* So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.
Posts Tagged ‘no confidence’
Monday Mega-Links
* Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Be President. Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken. Clinton Releases a Brutal Anti-Trump Ad. 5 not-totally-crazy electoral maps that show Donald Trump winning. Could Trump Put Georgia in Play for Democrats? Only a Democrat can stop Trump now. Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism. The six days of Carly Fiorina’s vice presidential campaign, ranked.
* Report: FBI Preparing to Interview Hillary Clinton About Email Thing.
* Wave of no-confidence votes sweeps Wisconsin campuses.
* Why graduate students should be allowed to see the letters we write on their behalf. I was in strong disagreement with the headline but was won over by the text.
* Recommendation for a quick, great read: Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti, an Afrofuturist space-age riff on Harry Potter with more than a little bit of Octavia Butler in there…
* Another thing I’ve been enjoying, which you might too: “Hardcore Game of Thrones” on howl.fm. (First three episodes available for free here.) It’s completely sold me on the viability of a prequel spinoff, and I may actually like it more than the actual series.
* Two Great Tastes: On Civil War and Hamilton. Meanwhile, a great review from Abigail Nussbaum asks whether Civil War (which I liked a lot) has ruined the MCU.
* The Norton Writer’s Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay written by an undergraduate. Literacy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.
* “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
* Unable to analyze meaning, narrative, or argument, computer scoring instead relies on length, grammar, and arcane vocabulary to do assess prose. Should you trust a computer to grade your child’s writing on Common Core tests?
* A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism.
* Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.
* Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?
* Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight. This situation is absolutely untenable and I cannot believe the airlines are willingly participating.
* Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills.
* Maps of the end of the world. The post keeps going after the image!
* Why Refrigerators Were So Slow to Catch On in China.
* U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.
* Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.’
One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.
* Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet.
* Happy Mother’s Day: Kids’ Screen Time Is A Feminist Issue. Keep scrolling!
* Nonhuman Rights Project Chimpanzee Clients Hercules and Leo to Be Sent to Sanctuary.
* Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff.
* The modern banking system and zero-factor security.
* University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien. There’s still more after the image!
* Here’s the Table Of Contents For Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Amazing Big Book of Science Fiction.
* The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies.
* Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
* Fullest House, A Never-Ending Stream of Daily ‘Full House’ Scripts Generated by a Neural Network.
* Before Hamilton, there was… An Oral History of Rent.
* Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship.
* Grimdark realism isn’t realistic: where is kindness on Game of Thrones?
* Twilight of The Antioch Review.
* Why we sued the American Studies Association.
* When Robinson Met Bacigalupi.
* Daredevils Jump Out of Plane, Play Quick Game of Quidditch Before Landing. Keep going.
* The Flight of the Navigator sequel/reboot just wrote itself.
* New J.M. Coetzee novel announced.
* Daredevil and the Problem of the Not Bad.
Ultimately, there’s not much you can say about Daredevil because its not-goodness derives from the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. This makes it hard to say anything about the way it’s not saying anything. Based on the first season, I would have argued that the show uses the superhero genre tode-familiarize gentrification and the way crime plays into struggles over urban land use. Similarly, I would contend that Jessica Jones uses the superhero-detective genre to de-familiarize trauma and addiction. Coming out — dare I say, being flushed out — of Daredevil season two, I would say that it uses the Batman-genre to re-familiarize the Ninja-genre. And for all the violence it does to its characters and setting, the real problem is this reinvestment in the fetish of ninja violence. The show uses the spectacle ofliteral violence to render unnecessary the organic narrative flow of people just being people in the world. Instead of the hidden injuries and traumas of class, as they play themselves out across our lives, we get a story of a ninja fighting ninjas because, well, ninjas.
* CEI et al. argue that TSA’s final rule fails to consider one important factor related to the deployment body scanners: a potential increase in highway injuries and deaths. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. Past research suggests that post-9/11 airport security policies were so invasive that a number of would-be air travelers decided to drive instead. Given the fact that auto travel is far more dangerous than air travel,three Cornell University economists found that TSA’s invasive, time-consuming airport screening policies resulted in about 500 additional highway fatalities annually in the years following 9/11—more than a fully loaded 747 per year.
* Google is working on a computer that is literally injected into your eye. Hard pass.
* Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War.
* What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage.
* On women’s bodies in academia.
* Educated people are usually critical of absolute truths, no matter if they come from statistics or religious revelation. Facts need to be understood within a larger cultural context in order to be deemed plausible or implausible. Today, however, we see an increasing tendency to describe the world not in terms of cultural values, but in terms of fundamental truths. In the cases of fundamentalism and neoliberal education of excellence, as I’ve shown here, this “deculturation” takes the form of a dangerous combination of religion and pseudoscientific thought peddled as excellence.
* There’s a Sci-Fi Novel Secretly Unfolding in Reddit’s Comments.
* 78% of Reddit Threads With 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis.
* Sure, let’s clone Leonardo da Vinci. Things could hardly get worse.
* I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Historical memory is not about the past — it is about the future.
* And some scenes from the Anthropocene: Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There. Fort McMurray Wildfire: 80,000 Evacuated Over Out-of-Control Blaze. Fleeing Fire in Oil Country. Alberta Wildfires Expected to Double In Size and Burn for Months. The First Coral Reefs Are Starting to Permanently Dissolve. Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard. Have a great week, everybody!
Tuesday Afternoon Links
* A new page at Marquette: a $96 million residence hall development.
* And then there’s that old page.
* There’s more than one way to brand a college. Like at least three or four.
* No-confidence vote by UW faculty passes overwhelmingly.
* Scientists Find New Earthlike Planets, Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines Living There.
* “Why Is Westeros So Fucked Up?” “In conclusion, Game of Thrones is a franchise of contrasts.”
For the television series, it’s more complicated. The crucial question is this: How do you take a story that’s written as a deliberate repudiation of 1990s fantasy norms and make it work, twenty years later, with an audience that didn’t necessarily grow up with Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan novels? The story is generally strong enough that it’s managed to survive and thrive; the failures of the Starks are not just reversals of fantasy convention but overall storytelling convention. But the longer the series goes, the less able it is to draw upon such clear subversions.
* Don DeLillo’s back and I’m pretty excited about Zero K.
* Hamilton, the musical you may be tired of hearing about because it is literally impossible to get tickets to see it until 2047, made Tony history Tuesday morning, scoring a record-breaking 16 nominations.
* It’s Illegal to Possess or Distribute This Huge Number.
* Photo Essay: Fracking Communities.
* Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920. More Evidence for Lead Poisoning as Key Crime Driver.
* Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus.
* Does Viewing Pornography Reduce Marital Quality Over Time? Evidence from Longitudinal Data.
* google it should have been steph curry truth
* Jessica Jones season two is doomed watch: Trouble On The Set Of Jessica Jones Season One Was Calmed By David Tennant.
* You just can’t win: After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight.
* High school football player faces 70 criminal charges for yearbook picture prank.
* “Poet & Vagabond”: Roberto Bolaño’s business card.
* Like the lady said: the goal should be a society without classes! Fights on planes 400% more likely when there’s a first class section.
* Here’s yet another surprise David Bowie left for us on Backstar.
* Famous last words watch: Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
* Society of synthetic linguists explain to court, in Klingon, why Klingon shouldn’t be copyrightable.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly disappointing Star Trek (2009) sequels every three years, forever.
Gerry Canavan 
Monday Night Links
with one comment
* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.
* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.
* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.
* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.
* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.
* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.
* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?
* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.
* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).
* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?
* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.
* Assange v. Google.
* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.
* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.
* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?
Written by gerrycanavan
June 3, 2013 at 9:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, America, austerity, Ben and Jerry, capitalism, carbon, charts, climate change, comics, community, copyright, CUNY, Dan Harmon, disability, disaster, Disneyland, ecology, fertility, Florida, food, Google, How the University Works, ice cream, idelogy, intergenerational warfare, Julian Assange, kids today, Marvelman, Miracleman, MOOCs, neoliberalism, No Child Left Behind, no confidence, NYU, Pablo Neruda, poetry, remedial courses, Republicans, San Jose State, shared governance, Soylent Green, student debt, television, the CIA, the kids are all right, the kids aren't all right, the richest nation in the history of the world, the Senate, true crime, women's health, world-historical director's commentaries