Posts Tagged ‘Monticello’
July the 5th Be With You Links
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose “job hunt” turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my “individualized” health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* * The “mass graves” story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution.Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman’s name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we know her story?
* CTRL-F “rape” CTRL-F “slave” CTRL-F “Hemings”
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings’s slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
* Dear TNI Contributors, Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, too.
* In sum, here’s what they found: If you’re going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* ‘Beta Males’ Want To Kill Women Because They Can’t Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn’t? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don’t ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don’t worry folks; we’ve got this.
It’s called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of ’90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn’t die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don’t speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don’t speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don’t Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
Monday Morning Links!
* The first cut of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ was over 3 hours long. I’m sure that would have solved all the problems.
* Science Fiction and the Urban Crisis.
* In short, riots aren’t counterproductive because they do not achieve their goals. They are counterproductive because they are an expression of those who are already-counterproductive, those “individuals committing the violence,” those ever-ready to riot.
* Starfleet as the Federation’s “Dumping Ground for Orphans.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18.5: “Peaceful Protest.”
* Wow: Rebuilt slave sites being unveiled at Jefferson’s Monticello.
* The U.S. Civil War ended 150 years ago, but once a year, deep in the sugar cane fields of southern Brazil, the Confederate battle flag rises again.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably. They’re banning Sherman Alexie? Come on.
* Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity.
* Executive Who Presided Over Nonprofit’s Fall Seeks $1.2 Million Payday.
* The names of the chemical elements in Chinese. More links below the chart.
* The Washington Post‘s Police Problem.
* Judith Butler’s talents are wasted on a “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” piece that really should be obvious to everyone.
* The most amazing thing about this exchange is that Sam Harris thinks he won this argument so completely he needed everyone in the world to see.
* The headline reads, “Nepal’s Kung Fu Nuns Have Refused To Be Evacuated – They’re Staying Back To Help Victims.”
* “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Disability in Game of Thrones.”
* Porn data: visualising fetish space.
* Ideology at its cutest (hat tip: Justin I.): Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear.
* Big Bird Actor: I Almost Died on the Challenger and I Cry in the Suit.
* Report: Cop Dismissed Freddie Gray’s Pleas for Help as “Jailitis.”
* Christie signs law greenlighting fast track sale of N.J. public water systems.
* The Great Victoria’s Secret Bra Heist of Pennsylvania.
* Behind the scenes of the Game of Thrones map.
* It’s always worse than you think: The CIA has been organizing clandestine TED Talks.
* “Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.
* “Social media trend sees men ditching sit-ups for snack cakes.” My moment has arrived!
* Tesla unveils a battery to power your home, completely off grid.
* I hate to link to an SNL bit, but their parody of a Black Widow movie was really pretty good.
* Area X novella coming… eventually. I liked the first book in the trilogy much, much more than the latter two, but I’m still in.
* Can 3D printing save the rhino? Seattle-based bioengineering start-up Pembient believes it can. The company plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D printed rhino horn in an effort to stem the number of rhinos killed for their horns. But conservationists fear that the plan may backfire, undermining their own efforts to cut the demand for such products in China and Vietnam, the main black markets for rhino horns.
* The coming DC Cinematic Universe trainwreck, Suicide Squad edition.
* A University Is Not Walmart.
* Trustees are basically heroes, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
* And LLAP, Grace Lee Whitney.
Gerry Canavan 