Monday Morning

* In local news: Dangerous Levels of ‘Erin Brockovich’ Chemical Found in Local Drinking Water.

* Great little Wisconsin story about the hotel NFL teams stay at when they play the Packers.

* A brief history of Tetris.

* To understand Charlotte’s rage, you have to understand its roads. A Homegirl Reflecting on Charlotte Uprising.

* Homeless and in graduate school.

* The survey that Williams was part of, the Milwaukee Area Renters Study (MARS), may be the first rigorous, detailed look at eviction in a major city. Interviewers like Williams spoke to about 1,100 Milwaukee-area tenants between 2009 and 2011, asking them a battery of questions on their housing history. The survey has already fundamentally changed researchers’ understanding of eviction, revealing the problem to be far larger than previously understood. 

* The rise and rise of tabletop gaming.

* It’s genuinely disturbing how easy it is to make a 269-269 electoral map, and how plausible that outcome seems.

* Here’s Everything Donald Trump Has Promised to Do on His First Day as President. Seven Days of Donald Trump’s Lies. Scope of Trump’s falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate. Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths. The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. Bruce vs. Trump. Trump’s jet vs. the taxpayers. Intel Officials Investigating Trump Advisor’s Ties To Putin Allies. Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia. Pregaming the debate. And again. And again. And again.

“Trump looked like a president tonight” will be the media’s mantra tomorrow night barring anything short of a stroke on stage.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 26, 2016

* Obama legacy project, take one.

* Know your 1%.

* From the right: “Against democracy.”

* Roughly speaking, a white voter will lean left if she is “more college than church” and will lean right if she is “more church than college.”

* Democrats don’t actually want to win, exhibit 37,000.

* If you want a vision of the future:

 The Democrats have become the party, not of some specific ideological agenda, but of the traditional system as such. One of Obama’s major goals has been to rehabilitate the Republicans and force them to act as a worthy opponent rather than an implacable foe. This approach was naive and in many ways dangerous, as shown most vividly when Obama tried to “leverage” the Republicans’ unprecedented brinksmanship on the debt ceiling to engineer a “grand bargain” on the deficit, but it fits with the view that the system only works if there are two worthy opponents locked in an eternal struggle with no final victories. We can see something similar in Clinton’s controversial decision to treat Trump as an outlier rather than letting him tar the Republican brand as such. It works to her political disadvantage — showing that her centrist opportunism is weirdly principled in its own way — but from within her worldview, the most important thing is to restore the traditional balance of forces.

The situation we are in shows the intrinsic instability of party democracy. An eternal struggle between worthy opponents is not possible in practice. Eventually, one of the two teams is going to decide that they want to win in the strong sense, to defeat the opponent once and for all. And if that desire cannot be achieved immediately, it will inevitably lead to a long period where the old enemy is treated as a foe — as intrinsically evil and illegitimate. Within the American system, with its baroque structure of constraints and veto points, that will lead to a period where government is barely functional, because the natural tendency will be for the radicalized party to refuse to go along with the system until they have full control over it.

* Clinton’s policy team.

* This would be a better story if they were going to dive in to how creepy this would be: Geordi La Forge Has a Ship Full of Datas in This First Look at Star Trek: Waypoint.

* Tonight in Jungeland: Chris Christie’s Chances For Impeachment Just Went Way Up.

* On the Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Brute Luck.

* Scientists have found a better version of the Dyson Sphere. Meet the Dyson Swarm, a vast mega-structure comprised of a plethora of solar panels.

* Mars! Still! Again!

* The circle of lfe.

* Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.

* A walking tour of New York’s surveillance network.

* The Stolen War: How corruption and fraud created a failed state in Iraq—and led directly to the rise of ISIS.

* The Fallacies Of Neoliberal Protest.

* Please be true, please be true: Arrival Is a Scifi Masterpiece You Won’t Stop Thinking About.

* “The Battle of Algiers” at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point.

* Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said a two-year study he led concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. Challenge accepted.

* Cats sailed with Vikings to conquer the world, genetic study reveals. Trade between China and Rome in the ancient world, as tokened by a pair of corpses found in a London cemetery. (On that second one others say not so fast.)

* “…Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more “newsworthy” tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.”

* Breaking Bad at a Bronx charter.

* The Three-Body Problem in, well, China.

* A Law Professor Explains Why You Should Never Talk to Police.

* A History of Native Americans Protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

* The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.

* A brief history of gang violence in Chicago.

* This is what word processing machines, word processing software, and word processing as an office management strategy all have common: they are techniques for providing the essential labor required to produce texts while also concealing that labor, thereby generating the impression that the command to produce a document can itself produce documents.

* Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest is a start, but what if pro athletes refused to play? Students Are Pulling a Kaepernick All Over America — and Being Threatened for It.

* And if you want a vision of the future: They’re gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies.

They're gonna be submerging this dude in water and taking photos every 5 years until he dies https://t.co/Ms9H5T61Te

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) September 24, 2016

Sunday Won’t Procrastinate Itself: Links!

* A City Where Everyone Works, There Is No Police, And The Salary Is 1200 Euros.

* This piece and the comments (read both) constitute one of the only serious or substantive discussions of Laura Kipnis’s CHE pieces I’ve seen. I just finished a long and frustrating but possibly ultimately consensus-building Facebook debate about the minutiae of this thing, so I’m basically an expert on the case now.

* “With its new flavor, Save Our Swirled, Ben & Jerry’s is urging fans to dig their spoons into climate change activism.” That’s solve it!

* California’s Snowpack Is Now Zero Percent of Normal.

* It’s so hot in India the roads are melting.

* For those who want to build a stronger left in the US, there is no substitute for the work — however slow and painstaking it might be — of building social movements and struggles at the grassroots and of organizing a political alternative independent of the Democratic Party.

I can give you a solution, too, it’s just like everything else: withdraw support from Democrats, build coalition for new Constitution.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

* ‘American Universities Are Addicted to Chinese Students.’

* Black dolls and American culture.

* Jessica Springsteen, born to jump.

* How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.

* PROFS Statement on Joint Finance Committee Action on UW System Budget. UW Struggle: Final Update. An Idiot’s Guide to the Tenure Process. Don’t mourn, organize. In all its glory.

Die Public Universities is bipartisan consensus. Like most austerity, the difference is Republicans = “we love it,” Dems = “sadly, we must.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

Definitely an argument the lizard people who control everything will respond to positively https://t.co/2RyceIKiF2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

America’s robust public university system produces the medical technology that will keep lizard people alive forever. #pleasefundeducation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

Lizard people need educated humans to act as the middle-men enforcing their regime of total control. #pleasefundeducation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

Public universities are a key source of the exorbitant speaking fees and no-show sinecures lizard people crave. #pleasefundeducation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

Without public education, lizard people would have as many as three weekends a year without sports on tv. #pleasefundeducation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015

* And then there’s Texas.

* Can academics really “have it all”?

* The fall of Rome.

* To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.

* Boing Boing covers Rashida Jones’s “amateur porn” documentary Hot Girls Wanted.

* Science proves music really was better back then.

* It also proves nothing likes being eaten.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Philosophy: 1, 2.

* The Wire, but for Israel/Palestine.

* And the arc of history is long, but production on TRON 3 has been shut down.

Thursday Night Links

* Everybody’s getting richer except actual human beings.

* In 2002, a novel thought to be the first written by an African-American woman became a best seller, praised for its dramatic depiction of Southern life in the mid-1850s through the observant eyes of a refined and literate house servant. But one part of the story remained a tantalizing secret: the author’s identity.

* Looking back on three decades of crisis in the humanities.

* Best Pope ever?

* One In Nine U.S. Prisoners Are Serving Life Sentences, Report Finds.

* Faculty wins one in Oregon.

* And a little something for 13-year-old-me: “Twenty years later, why Counting Crows’ August and Everything After is as meaningful as Nirvana’s In Utero.“ Take that, popular and critical consensus!

Sunday Night Ukulele

Sunday night ukulele fix: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain plays “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the theme from Shaft. Via MeFi.

Nevermind

This year’s freshmen are the last group of students I’m likely to have that are older than 1991’s Nevermind. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Strange Maps is just about exactly what it sounds like, but it’s also the most fun specialty blog I’ve visited in a good while. Where else are you going to find the the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which proves Sweden’s status as secular paradise in graph form, plus a mapping of Middle-Earth onto Regular-Europe, a mapping of how evolution is taught in the U.S., the world as seen from 9th Avenue, Tatooine, and the most generic country ever? At right: Inside the Hollow Earth.

Via Cynical-C, which this morning also brings us “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as performed by choir.