Posts Tagged ‘mascots’
I Have (Not a Joke) 300 Tabs Open and This Afternoon I Am Closing Them All: Election Night Links!
Seriously, can you even imagine how aggressively evil the GOP nominee will have to be in order to get people fired up about Clinton?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 19, 2014
I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t been able to tend to my open tabs at all. There’s over 300 — and I’m not leaving this room until I’ve closed them all. Let’s go!
* Really, I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to shamelessly self-promote: I missed announcing my trip to Atlanta for SLSA 2016 and my presentations on “Literary Studies after Blackfish” and the upcoming almost-almost-done issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding,” as well as my New Inquiry review of the (fantastic) end to Liu Cixin’s (fantastic) Three-Body trilogy. My new essay on “Geriatric Zombies” from The Walking Med was namechecked as part of a larger zombie news report in the Seattle Times. Most importantly I haven’t been able to hype my Octavia Butler book, which is printed and apparently shipping. I’ve even held one in my hands!
* Meanwhile, here’s my guess for tonight’s final results, just to get it out of the way: 340-198.
* CFP: Letters to Octavia Butler. CFP: The Comics of Alison Bechdel. CFP: English Studies in Ruins? CFP: The World of Harry Potter.
* A new issue of the Eaton Journal in Archival Research in Science Fiction is out, including a piece from Larisa Mikhaylova on Star Trek fandom in Russia.
* French town upholds law against UFOs.
* Invisible Planets / Invisible Frameworks — Assembling an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF. I’ve been reading the Invisible Planets collection and it’s great.
* Why we should lower the voting age in America.
* Žižek on the lesser evil. Jameson on fascism, but not yet. Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage For 2016 Campaign. Americans, Politics, and Social Media. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say. The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List. No, “we” are not collectively responsible for anything. Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right. Ivanka is the real threat. A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. And did someone order a Constitutional crisis with a 4-4 Supreme Court?
* What Happens if You Vote and Die Before Election Day? Too late for all of us, alas.
* In contrast to the Fordist society observed by Gramsci, power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to avoid the constraints of critical reason. Increasingly, it is non-representational codes—of software, finance, human biology—that mediate between past, present and future, allowing society to cohere. Where, for example, employee engagement cannot be achieved via cultural or psychological means, increasingly business is looking to solutions such as wearable technology, that treat the worker as an item of fixed capital to be monitored physically, rather than human capital to be employed. The key human characteristics are those that are repeated in a quasi-mechanical fashion: footsteps, nightly sleep, respiration, heartbeat. These metronomic qualities of life come to represent each passing moment as yet another one of the same. The New Neoliberalism.
* “We are all Thomas More’s children”: 500 years of Utopia. And at LARB.
* How America Outlawed Adolescence. The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child.
* Inside the NSA’s For-Sale Spy Town. The Indiana Town That Modernism Built.
* Where Ph.D.s Work. IPFW Community Shocked by Restructuring Recommendations. Last month’s strike at Harvard. And its results. A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats.’ Saudi college student in Wisconsin dies after assault. Johns Hopkins threatens to close its interdisciplinary Humanities Center, sparking outcry from students and faculty members. San Diego State University tuition, 1959. How State Budget Cuts Affect Your Education.
* The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity.
* The American Association of University Professors has launched an investigation focused on the dismissal of Nathanial Bork, who had taught philosophy courses at the college for six years before he was dismissed. The AAUP says that his dismissal raises concerns both because of the issues he raises about rigor and also because he was fired shortly after he complained about the situation to the Higher Learning Commission, the college’s accreditor. Further, Bork was active in efforts to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at the college.
* A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award. Love this.
* “University Paid for Bigfoot Expedition.”
* Starship Troopers coming back just as documentary footage of 2016. A darker, grittier Muppet Babies, for a tragic time.
* Quentin Tarantino still insists he’s going to stop at 10 movies.
* Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization.’
* “Capitalism Broke Earth, Let’s Protect Mars.”
* Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup Changing Computing Forever.
* The video for Soul Asylum’s 1993 smash hit featured real missing kids. Some eventually came home; some never did.
* Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery. Football Alters the Brains of Kids as Young as 8. Why treating diabetes keeps getting more expensive. The Other Sister: Returning Home to Care for an Autistic Sibling.
* Inmates Explain How They’d Run Prisons.
* If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women.
* Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow. Bathroom air freshener causes emergency response at nuclear site.
* Why can’t the Star Trek timeline advance?
* The Venom From This Snake Will Make Your Life a Living Hell.
* Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange.
* Why Did This Guy Collect 500 Screenshots of Soda Machines in Video Games? Because He’s a Genius. And elsewhere on the Jacob Brogan science beat: Everyone Poops. Some Animals Eat It. Why?
* Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Thumb U.N. won’t intervene.
* Now Is The Perfect Time For The Indians To Quietly Abandon Chief Wahoo.
* Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces. How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.
* The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year.
* In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history: The Pyramid at the End of the World.
* Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million in Jerry Sandusky Case.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Yellowstone’s “Zone of Death.” And I’ll take this one too: The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic.
* How Doctor Strange went from being a racist Asian caricature to a magical white savior.
* A new favorite poem:
here's a sweet short poem by Tom French, who I'll be reading with this Sun., 1pm @IrishArtsCenter – y'all should come pic.twitter.com/VN2Yofc1yp
— Jana Prikryl (@janaprikryl) November 3, 2016
* Animal minds: the new anthropomorphism.
* You weren’t educated, you were trained.
* Twenty-first century Victorians.
* How We Tell Campus Rape Stories After Rolling Stone.
* Native lives matter. Tribe vows to fight North Dakota pipeline through winter. The world watches. A Standing Rock Syllabus.
* Superheroes and sadness. Pixar and sadness.
* Presenting The Black Mirror Expanded Universe.
* Wildlife numbers more than halve since 1970s in mass extinction. Inside the Frozen Zoo That Could Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life.
* The secret history of Teaching with Calvin & Hobbes.
* A bad idea, but fine: The Adventures of Young Dumbledore.
* Kardashev Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist.
* And frankly you had me at LEGO, but I like the rest too: LEGO’s New Line of Female Superheroes Is the Toy We Deserve.
quick why was it important than Obama beat Hillary Clinton again
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 15, 2014
Written by gerrycanavan
November 8, 2016 at 3:52 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 2016?, AAUP, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing media bias, adolescence, aliens, Alison Bechdel, alt right, America, animal intelligence, animal minds, animals, autism, banana republics, Beatniks, big league, Bigfoot, Black Mirror, Blackfish, books, Borges, butterflies, Calvin and Hobbes, Canada, CFPs, Chief Wahoo, children, China, China Miéville, Chinese science fiction, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civilization, Cixin Liu, class struggle, Cleveland Indians, cloning, comics, computers, concussions, Cornell, Death's End, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, despair, diabetes, disease, Doctor Strange, Donald Trump, Dumbledore, Eaton Journal, education, Electoral College, English departments, fandom, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, fascism, film, football, France, games, general election 2016, grief, Harry Potter, Harvard, Heterodox Academy, Hillary Clinton, How did we survive the Cold War?, ice sheet collapse, IPFW, Ivanka Trump, Jameson, Japan, Johns Hopkins, journamalism, Julian Assange, Kadashev type III, Ken Liu, kids today, lame excuses for why I haven't been blogging enough, LEGO, literary criticism, lower the voting age, Magic Leap, maps, Marvel, mascots, mass extinction, medicine, men, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, Muppet Babies, music, my life as a manchild, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, Native Lives Matter, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Inquiry, North Dakota, not yet, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, obituary, Octavia Butler, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, Penn State, Peter Pan, philosophy, Pixar, poems, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, poop, power, prison-industrial complex, prisons, public education, public universities, racism, rape, rape culture, rich people, Rolling Stone, ruin porn, ruins, Runaway Train, sadness, San Diego State University, Sid Meier, Sir Thomas More, SLSA, snakes, social media, soda machines, Soul Asylum, Standing Rock, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Stradivarius, superheroes, Supreme Court, Tarantino, the Anthropocene, the Arctic, the humanities, the law, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, thumb wars, Tom Hayden, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, UVA, UW Green Bay, Victorians, viewpoint diversity, violins, voting, war on education, we, white supremacist, Wikileaks, Wisconsin, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, writing, xkcd, Yellowstone, zombies, zoos, Zork, Žižek
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”
* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.
* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.
* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.
* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.
* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.
* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.
* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?
* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.
* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.
* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.
* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”
* The paradox of the underperforming professor.
* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.
* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.
“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”
And this used to be a free country.
* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.
* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.
* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.
* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.
* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”
* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.
* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.
* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.
* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.
* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”
* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.
* Point: “The green case for fracking.”
* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.
* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.
* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.
* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.
* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.
* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?
* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.
* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.
* Punishment Park is on YouTube.
* How privilege became a provocation.
* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.
* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.
* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.
* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 16, 2015 at 7:34 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a society incapable of learning, academia, Adblock, adjunctification, adjuncts, air travel, Aladdin, alien invasion, Amy Schumer, Andy Daly, apocalypse, asbestos, bailouts, Bill Cosby, books, Brazil, Bush, California, CFPs, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, code, comedy, communists are everywhere, computers, crayons, disability, disruption, domestic surveillance, earthquakes, ecology, FBI, finance capital, Firefly, fraud economy, futurity, Galaxy Quest, genies, Go Set a Watchman, Greece, Guillermo del Toro, Harper Lee, history, hoaxes, holograms, How the University Works, hydrofracking, if you want a vision of the future, innovation, Jabba the Hutt, John Pat Leary, Kickstarter, kids today, Kung Fury, LEGO, longevity, MAD, mascots, math, metrics, military-industrial-academic complex, my scholarly empire, NASA, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pensions, plagiarism, Pluto, politics, privilege, prostheses, psychology, Punishment Park, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Review, Richard Grusin, Robin Williams, robot soccer, robots, Ronald McDonald, sandwiches, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Scott Walker, sea level rise, Seattle, slavery, soccer, socialism, spinsters, Star Wars, Stephen King, student debt, student loans, student movements, student writing, superheroes, surveillance society, televsiont, Texas, the 1980s, the humanities, the Internet, The Onion, the rule of law, theology by other means, theory, Title IX, To Kill a Mockingbird, torture, TurnItIn, University of Wisconsin, Vatican, vegans, Wisconsin, words
Weekend Links!
* Malcolm Harris reviews Ivory Tower.
Speaking for the elite private liberal arts school is Wesleyan President Michael Roth, who argues for small classes, a balanced education and a lot of contact with professors. “Ivory Tower” gives Roth a fair hearing, but he can’t avoid coming off like a huckster of humanities when pitching the $60,000-plus annual price tag to the parents of potential students. (Hell, for 60 grand you could rent an apartment in Brooklyn and your own post-grad fellow.) The cost of this kind of education makes it both a model of learning for learning’s sake — yes, a high cost but a priceless reward — and totally inaccessible to most young people.
* Massive data dump on academic employment.
* Vladimir Nabokov’s Unpublished Screenplay Notes For Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Lolita.’
* Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Ian Bogost, when the walls fell.
* Let’s pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. No More Imperial Crusades.
* Prosecutors closing in on Chris Christie and Scott Walker. How the State of Wisconsin alleges Scott Walker aides violated the law, in 1 chart.
* Aren’t You A Little Short To Be A Stormtrooper? The Passing of the Armor to A Bullied Little Girl. Fighting bullies with stormtroopers.
* The golden age of girls’ running.
* Higher Ed Pays a High Price for Mediocrity.
* James Madison University Punished Sexual Assault With ‘Expulsion After Graduation.’ Department of Education Offers Proposed Campus Sexual Assault Regulations. Rape Victims At Fundamentalist Christian College Say They Were Told To Repent For Their Sins.
* “Turn Detroit into Drone Valley.” Sigh.
* “The death of a great American city: why does anyone still live in Detroit?”
* “By denying water service to thousands, Detroit is violating the human right to water.”
* What we Yo about when we Yo about Yo.
* In celebration of Juneteenth.
* I’m losing hope for Episode 7, but Episodes 8 and 9 have promise.
* One more on Louie: This isn’t a model for romance. It’s a blueprint for abuse.
* Labor and the Locavore shows that our society’s tendency to idealize local food allows small farmers to pay workers substandard wages, house them in shoddy labor camps, and quash their ability to unionize to demand better working conditions.
* “It’s a much bigger, more powerful question to ask, If today we are using management techniques that were also used on slave plantations,” she says, “how much more careful do we need to be? How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?”
* The secret history of Chief Wahoo.
* Pennsylvania Instructed Its Employees To Ignore Residents Sickened By Drilling. Duke Energy Was Warned About Potential For Dan River Spill Decades Ago, Documents Show.
* Marriage, kids, college, and class.
* Great moments in governance.
In Kansas, 9-year-old Spencer Collins has been told by authorities that he must stop sharing books with his neighbors, and close the little free library–honestly, it’s just a bookshelf–in his yard.
* The sixth season of The Twilight Zone we almost had.
* And Better Call Saul already has a second season. We just have to wait to see if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
Written by gerrycanavan
June 20, 2014 at 9:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, AMC, apps, austerity, baseball, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, bullies, campaign finance reform, Chief Wahoo, Chris Christie, class struggle, Cleveland, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, Detroit, drones, Duke, ecology, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Euclid, feminism, film, food, fracking, games, geometry, girls, governmentality, How the University Works, human rights, humanitarianism, imperialism, Iraq, Juneteenth, kids, Kubrick, labor, libraries, locavores, Lolita, Louie, malls, marriage, mascots, military interventionism, millennials, misogyny, money in politics, Nabokov, Native American issues, neoliberalism, North Carolina, oil, oil spills, Pennsylvania, politics, pollution, rape, rape culture, Rod Serling, running, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, slavery, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, television, the Anthropocene, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Twilight Zone, Title IX, TNG, tuition, water, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?
Friday Links!
* On the docket in Cultural Preservation today: David Graeber, “The Sadness of Post-Workerism, or, ‘Art and Immaterial Labour’ Conference: A Sort of Review” (main reading); Michael Bérubé, “American Studies without Exceptions” and Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” (optional).
* A great postdoc, if you’re looking: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for 21st Century Studies Provost Postdoc Fellow, “Humanities Futures.”
* “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
* To reform higher ed, we need a federal job guarantee.
* 2013 Is the Fourth Hottest Year on Record. 37 years straight of above-average temperatures. Soon, Sochi Won’t Be Cold Enough To Reliably Host The Winter Olympics.
* BREAKING: Rich people are ludicrously rich, everyone else totally broke. It’s fantastic.
* I had no idea cheerleaders were so radically underpaid. I’d always thought it was waged, full-time work — like being a mascot is.
* There Has Been An Average Of One School Shooting Every Other School Day So Far This Year.
* Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show. Nation Back On Board With SeaWorld Following Awesome Orca Trick.
* Officials looking for info on second chemical in WV spill. Behind West Virginia’s Massive Chemical Spill, A History Of Poverty And Pollution. ‘We live in a human sacrifice zone.’
* The FBI Just Busted the King of Revenge Porn.
* Obama Promises Governmentwide Scrutiny of Campus Rape.
* Booz Allen Hamilton Looking To Hire Snowden Catchers. I bet Edward Snowden would be great at this job.
* Durham police practices under microscope by Human Relations Commission.
* Low-Wage Federal Workers Walk Off Job.
* The Academic Job Cover Letter I Wanted to Write.
* These 11 Popular Sodas Tested Positive for a Potential Carcinogen. Pepsi One Won’t Give You Cancer as Long as You Don’t Drink a Whole Can.
* CNN is now officially the worst.
* New Hampshire is considering institutionalizing jury nullification. I’m strongly in favor of all good uses of jury nullification and strongly opposed to all bad uses of it, so I’m pretty torn here.
* Obummer Watch: Southern leg of Keystone XL opens in U.S.
* My friend Jennifer Whitaker reviews my friend Allison Seay’s poetry collection, To See the Queen.
* Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one.
* The duties of professors at college and universities.
* Chicken Soup for the Neoliberal Soul.
* Why breaking is funny, and when it isn’t.
* Researchers predict Facebook will die out “like a disease.”
* Canavan’s Razor comes to Superman comics.
* “Yale College seeks smart students from poor families. They’re out there—but hard to find.” More here.
* As part of a settlement between the Archdiocese of Chicago and the victims of 30 pedophile priests, a cache of 6000 documents has been made public, detailing the Catholic Church’s efforts over many years to cover up sexual abuse and protect accused priests.
* If there must be a surveillance state, at least let it be steampunk.
* Chessmate-in-one puzzles on the iPad.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 24, 2014 at 7:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2013, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adjuncts, Allison Seay, American Studies, animal rights, animals, Barack Obama, Bob Dylan, Breaking Bad, bullshit jobs, Canavan's Razor, cancer, Catholicism, Center for 21st Century Studies, cheerleaders, chess, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college, comedy, cultural preservation, David Graeber, delicious Coca-Cola, dolphins, Durham, dystopia, ecology, Edward Snowden, Facebook, Facts of Life, feminism, football, games, guaranteed basic income, guns, How the University Works, iPads, jury nullification, Keystone XL, labor, maps, mascots, mass shootings, Michael Bérubé, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, New Hampshire, NFL, North Carolina, oil, Olympics, poetry, police violence, politics, pollution, postdocs, poverty, rape, rape culture, religion, revenge porn, revolution, rich people, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Sea World, sexual abuse, silence, Sochi, soda, sports, steampunk, strikes, Superman, surveillance society, television, The Onion, therapy, Ukraine, unions, UWM, water, West Virginia, whales, what it is I think I'm doing, will you please be quiet please, Wisconsin, work, Yale
However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That
* First, they cast Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and I said nothing.
* de Boer v. Schuman re: Hopkins. It’s not the supply, it’s the demand.
* The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.
* Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes.
* If I worked at Kansas University, this post might get me fired.
* Rortybomb v. the social safety net.
* X-tend the Allegory: What if the X-Men actually were black? Essay version. Via.
* “Men’s Rights” Trolls Spammed Us With 400 Fake Rape Reports.
* The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency.’ It’s already here. 96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change. The year in fossil fuel disasters.
* “Unfathomable”: Why Is One Commission Trying to Close California’s Largest Public College? ACCJC Gone Wild.
* San Jose State University has all but ended its experiment to offer low-cost, high-quality online education in partnership with the massive open online course provider Udacity after a year of disappointing results and growing dismay among faculty members.
* Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses.
* CSU-Pueblo revising budget downward; up to 50 jobs at risk, loss of $3.3M.
* For-Profit College Oakbridge Academy Of Arts Suddenly Shuts Down.
* “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” the billionaire told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”
* In Defense of ‘Entitlements.’
* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.
* “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
* Scott Walker signals he will sign school mascot bill.
* Thieves steal risqué calendars, leave protest signs.
* DC Passes Great Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Days Bills. What’s in Them?
* France institutes a carbon tax.
* Community Season 5 Feels Like An Old Friend Has Finally Come Home.
* 62 Percent of Restaurant Workers Don’t Wash Their Hands After Handling Raw Beef.
* Shock in Ohio: No evidence of plot to register non-citizen voters. That only proves how successful the conspiracy has been!
* Wow: Tampa Toddler Thriving After Rare 5-Organ Transplant.
* The Decline of the US Death Penalty. Still illegal to murder people in Detroit (maybe). 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 20123. Data Broker Removes Rape-Victims List After Journal Inquiry.
* The true story of the original “welfare queen.”
* Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.
* The 16 Colleges and Universities Where It’s Hardest to Get an A.
* Michael Pollan on plant intelligence.
* Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter.
* Marriage equality reaches New Mexico.
* A vigil planned as a peaceful remembrance of a teen killed in police custody ended with tear gas and arrests Thursday night in downtown Durham.
* An oral history of the Cones of Dunshire.
* On scarcity and the Federation.
* “Characters” trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, Afrofuturism, allegory, Ant-Man, apocalypse, Bitcoin, calling in, carbon tax, catastrophe, Charlie Stross, charts, City College of San Francisco, class struggle, climate change, college, comics, community, CSU Pueblo, Dan Harmon, deafness, death, death penalty, Detroit, Durham, ecology, entitlements, film, for-profit schools, fossil fuels, France, gay rights, God works in mysterious ways, grade inflation, graduate student life, How the University Works, hygiene, illness, income inequality, insanity, Johns Hopkins, Kansas State University, labor, LEGO, manifestoes, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, mascots, Mayor Bloomberg, meat, medicine, men's rights activism, Michael Pollan, minimum wage, misogyny, MOOCs, mundane SF, Native American issues, New Mexico, no future, Ohio, over-educated literary theory PhDs, paid sick days, Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd, photographs, plants, police brutality, politics, post-scarcity, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, rape, rape culture, restaurants, rich people, San Jose State, scarcity, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, silence, social media, stamps, Star Trek, television, tenure, The Cones of Dunshire, the future is now, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the way we die now, true crime, voter fraud, voter suppression, Washington DC, welfare queens, Wes Anderson, words, X-Men, Žižek
And Some Links
* The theme for MLA 2014 is “Vulnerable Times.”
A decade has passed since the National Collegiate Athletic Association rolled out its academic reform package. In that time, there is strong evidence that the reforms designed to open access to higher education to more athletes and punishing coaches and institutions failing at academics came at the expense of the integrity of the academy. The landscape of the NCAA’s program is scorched with scandals surrounding admissions, academic fraud, major clustering and clever gaming of the system for the wealthiest institutions to avoid penalties. We conclude that it has significantly damaged higher education.
* Kennesaw State to add football. I’m shocked any Board of Trustees would volunteer to take on this kind of liability, knowing what we know…
* Tesla catches the New York Times deliberately tanking its review of its Model S electric car, while at the same time revealing the truly staggering amount of data they can log while you’re driving.
* Apocalypse now: “Think of carbon as a global pollutant that affects the ocean everywhere it touches the sky,” explains Stanford University marine science professor and Hopkins Marine Station director Steve Palumbi. What does ocean acidification mean for sea life?
* Sad coda to the Oscar Pistorius story: Olympic Hero Oscar Pistorius Charged With Murder in Shooting Death of Girlfriend.
* Abolish the states watch: Scott Walker edition.
Yesterday Scott Walker finally announced his much-awaited decision about how to deal with the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. And he managed to come up with a “solution” that simultaneously lets him express solidarity with his nullification-minded soul-mates in the Deep South while increasing federal involvement in health insurance in his state and also costing Wisconsin taxpayers some serious money! Quite the triple-gainer, eh?
* Woman Says She’s Had the Same Song Stuck in Her Head for Three Years.
* New Atlanta Braves Logo Features Gruesome Depiction Of Trail Of Tears.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 14, 2013 at 11:54 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Atlanta Braves, climate change, college football, college sports, demographics, disability, ecology, electric cars, federalism, football, guns, health care, How the University Works, Kennesaw State, liability, love, madness, mascots, Medicaid, MLA, music, NCAA, New York Times, nullification, ocean acidification, Olympics, Oscar Pistorius, poetry, politics, Republicans, Risk, Scott Walker, the fifty states, trail of tears, vulnerability, Wisconsin
Still OoT But With Unexpected Hotel Wifi Links
* Ripped from the pages of Infinite Jest, a playable version of Eschaton. (via)
* Via Pete Lit, federal government to use its immense buying power to benefit society.
By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.
This looks to me like perhaps a first case of the end-runs Obama will have to make around our broken legislative institutions if he hopes to avoid a failed presidency. Another good sign: the final embrace of sidecar reconciliation to finish the job on health care.
* Of course, that headline in the New York Times gets it wrong, as Steve Benen has been desperately trying to explain to anyone who will listen: Democrats don’t need to pass health care via reconciliation because health care already passed through the regular order. Regardless, the Republicans are promising a full-on freakout if reconciliation is used; what might they do?
* “Pentagon fesses up to 800 pages’ worth of potentially illegal spying, including peace groups and Planned Parenthood.” Hey, thanks for admitting it! Of course we won’t prosecute you; you were just protecting the homeland!
* Eliza Dushku to ruin another Joss Whedon production.
* The pornography of infinity: China Miéville on J.G. Ballard.
* J.D. Salinger v. Raiders of the Lost Ark.
* Wikipedia’s list of landings on other planets. Did the Soviets think there was life on Venus? They certainly seem to have thought there was something there. Via Boing Boing.
* Secret origins of the cellar door line from Donnie Darko.
* Really good reading of the U.K. version of The Office that focuses on Gervais’s critique of celebrity culture to explain, among other things, how David Brent could possibly have won a promotion on a 5-2 vote of the company board or been hired by a consulting firm—as well as why the U.S. version, in dropping this thematic angle, will always be intrinsically inferior.
* If I were a Brigham Young student, here’s the process I would have to undertake to grow my beloved beard.
* Students at the University of Mississippi want Admiral Akbar as their new mascot. I wholeheartedly endorse this effort.
* Also Via MeFi: Personal pop-culture rules. “No Robin Williams” and “anything involving dinosaurs” are two I think I follow.
* And Matt Yglesias selfishly takes a stand against one of our most-beloved cultural institutions. No special rights for late-in-the-alphabet people!
Written by gerrycanavan
February 27, 2010 at 10:58 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, activists, Admiral Akbar, alphabetism, apocalypse, Barack Obama, beards, Brigham Young University, Bush, celebrity culture, cellar door, China Miéville, David Foster Wallace, dinosaurs, domestic surveillance, Donnie Darko, Eliza Dushku, Eschaton, fantasy sports, film, health care, Indiana Jones, Infinite Jest, J.D. Salinger, J.G. Ballard, Joss Whedon, mascots, Mormons, NASA, nuclearity, Olympics, other planets, outer space, peace, Pentagon, Planned Parenthood, politics, pop culture, Raiders of the Lost Ark, reconciliation, Republicans, Ricky Gervais, Robin Williams, rules, science fiction, socialism, Soviet Union, Star Wars, Supreme Court, the filibuster, The Office, the pornography of infinity, the Senate, truth and reconciliation commissions, Venus, wiretapping
NYEE Links! A Whole Lot of Them!
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* What happened when slaves and free men were shipwrecked together. Amazing read.
* Schedule for the MLA Subconference.
* The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. The full report.
* “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.”
* Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote.
* “Obscure law lets Prince of Wales set off nuclear bombs.”
* “The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: at least 33,480 Americans dead.”
* Your weekly must-read: N.K. Jemisin has a new SF/F column in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
* Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation.
* Adjuncts at Loyola University Chicago Want a Union. Will the Jesuit University Respect Their Demands?
* The Absolute Disruption blog has some thoughts on spoilerphobia and The Force Awakens, with a digression through my Tolkien/TFA piece. That piece has had some interesting patterns of circulation, incidentally; the Salon piece did well on Facebook and Twitter while the WordPress version has had a second life in the conservative blogosphere by way of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen….
* George Lucas, genius. Another oral history of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Star Wars and the death of culture. What was cut from The Force Awakens. 13 Story Ideas That Were Dropped from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What is a Mary Sue, and does Star Wars: The Force Awakens have one? I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. Anakin Skywalker and the Methods of Rationality.
* Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use.
* “This iconic picture will live in history. When a women escaped ISIS territory and was able to wear color again.” More links after the photo.
* A suggestion for search committees, and some questions.
* The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales.
* From the archives: The Really Big One.
* ESPN is such a money pit it’s even dragging Star Wars down.
* My life as a job creator.
* Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game.
* Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death. How Can No One Be to Blame for Tamir Rice’s Death? How Philadelphia prosecutors protect police misconduct: Cops get caught lying — and then get off the hook. Police Rarely Criminally Charged for On-Duty Shootings. When is it legal for a cop to kill you?
* Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories.
* ASU’s Global Freshman Academy Is a Complete Bust.
* Being Véra Nabokov.
* Today in loopholes: consumptive demand.
* Loophole watch, part two: Pope Francis: atheists who follow their consciences will be welcome in Heaven.
* Why not cubic centimeters, or raw tonnage? Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”
* Great moments in political campaigning.
* This story has everything.
* Like Goodfellas but for embezzling from a fruitcake company.
* For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions.
* Africa and the Looting Machine.
* The House That Marx Built. Marxism for Tomorrow.
* How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.
* NSFW, obviously, but: These Real Women Want to Show You How to Give Them an Orgasm.
* Everything is totally normal, don’t even sweat it.
* We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles’ Enormous Methane Leak.
* The Opium Wars, Neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.
* The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books.
* The DMCA poisoned the Internet of Things in its cradle.
* More than one-third of wells in dairy farm-intensive Kewaunee County were found to be unsafe because they failed to meet health standards for drinking water, according to a new study.
* William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer.
* This Man Just Guessed How Much the Movies Have Spent “Rescuing” Matt Damon.
* For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.
* Your 2016 TV Preview.
* Why Do Employers Still Routinely Drug-Test Workers?
* When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.
* Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.
* After difficult summer, UW-Madison fighting off efforts to poach top professors. The view from the provinces.
* The Coolest Images From National Geographic’s 2015 Photo Contest. This Is Your Brain on Nature.
* Star Wars Lego Sets Exploding at 3,000 Frames per Second Is the Best Guilty Pleasure.
* When Bobby Shrugged.
* The science myths that will not die.
* Because you demanded it! The DeBoerist Manifesto.
* And Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. But don’t you believe it! Bring on 2016!
Written by gerrycanavan
December 30, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Arizona State University, bad handwriting, Bobby Fischer, Cascadia Subduction Zone, Catholicism, chess, Cleveland, climate change, coloring books, consumptive demand, corruption, cultural studies, culture, Delaware, Disney, DMCA, don't read the comments, drug testing, earthquakes, ecology, Eliezer Yudkowsky, embezzlement, English departments, entrepeneurs, epidemics, Episode 7, ESPN, fairy tales, fallout, Fallout 4, feminism, football, Freddie deBoer, galactic empires, Galápagos, games, gender, genius, George Lucas, Goodfellas, graves, guns, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, innovation, ISIS, Jesuits, leftism, LEGO, loopholes, Loyola, Madison, manifestos, Marx, Marxism, Mary Sue, mascots, methane, MLA, money, MOOCs, my media empire, mythology, N.K. Jemisin, National Geographic, neoliberalism, NSFW, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, opium wars, orgasms, Pacific Northwest, pacifism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photography, police corruption, police state, police violence, pornography, Prince Charles, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, science, science fiction, search committees, SETI, sex, sexuality, shipwrecks, slavery, spoilers, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, superexploitation, Tamir Rice, taxes, television, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, the CDC, The Force Awakens, the internet of things, the Pope, the prequels, the rich are different, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, true crime, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USPS, Vera Nabokov, violence, Vonnegut, water, Wisconsin