Posts Tagged ‘my media empire’
Thursday Links!
* I have a short piece up at the Cambridge UP blog: “We’re Sorry, the Final Frontier is Closed.” It talks a bit about the recent revival of space frontier and space opera fantasy in big-budget films like Jupiter Ascending, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Interstellar…
* Scientists determine the nation’s safest places to ride out a zombie apocalypse.
* Woodland ‘fairy door’ tradition ‘out of control.’
Now the trustees of Wayford Woods have announced ‘fairy control’ methods which will curb the “profusion of elfin construction”.
Trustee Steven Acreman said the trend was “in danger of getting out of control” but stressed he was not “anti-fairies”.
“It’s a very complex situation and nobody’s admitting that they’re evicting the fairies,” he said.
* “These beliefs persisted into recent times,” says Butler. “For example, in 1895 Michael Cleary convinced his family and community that his wife, Bridget, was a changeling. This was confirmed by a traditional fairy doctor, who attempted a herbal cure. When that didn’t work, they threatened her with fire, doused, and finally burned her to death.” Well, that’s certainly less charming.
* So by all means, criticize teachers when it is warranted. But resist education reformers at all costs, particularly when they rationalize their reforms as a way to address the problems of the teaching force. Education reformers, no matter their intentions, are the enemies of a unionized teaching force. They are the enemies of public education.
* Sweet Briar’s Sudden Closure Plans Leave Students and Employees Scrambling.
“The faculty and staff,” Mr. Brown said, “are feeling traumatized by this—not just by the loss of the institution, but by the way it has been handled. They seem to have no answers about anything, and that is what feels so deeply troubling.”
I hadn’t even thought about how impossible it will be for Sweet Briar faculty to sell their homes. What a nightmare.
* Who Gets the Endowment? I really hope higher ed media watches the dispersal of Sweet Briar’s endowment and property very closely.
Indeed, at the heart of the standard capitalist narrative is magic, as if the will to realize the abstract ideal of a cornucopia for all will itself — through fervent wishing and belief that can only be called religious — bring about the imagined state. It is the “invisible hand” idea from Adam Smith — the conviction that there really is a hidden force that given free rein sets everything aright. It is the God meme in capitalism and its writings, Smith’s among them, that is to capitalism what the Torah is to Judaism, the Gospels to Christianity, and the Koran to Islam: holy texts whose authenticity and reality must not be challenged or questioned unless as an adolescent moment of doubt, eventually subsumed by the re-embrace of total belief.
* I’ve always wanted a Trek anthology series. And with the ever-lowering cost of CGI effects it could be finally be done…
* In the short term, the contract faculty who teach the majority of courses at York University are striking for higher wages. In the long run, contract teaching needs to be abolished.
* The Unintended Consequences of Borrowing Business Tools to Run a University.
In some cases, regulation, not deliberative choice, has led campus leaders to rely on business advice. For example, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights II, signed into law in 1996, requires many of us to hire compensation consultants to ensure that “disqualified persons”—presidents, provosts, vice presidents for finance and administration, etc.—have not received an “excessive benefit” such as inappropriate compensation.In all situations that I have observed, this process has had unintended consequences. Using sophisticated tools developed for industry, the consultants have demonstrated that many higher-education leaders are undercompensated.
GASP! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED! I wonder if a “compensation consultant” has ever, in history, determined that a CEO was receiving “excessive benefit.”
* Raped on Campus? Don’t Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing. I’d see the story about Oregon’s admin raiding the campus health center for ammo to use against its own students, but I’d never seen the outrageous legal justification for it before now.
If you are a student and seek counseling at your college’s counseling center, your medical records are most likely not protected by the typical medical-privacy laws, otherwise known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Instead, they fall under the aegis of Ferpa, just as Oregon said. And compared with Hipaa, Ferpa is about as protective as cheesecloth.
* This Is What It’s Like To Go To Court In Ferguson, Missouri. DOJ Finds Ferguson Police Routinely Discriminate. Ferguson Police Tolerate Sexual Harassment of Female Officers. What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department? Particular lowlights from the DoJ report.
* Ferguson, Inc: The city’s protest movement tries to find a path forward.
* What’s happening here is fundamentally simple: the surveillance state enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care. The state cannot teach its citizens, because it has no idea what to teach; it can only place them under observation. Perfect observation — panopticism — then becomes its telos, which is justifies and universalizes by imposing a responsibility to surveil on the very citizens already being surveilled.
* Lao Science Fiction On the Rise.
* 1906 novel predicted what New York would be like in 2015 exactly.
* CSU profs: Stagnant pay pushing us out of middle class.
* American Airlines To Phase Out Complimentary Cabin Pressurization.
* More Companies Are Run By Men Named “John” Than By Women. Just lean in!
* Writers Block: TV Writers’ Rooms Have Even Fewer Women, Minorities Than Last Year.
* Douglas Adams made me a writer: Neil Gaiman salutes his friend and inspiration.
* The power of play: The effects of Portal 2 and Lumosity on cognitive and noncognitive skills.
* Lots of Cases of Synesthesia Are Based on Alphabet Magnets.
* Where’s The Funding For Women’s Soccer?
* Why Don’t Men Kick Each Other in the Balls?
* Stop Calling Children’s Gun Deaths “Accidental.”
* A singular event that has never happened in history before: Kenosha officer admits to planting evidence in homicide case.
* 2016 watch: Bernie’s Reasons Why Not.
* And Boing Boing has your gallery of Star Trek comic book covers.
One Thousand and One Wednesday Links!
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and things are only going to get worse in the next few weeks. But for now, some links!
* I made a Twitterbot that I’m pretty pleased with: @LOLbalwarming. It’s the only authentic voice left to us in these tough times.
* Book plug: Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism is really good. It’s the #3 book you should buy right now after the longstanding #1 and #2.
* And while I’m hawking stuff on Amazon: they discontinued my Swiss Army canvas wallet, so I had to find a new one. It’s leather, alas, but this Fossil wallet is everything else I want. It’s great.
* Submitted without comment: Letters in support of John McAdams from FIRE and AAUP.
* The shame of America’s parental leave.
* Why, in this day and age, is there even a Save command in any application? Its very presence implies — indeed, guarantees — that the default state of the world is unsafe. This breaks the rule our ancestors learned over billions of years of interaction with the objective world: when you do something, it stays done, until undone. Saving considered harmful. After what happened to me the other week, I am 100% on board with this.
* Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.
* On Weird Fiction and the Interstitial.
* Chris Ware, The Art of Comics No. 2.
* Great job alert: Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured).
* Salaita Goes After University Donors in Lawsuit Over Job Loss at Illinois. UIUC responds.
* The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation.
* Against professors as mandatory reporters.
* Scott Walker budget cut sparks sharp debate on UW System. Deep cuts in Wisconsin. Anticipating budget cuts, nervous UW System tried to strike deal. Republican UW Professor Has Sharp Words For Walker Over Faculty Comment. Scott Walker’s State of Ignorance. A reckless proposal. A self-inflicted wound. Be skeptical. Chasing away UW’s stars. Cut athletics.
* Of course there’s time to kill primary and secondary ed, too.
* From the archives, apropos of absolutely nothing: Stalin, CEO.
* “No Crisis” is a Los Angeles Review of Books special series considering the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. A new installment to the series will be released at the beginning of each month through the fall of 2015. Our aim, as our introductory essay explains, is to “show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.”
* As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities. I want to suggest further that their disinterest is right and even salutary, because what I really mean is that undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.
* Exciting new degradations: Bill Would Allow Texas Teachers To Kill Students.
* Howard Middle School Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History.
* Detroit Cop Who Killed 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones While She Slept Walks Free.
* Texas school suspends 9-year-old for making ‘terroristic threats’ with magic ‘Hobbit’ ring.
Kermit Elementary Principal Roxanne Greer told the Odessa American that she could not comment on the suspension, because “all student stuff is confidential,” but Steward said that she told him that any and all threats to a child’s safety — including magical ones — would be taken seriously by the school.
* Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor tries to put a good spin on what for all the world looks like elder abuse.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15, Cont’d: “Wellness” and the Anti-Vaxxers.
* In France, police bravely defend liberal democracy from an eight-year-old boy.
* The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland.
* Why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?
* Grace has Type 1 diabetes, for which there is no cure. Now 15 years old, she has endured approximately 34,000 blood tests, 5,550 shots and 1,660 medical tubing injections to keep her alive.
* The War Photo No One Would Publish.
* On running and street harassment.
* Bring the Jubilee: Croatia Cancels Debts For Tens Of Thousands Of Its Poorest People.
* Boing Boing reviews David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* Understanding The Man in the High Castle.
In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick’s version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it’s a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death.” That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick’s novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it’s still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.
* Americans Are Working So Hard, It’s Actually Killing People.
* Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.
* Let’s politicize vaccines because why not.
* But friends, I’m here to tell you: it gets worse.
* Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they’d committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he’d committed 40.
* Great read about one of the founders of the Men’s Rights Movement, a former national feminist.
* Inside that creepy Nationwide ad. “Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun.”
* Which Racist UNC Building Are You Today? The University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam Statue Represents a Legacy of White Supremacy.
* Clergy Send In Photos To Replace Images Of Black Youth Police Were Using For Target Practice.
* Food Not Bombs Sues Fort Lauderdale Over Homeless Feeding Law.
* A brief history of the Star Wars expanded universe.
* A brief history of the Super Bowl points spread.
* The shame of the Patriots fan. They even managed to sneak in one more on their way to the championship last weekend.
* Study Links Playing Tackle Football Before Age 12 To Cognitive Impairment.
* Watching football after a traumatic brain injury.
* Florida says parents can’t opt out their kids from standardized tests.
* The Cops Don’t Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
* BREAKING: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.
* Propaganda has gotten way more sophisticated since the old days.
* Man Wakes Up From Bender With Financial Problems Solved.
* Consumption Of Buncha Crunch Reverently Paused During Unsettling Scenes Of ‘American Sniper.’
* Report: Most Americans Can’t Even Name Their State’s Shadow Lord.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Student evaluations are terrible, episode 281.
* Transgender Kids Identify With Their Gender As Completely As Cisgender Kids.
* Coming out as poor at an elite university.
* Probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I had that kind of cash, but: The Vatican Will Offer Free Shaves And Haircuts To Rome’s 3,276 Homeless People.
* Disability, the state, and minimum wage.
* Pettiness and the human condition.
* UVM Recognizes “Neutral” as a Gender Identity.
* Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
* How to tell if you are in a soft science fiction novel.
* Fun With Conspiracy Theories: Did the Chernobyl Disaster Cover Up Something Even Worse? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
* New York cooks up a special unit for kicking hippies.
* When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild.
* Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults.
* When you stare too long into the abyss.
* The #1 reason people die early, in each country.
* Useless but Interesting Facts About America’s Married Couples.
* No, you’re lonely and depressed and lack self-control.
* The United States is becoming a terrible place for air travel. “Becoming.”
* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is back.
* And you can always spot the children of sociologists.
Junior Associate Dean of Closing All My Tabs Links
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is “temporarily out of stock,” but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t place your order! Cyborg Lincoln commands it!
* #SnomgIcanteven2015. Good luck, East Coast!
* The Day the Purpose of College Changed. Great piece. I’ve added it to Wednesday’s reading in the Cultural Preservation course, alongside readings from Bérubé and Bousquet that I added to the syllabus this year.
* The idea behind it is simple: Get donations, and give them to contingent faculty members in need.
* Scott Walker can’t afford to let Bobby Jindal be the only candidate in the race who destroyed education in his state. And while we’re on the subject: Dropkick Murphys Order Scott Walker To Stop Using Their Music: ‘We Literally Hate You!’
* I’m going to have to differ with former president Clinton and possible future president Bush. To me, Arizona State looks like a dystopia, rather than a model for the future. ASU is pretty clearly set up as a factory of credentialing, and any lip-service to educational excellence, particularly in the undergraduate sphere, is exactly that.
* What provosts think. The crucial takeaway: Say Nothing if you Want a Job. Elsewhere in academic freedom: Fox News Raises Alarm Over College Course About Race. Other universities could stand to learn something from ASU’s statement on the subject:
The university, however, issued a statement Friday after the segment, reading:
This course uses literature and rhetoric to look at how stories shape people’s understandings and experiences of race. It encourages students to examine how people talk about — or avoid talking about — race in the contemporary United States. This is an interdisciplinary course, so students will draw on history, literature, speeches and cultural changes — from scholarly texts to humor. The class is designed to empower students to confront the difficult and often thorny issues that surround us today and reach thoughtful conclusions rather than display gut reactions. A university is an academic environment where we discuss and debate a wide array of viewpoints.
* Of course, in addition to everything else ASU is also the school that’s trying to force its composition adjuncts into a 5/5 workload with minimal salary increase, so I’m not going to lose my mind defending it or anything.
* Part everyman tale, as far as English departments go, and part lesson in unintended consequences, Maryland English’s story looks something like this. Between 1996 and 2011, the number of majors actually grew, from 641 to 850 students. Then the university rolled out a new, faculty-backed general education program. Unlike the old general education program, which centered on the liberal arts and required a literature course, the new one offers students much more flexibility in how to fulfill their various requirements. So students who aren’t interested in the liberal arts can much more easily avoid them. Part of the idea was to take some of the burden off departments, such as English, that fulfilled requirements for many students under the old system. Faculty members generally supported the idea.
But then the numbers got funny. In the spring of 2012, the English department lost 88 majors. The following year, it lost 79 – then 128 more majors 12 months later. Between spring and fall 2014, 66 more majors fell from the rolls. Over all, the department lost 363 majors — about 40 percent — and the numbers continue to fall. I basically get called out personally as the article goes on:
One of the more controversial departmental reform topics is how to change the English program itself, including by creating more recruitment-oriented, lower-level courses. Cartwright said there’s a demonstrated interest in updated versions of Great Books courses, but also in what he said some have called “zombie courses” – pejoratively, not descriptively. Those include courses on such popular genres as science fiction, fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkein, regional literature or children’s literature.
Cartwright said there’s some feeling among his colleagues that such offerings equate to “dumbing down” the curriculum. But he said others feel there’s value in meeting students “where they are.” And of course there are professors whose areas of expertise are in those fields and vouch for their importance.
* Rise of the medical humanities.
* Associate Dean of Eureka Moments. Now accepting applications.
* The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem. A Hereditary Meritocracy.
* Greek Conservative Spokesman Concedes Defeat to Anti-Austerity Left. Greece: Phase One. I guess I’ll take the “Eeyore” side of the bet:
* Audio edition of Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library. KSR!
* How Amazon series misreads The Man in the High Castle. I’m glad someone got to this thinkypiece before I did; I’m crossing it off my list.
* The State department wants Frozen PSAs to finally convince the powerful children’s voting bloc to support climate change legislation.
* A new wave of videogames offers lessons in powerlessness, scarcity and inevitable failure. What makes them so compelling? And from the archives: Desert Bus: The Very Worst Video Game Ever Created.
* Free speech, and other things that cost $91,000,000.00.
* Massive open online sexual harassment.
* Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from.
* The bacteria at USC depend on energy, too, but they obtain it in a fundamentally different fashion. They don’t breathe in the sense that you and I do. In the most extreme cases, they don’t consume any conventional food, either. Instead, they power themselves in the most elemental way: by eating and breathing electricity. You were supposed to find us bacteria that eat garbage and shit electricity. I swear to god, I don’t know what you scientists are even doing sometimes.
* American Sniper is a racist, militaristic movie. But it has much to teach us if we want to build a successful antiwar movement. Learning from American Sniper.
* Why they throw subway cars away in the ocean.
* Great video bringing a kid’s imagination to life.
* Andrew Cuomo rips teacher unions as selfish ‘industry’ more interested in members’ rights than student needs. #ReadyforCuomo
* When the Boss Says, ‘Don’t Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid.’
* Gasp: Rationale for anti-ACA case continues to unravel.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15: Wellness.
* “No king, no king, lalalala” in three dozen languages. Apropos of nothing, of course.
* Ninth Circuit Panel Suggests Perjury Prosecution For Lying Prosecutors. You mean that’s not the rule already?
* The age of miracles: Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES.
* The murderers of Charlie Hebdo prove that Puritan thugs (broadly defined) do in fact exist. However, this does not mean (contra McKinney and his supporters, educated and otherwise) that all those speaking out against Puritan thugs are beyond reproach. Nor does it place a seal forever upon the righteousness of comics creators or comics scholars. Is comics scholarship an academic field devoted to the understanding and discussion of comics, bringing a wide range of knowledge and approaches to a complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes flawed, sometimes undervalued, and perhaps sometimes overvalued medium? Or is comics scholarship to be devoted to boosterism, advocacy, and sacralization?If Charlie Hebdo’s accomplishment was to fight against all priesthoods, then surely it does them little honor to try to set up a priesthood in their name, handing down stern pronouncements about how their work must be read and understood.
* Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate.
* Great moments in he said/she said: Maybe Drunk, Sleeping Woman Wanted to Be Set on Fire.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
* Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed.
* Deflategate by the numbers: Data Show The Patriots Have Fumbled The Ball Far Less Than Any Other NFL Team.
* How to write like J.K. Rowling.
* The headline reads, “Pope Uses Balloons As Peace Symbols After Dove Debacle.”
* Pope Francis Wants To Cross The U.S.-Mexico Border As A ‘Beautiful Gesture Of Brotherhood.’
* The New Measles: One of the most infectious viruses on the planet is making a comeback in the United States, and many doctors have never even seen it. How Anti-Vaxxers Ruined Disneyland For Themselves (And Everyone Else.) Measles is horrible.
* The idea that a major problem with climate change is “sunburn” is just so incredibly, blisteringly stupid I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.
* More bad news: Negative tweets mean you’re probably going to die of a heart attack, study says.
* I’ve let so many tabs pile up since my last link post I have no choice but to do a “nightmare headlines” lightning round: Burglar gets 30 years in prison for raping 101-year-old woman in home. Father of ailing twins can only donate his liver to one of them. Vanderbilt Woman Didn’t Think She’d Been Raped Until She Saw Video Of It. Nearly two dozen cats seized from a Md. home, then euthanized touches off a furor. Prison Visitor Says Guards Made Her Prove She Was Menstruating By Letting Them Inspect Her Vagina. Ocean Warming Now Off The Charts. Here’s A Spider So Awful You’ll Wish It Would Only Bite You To Death.
* Mamas, don’t let your cities grow up to be gambling metropolises.
* Weird op-ed (linking to Serial) that seems to argue that extreme prosecutorial coercion through overcharging and oversentencing is a feature, rather than a bug. That said, I’d thought the podcast itself had explicitly explained why strangulation is associated with “premeditation,” though perhaps that’s only something I saw on Reddit.
* #serialseason2: Who killed Padmé Amidala? I actually like this theory fan rewrite a lot.
* George Lucas said Disney killed all his ideas for New Star Wars movies. Okay, so they did one thing right.
* The precession of simulacra: Car Manufacturers Have Been Faking Our Engine Noises.
* Peak Vox, but I actually found it interesting: Here are 9 surprising facts about feces you may not know.
* Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet.
* Median weekly earnings by educational attainment in 2014.
* Federal Prison Sentence Begins for Anti-Drone Activist.
* The Princess Bride, the new film from Francois Truffaut.
* The Star Wars tipping point.
* How to tell if you are in a High Fantasy novel.
* Would Crashing Through a Wall Actually Kill the Kool-Aid Man?
* My current favorite video: Marquette in the 1980s.
* And here they all are, together forever. All 1,547 Star Trek lens flares.
Good Morning, It’s Sunday Morning Links
* A rare correction: actually your pets will burn in hell. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com regrets the error.
* Watch out, modern-day slaves, the Pope might un-denounce your exploitation next!
* Sad update: Cheryl Abbate has been run out of Marquette.
* Adding that to the explicitly military and overseas contingency funding, the real dimensions of the US military-intelligence-police-prison complex begin to come into view: a staggering $830 billion, more than 80 cents out of every dollar in the funding bill, is devoted to killing, spying on, imprisoning or otherwise oppressing the people of the world, including the American people.
* The federal government is using data gimmicks to mask the true scope of homelessness.
* To end police violence, we must end policing as we know it.
* Timelapse video reveals massive size of New York City protests.
* Ferguson to Increase Police Ticketing to Close City’s Budget Gap.
* Point/counterpoint: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture is totally legit. Ex-NFL punter Chris Kluwe says maybe not.
* But what we do know is that the histories of slavery and of capitalism look very different if we understand them in relation to each other. The next time we walk the streets of Lower Manhattan or the grounds of Harvard University, we should think at least in passing of the millions of enslaved workers who helped make some of that grandeur possible, and to the ways that slavery’s legacy persists today.
* U.S. Schools Saying Goodbye to Foreign Languages. Horrible.
* Cruel optimism we can believe in: What if Democrats had their own Tea Party–esque rebellion? Why the Democratic Party could seriously change — for real, this time.
* Ever Say Never Again: On the History and Future of James Bond.
* Scientists think the Big Bang could’ve created a mirror universe where time flows backward.
* What are the bastards ruining now? Buffy.
* Is Studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer More Important Than Studying Shakespeare? I say teach the controversy.
* I think I would say Freddie is probably the worst possible spokesperson for the conversation the feminist left should be having in the wake of the Rolling Stone UVA scandal. But no one else seems to want to talk about it at all.
* Meanwhile, Matt Fraction walks away from Twitter.
* As recruitment dips, TFA leader says New York training site to close.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say “racism.”
* The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon.
* A Tolkien true believer vs. the nerds.
* Hear Philip K. Dick Talk About SF And The Mainstream In 1976.
* Playboy ranks every Star Trek episodes. “Mirror, Mirror” at #3 is a deeply weird choice. And “Arena” at #6 is just insane.
* They did a TV movie where the McCallisters get divorced? Pretty dark, Home Alone!
* Portuguese Street Artist Creates Stunning 3D Graffiti That Seems To Float In The Air.
* The Hobbit: A Middle-Earth Workplace.
* Now it’s the Kindle version of Green Planets that has inexplicably gone on deep discount for the weekend, if you’re in the market. And don’t forget to pre-order The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, out in January!
* And they say our society is no longer capable of achieving great things: This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint.
Wednesday Links! Some Especially Good Ones!
* Paradoxa 26, “SF Now,” is on its way, and has my essay on Snowpiercer and necrofuturism in it. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams’s introduction to the issue is online.
* Extrapolation‘s current call for reviewers.
* UCR is hiring: Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian.
* African SF: Presenting Omenana 1.1. Of particular note: “The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fan Girl.”
* Nnedi Okorafor, Ytasha Womack, Isiah Lavender, and Sigal Samuel discussion #BlackStormTrooper.
* NASA Officially Announce Plans To Put Humans On Mars With Orion Space Capsule.
* UAB shuts down its football program. Of course, the reason is austerity:
“The fiscal realities we face — both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint — are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB,” Watts said in a statement released by the university. “As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the athletic department, football is simply not sustainable.”
We just can’t afford to throw bricks at students’ heads any more — not in these tough times.
* Teaching fellows strike at the University of Oregon.
* “Hypereducated and On Welfare”: The adjunct crisis hits Elle.
* Stefan Grimm and academic precarity: 1, 2.
* Meanwhile: College Hilariously Defends Buying $219,000 Table.
* Work, the welfare state, and what counts as “dignity.”
* It really pains me to say it, because I think the consequences for anti-rape activism will be dire, but significant questions have been raised about Rolling Stone‘s UVA story that neither the journalist nor the magazine have good answers to. It’s a good day to think carefully about what Freddie deBoer says here: “…it’s an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool.”
* Imagine a World Without Prisons: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Superheroes, and Prison Abolition.
* Against New Atheism: The “New Atheists” have gained traction because they give intellectual cover to Western imperialism.
* The mass transit system Milwaukee didn’t know it needed. Now, if you could just snake another couple lines up the lake side… More links below the map.
* The Ferguson PD victory lap continues: Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a riot.
* How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street.
* How One Woman Could Hit The Reset Button In The Case Against Darren Wilson.
* Utah’s Insanely Expensive Plan To Seize Public Lands. “…a price tag that could only be paid if the state were able to increase drilling and mining.” Oh, so not insane, then, just evil.
* There are boondoggles and there are boondoggles: Federal prosecutors subpoenaed dozens of records and documents relating to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s iPad program, including emails, proposals and score sheets dealing with the bids that led to a multi-million Apple contract with the district.
* For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25…
* Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today.
* And the market for Girl Scout cookies is about to be disrupted. I gained ten pounds just reading this story.
