Posts Tagged ‘mourning’
Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.
* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.
* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).
* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.
* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.
* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.
* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.
* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.
* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?
* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.
* When a woman ran for president in 1872.
* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.
* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.
* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.
* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.
* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.
* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.
* How not to mourn Toni Morrison.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.
* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.
* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.
* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.
* A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.
* United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.
* Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.
* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.
* Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.
* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.
* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.
Weekend Links!
* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”
* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!
* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.
* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…
* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.
* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.
* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.
* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.
* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.
* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.
* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.
* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”
* The female price of male pleasure.
* The gig economy and sexual harassment.
* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.
* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.
* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.
* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.
* Oh no.
* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.
* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.
* A world without Holocaust survivors.
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.
* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.
* On the greatness of Swastika Night.
* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.
* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Sunday Night Links!
* But trains loaded with millions of gallons of crude oil thread the thickly populated areas of some of the nation’s biggest cities. Including Milwaukee.
* Love Song for a Neoliberal University: StarbucksU.
* Corinthian Colleges Inc. shut down its remaining 28 for-profit career schools, ending classes for about 16,000 students, in the biggest collapse in U.S. higher education.
* I’m not anti-technology, or anti-innovation. And I think traditional colleges are deeply flawed. But I am very, very much against expanding the money-laundering side of our financial aid system. And that is the coal mine into which the ASU-EdX canary is being lowered.
* Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life.
* On the deep grammar of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
* Hell didn’t exist, so we built it: the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
* What It’s Like to Be a Girl in America’s Juvenile Justice System.
* This is the toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the West. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of Western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized. Aside from being repugnant in its own right, this formula, by design, is deeply deceptive as propaganda: It creates the impression among Western populations that we are the victims but not the perpetrators of heinous violence, that terrorism is something done to us but that we never commit ourselves, that “primitive, radical and inhumanely violent” describes the enemy tribe but not our own.
* When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.
* Tom DeLay: People keep forgetting that God ‘wrote the Constitution.’
* Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip? Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company.
* Entire Treasury Department Competing For Same Goldman Sachs Job Opening.
* 23 maps and charts on language.
* Before And After: Earthquake Destroys Kathmandu’s Centuries-Old Landmarks.
* How Well Does ‘Daredevil’ Handle Disability Issues?
* Tetris: The Unauthorized Biography.
* An Abandoned Island in The Middle of NYC.
* Native Hawaiians are fighting off an invasion of astronomers. The Heart of the Hawaiian Peoples’ Arguments Against the Telescope on Mauna Kea.
* And some local interest from the Decolonial Atlas: The Great Lakes in Ojibwe.
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it yesterday: “Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis.”
* Chomsky: How America’s Great University System Is Being Destroyed.
* “Faculty and Students Are Walking Out Today for Catholic Identity.”
* CFP: Porn Studies Special Issue: Porn and Labour.
* Igbinedion’s production company Igodo Films recently shared Oya: Rise of The Orishas in full online. They also revealed that the Oya project has been adapted for the silver screen with principal photography on the feature-length film version scheduled to begin later this year in Brazil. The London-based filmmaker shared in a recentinterview that he made the short film in order to prove that there is a market for sci-fi films revolving around African characters and storylines. In this regard, Oya joins Ethiopian post-apocalyptic flick Crumbs in forging a path for future film projects from the continent within the realm of speculative fiction. In addition to the full-length project, Oya‘s creators have also confirmed plans for a comic book adaptation of the film, which is currently available for pre-order.
* Neil Gaiman reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Sounds bizarre and great.
* Study: Killers are less likely to be executed if their victims are black. What could explain it?
* First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims.
* London, the city that privatised itself to death.
* Once-homeless Baylor player ineligible, allegedly for accepting a place to live.
* How Facebook is changing the ways we feel.
* The creators of that (great!) Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan film might be in trouble.
* Meanwhile everything old is new again: Duck Tales, Inspector Gadget, even Danger Mouse.
* The day we all feared is upon us.
* It’s important that the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots succeed, either at achieving an outright ban or at sparking debate resulting in some other sensible and effective regulation. This is vital not just to prevent fully autonomous weapons from causing harm; an effective movement will also show us how to proactively ban other future military technology.
* Meet Your Republican 2016 Front-Runner.
* Thousands of oil refinery workers are striking for safer working conditions. Their fight is central to the struggle against climate change.
* Choose Your Own Adventure: So You’ve Accidentally Gotten Pregnant in South Dakota.
* And xkcd maps the future and the past.
Friday: Steven Salaita Link Roundup and More
* Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair. Return of the blacklist? Cowardice and censorship at the University of Illinois. Academic Freedom, Except When I Disagree. Bérubé on Salaita. The national AAUP’s statement. Cary Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of bestowing academic freedom. Cary Nelson’s Case. John K. Wilson. The definition of academic freedom, for many, does not accommodate dissent. The University of Illinois Is Not an Island. A Love Letter to Twitter. A New Birth of Academic Freedom.
* One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against. So it’s probably natural for college students to be a little ironic, a little unsettled. It’s time, meanwhile, to admit that the college years aren’t for figuring out some improvised “sense of purpose.” They’re more like a period of acclimatization—a time when realizations can dawn. If you’re feeling uneasy about life, then you’re doing the reading.
* Matthew Cheney has a call to read Survivor over Octavia Butler’s objections, inspired in part by my recent series at LARoB.
* Princeton Considers End to Limit on Number of As.
* The University of Colorado is moving to fire a tenured faculty member after the Boulder campus paid $825,000 this week to settle a graduate student’s allegations that the philosophy professor retaliated against her for reporting she was sexually assault by a fellow student.
* Watch NJ cop go rogue: Since Obama ‘doesn’t follow Constitution, we don’t have to.’
* Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health.
* Is Student Debt Harmful to Your Health? Student debt correlated with nagging sense that life is pointless.
* Oh, there’s your problem, your culture produces monsters: Telling white people the criminal justice system is racist makes them like it more.
* On not being cynical enough: LeBron James just leapt from one carefully constructed superteam to another. Of course I’m talking about you; I was always cynical about this. #cynicprivilege
* The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.
* An interview on death and mourning with Thomas Laqueur, from the great TNI issue on mourning I was hyping the other day.
* When stock photography modeling goes wrong.
* Endless Adjunct: The Game! From @readywriting.
* “Ole Miss Struggles to Be a New Miss.” On trying to rebrand.
* The Wonder Years: An Oral History.
* I guess in Obama’s America it’s not always legal to randomly murder people for no reason.
* Run Cruel optimism, Liz, run cruel optimism!
* “Punk archaeologists” explain why they dug out the Atari landfill. I should have been a punk archaeologist.
* Christina Hendrick’s time-travel-centered Mad Men spinoff looks pretty promising. The Mary Poppins one is good too.
* Lost in Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam trying to make Don Quixote again, which is now about trying to make Don Quixote.
* There’s only one thing Disney/Marvel loves more than money, and that’s not making inclusive superhero movies.
* Perhaps most importantly to everyone outside of Broadway, this production basically puts the kibosh on any new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—at least until it’s over. David said he “hadn’t ruled out” doing more Curb, but that he’s “not going to mentally do that to myself right now.” Also, if he did do another season, “this play would push that schedule back.” So we’d say that if he did do a ninth season, it could be about how Larry David starring in a Broadway show ends up irritating everyone else. But of course, he already did that.
* Everything old is new again: Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016. NBC has great idea for family show starring Bill Cosby.
* Slot-machine science: How casinos get you to spend more money. A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos.
* The arc of history is long, but bends towards justice: Cops no longer desire photo of teenager’s erection.
* Over the cliff: Almost 20 percent of people near retirement age have no retirement savings.
* The headline reads, “Experts Split If Robots Will Usurp Human Workers By 2025.”
* Google Saved by the Bell Truth. Wake up sheeple.
* My god. The bureaucracy works.
* And SMBC presents: The Darwinist!
Thursday Links!
* The big story in academia yesterday was the eleventh-hour preemptive firing of Steven Salaita from UIUC (which according to reports may have cost him his tenure at Virginia Tech as well). Especially disturbing in all this is the participation of former AAUP president Cary Nelson, on the side of the firing. Some commentary from Corey Robin, Claire Potter, Philip Weiss, and Electronic Intifada. A statement for the Illinois AAUP. A petition.
* Delayed gratification watch: This week I finally cracked and read Chris Ware’s Building Stories after nearly two years of anticipation. So great. I can’t wait to teach it. I may write more about this later, but for now I can tell you that my arbitrary path through the book told a beautiful story that began with the couple’s fateful move to Englewood and drifted backwards in time, Ulysses-like, to the day the couple met, before culminating in a quietly nostalgic trip to the eponymous building as it stood about to be torn down. So great. My friend Jacob’s review. “I Hoped That the Book Would Just Be Fun”: A Brief Interview with Chris Ware.
* Call for applications: Wisconsin Poet Laureate.
* Oak Creek, Two Years After the Sikh Mass Murder.
* On adjuncts and wildcat strikes.
* I was born too early: N.Y.U. to Add a Bachelor’s Degree in Video Game Design.
* I was born too late: MIT looking into paying professors by the word.
* College rankings, 1911. Class III! How dare they. #impeachTaft
* The conservative plan to destroy higher education by capturing accreditation.
* UMass-Dartmouth to Pay $1.2-Million to Professor in Discrimination Case.
* Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning.
* The country’s largest environmental group is profiting from oil drilling.
* NYPD sadly forced to arrest its critics.
* Medical Workers Say NYPD Cops Beat Man Shackled In A Stretcher. It Is Time We Treat Police Brutality as a National Crisis.
* The CIA Must Tell the Truth About My Rendition At 12 Years Old.
* State’s rights we can believe in: New Jersey drivers may be able to ignore other states’ speed cameras.
* Netflix Says Arrested Development Season 5 Is ‘Just a Matter of When.’
* Maria Bamford and the Hard Work of Acting Normal.
* Porn production plummets in Los Angeles.
* How Marvel Conquered Hollywood.
* The Lost Projects of Dan Harmon. In addition to Building Stories, I also cracked this week and finally started watching Rick and Morty. Now, granted, it’s no Building Stories — but it’s pretty good!
* The New Inquiry‘s “Mourning” issue is out today and has some really nice essays I think I’ll be using in the second go of my Cultural Preservation course next spring.
* Why Civilization: Beyond Earth Is The Hottest New Space Strategy Game.
* Disney Is Really Building A Star Wars Theme Park.
* You Are Given An Unlimited Supply Of Something. The One Catch? The Next Person Sets A Condition.
* Wikipedia’s monkey selfie ruling is a travesty for the world’s monkey artists.
* Apparently Kid for President.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Insurance Company Pays Elderly Man’s Workman’s Comp Settlement With $21,000 in Coins.
* Department of diminishing returns: The British Office: The Movie.
* And the kind of headline where I really don’t want any details: NASA: New “impossible” engine works, could change space travel forever. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning…
Wednesday Night Links!
* Reminded today of a recent Facebook post from Jonathan Senchyne: …teaching students to be critical of the institutional logics and power structures which many of them aspire to belong to requires you to open space and time for them to mourn these institutions as anchors and meaning-givers in their lives. Only after that can they begin to think about how best to live in the ruins and to think otherwise. See also: David Palumbo-Liu, on sadness.
* “The university hasn’t laid out long-term goals for the MOOCs, and the numbers don’t bode particularly well for the courses’ overall success,” the editorial reads. “We’re confused as to why an unproven and unused educational experiment that isn’t even aimed at UT students is something the system feels they should continue funding.”
* Disability and the campus visit.
* Is Ivan adjuncting on your campus? Be vigilant, administrators! Meanwhile the Brookings Institution proposes we just let the markets eat adjuncts. Sure, people can choose to pay more for cruelty-free adjuncts if they want, but in these tough times…
* What chairs can do for adjuncts, today. Informed and realistic, striking precisely because the suggestions are so small.
* When I first saw it on Twitter I couldn’t believe the New York Times *actually* headlined their Wendy Davis profile “Can Wendy Davis Have It All?”
* W.H. Auden: “J.R.R., old boy, does this story really need two women?”
* The New Yorker’s culture blog profiles @NeinQuarterly, while their finance blog profiles Klaus Teuber, creator of Settlers of Catan.
* Bing censoring Chinese language search results for users in the US.
* Humans aren’t built to sit all day. This is much healthier.
* Climate map of every Winter Olympics. On Sex in the Olympic Village. The Shoshi Games.
* Just Ten Colleges Take in One Sixth of All Donations.
* And listen: you should really just be reading Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal every day.
Thursday Links!
* Is it too late? The long view offers reason to hope. From Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene.
* U.S. to Retire Most Chimps From Research.
* The long road to marriage equality. Adam Kotsko: Marriage and Meritocracy.
* In a previous post on this site I announced a plan for the creation of MOOA, or massive, open, online administrations that would supplant the thousands of separate administrations currently managing the affairs of America’s colleges. The MOOA idea was, of course, satire. However, I must report that two educational consultants contacted me to offer their services in bringing my MOOA to the market. Additionally, three separate reporters called to discuss the MOOA concept. When I explained that MOOA was a satire, one asked, “Are you sure?”
* What we need instead, I think, is a study of neoliberal bias in the university, particularly since the rhetoric of neoliberalism has now become ubiquitous, the lingua franca of administrators and even many faculty. In the 1990s Bill Readings observed that the new rationale of the university was the amorphous, technocratic one of “excellence,” rather than the traditional ones of disciplinary reason or national culture. The incantation of “excellence” no longer has quite the same currency; the new neoliberal mantra includes the buzzwords “disruption,” “innovation,” and “choice.” Part of their force is that they seem self-evident goods: who would be against innovation or choice? But I think that they sidestep some of the crucial problems of higher education, especially regarding equality. According to all the statistical markers, college is subject to a steeper class divide than it was 40 years ago, and academic jobs show a sharper stratification. This violates the best hope of the American university. What good is innovation if it brings us a more inequitable world?
* The latest update on Capturing the Friedmans.
* …given what we know from the big picture, I think it’s safe to say that ostensible reason for the long-term collapse in humanities enrollment has to do with the increasing choice of women to enter more pre-professional majors like business, communications, and social work in the aftermath of a) the opening of the workplace and b) universal coeducation suddenly making those degrees relevant. You’d have to be pretty tone-deaf to point to their ability to make that choice as a sign of cultural malaise.
* I used to maniacally play Solitaire Tic-Tac-Toe to keep myself sane in high school. If I’d known about Tic-Tac-Toe2, I might never have graduated.
* And good news everyone! The housing bubble is back!
Gerry Canavan 