Teach all girls self-defense.
* Bold new horizons in student debt moralism.
* The history of America, as seen through the Census.
* Doogie Howser, M.D. gets the gritty reboot you never knew it needed.
* Harriet Potter and the Very Dedicated Parent. There really should be an app for this.
* Male film critics are apparently unable to understand the explicit, surface text of Goodfellas.
* Alanis Morissette, before Jagged Little Pill.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* This is close, but I for one believe the hottest take is still out there.
* And I guess some people just see farther.
All The Wednesday Links!
* I got some really good news the other day: an NEH Summer Stipend! Here’s the full list of $22.8 million in awards and offers for 232 humanities projects.
* Two of the poems from the award-winning first collection of my partner, Jaimee Hills, are up at Waywiser Press: “Synaesthesia” and “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* I taught #GamerGate in my video game class yesterday. It wasn’t my favorite day of the semester, not by a long shot, but TNI‘s “Gaming and Feminism” post was a great help, particularly the link to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 and Playing with privilege: the invisible benefits of gaming while male. I didn’t spend that much time on it, but I’m still tickled by Why So Few Violent Games?
* Salvage-Marxism embraces the Socialist rococo, the feel-good where we can and the feel-bad where we must, the utopian and the unflinching. Salvage will bring together the work of those who share a heartbroken, furious love of the world, and our rigorous principle: Hope is precious; it must be rationed.
* An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings. He tries to understand their peculiar habits: for example, their philosophers are obsessed by numerology and the being of the one and the two, while their novelists write complex narratives about the impossibility of narrating anything; their politicians meanwhile, all drawn from the wealthiest classes, publicly debate the problem of making more money by reducing the spending of the poor. It is a world which does not require a Brechtian V-effect since it is already objectively estranged. The cosmonaut, stranded for an unforeseeable period on this planet owing to faulty technology (incomprehensibility of set theory or mathemes, ignorance of computer programmes or digitality, insensibility towards hip-hop, Twitter, or bitcoins), wonders how one could ever understand what is by definition radically other; until he meets a wise old alien economist who explains that not only are the races of the two planets related, but that this one is in fact simply a later stage of his own socio-economic system (capitalism), which he was brought up to think of in two stages, whereas he has here found a third one, both different and the same. Ah, he cries, now I finally understand: this is the dialectic! Now I can write my report! Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity.”
* Terry Pratchett: “Not having battles, and doing without kings.”
* Confabulation in the humanities.
* Fantasy scholarship needs theory. Badly.
* The first African science fiction short story? Leonard Flemming’s ‘And So It Came To Pass.’
* Adam Kotsko: Notes toward an overanalysis of a failed sci-fi spin-off.
* Did the Anthropocene Begin with the Deaths of 50 Million Native Americans? Defining the Anthropocene. The Inhuman Anthropocene.
* Scars of the Anthropocene: Japan builds a sea wall.
* Nestle Continues Stealing World’s Water During Drought. A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water.
* Devastating report finds humans killed almost 3 million whales last century.
* Costa Rica powered with 100% renewable energy for 75 straight days.
* It’s May 2065, and Cornell’s Dean of Nonlitigable Revelry is angry. So good.
* Welcome to Ohio State, Where Everything Is for Sale.
It’s true that some of the faculty opposed this deal (but only 84 percent,according to a survey), and it’s also true that since the Australian takeover, prices for parking permits have gone through the roof. But it is not true, as has been reported in some places, that faculty have formed hitchhiking co-ops because they can no longer afford to park on campus.
The important point here is that this deal puts the lie to the complaint we hear so often that college doesn’t prepare people for the real world. Our CFO, the guy who orchestrated this deal, has just landed a very lucrative job with the Australian firm he sold the parking to. It’s called synergy, baby! Look it up.
* UW Struggle: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Public Authority Edition. This Is What Wisconsin’s 2.5% Budget Cut Looks Like.
* Sweet Briar Alumnae Outline Legal Case Against College.
* U.Mass. Faces $3B in Debt. reclaimUC: “That’s nothing.” More links below the chart.
* New York Attorney General Is Investigating Cooper Union’s Decision to Charge Tuition.
* “Why Tenure Matters.” Holy moly.
A former administrator at Chicago State University has accused its president and other officials of firing her in part because she refused their demands that she file a false sexual-harassment charge against a faculty member critical of the leadership.
* University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation.
* Free expression and academic labor.
It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates. They had the protection of the tenure system and often the benefit of faculty unions that could agitate on their behalf. But with so many instructors in a state of minimal institutional protection or authority, lacking long-term contracts, benefits, or collective bargaining, the risk of angered students multiplies. Adjuncts don’t even need to be fired; they can just not get any classes the next semester. Grad students don’t even need to be fired; they can just have their job applications placed on the deny pile. This is why I think the problem is actually probably much larger than the high-profile anecdotes would suggest. The greatest impediment to real pedagogical and political freedom on campus is self-censorship due to labor insecurity. Discussion of contingency is almost entirely absent in Cooke’s essay.
* Academics talking about money.
* On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”
* What If Education Reform Got It All Wrong in the First Place?
* Nearly a quarter century ago, “A Nation at Risk” hit our schools like a brick dropped from a penthouse window. One problem: The landmark document that still shapes our national debate on education was misquoted, misinterpreted, and often dead wrong.
* What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test?
* How one dad opted out his kindergartner from standardized testing.
* Trying the 12-year-old “Slender Man” stabbers as adults is as illogical and barbaric as they are.
* Plane Safety Cards Explained.
*A University of Calgary professor has written “the first scholarly study of the Archie comic,” titled Twelve-Cent Archie. Though some of his colleagues were skeptical, his motivation, Bart Beaty explains, was “to really challenge the kind of snobbery that’s inherent in the way that comics aren’t studied.”
* Meanwhile, we live in very weird times: Archie vs. Predator.
* Ted Cruz, I think, speaks for us all: “My music tastes changed on 9/11.”
* Lead prosecutor apologizes for role in sending man to death row.
* BREAKING: your weed killer is poisonous.
* America’s race problem has been solved, and it was easier than you would have thought.
* SF Bishop Sorry Sprinklers Installed To Roust Homeless Were Discovered ‘Misunderstood.’
* Worst person in the world speaks.
* If you give a lion a CAT scan.
* This Floating McDonalds Has Sat Empty For 28 Years.
* There goes my Plan B: Business Owner Millions in Debt Arrested Two Years After Faking Death.
* “As They Lay Dying”: Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.
* 1. An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child’s forgotten book and mistakenly beliefs that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world. Mustaba Snoopy.
* Texas’ brazen attempt to silence one of its most effective death penalty defense lawyers.
* The Wall Street Journal reports that the leading trade group for compound pharmacists is now discouraging its members from supplying the drugs necessary for lethal injections — in what represents the first official stance the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP) has ever taken on death penalty issues. Relatedly.
* I’m not one for tech solutions generally but they should figure out a way to put microlocal cell phone jammers in cars. Nothing else is going to stop this from happening.
* The best description of social media I’ve ever seen:
* Podcast: Government Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know FBI Agents Can See They’re Creating Terrorists.
* Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad.
* The strange things people Google in every state. The most common job in every state.
* Before Judges, the Godfathers Become Sick Old Grandfathers.
* H-Bomb Physicist Ignores Federal Order to Cut 5,000 Words From Memoir.
* The Apple Watch Is the Perfect Wrist Piece for Dystopia.
* The Second Death of Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe, no longer at ease.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Zelda TV show isn’t going to happen.
* And it’s not all death and destruction: There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined.
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine’s Day
* Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in: Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
* Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted. Oh, okay.
* The UW: Update from the Struggle.
* How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
* The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here’s a link to the full article, which has a definition of “merit” (as/against “prestige”) I can’t make heads or tails of.
* The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft’s work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft’s fiction was “finicky,” “childish,” and “antagonistic to reality.” But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being “shocked” is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren’t reading Jason Shiga’s Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it’s great.
* The social network’s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees — the same level that Facebook strives for. “We’re well below that now,” he said. I’m sure if you keep up what you’re doing you’ll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat: The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he’s a communist.
* Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
* An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC ’16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant. I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice, but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
* To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. “Restore.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
* I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
* When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
* Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him. I’ve come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I’m not a scientist.
* Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where “you didn’t know you were poor.” But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin’.
* The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony’s Secret Spider-Man Deal.
* The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
* By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I’ve resolved to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
* Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
* South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
“If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks,” the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
* NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
* Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn’t ‘Appreciate Her Tone.’
* The arc of history is long, but: Putin Banned From ‘Mighty Taco’ Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc., Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc. Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up: Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week’s The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
* The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals. Wash that “good Vox” taste out of your mouth with this “bad Vox” chaser: The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white prisoners.
* Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer. Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Somber news this Valentine’s Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links
* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.
* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!
* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.
* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.
* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.
* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.
* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.
* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.
* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.
Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.
* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.
* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.
* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.
As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.
It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).
* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.
* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.
* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.
* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.
* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.
* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.
* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.
* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).
* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.
* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.
* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.
* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.
* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.
* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”
* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.
* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.
* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.
* Every episode of Friends at the same time.
* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
* Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette. Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long. As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to discuss this all at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example on Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a campus and for the students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21: “Indigeneities.”
* Climate change comes to Shishmaref, Alaska. Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
* But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: “hands up” transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages—the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, “hands up” isn’t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one’s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other—deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black—become the objects of state violence. “Hands up” cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
* Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man. Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops. California Cop Tweets That He Will ‘Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill’ Protesters. Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality. UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’ Cops Off Campus.
* Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse — If You’re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
* Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
* Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built. They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years. Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase. ASU English by the Numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
* Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
* The ‘Job Market’ That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile: According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp! The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
* The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It’s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
* The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
* Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions, suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
* This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
* Five Stories About Addiction.
* Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It’s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so. On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA’s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
* The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
* Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
* All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
* Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
* 18 Badass Women You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand — a stern “hush hush” to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens’s claim that “our belief is not a belief” could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, “atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.” He claims being an agnostic would be “a truer liberation” since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming — a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett’s Hamm when he exclaims, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”
* The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing—It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k altogether.
Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links
* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.
* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.
* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.
* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.
* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.
* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”
* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.
* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.
* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:
* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.
* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.
Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.
* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.
* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.
* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.
* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.
* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.
* No capital projects but the end of capital.
* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!
* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.
* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.
* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.
* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.
* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.
* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.
* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.
* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.
* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.
* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.
* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.
* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.
* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.
* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.
* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.
* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?
* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.
* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.
* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?
* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.
* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”
* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.
* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.
* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.
* And, finally, MTV is ready to tell my story.
Monday, Monday
* The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
* The exciting return of “Is Health Care Reform Constitutional,” and friends, this one could be a doozy. Here Is What Will Happen If The Supreme Court Strikes Down Obamacare’s Subsidies. And from the archives: Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.
* It’s baaaaack: A totally legal, totally shady way that Republicans could ensure Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
* The Quest for Restoration, or, Gone Girl and Interstellar Considered as the Same Film.
* As a society, we are somewhat obsessed with the risks of dying – from car crashes, cancer, terrorists, Ebola, or any of the thousands of mortal terrors that haunt our nightly newscasts. But we’re less accustomed to consider the risks of living long – of outliving our retirement savings.
* Is Serial problematic? Serial: listeners of podcast phenomenon turn detectives – with troubling results. What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much. Alas, I listened to this this weekend and got hooked despite all my critical detachment.
* Doritos-Flavored Mountain Dew Is Real, PepsiCo Confirms. This is unfathomable. There are some lines never meant to be crossed.
* Can anyone even remember postmodernism?
* World Cup Watch: North Koreans working as ‘state-sponsored slaves’ in Qatar.
* Against spoiler alerts, in the LARoB.
The rise of spoiler-free criticism seems like a move away from criticism as art — and a move toward criticism as an arm of fandom marketing. It’s fine to not want spoilers in your criticism. But there is something distasteful about the assumption that providing spoilers is some sort of lapse in ethics or etiquette. If you don’t treat art first as a consumer product, the spoiler-free doctrine seems to suggest, you’re being cruel and unfair. But critics really are not under any obligation to like what you like or to treat art with one particular kind of reverence. In the name of preserving suspense, the command to remain spoiler-free threatens to make criticism and art more blandly uniform, and less surprising.
* On artificial intelligence in board games.
* Wikipedia’s list of deleted articles with freaky or inappropriate titles.
* Tig Notaro, national treasure.
* For example, research in economics has shown that the wage gap between lighter- and darker-skinned African Americans is nearly as large as the gap between African Americans and whites. In our analysis of data from theNational Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we found that the darkest-skinned African American girls were three times more likely to be suspended at school than their lighter-skinned counterparts — a disparity that is again roughly equal to the gap between blacks and whites. Alternatively put, while African American girls are three times more likely to be suspended than white girls, the darkest-skinned African American girls are several times more likely to experience suspension.
* A boy was accused of taking a backpack. The courts took the next three years of his life.
* Frenzied Financialization: Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer. Finance as a New Terrain for Progressive Urban Politics.
* Former Football Player Sues UNC Over Fake Courses. A University President’s Comments on Rape. Brown University Student Tests Positive For Date-Rape Drug at Frat Party.
* Occasion #7 is all about debt.
* Cloud computing: the race to zero.
* Telepathy is now possible using current technology.
* Let me pause and say here: of course I love many literary dudes. They are not, all of them, smug and condescending. But let me say something else: I thought for a while that the really terrible ones were time limited — that they were products of the 1950s, of a particular time period, and that it really was a viable strategy to just talk about snacks until they all retired. But I have now realized this is not true; new terrible smug dudes are coming up through the ranks. Hydra-like, smug dude attitude keeps springing forth from itself.
* The corals that came back from the dead.
* Billboard ads are expensive to construct, maintain and rent, but they don’t serve any functional purposes — so Michal Polacek redesigned them to house the homeless. The next best thing to just abolishing homelessness.
* In 2012, DiMaggio released the results of his own Safe Routes to School program. Child pedestrian injury rates had plummeted, falling to half their original numbers. “We showed that kids can still be kids,” says DiMaggio. “They can walk and bike to school and be safe.” The project’s federal funding expired last year, however, and no plans exist to extend the initiative to areas beyond the immediate vicinity of the selected schools.
* Obama endorses net neutrality.
* Incredibly misleading ad placement at Amazon inside the book description makes every book seem like it was an Amazon Editors’ Favorite Book of the Year.
* “But a deep look at Mars One’s plan and its finances reveals that not only is the goal a longshot, it might be a scam.” No! No! I won’t believe it!
* How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in 2014’s Close Races?
For His Unwavering Devotion to Weekend Links, Gerry Canavan Has Been Awarded the Nobel Prize for Linkblogging
* Every so often the Nobel Committee accidentally picks a genuinely deserving, genuinely inspiring recipient of the Peace Prize. This year was one. A 2013 profile of Malala Yousafzai. A speech to Pakistani Marxists. What did one Nobel laureate say to the other?
* Every so often the Supreme Court accidentally makes a good decision. Last night’s overturning of Wisconsin’s voter suppression law was one.
* What would the twentieth-century history of English studies look like if we had thought to preserve the records of our teaching? How could that history be different if we had institutional archives of syllabi, student notes, lecture drafts, handouts and seminar papers, just as we have archives of journal articles, drafts of novels, recordings of performances, and committee meeting minutes? What if universities had collected classroom documents alongside other records and traces of the knowledge they create and culture that they value?
* Another lovely Chomsky rant on the university.
So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
* Recent cuts have unfortunately made future cuts inevitable: The University of Wisconsin System is about to do some wholesale, strategic belt-tightening, according to its president. But it’s not all absolutely miserable news:
Regent Janice Mueller noted that of the $1.6 billion total paid to unclassified staff on UW campuses, faculty accounted for $550 million, leaving more than $1 billion going to non-faculty. “That seemed a little out of whack to me,” Mueller said. “I would think faculty salaries would be the larger share.”
I didn’t think Regents were allowed to notice things that like.
* The Excessive Political Power Of White Men In The United States, In One Chart.
* Phil Maciak on the greatness of Transparent.
* Why we need academic freedom: On Being Sued.
* Neoliberalism is the triumph of the state, not its retreat. The case of Mexico.
* On the cultural ideology of Big Data.
* It Would Actually Be Very Simple To End Homelessness Forever.
* It seems that all of Pearson’s critical foundational research and proven classroom results in the world couldn’t get the question 3 x 7 x 26 correct.
* Federal spending was lower this year than Paul Ryan originally asked for. Ha, take that Republicans! Another Obama-led triumph for the left!
* But things will be different once Obama finally becomes president. Obama Plans to Close Guantanamo Whether Congress Likes It Or Not.
* Nightmares: Could Enterovirus D68 Be Causing Polio-Like Paralysis in Kids?
* NYC airport workers walk off job, protesting lack of protection from Ebola risks.
* SF in everything: Malware needs to know if it’s in the Matrix.
* Lady Ghostbusters will be a reboot, almost assuredly a terrible one.
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
* It’s happening again: Vastly Different Stories Emerging In Police Shooting Of St. Louis Teen. The Associated Press is On It:
* Teenagers in prison have a shockingly high suicide rate.
* Roger Ebert: The Collected Wikipedia Edits.
* The many faces of capitalism.
* The University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department issued an apology Wednesday after a list of safety tips posted to the department’s website was criticized for appearing to blame victims of campus crimes, particularly survivors of sexual assault.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings.
* Today in theology: Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church decided Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control.
By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.
* Two Bad Tastes That Taste Bad Together: The US Doesn’t Have Enough Railroads to Keep Up With the Oil Boom.
* For some unfathomable reason somebody handed Cary Nelson another shovel: A Civility Manifesto.
* Another piece on the law and Tommy the Chimp.
* And maybe there are some doors we just shouldn’t open: I’m Slavoj Žižek, AMA.
Sunday Links!
* Did you notice my post last night? Isiah Lavender’s Black and Brown Planets is out! My essay in the book is on Samuel Delany.
* Sketching out a table of contents for Pink Planets: highlights from the history of feminist SF.
* The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism. The war is all too real. But it’s also fake. There is no clash of civilizations, no ideological battle, no grand effort on the part of the United States to defeat terrorism. As long as terrorism doesn’t threaten core US interests, American elites are content to allow it — and help it — flourish. They don’t want to win this war. It will go on forever, unless we make them end it.
* The United States and the “moderate Muslim.”
In each of these, I merely concede the Maher and Harris definition of moderation as a rhetorical act. That definition is of course loaded with assumptions and petty prejudice, and bends always in the direction of American interests. But I accept their definition here merely to demonstrate: even according to their own definition, American actions have undermined “moderation” at every turn.
* Fox News, asking the real questions. “What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?”
* The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever.
* “Social Justice Warriors” and the New Culture War.
* As selective colleges try to increase economic diversity among their undergraduates, the University of Chicago announced Wednesday that it’s embarking on an unusual effort to enroll more low-income students, including the elimination of loans in its aid packages.
* In search of an academic wife.
* “Yes Means Yes” at campuses in California and New York.
* A model state law for banning revenge porn.
* Let the children play: Homework isn’t linked to education outcomes before age 12, and not really after age 12, either.
* Enslaved Ants Regularly Rise In Rebellion, Kill Their Slavers’ Children.
* Ebola Vaccine Delay May Be Due To An Intellectual Property Dispute. This was a bit in Kim Stanle Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series: one company has the cure for cancer and the other company has the delivery mechanism, so both go out of business.
* Elsewhere in the famous efficiency of markets: Marvel will apparently cancel one of its longest-running series out of spite for Fox Studios.
* This Is The First High-Frequency Trader To Be Criminally Charged With Rigging The Market.
* Prison bankers cash in on captive customers.
* The time Larry Niven suggested spreading rumors within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs in order to lower health care costs.
* Suicide, Unemployment Increasingly Linked, Paper Suggests.
* Perfectionism: Could There Be a Downside?
* I’d be really interested to see if this use of eminent domain would survive a legal challenge.
* Data centers are wasting electricity so excessively that only “critical action” can prevent the pollution and rate hikes that some U.S. regions could eventually suffer as a result of power plant construction intended to ensure that the ravenous facilities are well-fed, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis warns.
* From the archives: Lili Loofbourow on the incredible misogyny of The Social Network.
* Moral panic watch: ‘Back-up husbands,’ ‘emotional affairs’ and the rise of digital infidelity.
* Look, a shooting star! Make a wish! Also at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Superman, why are you lying about your X-ray vision?
* Fantasy sports and the coming gambling boom.
* And this looks great for parents and kids: B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures.
Sunday Morning Links
* Call for applications: The 2015-16 postdoc seminar at Rice, “After Biopolitics.”
* In the absence of sparrows: the front page story says you’ve been missing since / November 22, 2012. Everything else it doesn’t say. / In the absence of sparrows: you simply wandered off, past the Sunoco, pockets stuffed. / The door to your apartment is open still—
* Together, these forums, initiatives, and spy teams constitute a sustained effort to suppress meaningful resistance to the university’s privatization program by placing strict boundaries on dissent. Policing Civility.
* Elsewhere in campus civility: The Pentagon Is Giving Grenade Launchers to Campus Police.
* Hence I propose that, roughly speaking, one’s privilege level correlates with the likelihood that expressing anger will make people take your concerns more seriously rather than less — or at the very least, that it will prompt a reaction to you as an individual rather than triggering an immediate generalization about your demographic profile. This is one of the most intimate and insidious things about privilege dynamics: even the right to express perfectly natural and justified human emotions can’t be taken for granted.
* The Paris Review interviews Ray Bradbury.
If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
* …and translates Umberto Eco.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.
* God, I wish these J.G. Ballard books for children were real.
* Previously unknown final chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Detroit’s Under-Funded Fire Departments Use a Soda Can For a Fire Alarm.
* Gape in amazement as The New Yorker‘s famous fact-checkers seriously drop the ball.
* Vox gets nostalgic for the 1994 AT&T “You Will” ad campaign.
* As fast-food workers demonstrate nationwide for a $15 hourly wage, and congressional Republicans fight off a $10 federal minimum, little SeaTac has something to offer the debate. Its neighbor, Seattle, was the first big city to approve a $15 wage, this spring, but that doesn’t start phasing in until next year. SeaTac did it all at once. And, though there’s nothing definitive, this much is clear: The sky did not fall.
* Profiles in courage: Obama to delay his big move on immigration until after election.
* Saving some time before the next invasion.
* Not really how it’s supposed to work: An atheist airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment last month for refusing to take an oath containing “so help me God,” the American Humanist Association said Thursday.
* Peace activism vs. environmental activism.
* Geographers prove no one likes the Jets.
* Female privilege is real: Sharks nine times more likely to kill men than women, study says.
* The eight white identities. I’m not 100% clear on the daylight between White Traitor and White Abolitionist, but otherwise it seems to taxonomize approaches to white supremacy I see on the Internet all the time.
* Could it be possible that police departments are lying when they say suspects handcuffed behind their backs are shooting themselves in the chest with hidden weapons that were somehow not found when they were searched? Truly, a bold provocation. Perhaps it will always be a mystery.
* Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.
* And: you fools: every day is Bill Murray Day.
Gerry Canavan 