Posts Tagged ‘Massey Energy’
What Day Is It? Links
* Jaimee’s book was reviewed in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last week. We spent the weekend in DC for her book launch and reading at the Folger, which was amazing. She just absolutely killed it. Buy her book! And come to her reading in Milwaukee next week…
* Part of the issue is an image problem around the impact of humanities research on the wider world. The public should know about Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke University, whose explanation of the “outbreak narrative” of contagion is changing the way scientists think about the spread of infectious diseases. Yeah they should! Humanities research is groundbreaking, life-changing… and ignored.
* “The Time Traveller,” a story in tweets by Alberto Chimal.
* “Nuclear War” Turns 50: A Fun Game about Human Extinction.
* Professorial anger, then and now. A bit more here.
* Every NYT Higher-Ed Thinkpiece Ever Written. How to write an essay about teaching that will not be published in the NYT, Chronicle, IHE, or anywhere else.
* The semipublic intellectual.
* What happens when you fiddle with just one knob on the infernal machine: rich people get richer.
* Billionaires and superstorms.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Are Public Universities Going to Disappear?
* The care work of the (mostly female) academic: “I estimate that someone cries in my office at least once every three weeks.”
* An incredibly rare Tolkien-annotated map of Middle-Earth was just discovered in a used bookstore.
* Highly irregular: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be considered the eighth book in the Harry Potter series.
* In a final speech to the synod, Pope Francis endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States, while taking some clear swipes at conservatives who hold up church doctrine above all else, and use it to cast judgment on others.
* What Happens if a Former CEO Actually Goes to Prison?
* Cop Attacks High School Student In Her Classroom.
* The Hoverboard Scene In Back To The Future 2 Nearly Killed A Stuntwoman. Amazing story.
* Look, I’m not made of stone.
* A Google Tour Through The Underground: How to Read a Russian Novel Set in the Moscow Metro.
* NLRB Returns to Grad Student Unions.
* Bring on the climate trials: ICN has demonstrated that as early as the late 1970s, Exxon scientists were briefing top executives that climate change was real, dangerous, and caused by their product. By the early 1980s, their own climate models were predicting—with great accuracy—the track the global temperature has taken ever since. Meanwhile.
* David Mitchell on A Wizard of Earthsea.
* College sports: still the worst.
* Portugal has apparently smartly baked the potential for coups in its official constitutional order.
* Emolument took data from both the US and UK and found that while science grads get a bit of a headstart straight out of university in terms of pay, in later life it’s people with humanities degrees who tend to get bigger pay cheques.
* How to Make a Virtuoso Violinist: One mother’s devastating study of 100 musical prodigies.
* A DEA Agent Who Helped Take Down Silk Road Is Going to Prison for Unbelievable Corruption.
* The Ecological Uncanny: On the “Southern Reach” Trilogy.
* Boondoggle watch: The City of Milwaukee has been awarded a $14.2 million federal grant for construction of a spur connecting the streetcar with the lakefront.
* “Many Colleges’ New Emergency Plan: Try to Account for Every Possibility.” Well, that’ll work.
* Should a Cal State Fullerton math professor be forced to have his students use $180 textbook, written by his boss? Why is Cal State letting the math department chair require his own book?
* “They didn’t hire me, they hired me minus 35 pounds,” Fisher recently quipped.
* The arc of history is long, but Subway will finally pay for calling an eleven-inch sandwich a “footlong.” Next up: they shouldn’t be allowed to call that bread.
* Miracles and wonders: Landmark Huntington’s trial starts.
* Star Wars but with philosophers.
* “Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas.”
* Sesame Street will introduce an autistic muppet.
* I hate it when Yglesias is right, but sometimes he’s right: Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble. Down-ballot the Obama years have been a complete disaster in ways no one in the party seems ready or able to face.
* Wesleyan University’s student assembly is considering substantial cuts to the student newspaper’s budget, in a move that is surely *completely unrelated* to a truly stupid recent uproar when the paper published an unpopular op-ed. The paper is soliciting donations to stay alive.
* My brilliant colleague C.J. Hribal on his old house.
* The secret linguistic life of girls.
* Talkin’ Trash with Brian Thill and Pinar Yoldas.
* Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
* A literary history of whales.
* The Deadly Legacy of HIV Truthers.
* Things Men In Literature Have Died From.
* Exploring ‘Cartozia Tales,’ The Crowdfunded Fantasy Anthology for Readers of All Ages.
* Nabokov v. Kafka on drawing the monster.
* “Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here”: throwing shade the Le Guin way.
* Guys, we are definitely living inside a simulation. And possibly just a few years away from either crashing it or figuring out how to hack it.
* And teach the controversy: Luke Skywalker, Sith Lord. I really think this is just an effective viral marketing ploy, but I’ll concede I’m starting to have my doubts.
No One Could Have Predicted
Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.
Monday Links!
* Fredric Jameson previews his new book, Representing Capital.
You will now have understood that this distinction between politics and economics, between the achievable Utopia of the Utopian planners and the deep unconscious absolute Utopian impulse, is one between the social-democratic moment and the moment of communism. Communism can only be posited as a radical, even unimaginable break; socialism is an essentially political process within our present, within our system, which is to say within capitalism itself. Socialism is capitalism’s dream of a perfected system. Communism is that unimaginable fulfillment of a radical alternative that cannot even be dreamt.
* Unexpectedly, grad school lowers your blood pressure. It doesn’t seem right to me either.
* The GOP thinks not enough people are unemployed. Calculated Risk has a brief history of the current catastrophe.
* Wisconsin has some buyer’s remorse.
* More on hydrofracking: How radioactive is Pittsburgh’s drinking water? What’s fracking going to do to New York?
* First Big Coal Broke the Union. Then It Broke This Town.
* Trailer for the American remake of The King’s Speech.
* Scientists in Hollywood. The focus is on Natalie Portman and Mayim Bialik.
* And Jon Hamm, Superman. I’m sure yet another version of the origin story will be great, though.
Tuesday
* Blasphemy! Mattel is changing the rules of Scrabble to allow proper nouns.
* Towards a theory of erotic capital.
* Allen sends along three articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the disastrous job market in the humanities:
* Frank Donoghue: An Open Letter From a Director of Graduate Admissions.
* Peter Conn: We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities.
* Lee S. Shulman: Doctoral Education Shouldn’t Be a Marathon.
Now I’m depressed.
* Ambinder has more SCOTUS speculation, explaining Obama’s likely strategy and why Elena Kagan is widely believed to be the frontrunner for the nomination.
* ExxonMobil paid no federal income tax in 2009 on $45.2 billion in profit. Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid the same amount between 1998 and 2005.
* The West Virginia mining disaster that has killed at least 25 people appears to have been caused in part by corporate neglect of safe conditions.
* Frum: Don’t listen to Fox. Coburn: Don’t listen to Fox. Good advice.
Gerry Canavan 
