Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

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So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links

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* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…

* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).

* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!

* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)

* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…

* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.

* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.

* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.

* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.

* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.

* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!

* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.

* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.

* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.

* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.

Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.

* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.

* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.

* How to read Infinite Jest.

* Let the children sue.

* Monsters of climate change.

Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.

What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?

The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.

* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.

Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.

The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.

How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.

* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.

* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.

Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.

* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.

Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.

* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.

Politics corner!

* It’s been so long since I posted that this caravan of bloodthirsty women and children isn’t even attacking the US anymore.

* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.

* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.

Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.

* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!

I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’

* The political theology of Trump.

* Florida. Why is it always Florida?

The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.

* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.

* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.

* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.

* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.

Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.

Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.

* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.

* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.

* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.

Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.

Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.

* Why are we in the Middle East?

* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.

* And Wisconsin’s even worse.

* Trans rights are human rights.

Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.

Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.

* Oops! Our bad!

But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.

A pandemic killing tens of millions of people is a real possibility — and we are not prepared for it.

Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.

What is the evolutionary advantage of death?

* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.

* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.

Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.

A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.

* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.

* How to revise Lovecraft.

How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.

Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.

* The cruelest optimism: Large-scale humanities Ph.D. tracking effort finds most would do it all over again, if given the choice, and that these Ph.D.s believe their programs prepared them for diverse career paths, especially after the first few years following graduation.

* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.

* Fuck yeah.

“Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.

Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?

* The story of a serial SWATter.

The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”

* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.

The Strand, New York City’s largest independent bookstore, is owned by a millionaire — and the booksellers who work there are all broke.

* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.

* Twilight of Apu.

Ross MacDonald is a creator of fake period paper props – books, documents, packaging etc – for use in movies and television.

* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.

* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.

* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.

* Losing Laura.

* This seems fine.

* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.

The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.

A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.

* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?

* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.

* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.

* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.

Written by gerrycanavan

November 12, 2018 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Thursday Noontime Links!

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* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.

* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.

* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, ‘Country Will Go Down, Too.’ Obviously.

* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.

Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details ‘Torture’ For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.

* Right on schedule: “Citizenship shouldn’t be a birthright.”

Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.

* Deported for doing journalism.

If it’s peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it’s a strange and inexplicable practice, or it’s what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.

* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don’t worry, Fox is on it.

On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald’s, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.

Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.

* The “do what you want” theory of politics: Why embracing “Abolish ICE” and Medicare-for-all won’t doom the Democrats.

America Can Never Sort Out Whether ‘Socialism’ Is Marginal or Rising.

Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.

* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?

* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.

* Snikt!

Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…

* Money is speech. It’s better actually.

* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What’s Really Warming the World?

Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.

But the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.

Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.

* America’s racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.

Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?

Putting the “crow” in necrophilia.

At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.

* I’d watch it.

How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.

* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm.

Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That’s Actually True?

Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.

* ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ Heading to Netflix.

* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.

* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.

Tuesday Afternoon Links!

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* CFP: ASLE 2019: Paradise on Fire. CFP: Trans Futures. CFP: Superheroes and Disability: Unmasking Ableism in the Media.

* The return of the MA in SF at Liverpool.

* American Literature 90.2: “Queer about Comics.”

* ‘Mothers could not stop crying’: Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants. Immigrant moms in SeaTac prison ‘could hear their children screaming.’ Asylum seekers are being sexually assaulted in U.S. detention. A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants. Morristown, TN. Jeff Sessions is an evil man. There is no bottom. More denaturalization. More surveillance. ‘Again’ is happening right now on America’s border. What will you do?

* Meanwhile. By Trump’s own yardstick, NKorea pact falls flat.

Meet the guys who tape Trump’s papers back together.

* It’s hard to imagine a shift that better embodies a sound public health response to the opioid epidemic, and yet it’s the result—one among many—of a process initiated by Burlington’s mayor and chief of police, neither of whom have a background in health. What’s happening in Burlington suggests how a small city can begin to confront a monster epidemic and, in the process, stretch ideas about the role of a small-city police department.

* Meanwhile, in NYC.

* The World Cup of Disputed Nations.

* n+1’s patented World Cup Preview 2018.

* Nike v. Iran.

* The New York Times is bad, exhibit 657. 658.

For almost 25 years, Shane Smith’s plan for Vice was that, by the time the suckers caught on, he’d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded.

* Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House. The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence.

Neoliberal Fascism.

* How Unions Help Adjuncts.

* I’m Asking You For A Peer-Reviewed Study Showing That A Typical Fat Person Can Become Sustainably Non-Fat Through Deliberate Weight-Loss.

* Computer assistance for the modern novelist.

* The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

* Vanity Fair revisits The Staircase.

* Researchers from Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) say the obesity gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. An explosive U.N. report shows America’s safety net was failing before Trump’s election. Private schools’ curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together. Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.

A Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protector Is Sentenced to Prison in North Dakota.

* Sadly The NRA is immune from prosecution no matter how flagrantly it broke the law here. Them’s the rules.

Moving Animals to Safe Havens Can Unexpectedly Doom Them.

* Oil companies struggling to drill in the permafrost the oil they burn is melting.

* Puerto Rico’s morgue is overflowing with unclaimed dead bodies after a storm nine months ago.

* nobodywantsthis.tv

* A Review of the ‘Hereditary’ Wikipedia Page, by Someone Who Is Too Afraid to See ‘Hereditary.’

* Of course: Bill Clinton comes to Al Franken’s defense.

* My petard — it seems to have somehow hoisted… me?

What Happens When an Adjunct Instructor Wants to Retire?

Jeff Bezos Is Already $40 Billion Richer This Year—While Because the Typical Amazon Worker Has Made Just $12,000.

New Study on Rising Suicide Rates Suggests Capitalism Is Quite Literally Killing Us.

Days Before Murder Trial, Prosecutors Reveal a Missing Confession. Dozens claim a Chicago detective beat them into confessions. A pattern of abuse or a pattern of lies?

Marine Veteran Trains White Supremacists in Military Tactics.

* The best Mario Kart character, according to data science.

* Another military-industrial nightmare stealing its branding from Tolkien.

The World Can’t Afford High-Tech Insulin.

* The age of the MSNBC Mom.

We Aren’t Teaching What Students Need to Know About Climate Science.

Job Satisfaction of Humanities Master’s Degree Recipients.

* Building the Dream: LEGO Friends and the Construction of Human Capital.

* Hamlet and science.

* What the world would be like if land and sea were inverted.

* Talk. Talk or suffer the consequences. The state of our union is typical. Quantum computers. Herman Melville. Screenwriting. Dreams of flight.

* Infinity War crosses $2B. That this set of characters has revolutions both comics and film, fifty years apart, is pretty incredible.

* Map of North America, c. 2024 (start of Trump’s third term).

On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.

* And giant African baobab trees die suddenly after thousands of years. Seems fine!

Written by gerrycanavan

June 12, 2018 at 1:07 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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All the Links, Half the Calories

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* Fake Blood and Blanks: Schools Stage Active Shooter Drills. This is utterly horrific. The country has lost its mind.

Mass shootings in America, 1999 through 2013.

Arkansas man guns down 15-year-old girl for egging son’s car as a prank.

Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery. These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit. Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in bondage at the White House.

Jefferson had a number of slaves who gained their freedom by various methods. He freed two slaves in his lifetime and five in his will. Three others ran away and were not pursued. (Still others successfully ran away despite pursuit.) All ten freed with Jefferson’s consent were members of the Hemings family; the seven he officially freed were all skilled tradesmen. About 200 slaves were sold at estate sales after Jefferson’s death.

* In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?

* On the Killing of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn: I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson’s genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington’s abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge, that the G.I Bill’s accolades are somehow inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting which, likely to the end of our days, we shall unerringly return. I had never heard Oney Judge’s story before. What a life. More, more.

Justifiable Homicides Up 200 Percent in Florida Post-Stand Your Ground. Just make sure you don’t get more than one DUI a year or you could miss out in the horrible war of all against all.

* Terrible news, everyone: Change In Jet Stream Is the Likely Cause of Brutal Winter. Arctic getting darker, making Earth warmer. Rise in malaria forecast for tropical highlands.

* 401-not-okays.

On Friday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Missoula County Attorney’s Office in Montana, alleging that it has found “substantial evidence” that prosecutors there systematically discriminate against female sexual-assault victims.

A Northwestern University student alleges in a federal lawsuit that the school mishandled her complaint that a professor sexually attacked her after getting her drunk in 2012.

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

8 Book Historians, Curators, Specialists, And Librarians Who Are Killing It Online. #4 with a bullet: Duke’s Own Mitch Fraas.

California police use taser on deaf man trying to communicate with them via sign language.

Facets of Hope for Adjunct Faculty.

Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now.

Loyola Marymount U. Is Accused of Interfering With Adjuncts’ Union Election. Strike at UIC.

Vitruvian Man Had a Hernia.

PBS: Bought and Paid For.

* National recruitment sources have become necessary because most Black youth from our city who attend college outside of Milwaukee decide never to return. And you can’t blame them given the fact that several studies have shown Milwaukee to be among the worst cities in the country for African Americans.

* And it gets worse for the Cream City.

* The NFL wanted him… until he was named a Rhodes Scholar.

After Historic UAW Defeat at Tennessee Volkswagen Plant, Theories Abound. A Titanic Defeat.

Snake-handling star of ‘Snake Salvation’ reality show dies from snake bite.

* The Duke Chronicle profiles a first-year student who also works in the porn industry.

Behind Frank Underwood’s Medieval Senate Maneuver In ‘House Of Cards.’ * Political Drama Without Politics: The Nihlism of House of Cards.

Where do you go after you leave the cast of The Real World?

* Hoverboards or I walk.

20 Practical Uses for Coca-Cola That Prove That It Should Not Be In The Human Body. So good though.

* Event in NYC: All the Women in Capital.

* BDS as psychological warfare.

Apple working on heart attack prediction device.

* Previewing the coming disaster at Qatar World Cup 2022.

​The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.

New Zealand Prime Minister publicly denies being a lizard person.

* A Pushing Daisies Stage Musical?

* And The Cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel Says Wes Anderson Is a Genius Hardass. Hurry up and get here, March!

Wednesday Links: Breaking Bad, Divine Justice, Fake Vaccines, and More

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* Just got an email alert from CNN: there appear to have been another set of terror attacks in Mumbai. Very sad news.

* Drug trials in Africa show two AIDS prevention drugs are apparently successful in preventing the spread of the disease.

* And the inevitable dark reflection of the previous link: The headline reads, “CIA used a fake vaccination campaign in hunt for Bin Laden.”

* Justice is sweet: News Corp. has lost $7B in the last four days, shareholders are furious, and Lautenberg is joining the call for DOJ and SEC investigations into Murdoch’s empire.

* ThinkProgress: Meet The Indonesian Workers Who Make Your Nikes.

* Reduce the deficit by stopping building pointless superweapons we can never use.

* Premature victory lap watch: Obama for America raked in $86 million for the last quarter, crushing the GOP. The bulk of the money came from small donors.

* Chuck Klosterman: Why AMC’s Breaking Bad beats Mad MenThe Sopranos, and The Wire.

* And RSA Animate explains why there’s no empathy in Heaven, or in Utopia:

Wednesday

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* Via everywhere: “A Letter to My Students” from Michael O’Hare.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

* But the news isn’t all bad: Nike has filed a patent on the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future, Part II.

* Should blogs count toward tenure? Cathy Davidson says yes, but as service work, not publication. More from Chutry, who approves.

* New Jersey in the news! The state lost $400 million in federal education funding for not following directions.

* Trailer for AMC’s The Walking Dead. I’m cautiously optimistic, even if some of this (particularly the washed-out, poorly acted opening scenes) seems really amateurish.

* John Krasinski’s adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men can be watched on Hulu until September 5. Speaking as a hideous man, I thought it was worth watching.

* “Competitive balance an issue in EPL.” Four 6-0 games in two weeks—you think?

* What’s in the Avatar special edition?

* And presenting the Next Generation that never (but almost) was, starring Wesley Snipes as Geordi La Forge.