Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘men’s rights activism

Friday Links Are Just a Party and Parties Aren’t Meant to Last

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51yLZieyZIL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_* Out today, a project very close to my heart: my edited 2016 rerelease of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Here’s the Amazon order page, for you or your favorite academic library!

* The Ever-Tightening Job Market for Ph.D.s. The Mobile Academic.

The strange story of Hugo Gernsback, who brought science fiction magazines to America.

* Just in time for finals! MLA Eighth Edition: What’s New and Different.

* At LARoB Rebecca Evans reviews the reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Green Earth. David Perry reviews The Secret Life of Stories. Against Star Wars. Inside the Coetzee Collection.

* My desire to see The Twilight Zone has boomeranged on me in the most ironic possible way.

* An independent researcher claims to have discovered a lost civilization in China.

Existential Depression in Gifted Children.

* Mourning Prince and David Bowie, who showed there’s no one right way to be a man. Buzzfeed’s The Most Powerful Writing about Prince. Nation Too Sad To F*ck Even Though It’s What Prince Would Have Wanted.

The Secret Life of Novelizations.

The Hidden Economics of Porn.

Five Hundred Years of Utopia.

Harriet Tubman once staged a sit-in to get $20. The Treasury just gave her all of them. You have no idea how hardcore Harriet Tubman really was.

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The smug style in American liberalism.

* How Chicago elites imported charters, closed neighborhood schools, and snuffed out creativity.

How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated.

How to Blow $9 Billion in 6 Months.

* Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.

Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem. Related: 25 Best Wisconsin High Schools: U.S. News Rankings 2016.

Against Activism.

For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress.” Bernie Sanders offers a different way forward. How Sanders fell short. The real scandal.

12 Reasons Not to Write Lord of the Rings.

I Talked to the Kid Whose Mom Used Craigslist to Find Him a Feminism Tutor, and It Got Weird.

* Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea. Insects Are Conscious and Egocentric.

* Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors. But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

Details arise about U.S. Bank robbery in the Alumni Memorial Union.

* Behold, the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.

* The Tragic History of RC Cola.

U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High.

Hamilton just won the Pulitzer for drama. Here’s why it matters for American musicals. And congrats to Emily Nussbaum!

This map shows every place in the US that has ever had a woman in Congress.

The Average 29-Year-Old.

* Milwaukee’s Appeals, Vibrant and Cheap.

First Criminal Charges Handed Down After Flint Water Crisis.

* A man once described as a “perfect donor” at an August, Georgia sperm bank and who fathered at least 36 children around the world is actually a mentally ill felon whose lies on his donor forms went undiscovered for more than a decade.

We owe Rey and Finn’s friendship to Harrison Ford’s broken leg.

Love It Or List It sued over shoddy renovations, ridiculous falsehoods.

As A Father Of Daughters, I Think We Should Treat All Women Like My Daughters.

* Hello, from the Magic Tavern watch! There’s two noncanonical podcasts from Foon-16 over at One Shot. There’s also a band new, slightly less… rigorous improv podcast from some of the principals involved called Siblings Peculiar.

The U.S.’s Best High School Starts at 9:15 a.m.

Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science.

New Evidence Suggests That Limbs and Fins Evolved From Fish Gills.

* How to Shakespeare.

* Cards Against Humanities.

* And rejoice, comrades! Twilight Struggle has come to Steam.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 22, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!

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* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.

* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!

* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.

* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.

* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).

Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.

* Star Trek 2017 Rumor Watch!

* Local news.

* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?

“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”

* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.

* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.

272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?

* How to Build a Major in a Young Field: The University of Toledo’s new disability-studies program attracts undergradute interest.

* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.

UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.

President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.

Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’

* The Minecraft Generation.

Behind the Scenes at the Met.

The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.

* Wild Chernobyl.

* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.

A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.

Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.

* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.

* A(other) New Map for America.

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This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!

How Not to Audit the Pentagon.

You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.

* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!

New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.

Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.

* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!

* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.

* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.

* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.

* I was a men’s rights activist.

* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.

* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.

* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.

* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.

Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan. The chimp was eventually caught after being shot with a tranquilizer gun and falling from the power lines, Kyodo news reported. REUTERS/Kyodo

It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.

Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.

Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.

A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.

Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.

* Being Kumail Nanjiani.

* Being Cherie Berry.

* Being Monica Lewinsky.

* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.

Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.

Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.

Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.

New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.

* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.

At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.

Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?

* And they said culture was dead!

* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.

Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.

Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.

Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.

Can SeaWorld Redeem Itself?

* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?

* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?

* Behold, the US alt-right.

* If you want a vision of the future.

* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 18, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Weekend Links! Catch Them All!

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oeb-3Americans first learn about slavery as children, before adults are willing to explain finance capital or rape. By high school, young adults are ready to hear about sexual violence as an element of slavery and about how owners valued their property, but there’s no level of developmental maturity that prepares someone to grasp systemized monstrosity on this scale. Forced labor we can understand—maybe it’s even a historical constant so far. Mass murder too. But an entire economy built on imprisoning and raping children? One that enslaved near 40 percent of the population? Even for the secular, only religious words seem to carry enough weight: unholy, abomination, evil.

Plan C: The top secret Cold War plan for martial law in the USA.

* The Huntington honors Octavia Butler. And from the archives! My writeup on the Butler papers at the Huntington.

* The first issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.

Feeding English Majors in the 21st Century.

Chicago State University in danger of closing: Alumni speak out.

* CFP: Fantasies of Contemporary Culture. Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.” MUHuCon 2016. Feminist Review: Dystopias and Utopias.

* One of the major figures in science fiction studies, Rob Latham, has issued a statement regarding his shocking firing from UC Riverside.

* Melissa Click has now been suspended, after being charged with third degree assault.

A University Softens a Plan to Cut Tenured Faculty, but Professors Remain Wary.

Prominent Medieval Scholar’s Blog on ‘Feminist Fog’ Sparks an Uproar.

How startling, unique cuts have transformed Louisiana’s universities.

* A How-To.

Is It Discriminatory to Require Peer Review?

2.5 million men ‘have no close friends.’

* After capitalism.

Sanders and the Theory of Change: Radical Politics for Grown-Ups.

* Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination.

How to pair wine with your favorite Girl Scout cookies.

How Intellectuals Create a Public.

Long Before Helping Flint, Michigan Officials Were Shipping Clean Water to Their Own Workers. Flint’s Bottom Line. What went wrong in Flint. Flint Residents Told That Their Children Could Be Taken Away If They Don’t Pay For City’s Poison Water. Report: ‘Every Major US City East of the Mississippi’ Is Underreporting Heavy Metals In Its Water. It’s everywhere. “Milwaukee taking steps to prevent lead from getting in water.”

* And elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: FBI arrests suspect who allegedly wanted to cause mass terrorism in Milwaukee. MPS as “national disgrace.” ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Milwaukee leaders speak out against deadly rise in car thefts. Have I mentioned we’re hiring?

Chicago Police Hid Mics, Destroyed Dashcams To Block Audio, Records Show.

What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers.

* The Difference a Mutant Makes.

* See? It’s good that I’m like this.

AmazonWarnings* Suggested Amazon warning labels.

* Star Wars Social Networks.

* On the SNAFU Principle.

* Richard Feynman, “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle.”

Rhode Island: Children Under 10 Shall Not Be Left Home Alone, Even Briefly.

Sea level rise from ocean warming underestimated, scientists say.

* History is melting.

* In praise of blizzards.

Climate dystopia is here: Zika virus prompts calls for women to stop having babies.

Why science-fiction writers find it so hard to discuss climate tech.

Racial harmony in a Marxist utopia: how the Soviet Union capitalised on US discrimination.

Linguists Analyze Every Disney Princess Movie, to Somewhat Depressing Results.

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.

* Everything’s fine: Hillary’s team copied intel off top-secret server to email.

Constitutional Convention 2016.

* Today in Doctor Who fandom: The Season of River Song. And then there was Chibnall.

Fictional Games From Epic Fantasy Books. A People’s History of Board Games.

Instructor explained clearly that he’d hand out the rating sheets and then sit in his car while we completed them.

Here’s why we’re attracted to people of a similar height, scientists say.

Former NFL Player Tyler Sash Had CTE When He Died At Age 27.

* A dark, gritty Hanna-Barbera reboot.

Airbnb makes half its SF money with illegal listings.

Trailer with $70,000 worth of cheese stolen in Wisconsin. And that’s only the second-largest cheese heist in the state this week.

Nearly $50,000 In Bull Semen Stolen From Turlock Truck.

The final days of Al Jazeera America.

* Twilight of the sleazy professor.

* The end of Go.

* Dailyshowgnarok.

The FBI Claims Not to Have a File on David Bowie.

According to the trades and his pitch to investors, Ryan Kavanaugh had found film business formula that couldn’t lose. It could. Unraveling a Tinseltown Ponzi scheme.

69% of the alcohol sold in the UK is sold to “harmful,” “hazardous” or “increasing risk” drinkers, accounting for more than 60% of the industry’s revenues.

* A map of every city.

* The lost age of pinball.

* It’s finally happening.

Meet the Americans Who Moved to Europe and Went AWOL on Their Student Loans.

* And there is no politics — only LEGO.

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Written by gerrycanavan

January 29, 2016 at 12:09 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Finals Week Links!

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CVz6SWOVEAAlsQI* ICYMI: The CFP for the 11th Annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference ends tomorrow.

College sports’ fastest-rising expense: Paying coaches not to work.

* Huge, if true: While university presidents earn millions, many professors struggle.

* Shakespeare, by the numbers.

* Soviet Science Fiction Christmas Cards.

* The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad.

In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels. “A long-shot chance to save the planet.” And on the neg: Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments.

* The climate movement as peace movement.

In a security video obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Strickland is seen in handcuffs, barely conscious and being dragged along the floor by officers, while a prison nurse standing close by does nothing. Even as he lies face down on the floor, near death, guards can be heard shouting, “Stop resisting.”

* Police restraint saves lives.

Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement.

* Divorce on the frontier.

* Unpregnant.

For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. “We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!” laughed Miller. “So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.’” And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. “She’s a real stickler for that,” said Miller. “And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.”

* Roar Magazine #0: The Potential of Debtors’ Unions.

* Jacqui Shine at LARoB reviews We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s.

* MST3K breaks Kickstarter records, secures 14 new episodes. Let the backlash commence!

* We’re apparently getting two China Miéville novels this year, and the second one sounds incredible.

THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS is an intense and gripping tale set in an alternative universe: June 1940 following Paris’ fall to the Germans, the villa of Air-Bel in Marsailles, is filled with Trotskyists, anti-fascists, exiled artists, and surrealists. One Air-Bel dissident decides the best way to fight the Nazis is to construct a surrealist bomb. When the bomb is accidentally detonated, surrealist Cataclysm sweeps Paris and transforms it according to a violent, weaponized dream logic.

He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.

The Senate is so crazily designed it would be literally illegal for a US state to copy it.

* Dilbert minus with too much Dilbert.

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The lost Marxists: what happened to the academics made jobless by communism’s collapse?

Mockingjay Part 2: Let’s talk about that epilogue.

* The rich are different!

* Teach the controversy: The sealed mausoleum believed to be a fully-functioning time machine.

* A brief history of trying and failing to impeach Supreme Court justices.

* The Indo-European and Uralic Language Families.

* Your short of the week: “Lost Property.”

* Jessica Jones, Buffy season six, and rape.

* The Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, updated for 2015.

* And rest in peace, Benedict Anderson.

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Thursday Links, Inc.

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* University, Inc.

* Like Kirk said, don’t let them promote you: Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work.

* Best American Poetry Pseudonyms.

* All the Sensible Progressives agree: The Clinton email scandal is over, over, so over.

Big-Name Plan B’s for Democrats Concerned About Hillary Clinton. I guess I’ll get started on Plan C.

* The Hal Salive Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

* At long last, the billionaires have come for their ancient enemy, UNC’s English department.

Rutgers Faculty Union Urges Inquiry Into Football Coach.

Cooperation or Collusion? Lawsuit Accuses Duke and UNC of Faculty Non-Poaching Deal. I think they bought themselves a whole lot of legal trouble here.

* Amid all the weirdness of the U Iowa president hire, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gotta spend money to make money. University of Iowa Faculty Senate votes ‘no confidence’ in Board of Regents. “We’re just getting started.”

* Some good news in Wisconsin: MATC announces free tuition for low-income students.

Here’s the truth: academia is an amazing sector with some of the best features of any job, even if it also has substantial problems. Folks on the way out might feel like they’re biting their thumb at something, and those still “stuck” on the inside of this troubled-but-terrific career might feel some welcome-if-temporary solidarity. But after that, it’s just more fodder for legislators, corporations, and the general public to undermine the academy. It helps nobody in the long run. No One Cares That You Quit Your Job.

* Mediocrity is the secret key that explains everything. Moving beyond the early focus on conformity, we propose that the threat of status loss may make those with middle status more wary of advancing creative solutions in fear that they will be evaluated negatively. Using different manipulations of status and measures of creativity, we found that when being evaluated, middle-status individuals were less creative than either high-status or low-status individuals (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we found that anxiety at the prospect of status loss also caused individuals with middle status to narrow their focus of attention and to think more convergently (Study 3). We delineate the consequences of power and status both theoretically and empirically by showing that, unlike status, the relationship between power and creativity is positive and linear (Study 4). By both measuring status (Studies 2 and 3) and by manipulating it directly (Study 5), we demonstrate that the threat of status loss explains the consequences of middle status.

Researchers have discovered a better way to wait in line, and you’re going to hate it.

Half of Americans have diabetes or pre-diabetes. This is framed as good news: “…after two decades of linear growth, the prevalence of diabetes in the United States has finally started to plateau.”

Words about slavery that we should all stop using.

* “Prison gets rich looking up preschoolers.”

* “Author says parent from Tennessee is confusing ‘gynaecology with pornography’ over description of Lacks discovering a lump in her cervix.”

* The next Charles Darwin?

* Kim Davis has defeated us all. Related: Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Never Should Have Gone to Jail.

The Final Discworld Book Is Bittersweet For Many Reasons. I haven’t read one of these in decades, but I’m still sad he’s gone.

Brooklyn College’s Longtime Janitor Is Also Its Cocaine Dealer, Police Say.

* An interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.

Salman Rushdie’s Bewilderment at Snapchat Inspired Him to Write Science Fiction.

The Joy Machine: Stephen Colbert, Satire, and Faith.

The High Burden of Low Wages: How Renting Affordably in NYC is Impossible on Minimum Wage.

One lawyer’s crusade to defend extreme pornography.

#DownWithCentennialism.

Washington’s Football Team Is the Donald Trump of the NFL.

* Negging and neoliberalism.

* Wifework and the university.

* And Boots lives. I anticipate that this will make Zoey’s entire year.

Commencement Weekend Links!

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* Commencement speech bingo. More links below!

ut_bingo_f* Pro-tip: apparently it only counts as free speech if you’re already powerful.

* ICYMI: My guest post at SF Signal on dystopia, anti-utopia, and the end of the world.

College is a promise the economy does not keep.

Of Course Women Are Getting Sexually Harassed by Drones.

* CFP: Into the Pensieve: The Harry Potter Generation in Retrospect.

* Rethinking Monopoly for neofeudal capitalism.

Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries. Well, yes, I’m definitely worried. That’s madness.

“Hood disease.” My God, don’t call it that.

* It places the United States in the top spot, ahead of Sweden and Canada, which come in at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Yet when the scores are adjusted for national levels of income, the United States drops to 15th place, behind such developing countries as China and Serbia.

* If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears.

* The proposed rule would cut off student aid to career-focused programs at for-profit and nonprofit colleges if the program’s student-loan default rate reached 30 percent or if half of its graduates failed two student-loan debt standards.

* Kansas and the death of academic freedom.

* The NCAA will allow Boise State to help its homeless player.

MRA city councilman files Title IX complaint on behalf of U Oregon players arbitrarily kicked off team after DA slow-walks the process to protect their eligibility for March Madness and then declines to bring charges, thereby completing the circle of shitshow.

According to faculty accounts, deans received an email from the administration on the evening of May 5, alerting them to a meeting the next day about staffing issues. At that meeting, deans in certain colleges were told they needed to cut a prescribed number of full-time faculty positions. Of 16 total cuts, 11 were to come from the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty members said. Deans were given two days – until Thursday – to consult with their department chairs about which faculty members to terminate. Affected instructors were notified that day.

* Kate Hayles and Mark Kruse have developed a model for humanities/STEM cooperative teaching.

* U.S. Cities Under 12 feet of Sea Level Rise.

* The Forever Drought.

* The best way to think of the dilemma is keeping in mind the three things Obama wants his regulations to accomplish: He wants them to effectively reduce carbon pollution, he wants them not to cost consumers too much, and he wants to be sure they can survive legal challenge. The trouble is that he can only pick two of these. And the primary question weighing on administration regulators as they make their decision will be how to read the mind of Anthony Kennedy.

* To turn the US-Mexico border into “The Border,” America had to erase its Caribbean history.

An article about secrecy and the death penalty in Missouri got the May edition of St. Louis Magazine banned from the Missouri Department of Corrections.

* Meanwhile the New York Times is a complete mess.

The Rise of the Voluntariat.

The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.

But unlike the proletariat’s labor, the voluntariat’s has become untethered from wages. The voluntariat’s labor is every bit as alienable as the proletariat’s — Coursera’s Translator Contract leaves no doubt about that — but it must be experienced by the voluntariat as a spontaneous, non-alienated gift.

* Will roads made out of solar panels save us?

Playing football is even worse for players’ brains than we thought.

* An Oral History of The West Wing.

* Medical nightmare of the week: Morgellons disease.

* Speculative genetic explanations for social phenomena have an old and undistinguished history, some of which Wade reviews superficially, presumably to demonstrate his skill at reviewing topics superficially. The common thread, though, is that such explanations have always been (1) put forward to establish a bio-political point, to draw imaginary limits around the social progress of certain human groups; (2) accompanied by the dissimulation that they are not political statements, but merely value-neutral science; and (3) false.

* The Bay Area author of an upcoming book shatters the image of California’s historic missions as idyllic sites where Franciscan friars and Indians lived in harmony. Speaking before about 100 people Saturday at the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, Elias Castillo, author of “A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions,” said in reality the missions were “death camps.”

* Save your research in the cloud, they said.

* Viggo vs. Lord of the Rings.

The New York Pizza Project, Documenting New York City’s Pizza Shops in Photos and Interviews.

He also had a theory about colonizing the solar system using nuclear bombs. We could terraform other planets, he argued, by pulverizing them and then moving them closer or further from the sun. What could possibly go wrong?

* So maybe it’s for the best that Russia’s just evicted us from space.

However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That

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9710380815_b64e98462e_b* 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.

* Charlie Stross v. Bitcoin.

* 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.’

* The way we die now.

* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.

IncomeGuide_2013_Jan17_RGB_page-11_11

“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.”

* World’s first full-size Lego car can hit 20 mph, powered by insane, 256-cylinder compresed air engine.

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.

* Mars by night.

* 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.

* And ion has your science fiction postage stamps.

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Written by gerrycanavan

December 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Supersized Post-Computer-Crash Weekend Feel-Good Happy Links

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Sorry I’ve been MIA. John Siracusa’s OS Mavericks review didn’t tell me the update would completely nuke my computer for three days. Fairly big omission, JS.

Only by the grace of God did I not wind up on Senator Session’s anti-NEH hit list.

* Apple screws up Capitalism 101 by having its products remain useful on a too-long obsolescence-cycle.

“If part-time is so good, why don’t we have part-time administration?”

* Against student evaluations. UPDATE: Of course the natural form for discuss this is a Twitter fight.

* Rape culture at UConn. Really stunning report.

Carolyn Luby, a student who organized the complaint, said the university failed to stop harassment she faced for criticizing the school’s new “powerful and aggressive” Husky logo in an open letter to UConn president, Susan Herbst. Luby saw the redesigned logo as “glorifying intimidation with an already prevalent rape culture.”

In reaction, commenters on Barstool Sports posted links to her Facebook page. Rush Limbaugh did a segment criticizing Luby in which he stated, “I, El Rushbo, have amplified it and made it even bigger. Let’s see what happens.”

Luby subsequently received rape and death threats. People walked by her on campus and called her “a bitch,” she said. One email she received told her, “I hope you get raped by a husky,” and another said, “I wish you would’ve run in the Boston marathon.” Fraternity members sexually harassed her, Luby said, making statements like, “Don’t worry, we won’t rape you,” as they drove by.

“[The university] would send campus-wide emails about picking up trash, but no warning about hate speech and harassment,” Luby said.

Unlike Georgetown University’s president, who sent a campus-wide email defending Sandra Fluke after Limbaugh and others made her a target in 2012, UConn did nothing, Luby said. Herbst remained silent, and Luby said one school official told her, “That’s kind of the risk you run when you publish something on the Internet.”

University police suggested she keep a low profile and wear a hat on campus, Luby said.

* I ranted about this one enough on Twitter, but this story about the University of Iowa TA who accidentally emailed nude photos to her class (which I feel dirty even linking to at all) is also rape culture in action.

62% of higher education professionals report experiencing workplace bullying.

Talking with Students about Being an Adjunct. Totally insanely, CUNY hasn’t been paying its adjuncts for months.

The UC Davis Pepper-Spraying Cop Gets a $38,000 Settlement, $8000 more than his victims.

City College of S.F. outlines closing plan.

* Thinking (only) like an administration: Faculty Couples, for Better or Worse.

We have the rare opportunity to chronicle a labor movement’s development in real time from its infancy as we watch the organization of college football players.

Confessions of a Drone Warrior.

Flood Insurance Jumping Sevenfold Depresses U.S. Home Values. I wonder if even “the market speaking” could pull us out of the death spiral now.

* Climate change cost you the McDonald’s dollar menu. Greenland Has Melted So Much That We Can Mine It for Uranium Now. Arctic Temperatures Reach Highest Levels In 44,000 Years. Gambling with Civilization.

* The men’s rights movement is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

* Rortybomb on striking fast food workers and the neoliberal failings of Obamacare. From the second:

Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism.

* The Decline of Wikipedia.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

* Mitch Hurwitz at the New York Television Festival.

* Davis Sedaris writes about the suicide of his sister Tiffany.

* We should put hyper-efficient rich people in charge of everything: How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes. That’s why they earn the big bucks, I guess.

Condé Nast Discontinuing Internship Program. The first of many, I’d bet.

* After all this time I’m completely amazed that people still talk to the Daily Show at all. “They made all those other people look like total idiots! I’d better be super-careful as I make my wise and reasoned argument!”

* From the archives: How They Made Bottle Rocket. 1995.

* Wisconsin conservatives file challenge against state’s same-sex partnership law. Special Prosecutor Looking At Wisconsin Recall Elections. Milwaukee has still not enrolled anyone for ACA.

What Good Wife Storyline Did CBS Kill to Avoid Pissing Off the NFL?

* They said it: Fox News: Anti-Bullying Policies Limit Conservatives’ Free Speech.

America’s Most Popular Boys’ Names Since 1960, in 1 Spectacular GIF.

* The Harvard Crimson says don’t teach for America.

American Schools Are Missing 389,000 Teachers. Study: Charters Pose a Financial Threat to Already-Struggling School Districts.

* The Duke Chronicle says walk out on Charles Murray.

A man is stealing your home, poisoning your food and burning the forests around you, all the while explaining why you should thank him. Maybe you are allowed to question his genius, and maybe he answers. Some nod; others frown.

And you watch the flames rise, knowing at least you have engaged in “discourse.”

Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

List of reasons for admission to an insane asylum from the late 1800s, supposedly.

California Deputies Shoot and Kill Boy Carrying a Fake Gun. Black Teen Detained by NYPD for Buying an Expensive Belt.

Zombie Simpsons: How the best show ever became the broadcasting undead.

* It’s handled: Scandal has its own scandal after popular fan blogger turns out to be ABC executive. UPDATE: Followup!

* Old villains never die, they just fade away: Diebold charged with bribing officials, falsifying records in China, Russia, Indonesia; fined nearly $50 million.

* Gawker is seriously arguing no one should be fired for uncritically publishing an entirely fact-free smear job so ludicrously inaccurate it didn’t even last two hours. I disagree!

* We’ve all been there: Groom Who Called in Bomb Hoax to Own Wedding Sentenced to Year in Jail.

Facebook OKs Decapitation Videos (But No Breastfeeding).

* OMG WTF TSA.

* And today’s apocalypse: “We’ve Reached ‘The End of Antibiotics, Period.’”

Written by gerrycanavan

October 25, 2013 at 9:32 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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