Posts Tagged ‘McKenzie Wark’
Christmas Hangover Links
* This was fun: My Tolkien/The Force Awakens mini-essay got picked up by Salon.
* Is Star Wars setting up Poe Dameron as its first queer protagonist? Rey is not a role model for little girls. The prior texts against which this film needs to be judged are not those long-ago movies, but rather the trailers for this new movie. And bah humbug! Double humbug! Double triple bah humbug!
* And for the devotee: How Did This Get Made? covered The Star Wars Holiday Special this week — with bonus oral history.
* A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection.
* New York University is known for bestowing lavish perks on its leaders. Its new president, Andrew Hamilton, will be no exception. NYU sort of hitting it out of the park this week generally. The latest extravagances in the college sports arms race? Laser tag and mini golf.
* Economists Say ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to Christmas Presents.
* Phylogeny of elves finds that santa’s workers are actually dwarves.
* The death of the Wisconsin idea: Under the proposed policies, faculty members could be laid off for financial reasons or if academic programs are discontinued for education reasons, including long-term strategic planning that includes “market demand and societal needs.”
* Let this be our Christmas story. Why? Well, that requires some explaining and perhaps even a stronger rationale than I’m yet able to muster. Because it has no cheer, redemption or family bonding. It’s about power, money, greed, recklessness and what can only be termed the sort of roughshod ridiculousness and surreal unintentional comedy that comes from being powerful enough or serving people with sufficient power that the ordinary sort of fear of getting caught and having to explain yourself simply doesn’t apply.
* Call for ideas: the Museum of Capitalism.
* From Bleeding Heart Libertarians: “Universities may indeed be exploiting adjuncts, but they cannot rectify this mistake without significant moral costs.”
* What really happened in the Christmas truce of 1914? The Real Story Behind the 1914 Christmas Truce in World War I.
* The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom.
* The strange case of Case Western Reserve University law school.
* El Niño, explained: A guide to the biggest weather story of 2015. Records smashed on East Coast’s warmest ever Christmas Eve.
* African-Inspired Space Opera Yohancé Is Going To Be Our Next Obsession.
* ‘Unprecedented’ gas leak in California is the climate disaster version of BP’s oil spill.
Thursday Links!
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Gerry Canavan 