Posts Tagged ‘Minority Report’
A Few More Morning Links
* J.G. Ballard’s reading list, from age 6 to age 25.
* Germans are stealing our precious words; their current favorite is shitschturm.
* We should be wary of declaring “the end of the English major” when what has really happened is that, in terms of humanities enrollments, schools like Yale have gone from exceptional to merely above average.
* Dystopia now: “Sky has developed technology to transfer adverts from train windows directly and silently into commuters’ heads.”
* And what could go wrong? Ginsberg says she won’t retire before 2016.
Saturday Links
* A new Flight of the Conchords mini-episode is here to make everything okay.
* The Minority Report touchless interface is here, and it’s amazing.
* The Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t obtain life insurance. Here’s what they did instead.
* The Longform Guide to the Death of Football.
* Voter suppression efforts take another hit as a federal judge restores early voting in Ohio. I caught a tiny bit of Rachel Maddow last night and she was hammering the sensible point that opposition to early voting doesn’t even have the fig leaf of supposedly preventing non-existent “voter fraud” to legitimate it; it’s just voter suppression, in the raw, plain and simple.
By my count GOP efforts to manipulate the vote have now failed in Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin. I think Pennsylvania’s still up next.
* This story has everything: Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse.
The theft was discovered during a routine inventory check last week at the St-Louis-de-Blandford warehouse, where the syrup is being held temporarily. The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which is responsible for the global strategic maple syrup reserve, initially kept the news quiet, hoping it would help police solve the crime quickly.
* Now I want Doctor Who to do a whole bowling episode.
* You can now get your entire genome sequences for just $1000.
* The New Inquiry troubles Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites.
We must dismantle not just the existing spheres of influence and also their reason for being. The effort is impossible but simple: dismantle all the relationships that causes us to hand out and to seek favor, erase the notion of what is owed, render farcical the very idea of acknowledgments. An idealistic notion, yes, but I am just cynical enough to point out that this book of elite-bashing contains a pages-long acknowledgments section where Hayes pays due deference to a murderer’s row of wealthy, connected elitists. With each person he thanks, I can see the invisible lattice of patronage and nepotism, so archly dissected in the main text, spiral out and off the page.
* And rest in peace, Shulamith Firestone.
Firestone applied Marxist analysis to the status of women and argued that true liberation would come only when women were freed from childbearing. In Firestone’s utopian future, babies would be gestated outside the womb and raised by both sexes.
“The tyranny of the biological family would be broken,” she wrote.
Tuesday Morning
* 10 Films You Should See at the Raindance Film Festival 2011. My cousin Chris’s brilliant Afghanistan documentary Where My Heart Beats clocks in at #9.
* Europocalpyse now: Greek Default Almost Assured. More here.
* And speaking of money: David Graeber vs. the Austrians.
* In these two books, we have two versions of school reform. One is devised by Wall Street financiers and politicians who believe in rigidly defined numerical goals and return on investment; they blame lazy teachers and self-interested unions when test scores are low. The other draws on the deep experience of a compassionate teacher who finds fault not with teachers, unions, or students, but with a society that refuses to take responsibility for the conditions in which its children live and learn—and who has demonstrated through her own efforts how one dedicated teacher has improved the education of poor young people.
* Bringing the number of planets discovered outside our solar system to 645, the 50-planet haul includes 16 super-Earths (planets with a mass between one and ten times that of Earth), including one that orbits at the edge of the habitable zone of its star). Sounds like it’s time to bring freedom to the HD85512bians.
* And North Carolina really is going to try to ban gay marriage. Again.
State law already bans same-sex marriage, and opponents of a constitutional amendment contend that it is unnecessary. North Carolina is the only state in the Southeast without such a provision in its constitution.
We cannot allow a discrimination gap. Rally in Raleigh this afternoon. Unfortunately I have a commitment on campus at noon or I’d go myself.
Gerry Canavan 