Posts Tagged ‘nonprofit-industrial complex’
Weekend Links!
* Extrapolation 58.1 is out! With articles on Octavia Butler, Aldous Huxley, Neal Stephenson, and Celu Ambsterstone. I’ll give a special endorsement to Donawerth and Scally’s Butler article, which is not only the first article to cite my book (that I know of) but also a truly great study tracing Butler’s footsteps research Kindred in Maryland. Check it out!
* CFP: Utopia, Now!
* Jeff VanderMeer in conversation with Cory Doctorow.
The result is “Agency,” Mr. Gibson’s next novel, which Berkley will publish in January. The story unfolds in two timelines: San Francisco in 2017, in an alternate time track where Hillary Clinton won the election and Mr. Trump’s political ambitions were thwarted, and London in the 22nd century, after decades of cataclysmic events have killed 80 percent of humanity.
Mr. Gibson never set out to write a sequel, but the plots of “Agency” and “The Peripheral” converged unexpectedly last fall. He had spent about a year writing “Agency” when the 2016 election rendered the fictional world he had created obsolete. “I assumed that if Trump won, I’d be able to shift a few things and continue to tell my story,” he said. But when he tried tinkering with the draft, he realized that the world had changed too drastically for him to plausibly salvage the story. “It was immediately obvious to me that there had been some fundamental shift and I would have to rebuild the whole thing,” he said.
* The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in.
* Wes Anderson’s latest, Isle Of Dogs, gets a release date and poster. Warm up your power rankings now!
* I’m Wes Anderson, and I’m Directing This FBI Investigation into Russia and the Trump Campaign.
* If the police do it, it isn’t murder: Inmate’s water cut off for 7 days before his death in the Milwaukee County Jail.
* Purdue Has Bought Kaplan — for $1. The weird fall of Burlington College. Rand Paul Stealing My Bit. When 51 Years Experience Isn’t Good Enough.
* CBS is apparently fully committed to ruining Star Trek: Discovery in every possible way.
* More on the Cal audit that reveals massive administrative blight.
* Tracking White Collar Crime Zones.
* The March for Science wasn’t.
* Charter schools as corporate perk.
* What’s the matter with Nintendo?
* Apple’s Promise to End Rare Earth Mineral Mining Is ‘100 Percent Unattainable Today.’ Haters! Apple can do anything.
* 25 percent of young Britons have lied about reading Lord Of The Rings, poll reveals. I want to know how many have said they didn’t read it when they did!
* Corbynism or barbarism. Inside Corbyn’s Office.
* We May Have Uncovered the First Ever Evidence of the Multiverse.
* Trump Wants to Send a Man to Mars During His Presidency. The next launch window isn’t until the 2030s, so this is a worrying declaration indeed. Here’s the plan.
* Record-breaking climate events all over the world are being shaped by global warming, scientists find. What will Earth look like when all the ice melts?
* I Got Hacked So You Don’t Have To.
* Artist attaches Trump’s quotes about women to sexist 1950s ads and they fit too well. Into the shadows in Trump’s America. A GOP Lawmaker Has Been Revealed As The Creator Of Reddit’s Anti-Woman ‘Red Pill’ Forum. How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump. Killing Obamacare, Again (with an asterisk). In the richest country that has ever existed. We all gonna die. And the worst news yet: US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports.
Just thinking again how nationalism will transmogrify any violence Trump undertakes into heroic resolve, no matter how unfathomably evil.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 28, 2017
A partial list of crimes with no statute of limitations:
* murder
* kidnapping
* treason
* being brought to the US by your parents as a baby— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 28, 2017
* We Asked ICE About the Prank Calls to Their Anti-Immigrant Hotline and They Kind of Lost Their Shit. 100 Days of Democratic Rage. Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again. Trump supporters are the most overrated force in American politics. The Anatomy of Liberal Melancholy. Could Your Teen’s Meme Be a Red? Texas Is The Future.
To clarify: it is perfectly possible that some collusion between Trump’s agents and Russian hackers did indeed occur. But at this point, the empirical question of whether or not it happened is secondary to the deeper psychological need for media pundits, policy wonks, and the professional-managerial strata to maintain their sense of self when the objective historical conditions in which they flourished are being actively dissolved. For liberals, the continued libidinal investment in the drama of the as-yet invisible Trump-Russia scandal actively blocks any realization that the neoliberal order they are trying to restore is already dead on its feet, and that Trump is the uniquely bizarre American expression of a visible worldwide trend: the virulent, deepening nationalist backlash against a financially-integrated global economy based on the relatively free movement of commodities and people. His ascent is a death knell for an entire era and the basic assumptions about economic and political life that shape the worldview of contemporary liberals.
* Organize. Syllabus prep. The Tenure-Track Professor. Should I Go to Grad School? Ikigai. Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?
* Against buckraking. But what does Obama’s willingness to take the money in the first place say about progressive centrism, if we stipulate (as I think MY would likely agree) that Obama is probably as good as progressive centrists are likely to get? The left neoliberal hit against standard liberal-to-left politics in the 1980s was that it fostered sleazy interest groups and tacit or not-so-tacit mutual backscratching between these interest groups and politicians. If the very best alternative that left neoliberalism has to offer is another, and arguably worse version of this (Wall Street firms, unlike unions, don’t even have the need to pretend to have the interests of ordinary people at heart), then its raison d’etre is pretty well exploded.
* Disney will just take all your money, thanks.
* Building blocks of our weird future: artificial wombs.
* Warner Brothers Might Have to Pay $900 Million If It Can’t Prove Ghosts Are Real.
* More bad press for United. It’s like they’re trying to go bankrupt.
* “Twitter” is an oversimplification. There are many twitters, which is also part of the problem: my twitter and yours are different, but they can come into contact with each other and overlap, and do. We can each think the other person is a holographic projection into our living room, and the rooms are similar enough that we can overlook the ways they are different (and then blame the other person for coming into our house and acting like an asshole). But this also means that talking about what “twitter” is or isn’t, or does, or doesn’t, is a similar exercise in polemic misunderstanding. If the underlying structure of the program is a constant, the conversational norms and practical methods we bring to it will vary, radically and dramatically. Some of the problem is the latter thing: people not only use twitter differently, but they sometimes regard other people’s use of it as illegitimate or wrong. Policing other people on twitter can become particularly heated and vicious, if a police from one jurisdiction comes into another, without knowing it, and attempts to apply one set of laws to someone who thinks they’re operating in another. It rarely ends well. And yet if we keep pretending that there is one twitter (ours), we’ll keep crashing into each other and insisting that it’s the other car that came into my lane. Twitter road rage.
* Oh, I see the problem: Americans don’t read.
* And I know things seem dark, darker than they’ve ever been, but Illinois fixed it. Kudos.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 28, 2017 at 2:26 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, accreditation, administrative blight, Agency, air travel, aliens, Apple, art, artificial intelligence, artificial wombs, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, books, Brexit, Britain, buckraking, Burlington College, cargo cults, CBS, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, comics, community organizers, computers, conferences, corruption we can believe in, Cory Doctorow, cursive, Democrats, deportation, diabetes, Disney, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, dystopia, Episode IX, Extrapolation, FBI, for-profit colleges, Frozen 2, futurity, games, general election 2016, ghosts, hacking, health care, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, identity theft, ideology, Illinois, immigration, Indiana Jones, insulin, iPhones, Isle of Dogs, Ivy League, Jeff Vandermeer, Jeremy Corbyn, juvenilia, Kaplan University, kids today, Kindred, Legolas, Lord of the Rings, many worlds and alternate universes, Mars, Marvel, melancholy, memes, Milwaukee, misogyny, murder, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, NASA, neoliberalism, Nintendo, nonprofit-industrial complex, North Korea, Octavia Butler, outer space, philosophy, police violence, politics, prison, Purdue, Rand Paul, rare earth minerals, religion, resist, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, sexism, social media, socialism, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, syllabi, Teresa May, Texas, the humanities, The March for Science, the multiverse, The New Inquiry, The Peripheral, the truth is out there, time travel, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, United, United Kingdom, University of California, Utopia, voice, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Wes Anderson, white collar crime, William Gibson
Wednesday Links!
* The Department of English invites candidates holding the rank of Associate or Full Professor to apply for the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature honoring the department’s most celebrated graduate.
* Next week at Marquette: Cuban science fiction authors Yoss and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo!
* 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium: A Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Inside The Octavia Butler Archives With L.A. Writer Lynell George.
* I am writing to apply for the job–or rather “fellowship”–advertised on your website. As a restless member of the creative class, I agree that secure employment, renewable year-to-year, can be a suffocating hindrance. And besides, you specify “tons of snacks and beverages” as part of your benefit package. As a job-seeker motivated by a combination of desperation and snacks, I am an ideal candidate for this position.
* The report finds that the cost of forgoing tuition revenue from two- and four-year public institutions could run into the billions for some states: $4.96 billion in California, $3.89 billion in Texas and $2.53 billion in Michigan.
* Pence and gaslighting. Kaine’s tactical defeat. A Con Man of Epic Proportions. Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for A Mere Two Decades. The mind-blowing scale of Trump’s billion-dollar loss, in one tweet. Trump Foundation ordered to stop fundraising by N.Y. attorney general’s office. I want to believe! This seems legitimate. If Donald Trump Published an Academic Article. If you want a vision of the future.
yeah, just give it a good whack, it’ll turn back on https://t.co/baDF0VocTR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 4, 2016
* Bananas possible endings to the election, New Mexico edition.
* The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Visions of the Future.
* All told, however, Xiberras feels Louise could have done better. “We hoped for more followers to take notice of Louise’s behavior,” he says. “There were a few people who sensed the trap—a journalist among others, of course—but in the end, the majority just saw a pretty young girl of her time and not at all a kind of lonely girl, who is actually not at all that happy and with a serious alcohol problem.”
* Here’s a piece we can all get mad about, regardless of our pedagogical inclinations: Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?
* The Luke Cage Syllabus. 15 Essential Luke Cage Stories.
* Teaching the controversy: The Identity of a Famous Person Is News. The outing of Elena Ferrante and the power of naming. Ars longa, vita brevis.
* Yahooooooooooo: Yahoo built email spying software for intelligence agencies, report says.
* Tracing the path of one of the world’s most in-demand minerals from deadly mines in Congo to your phone. More here.
* That’s a hell of an act! What do you call it? The Mets. Relatedly: in search of the Korean bat flip.
* Nostalgia for World Culture: A New History of Esperanto.
* Harvard loses a mere $2 billion from its endowment. My favorite part of these stories is always the comparison to passive management by an index fund.
* More running it like a sandwich: More than ever, college football programs are finding it difficult to draw and retain the young fans who grow up to be lifelong season-ticket holders. In many athletic departments, the reasons can practically be cited as catechism: high-definition televisions, DVRs, diffuse fan bases and higher ticket and parking costs.
lol maybe you shoulda thought of that before you spent all that money on your new stadium https://t.co/zz8WUHyK9j
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) October 3, 2016
* American University Student Government Launches Campaign in Support of Mandatory Trigger Warnings.
* Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.
* Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today.
* The last days of Robin Williams, as told by his wife Susan Schneider Williams.
* ‘Killer Clowns’: Inside the Terrifying Hoax Sweeping America.
* No one knew then that Springsteen, like Smith, would provide a through-line for his fans as things got worse, shifted in unimaginable ways, shifted again. Springsteen has himself changed with the times, becoming more sensitive to the issues his most-adored music still raises. Born To Rundemonstrates that. The decency at the heart of his memoir is a balm. He’s not only survived a life in rock and roll; he shows how a true believer doesn’t have to get stuck within its illusions, no matter how much they also attract him. After all, to Springsteen, a worthwhile dream isn’t an illusion; it’s a form of work.
* Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates: You know, humans.
* One of the most important lessons of Ghosh’s book is that the politics of climate change must not tiptoe around the questions posed by colonial encounters. Issues of climate justice cannot be solved without first addressing questions of equitable distribution of power, historically rooted in imperialism. And therein lies Ghosh’s disagreement with those who find the source of the problem in capitalism itself (Naomi Klein, for example). For him, even if “capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.”
* Wealth of people in their 30s has ‘halved in a decade.’ Probably definitely totally unrelated: Federal student loans facilitate a pernicious profit motive in higher education.
* Patent application for a method of curing kidney stones.
* I think it’s 50/50 at this point that the Purge is a real thing before I’m dead.
* So You Want to Adapt The Tempest.
* No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously. Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene.
* The secret lives of New Jerseyans.
* On our phenomenal (recent) accomplishments in space.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 5, 2016 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 30 Rock, academia, academic jobs, adaptation, administrative blight, alcohol, alcoholism, Alison Bechdel, America, animals, apartheid, baseball, books, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, con artists, Cuba, D.B. Cooper, debates, domestic surveillance, Donald Trump, ecology, Electoral College, Elena Ferrante, endowments, English departments, entropy, Esperanto, feminism, foundations, Frankfurt School, fraud, frenemies, futurity, general election 2016, girls, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, Horkheimer and Adorno, horror, How the University Works, It, James Tiptree Jr., Jet Propulsion Laboratory, justice, Karl Marx, kidney stones, kids today, killer clowns, Korea, language, leftism, Luke Cage, Mad Men, Maine, Marla Maples, Marquette, Marxism, mass incarceration, McMansions, Mike Pence, millennials, NASA, NCAA, New Jersey, New Mexico, nonprofit-industrial complex, NSA, Octavia Butler, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, outer space, patents, politics, primates, race, racism, rhetoric and composition, Robin Williams, run it like a sandwich, scams, science, science fiction, Shirley Jackson, snacks, South Africa, sports, Springsteen, Stephen King, student debt, surveillance society, taxes, teenage sweetheart of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Congo, the courts, the law, the Mets, the Purge, the smartest kid on Earth, the suburbs, The Tempest, Tim Kaine, time, trees, trigger warnings, Ursula K. LeGuin, Utopia, Venn diagrams, Walter Benjamin, werewolf bar mitzvah, writing, Yahoo, Yoss
Please Enjoy Weekend Links!
* Get your abstracts in! CFP: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. And a CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction.”
* The schedule of classes for Marquette English is up at Spring 2017. I’ll be on research leave, if you’re wondering why I’m not listed…
* Best Tumblr in forever: Sad Chairs of Academia.
* How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe.
* How Skin-Deep Judgments of Professors Might Influence Student Success.
* The extent to which Trump is floating absolute gibberish cannot be undersold. Even Costanza is superseded in his time. Once more with feeling: On Bullshit.
* What did Trump lie about at the debate, mondo-hugeo chart edition. Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. Prince Georging, Meflection, and Gobbing: A brief guide to Trump’s rhetorical tricks. A Trump Glossary. You’ll get ’em next time, buddy. What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump. This May Be The Most Horrible Thing That Donald Trump Believes. When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped. How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media. How to bait Donald Trump. Gray’s. Sports. Almanac. How to evade your taxes the Trump way. More. Even more! Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money. Cuba! I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. Donald Trump and the truth about race and real estate in America. America is already great. There’s still heroes in the world. And then there’s what happened just this morning.
this might be the most undignified thing a politician has ever done to themselves with a phone and i'm including anthony weiner in this
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) September 30, 2016
The scariest thing about Trump isn't even Trump himself but how quickly elite Republicans fell into line. What wouldn't they support?
— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) May 27, 2016
* The most American-democracy thing that’s ever happened: But Republicans said the White House didn’t make a forceful case, putting themselves in the awkward position of blaming the president for a bill they enacted into law over Obama’s veto.
* Beyond Clinton or Trump: Nuclear Weapons and Democracy.
* Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November. What a shocking and unexpected consequence of these well-intentioned, commonsense laws.
* Note: The original headline for this piece was “George W. Bush is Not Your Cuddly Grandpa. George W. Bush can rot in hell.”
* Five questions we need to answer before colonizing Mars. Elon Musk’s spectacular plan to colonise Mars lacks substance. Fun and exciting, not boring and cramped! Is Elon Musk’s Crazy Mars Plan Even Legal?
* What could possibly go wrong? UVM Medical College to Eliminate Lectures.
* No Punishment for ‘Run Them Down’ Tweet.
* Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby.
* Why New Jersey’s Trains Aren’t Safer.
* Nicholson Baker goes to school. Reader, I bought it.
* Another review of Alice Kaplan’s book on The Stranger.
* “Liberalism is working”: Teen accused of stealing 65-cent carton of milk at middle school to face trial.
* Measles are gone from the Americas.
* On Premier League Fantasy Football.
* How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School.’
* The 25 Best Superpowers in the Superpowers Wiki.
*Wonder Woman Writer Greg Rucka Says Diana Has ‘Obviously’ Had Relationships With Women. She was on an island of only women for millennia! So yeah.
* The world passes 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. Permanently.
* And yet, looking back at The Jetsons intro sequence today, I wonder where the icecaps are in that little illustration of earth. Is some land missing from Central America? Has the North gained land mass? Such questions become more troubling in the context of current concerns about global warming and, once asked, open the floodgates for similar observations. In the intro sequence, flying cars convey the Jetsons and other families from their floating bungalow to other floating buildings like The Little Dipper School, Orbit High School, Shopping Centre, and Spacely Space Rockets Inc. What was once a cute innovation—why not live in floating cities?—becomes troubled by its energy costs and its purpose. Why do the Jetsons and other families live in orbit? What has happened below to force them into the skies?
* Today in on-the-nose metaphors: NASA Is Sinking Into the Ocean.
* Every society gets the post-apocalypse it deserves.
* There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Yes, I suppose they would be.
* Codex Silenda, A Handcrafted Puzzle Book With Pages That Must Be Solved to Unlock the Next One.
* Cheating in school as communism.
* Today in neoliberal consumerism: Want to Make Ethical Purchases? Stop Buying Illegal Drugs.
* The Dark, Gritty Tick goes to series. Spoon! But like a dirty, chipped spoon, a spoon that really reflects the darkness of our society and our souls.
* Emulator lets you turn NES games 3D.
* U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel.
* Striking Prisoners Say Their Guards Have Joined In.
* The Longreads Reading List on Utopias.
* Die a hero, or… Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?
* It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave. I wonder how many are actually caring for or financially supporting un-, under-, and unable-to-be-employed parents and siblings.
* Let’s Stop Talking About Stranger Things Season Two Before We Ruin It. Friends, I have some terrible news.
* There’s bad luck, and then there’s: Man Bitten On Penis By Spider For The Second Time This Year.
* Today in terrible ideas I could not denounce more strongly: Is it time for Star Trek: The Next Generation to go Kelvin?
* And at least the kids get it.
amazing: two survive a wreck and got the attention of the navy by spelling out an unignorable sign with palm leaves pic.twitter.com/h2hdmvLC44
— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) April 21, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
September 29, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D, 9/11, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accidents, Alice Kaplan, Amazon, America, amusement parks, anxiety, apocalypse, art, Back to the Future, bad luck, Baltimore, Barack Obama, beauty pagents, Biff Tannen, Big, Bob Ross, books, Buffy, bullshit, Bush, Camus, Catholicism, CFPs, chairs, Charlotte, cheating, China, Chris Christie, class struggle, climate change, comics, communism, computers, consumerism, courage, Cuba, daycare, debates, disability, Disney, Disney World, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Elon Musk, embargoes, eugenics, fantasy soccer, fantasy sports, Fidel Castro, flipped classrooms, Freddie Gray, futurity, general election 2016, George Costanza, grading, Gray's Sports Almanac, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, Hoboken, horror, hot moms, ideology, infrastructure, Instapundit, Joss Whedon, journalism, Kelvin Timeline, kids today, liberalism, liberalism is working, lies and lying liars, LinkedIn, Mad Max, Marquette, Mars, mass incarceration, measles, medical school, millennials, misogyny, NASA, neoliberalism, NES, Netflix, New Jersey Transit, Nicholson Baker, nonprofit-industrial complex, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, outer space, parenting, penises, politics, Pope Francis, prison, prison strikes, protests, puzzles, race, racism, reading, real estate, religion, remember the 90s?, reparations, Republicans, rhetoric, rising sea levels, Saudi Arabia, school, science fiction, science in magic, Scott Walker, Seinfeld, sexism, Silicon Valley, slavery, spiders, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stranger Things, substitute teachers, superheroes, superpowers, tax evasion, taxes, the alibi of photocopying, the courts, the digital, The Jetsons, the law, The Stranger, the Tick, the veto, Thirteenth Amendment, TNG, Tom Hanks, total system failure, trains, transmedia, true crime, Trump Foundation, Umberto Eco, undecided voters, Utopia, UVM, vaccination, voter ID, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman
Thursday Morning!
I’m never going to be upset again, and I will never suffer and I will never miss anybody and I don’t want any memories about anything
— NYT Minus Context (@NYTMinusContext) September 20, 2016
* A major new report suggests serious underemployment among liberal arts majors, affecting as many as 50% of recent graduates in some majors.
* Liu Cixin has an essay on Death’s End up at Tor: Chinese Literature and Apocalyptic SF: Some Notes on Death’s End (and has a review up already as well). My review probably won’t be published for another few weeks, so I’ll just say again: just buy it!
* Once more, with feeling: Student evaluations are useless.
* CFP: The Job Market. CFP: Loanwords to Live With. I know some of the editors of the Loanwords project and I think it looks really exciting. CFC: A Marxist Game.
* Congratulations to Claudia Rankine on her MacArthur grant.
* The New Republic reviews Alice Kaplan’s new book on The Stranger.
* David Fahrenthold’s reporting on Trump’s foundation has yielded a major scoop, evidence of self-dealing in public documents that would appear to be trivially against the law. Even wilder: this is their defense.
This is so brazen I don’t see how even being a candidate for president can stop a prosecution. https://t.co/iZp5OannN4
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 21, 2016
* America: taste the rainbow.
* Instapundit has been suspended from Twitter for a tweet about the Charlotte protests. The tweet in question seems pretty indefensible to me, though Reynolds tries at the link, and regardless of its defensibility suspending him for it seems likely to have very bad consequences both for Twitter and for left academics on a pragmatic level. 9:04 AM UPDATE: He’s already back on.
* “Actuaries shamelessly, although often in good faith, understate pension obligations by as much as 50 percent,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary and economist, in a speech last year at the M.I.T. Center for Finance and Policy. “Their clients want them to.”
* Seven charts that speak volumes about the opioid epidemic.
* Since the dawn of time, man has fought the rat.
* From Back to the Future II to Stephen King’s saving-JFK novel 11/23/63, the lesson one learns again and again is that trying to improve the world through time travel is a fool’s game, creating far worse problems than whatever you’d hoped to fix. Most of time travel fiction these days is one way or another designed to help us swallow the bitter pill that this life is the one we’re stuck with, that trying to make things better will only backfire.
* Cut-throat academia leads to ‘natural selection of bad science’, claims study.
* Something has gone wrong with our atheists.
* The bear who fought in World War II.
* Stranger Things spinoff greenlit.
* Going to go ahead and greenlight this one too: Family flee home after finding spiders which can cause four-hour erection followed by death in ASDA bananas.
* AI will eliminate 6 percent of jobs in five years, says report. Yes, even yours!
* Greenland’s huge annual ice loss is even worse than thought.
* A Massive Sinkhole Just Dumped Radioactive Waste Into Florida Water.
Guys, I don’t know about you but I have a really good feeling about this one. https://t.co/1N7yeddlos
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 22, 2016
* In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups, the police and the police.
* Teaching the controversy: “Should police officers be required to provide medical aid to people they’ve shot?”
* Slate vs. Stone re: Snowden.
* The Internet and the end of porn.
* Contradictions of Capital and Care.
* The end, one hopes, of Anthony Weiner.
* “Karen Gillan Promises There’s a Reason Her Jumanji Character Is Dressed Like That.”
* Been there: Child’s Loose Grasp On Balloon Only Thing Between Peace And Anarchy At Restaurant.
* School lunch worker forced to throw away student’s hot meal decides to quit.
* Save the Day, from Joss Whedon.
* Take that, every authority figure in my personal history! A new study finds that fidgeting — the toe-tapping, foot-wagging and other body movements that annoy your co-workers — is in fact good for your health.
* Political correctness run amok.
* These are the most lewd-sounding town names in each state.
* And now, truly, more than ever: “Tonight the Character of Death Will Be Played by Brad Pitt.”
Written by gerrycanavan
September 22, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, academic writing, actuarial science as politics, Algeria, Alice Kaplan, America, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, austerity, balloons, bananas, Barack Obama, bears, Brad Pitt, Camus, capitalism, care, children's literature, China, Christianity, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, college, college majors, communists are everywhere, Death's End, Donald Trump, drugs, English majors, existentialism, fidgeting, Florida, foundations, free speech, games, general election 2016, Greenland, health, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, Instapundit, Jaimee, Joss Whedon, Jumanji, Karen Gillan, Ken Liu, kids, Law and Order, loanwords, Marxism, misogyny, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, Oliver Stone, oxy, parenting, Parks and Recreation, pedagogy, peer review, penguins, pensions, poetry, police, police state, police violence, political correctness, politics, pollution, pornography, race, racism, rats, school lunches, science fiction, sexism, sexting, Skittles, Snowden, spiders, Stranger Things, student evaluations, tax evasion, taxes, teaching, the courts, the humanities, the Internet, the law, The Stranger, The Three-Body Problem, Twitter, underemployment, voting, war on drugs, water, white supremacy, Winnie the Pooh, World War II
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU
— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.
— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL
— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM
— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, Adam Kotsko, adjectives, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Alan Moore, alcohol, algorithms, Alice in Wonderland, America, animal personhood, animal research, animals, Apple, art, Art Spiegelman, austerity, Avatar, Balance of Terror, Barack Obama, basket of deplorables, Benjamin Robertson, Bill Clinton, Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter, Booster Gold, breastfeeding, Brexit, Britain, Bro Adams, Bugs Bunny, Camus, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, charity, China, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Newfield, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Civil War, class struggle, Clemson University, climate change, college majors, comics, communism, concussions, conspiracies, container ships, corporal punishment, credit scores, cryptozoology, cultural preservation, Dakota Access Pipeline, Dan Hassler-Forest, Darwing Duck, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, death, debt, deep time, Disney, Disney afternoon, Donald Trump, Donna Haraway, Douglas Adams, drama, Drug Enforcement Agency, drugs, DuckTales, Duke, Earth First, ecology, education, English, English departments, eschatology, eviction, Ewoks, faking your own death, fan culture, fantasy, fashion, first contact, FiveThirtyEight, flame trombones, Flat Earth, floods, FOIA, football, for-profit schools, Fordism, Fox News, Fred Moten, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Jameson, free speech, freedom of speech, games, gay issues, Gene L. Coon, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2016, genius, giraffes, graduate student life, graduate students, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda Jane, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, HBO, Hellboy, Henry Jenkins, heroin, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, homelessness, hydrofracking, illegal immigration, India, Infinite Jest, iPhones, Israel, ITT Tech, J.K. Rowling, Jack Daniels, James Tiptree Jr., Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, John Brunner, John C. Calhoun, John Carpenter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindergarten, King Lear, Klu Klux Klan, Kratom, labor, language, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Lewis Carroll, liberals, libraries, literature, lockouts, loneliness, Long Island University, magic, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, Making a Murderer, maladministration, mannequins, maps, Margaret Atwood, Maus, medical humanities, Mel Gibson, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, monsters, Montana, monuments, moral panic, Mother Theresa, musicals, my media empire, Nadja Spiegelman, names, narcissism, Nate Silver, Native Americans, NEH, neoliberalism, New York, NFL, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nostalgia, novels, obituary, oil spills, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, pennies, philanthropy, philosophy, Poe's Law, poetry, Pokémon Go, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, polls, Polygraph, pre-K, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, public universities, Quebec, queer readings writing themselves, race, racism, rape culture, Raymond Chandler, reaction, reactionaries, reading, religion, retirement plans, Richmond, rising sea levels, Roger Ailes, Romulans, sabotage, saints, Salvador Dali, Samsung, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scabs, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Shakespeare, slave trade, slavery, socialism, sound, Soviet Union, speculation, speculative fiction, speculative finance, sports, Stand on Zanzibar, Standing Rock, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, stillbirth, Stranger Things, strikes, student debt, student loans, student movements, surrealism, taste, teaching, tech trash, tenure, text adventures, textual histories, the Anthropcene, the avant-garde, the Capitalocene, the Chthulhucene, The City on the Edge of Forever, the courts, the Flood, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the humanities, the law, The Night Of, the oceans, The Passion of the Christ, the revolution, The Space Merchants, The Stranger, The Thing, the university in ruins, theater, theory, Thirteenth Amendment, TIAA-CREF, TNG, Tolkien, totality, trans* issues, transmedia, trees, trigger warnings, true crime, Trump TV, UIUC, Underground Railroad, unions, University of Chicago, Utopia, Virginia, Vonnegut, Vox, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Westeros, white people, wilderness, Wisconsin, words, WPA, writing, Zack Snyder
Monday Morning Links
In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now.
* Huge, if true: High Rise director Ben Wheatley: societal collapse is imminent.
* Huge, if true: Bernie Sanders can’t save America.
* Countless gynecologists failed to diagnose my rare condition – until Planned Parenthood rescued me.
* Endometriosis: the hidden suffering of millions of women revealed.
* Comic Crit reads Aurora and Seveneves.
* “Our society needs a massive reset in terms of its priorities [regarding autism],” Silberman said. “One of the main problems facing families now is their children aging out of services. Yet almost all of the funding into research goes into investigating causes.” […] “Many things are being ignored by going after the cause of the alleged epidemic that may not even be one,” said Silberman. “It is amazing to me, after all this arguing about whether or not vaccines cause autism that we still haven’t done a basic prevalence study of autism among adults.”
* The problem is, you can tear down an institution in a year. It takes 25 — if you’re the best — to build it back up again. But it’s too late now. By breaking the rules of the search, Harreld helped violate the trust of the community and the values of the university. Iowa’s tradition has been sullied. If Harreld remains and wants to be a serious university president, his job is not going to be “going from good to great,” but rather repairing the damage that the Board of Regents, the governor and he, himself have done.
* Cities bear rising cost of keeping water safe to drink. It’s always worse than you think.
* We Lost Our Daughter to a Mass Shooter and Now Owe $203,000 to His Ammo Dealer.
* What could possibly go wrong? You Can Now Rent H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Apartment.
* Inside every dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine is a little valve that directs the flow of water. For decades, most of these valves have come from a factory in the northwestern corner of Illinois, but not after today.
* Somebody get me Samuel L. Jackson.
* The nonprofit-Coca-Cola-industrial complex.
* Fun fact: There have been 4,286 Robins.
* Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
* If They Build It, Will We Come? Meet The Tech Entrepreneurs Trying To Take Back The Porn Industry.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 28, 2015 at 8:08 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with America, Andy Daly, apocalypse, Aurora, autism, Batman, Bernie Sanders, books, Bruce Harreld, charity, cheaters, cheating, class struggle, Coca-Cola, Colorado, comics, Cthulhu, disability, disruptive innovation, doomsday vaults, endometriosis, factories, food, football, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, High Rise, hot desking, J.G. Ballard, kids today, labor, mass shootings, New York, NFL, nonprofit-industrial complex, parenting, Patriots, Pippi Longstocking, Planned Parenthood, politics, pornography, prison, prison-industrial complex, public health, Review, Robin, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Seveneves, Syria, television, the worst, true prophecy, University of Iowa, Volkswagen, war, water, West Virginia University, women's health, work
Wednesday Links!
* Fans aren’t the irrational ones. They know how to seize pleasure from the world and hold tight even as it hurts them. If fandom is simply an obedient response to the signals of the consumer market, it is an obedience which threatens to overrun its master while saying yes.
* Another “I’m a professor” essay.
What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.
* Tenure, Fairness, and Fear(lessness).
But that is not really something that makes professors special. Rather, it is good for people to make their lives less fearsome and their minds less fearful. Those of us who have some of that privilege in our working lives should hold our heads high and try to be allies to others who are working to get their share of it. There’s no shame in having security, only in keeping other people from it.
* In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure,” System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.
* Can the University of Wisconsin Survive Governor Walker?
Is tenure a property right (implication: loss of tenure violation of contract, lawsuits to follow)? Maybe, says UW lawyer #OurUW
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 9, 2015
* Unless you are in highly unusual circumstances, really, do not think of adjuncting as a long-term career.
* What different colleges could do with $400 million.
* In Heated State-Budget Fights, Students Strive to Be Heard.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union: Five Trustees, Including Daniel Libeskind, Abruptly Resign.
* The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.
* But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.
* And then there was Rand, scooping the Democrats again.
* Concerned that kindergarten has become overly academic in recent years, this suburban school district south of Baltimore is introducing a new curriculum in the fall for 5-year-olds. Chief among its features is a most old-fashioned concept: play.
* From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.
* How Utah Became A Bizarre, Blissful Epicenter For Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.
* New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.
* Apple is finally fixing the reason your Mac and iPhone’s Wi-Fi sucks.
* The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.
* Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies.
* music is inefficient beep bop boop
* Why Franklin Richards Is The Most Ridiculous Character In All Of Comics.
* Information wants to be free! With regard to the pornographic material Osama Bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in the operational files. The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA. To the extent that this material exists, the CIA would be prohibited by 18 USC Section 1461 from mailing obscene matter.
* Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.
* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 10, 2015 at 12:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, anti-Asian prejudice, Apple, austerity, bankers, banking, cell phones, CIA, class struggle, climate change, climate trials, comics, Democrats, disruptive innovation, ecology, efficiency, fandom, fans, FOIA, Franklin Richards, garbage, gender, Germany, Great Recession, Harvard, How the University Works, Iceland, Information wants to be free, job security, kids today, kindergarten, labor, Macs, Marvel Comics, misogyny, multi-level marketing, music, Nazis, neoliberalism, New Inquiry, nonprofit-industrial complex, North Korea, Osama bin Laden, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, PhDs, photography, play, poetry, police brutality, police state, politics, pollution, porn, PTSD, race, racism, Rand Paul, Republican primary 2016, Republicans, Rikers Island, rising sea levels, schools, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, solitary confinement, student movements, suicide, teaching, tech trash, tenure, University of Wisconsin, Utah, UWM, veterans, war on education, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work
So Many Weekend Links!
I’ve been thinking all day about the “value of the humanities” and I really think it’s just that it’s good to know stuff.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
Is there serious case that the humanities advance job skills or informed citizenship? Maybe. But it’s really mostly just good to know stuff.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
#humanities RT @dg22727: @ayjay @gerrycanavan Well-worn, but: pic.twitter.com/l6YfmjGH7T
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 7, 2015
* I’ve seen this movie: Marquette working with firm to humanely manage seagulls.
* Best game I’ve played in a really long time: Rymdkapsel.
* The academic community has talked itself into a very strange corner with regards to adjunctification. “Respect” is just not a good rallying point: unquantifiable, unsatisfiable, turns political struggle into emotional one. The focus should stay on the system that produces adjunct jobs instead of full-time permanent ones.
* This report that administration and construction are not significant factors in rising tuition seems totally off to me. You’re dividing by different denominators in 2001 and 2011; that masks the magnitude of the change, but also hides new spending in real terms. The last student you add should be your cheapest student: all the infrastructure is in place, you’re just adding one more. But these numbers show the opposite trend: spending at colleges is increasing even given efficiencies gained by adding more students.
* ‘The Game Done Changed’: Reconsidering ‘The Wire’ Amidst the Baltimore Uprising.
* If you, like us, lusted after the art deco tiling and rose-colored lighting of the Grand Budapest Hotel lobby, or drooled over the yellow Parisian hotel room in Hotel Chevalier, here’s some enchanting news: Wes Anderson has designed a bar.
* NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal.
* Andrew Cuomo, pretty corrupt.
* An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty.
* The Poverty Capitalism Creates.
* As investigation enters fifth month, Tamir Rice’s mother has moved into a homeless shelter. Online activists raised $60K for Tamir Rice’s family — so where did all that money go?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* The Secret Lives of Homeless Students.
* The Hater’s Guide To Avengers: Age of Ultron. Are you Over the Avengers Yet? Ultron Has Always Been a Dumb Character, and That’s Okay. Even Whedon isn’t into it.
* Leaked Email From Marvel CEO Is A Listicle About Why Women Can’t Be Superheroes.
* Reading the Black Captain America (both of them).
* Joss Whedon Didn’t Quit Twitter Because of All the Mean Feminists.
* In defense of the Mommy Track.
* Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.
* ‘Comedy Bang-Bang’s’ Scott Aukerman: From ‘Screwing Around’ to a Podcast Empire.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably.
* The Pink and Blue Projects: Exploring the Genderization of Color.
* I really liked TNI’s “Trash” issue, though it gets Oscar the Grouch all wrong.
* Did a study find men’s beards are filled with poop?
* We Accidentally Turned The Entire Statue Of Liberty Into A Battery.
* Halo Players Spent Five Years Trying To Get Into An Empty Room.
* I’m glad that Facebook is choosing to publish such findings, but I cannot but shake my head about how the real findings are buried, and irrelevant comparisons take up the conclusion.
* A comics Kickstarter some of you might be interested in: Bizarre New World.
* Lawmakers drop Walker’s plan to spin off UW governance.
* Art Institute of Wisconsin to stop enrolling new students.
* Remember when Gerber tried to market “baby food for teens?”
* What Was the Venus de Milo Doing With Her Arms?
* Joan Would Have Lost Her Sexual Harassment Suit Against McCann Erickson. Assholes of Mad Men’s McCann pay dividends for real-life McCann.
* Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
* Health Insurance Companies Are Illegally Charging for Birth Control.
* Report: Most College Football Concussions Happen in Practice.
* Nothing gold can stay be allowed to just be a good thing that happened one time.
* Essential Reading: “I Am Error” Brings New Insight to the History of the NES.
* From graduation to garbage job (literally): One twentysomething’s struggle.
* The source of strange radio signals that have left astronomers at Australia’s most famous radio telescope scratching their heads for 17 years has finally been discovered. It turns out that it was a microwave oven.
* “My father felt the U.S.S.R. treated him better than America,” said Tynes-Mensah, a former university chemistry instructor who was born in the Russian town of Krasnodar and now lives mainly in the United States, spending summers in Russia. “He was happy here.”
* How to lie with statistics, Nicholas Kristof edition.
* Portrait of a suicide at UPenn.
* You Oughta Know Dave Coulier Will Be On Fuller House.
* Woman Who Tweeted ‘2 Drunk 2 Care’ Before Fatal Crash Gets 24 Years.
* Galadriel, Witch-Queen of Lórien.
In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs,” I suggested that the basic humanity of Tolkien’s inhuman creatures proved them to be more worthy of our sympathy than the elves, “whose near-perfection marks them with a profound otherness.” As immortals, elves are always playing a long game in which we finite beings cannot ever hope to be much more than pawns. The characters who seem most aware of this fact in The Lord of the Rings are, in fact, the orcs, as is tellingly revealed in the dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat. They lament having to work for “Big Bosses,” remember the “bad old times” when elves besieged them, and make hopeful plans for a postwar future in which there are “no big bosses.” In their fear and loathing of aristocrats and high powers, these orcs express thoroughly modern, even vaguely democratic sentiments. The Witch-Queen of Lórien, much like the dark Lord of Mordor, champions a different social order entirely. I am not entirely sure that Galadriel’s vision for how the world system should be organized is necessarily the better one. For those of us who are in favor of changing the world, Galadriel and her coterie of hereditary aristocrats represent the enemy, a power to be overcome, and her “long defeat” cannot come soon enough.
* The Magicians is coming to SyFy.
* Sheriffs Threaten Retaliation If The Price Of Prisoner Phone Calls Is Regulated.
* Starving the beast: The UNC system in 2015.
* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.
* Meet the original patent troll.
* The vanishing of Molly Norris.
* Empty, Lonely Nothingness. Forever: Understanding the Fermi Paradox.
* A Cancer Survivor Designs the Cards She Wishes She’d Received From Friends and Family.
* Get my checkbook! Original drawings depicting iconic Martians from HG Wells’s sci-fi masterpiece The War of the Worlds are on sale for £350,000.
* Edit of the Day: Footloose Without the Music Turns Kevin Bacon Into a Maniac.
* Deleted Scenes of Women in Disaster Movies Written by Men.
* Get me Thomas Pynchon: Aide to Kamala Harris arrested for pretending to run 3,000-year-old rogue police force.
* Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot.
* Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water. More North Carolina Residents Warned Of Contaminated Drinking Water. Horribly bleak study sees ‘empty landscape’ as large herbivores vanish at startling rate. A future without chocolate.
* Only the super-rich can save us now.
* McDonald’s to reverse declining sales with more attractive Hamburglar.
* These Suburban Preppers Are Ready for Anything.
* Bill Clinton has an exciting new greatest regret of his presidency.
* Someone made Game of Thrones into a Google map, and it’s amazing.
* Native Americans Say This Man Enslaved Them. Pope Francis Wants To Call Him A Saint.
* Which President Greenlit A Trip To The Center Of The Earth?
* And a dark, gritty Sliders I wish had gone to series: Parallels. By one of the creators of The Lost Room, which I also wish had gone to series!
Written by gerrycanavan
May 8, 2015 at 8:08 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, advertising, Age of Ultron, aliens, America, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, art, austerity, Avengers 2, baby food for teens, Baltimore, banned books, bars, beards, Bill Clinton, birth control, Bizarre New World, Black Widow, blue, Bobby Jindal, books, California, cancer, capitalism, Captain America, cartooning, catastrophe, Catholicism, CFPs, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, color, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, concussions, corruption, cut it out, design, doomsday preppers, drunk driving, ecology, Edward Snowden, emigration, English departments, extermination, Facebook, Fermi paradox, film, football, Footloose, for-profit schools, Freddie Gray, freemasons, Fuller House, Galadriel, Game of Thrones, games, garbage, gender, Gerber, Google Maps, Great Filter, Great Recession, H. G. Wells, Halo, Hamburglar, haters, health insurance, HERDI, hollow Earth, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrofracking, if you want a vision of the future, Indiana Jones, Islam, it's good to know stuff, Joss Whedon, juvenile, Kevin Bacon, kids today, Knights Templar, labor, LEGO, Lev Grossman, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, Lousiana, LSU, Mad Men, many worlds and alternate universes, maps, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, mass incarceration, McCann Erickson, McDonald's, Milwaukee, Molly Norris, moms, Native American issues, neoliberalism, NES, Netflix, New England Patriots, New York, nonprofit-industrial complex, nothingness, NSA, only the super-rich can save us now, orcs, Oscar the Grouch, outer space, Parallels, patent trolls, patents, pink, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, poop, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, Pynchon, race, racism, research, riots, Rymdkapsel, saints, science, Scott Aukerman, Scott Walker, sculpture, seagulls, SETI, sexism, sexual harassent, Shakespeare, slavery, Sliders, social media, statistics, Statue of Liberty, Stephen Colbert, Steven Salaita, street lit, students, suburbia, suicide, superheroes, surveillance society, surveillance state, Tamir Rice, tenure, texting, the humanities, the ind, The Lost Room, The Magicians, the Pope, The Sheep Look Up, the sublime, the Sudan, The Wire, there's no such thing as bad publicity, Tolkien, trash, UIUC, UNC, University of Wisconsin, UPenn, urban fiction, USSR, Venus de Milo, War of the Worlds, war on education, water, Wes Anderson, white people, Wisconsin, work, YouTube, Zelda
Monday Morning Links!
* The first cut of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ was over 3 hours long. I’m sure that would have solved all the problems.
* Science Fiction and the Urban Crisis.
* In short, riots aren’t counterproductive because they do not achieve their goals. They are counterproductive because they are an expression of those who are already-counterproductive, those “individuals committing the violence,” those ever-ready to riot.
* Starfleet as the Federation’s “Dumping Ground for Orphans.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18.5: “Peaceful Protest.”
* Wow: Rebuilt slave sites being unveiled at Jefferson’s Monticello.
* The U.S. Civil War ended 150 years ago, but once a year, deep in the sugar cane fields of southern Brazil, the Confederate battle flag rises again.
* Parents call cops on teen for giving away banned book; it backfires predictably. They’re banning Sherman Alexie? Come on.
* Salvage Accumulation, or the Structural Effects of Capitalist Generativity.
* Executive Who Presided Over Nonprofit’s Fall Seeks $1.2 Million Payday.
* The names of the chemical elements in Chinese. More links below the chart.
* The Washington Post‘s Police Problem.
* Judith Butler’s talents are wasted on a “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” piece that really should be obvious to everyone.
* The most amazing thing about this exchange is that Sam Harris thinks he won this argument so completely he needed everyone in the world to see.
* The headline reads, “Nepal’s Kung Fu Nuns Have Refused To Be Evacuated – They’re Staying Back To Help Victims.”
* “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things: Disability in Game of Thrones.”
* Porn data: visualising fetish space.
* Ideology at its cutest (hat tip: Justin I.): Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear.
* Big Bird Actor: I Almost Died on the Challenger and I Cry in the Suit.
* Report: Cop Dismissed Freddie Gray’s Pleas for Help as “Jailitis.”
* Christie signs law greenlighting fast track sale of N.J. public water systems.
* The Great Victoria’s Secret Bra Heist of Pennsylvania.
* Behind the scenes of the Game of Thrones map.
* It’s always worse than you think: The CIA has been organizing clandestine TED Talks.
* “Cool” is a bit of a moving target. Sixty years ago it was James Dean, nonchalantly smoking a cigarette as he sat on a motorbike, glaring down 1950s conformity with brooding disapproval. Five years ago it was Zooey Deschanel holding a cupcake.
* “Social media trend sees men ditching sit-ups for snack cakes.” My moment has arrived!
* Tesla unveils a battery to power your home, completely off grid.
* I hate to link to an SNL bit, but their parody of a Black Widow movie was really pretty good.
* Area X novella coming… eventually. I liked the first book in the trilogy much, much more than the latter two, but I’m still in.
* Can 3D printing save the rhino? Seattle-based bioengineering start-up Pembient believes it can. The company plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D printed rhino horn in an effort to stem the number of rhinos killed for their horns. But conservationists fear that the plan may backfire, undermining their own efforts to cut the demand for such products in China and Vietnam, the main black markets for rhino horns.
* The coming DC Cinematic Universe trainwreck, Suicide Squad edition.
* A University Is Not Walmart.
* Trustees are basically heroes, and the Chronicle is ON IT.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 4, 2015 at 8:09 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, 3D printing, academia, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, Age of Ultron, Area X, austerity, Baltimore, banned books, batteries, Bernie Sanders, Big Bird, Big Data, Black Widow, bras, capitalism, CEOs, Challenger, charts, Chinese, Chris Christie, CIA, cities, Civil War, class struggle, cool, cultural preservation, dadbod, DC Comics, debate, disability, disability studies, endangered species, film, Florida, Freddie Gray, Game of Thrones, Grace Lee Whitney, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, it's always worse than you think, Jeff Vandermeer, Joss Whedon, Judith Butler, kung fu, LLAP, Marvel, Monticello, neoliberalism, Nepal, Noam Chomsky, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nuns, obituary, orphans, Pennsylvania, periodic tale, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, poliitcs, pornography, primitive accumulation, privatize everything, protests, race, racism, rhinos, riots, Sam Harris, science fiction, Sesame Street, sex offenders, Sherman Alexie, slavery, SNL, social media, Star Trek, Suicide Squad, TED talks, teddy bears, Tesla, The Avengers 2, the Confederacy, The Culture, the Federation, Thomas Jefferson, trustees, Vermont, Walmart, water, words
All the Weekend Links You’ll Ever Need
* Key Findings in Chapel Hill’s Academic-Fraud Investigation. I find the scale of this thing totally amazing; that the NCAA is still claiming it has no jurisdiction here is also amazing. It’ll be interesting to see UNC’s next accreditation report.
* Another sportsball-related disaster that the NCAA, alas, just can’t do anything about: Many Athletes Receive Little Education on Concussion.
* Lawsuit Alleges College Athletes Should Be Paid at Least Minimum Wage. The NCAA wishes it could act.
* S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education.
* Miami University gave George Will four adjuncts’ yearly salary for this nonsense. But presidents of higher ed nonprofits say that’s chump change.
* Study: we should probably just abolish men.
* Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Birth Control. So old I can remember when giving employers direct veto power over health care was the reductio ad absurdum of the Hobby Lobby case.
* Surfers of the nightmare Internet: The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.
* The Anti-Socialist Origins of Big Data.
* African Writers in a New World. The interviews in this series will lead up to the Symposium of African Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The event, which will take place December 2-3, 2014, will feature conversations with Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and Taiye Selasi. “African Writers in a New World” will conclude with a conference report from the Symposium.
* It became necessary to destroy Detroit in order to save it. And Chicago. And pretty much everywhere.
* Rio has used mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics as a “state of exception” to push through private development projects and neoliberal reforms. The Jock Doctrine.
* America’s perpetual state of emergency.
* I said on Twitter that this “13th grade” pilot program in Oregon seems like an example of Goodhart’s Law, though I think I could probably be convinced otherwise.
* Republicans increasingly saying the quiet part loud.
* And that’s not even a link to this utterly bizarre video from AEI about roofies.
* Infidels defile the sacrament: I suspect some of the irrationality around voter ID laws might be linked to Stephen Keating’s notion of voting as religious ritual.
* Speaking of saying the quiet part loud: Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have A Constitutional Right To Use Excessive Force.
* At about 4 a.m., officers were dispatched to 3779 W. 5300 South to check on a man who had called a suicide hotline, according to Detective Matt Gwynn, the public information officer for Roy Police Department. A negotiator from the SWAT team was then brought in, and Gwynn says a 6- to 6 ½-hour standoff ensued. “At some point those negotiations failed and unfortunately the SWAT team was involved in a shooting, and the subject is now deceased,” Gwynn said.
* Cops Use Action-Movie Arsenal to Catch Teen Who Stole Cigarettes. I just thank god they caught the guy.
* CHP officer says stealing nude photos from female arrestees ‘game’ for cops.
* Cash damages for woman duped into having undercover spy’s child.
* Climate Change Is Causing Mountain Goats To Shrink. Will you act now, America?
* Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit Of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm.
* By pretending climate change isn’t real we develop the tax base to deal with climate change. With a plan this solid, what could go wrong?
* I’m sure Miami seceding from the rest of Florida would solve it. Of course Republicans have a better idea.
* The United States of Reddit.
* It’s nearly impossible to fire a tech millionaire.
* I mean really, we need to figure out how to fire some of these guys.
* On the Internet, Men Are Called Names. Women Are Stalked and Sexually Harassed. Cassandra among the creeps.
* Matt Yglesias Entirely Misunderstands Why [Anything] Exists.
That Yglesias piece is actually really good at revealing neo/liberalism as Panglossian in-this-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-ism.
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014
Everything that exists is necessary; everything that exists is good. -Matt Yglesias
— Gritty Rebootavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2014
Americans killed by Ebola today: 0 Americans killed by ISIS today: 0 Americans killed by guns today: 86 Source: http://t.co/QCOpdKkjPN
— Sam Johnston (@samj) October 24, 2014
* Peter Jackson vows Battle of the Fire Armies will be literally unwatchable.
* J.K. Rowling releasing new Harry Potter story about Dolores Umbridge.
* If you call slipstream “transrealism” it sounds like a new thing.
* You’re finally getting (another) dark, gritty Archie reboot.
* What’s my risk of catching Ebola? But that’s no reason not to panic.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on “Mount Thoreau” and the naming of things in the wilderness.
* Science proves I listen to Counting Crows because I’m just that smart. So it’s not my fault and no one can blame me. I’m as much a victim as anyone.
* And io9 has your Top 100 Science Fiction-Themed Songs Of All Time. That they left off “Nothing But Flowers” is a crime against all time and space.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 25, 2014 at 8:21 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 13th grade, abolish men, academia, accreditation, adjuncts, Africa, America, American Enterprise Institute, Archie, austerity, Battle of the Five Armies, Big Data, birth control, books, Buzzfeed, Chicago, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civic religion, class struggle, climate change, college sports, concussions, corporatism, Counting Crows, Detroit, Ebola, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, film, Florida, fraud, George Will, graduation rates, guns, Harry Potter, Hobby Lobby, How the University Works, hydrofracking, intelligence, J.K. Rowling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lord of the Rings, Matt Yglesias, men, methane, Miami, Miami University, minimum wage, misogyny, moral panic, music, names, natural gas, nature, NCAA, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, nothing but flowers, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Olympics, only the super-rich can save us now, Oregon, paper classes, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, police brutality, police state, politics, rape, rape culture, reboots, Reddit, Republicans, revenge porn, Risk, ritual, roofies, saying the quiet part loud, science fiction, Seattle, secessionism, sexism, shock doctrine, Silicon Valley, slipstream, sports, stalking, state of exception, states of emergency, suicide, SWAT teams, Talking Heads, teaching, television, the Constitution, the courts, the dark side of the digital, The Hobbit, the Internet, the law, the marshmallow test, the wilderness, theft, Tolkien, transrealism, true crime, UNC, voter ID, voter suppression, voting, war on education
Tuesday Links!
* UT President just comes out and says it: tenure is over.
Rather than debate these issues as an all-or-nothing matter, we should implement our system in a way that looks to the purposes tenure serves. In fact, we already do that. American higher education, including UT, has been using an increasing share of non-tenured faculty. In this sense, American higher education has been de-tenuring itself, that is, unleveraging itself, for the last 20 years. My point here is that we need to do this in a purposeful way that is aligned with our large-scale teaching and research goals in ever more detailed ways. We need to use tenure when it is most needed: where competition is the keenest and where research is more central to the enterprise. It is less necessary where those two features aren’t present. Again, my point here is not that I have the answer. My point is that we can’t shy away from an issue even as sacred as how we use tenure. We need to lead the way by implementing everything we do in light of the purposes we claim it promotes.
* Meanwhile: There’s still no STEM shortage.
* For-Profit Colleges as Factories of Debt.
* Isn’t everybody equal now? Can’t women be obnoxious too? Wesleyan Rules That Fraternities Must Accept Women.
* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tries to make sense of Wisconsin’s ever-changing voter ID rules.
* I’ve simply never understood how “divestment” was supposed to work as a tactic against climate change. The only thing that threatens to shake this conviction is the fact that Slate agrees.
* Better march harder: Worldwide Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached Record Levels In 2013.
* Yes we can! U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.
* Elsewhere in Obama doing a heckuva job: The US just started bombing Syria.
* Police shoot teenage special-needs girl within 20 seconds of arriving to ‘help.’
* What Reparations in America Could Look Like.
* I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.
* Inside Higher Ed debates whether and how you can try to address male pathologies in the classroom without reentering maleness pedagogically.
* What it’s like to have a stroke at 33.
* On this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver takes a look at the Miss America pageant and asks, “How the f*ck is this still happening?”
* 11/23/63 is coming to Hulu as a series. I feel like I run a link that says this at least three times a year.
* The past isn’t done with us: A Brazilian man whose parents were African slaves could be the oldest living person ever documented after receiving a birth cerficate showing he turned 126 last week, it was reported on Tuesday.
* The past isn’t done with us, part two: Star Trek 3 might reunite William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
* I’ve had dreams like this: Camera falls from a plane and lands in a pig farm.
* Somebody’s stealing my bit: There’s a new university course focusing on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
* And they say America is a country no longer capable of achieving great things: Rhode Island Man Manages to Get Four DUIs in 30 Hours.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11/23/63, academia, alcohol, America, Austin, Barack Obama, beauty pagents, Bob Ross, carbon, class struggle, climate change, comics, divestment, Don't mention the war, dreams, ecology, employment, fear of flying, fear of heights, film, for-profit schools, fraternities, Glengarry Glen Ross, guns, How the University Works, Hulu, ISIS, J.J. Abrams, jobs, John Oliver, longevity, male privilege, male studies, maleness, Marvel, Milwaukee, Miss America, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, nuclear weapons, our brains work in interesting ways, pigs, police brutality, police violence, politics, prison-educational complex, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, reparations, Rhode Island, Star Trek, STEM, Stephen King, strokes, student debt, Syria, television, tenure, the past isn't over it isn't even past, time travel, University of Texas, voter ID, Wesleyan, Wisconsin
Wednesday Links! Seriously a Lot!
* Like C.P. Snow’s two cultures of the humanities and the sciences, a new bimodal view of higher education is becoming increasingly important at the start of the twenty-first century: one that sees the goal of universities as developing “the whole person” and another that sees it as largely or even exclusively in terms of job training. The Two Cultures of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century and Their Impact on Academic Freedom.
* Academic search season watch: How To Tailor a Job Letter (Without Flattering, Pandering, or Begging).
* Episode 21 of Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (with Kurt Busiek) is a great look at how Marvel’s sausage is made. Give it a listen if you’re a fan of the comics…
* Time for the Libya mea culpas.
* TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.
* What Happened To Jennifer Lawrence Was Sexual Assault.
* The Police Tool That Pervs Use to Steal Nude Pics From Apple’s iCloud.
* Steve Shaviro: Twenty-Two Theses on Nature.
* Even the Department of Education thinks their rating system will be a mess.
* Yale’s tax exempt New Haven property worth $2.5 billion.
* Thirty-two teens escaped from a Nashville youth detention center by crawling under a weak spot in a fence late Monday, and nine of them were still on the run Tuesday, a spokesman said.
* Change Of Habit: How Seattle Cops Fought An Addiction To Locking Up Drug Users.
* Three Myths About Police Body Cams.
* Jeff Mizanskey Is Serving Life in Prison for Marijuana.
* Scientists Find ‘Alarming’ Amount Of Arsenic In Groundwater Near Texas Fracking Sites.
* Can journalistic ethics include nonhuman perspectives?
* Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female.
* All The Game Of Thrones Fan Theories You Absolutely Need To Know.
* NIH finally makes good with Henrietta Lacks’ family.
* Twenty Days of Harassment and Racism as an American Apparel Employee.
* Durham Public Schools dumps Teach for America.
* The Four-Year-Old’s Workday.
* Rape culture and Title IX at the University of Kansas.
* “Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better — perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background — we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.”
* Twitter has an algorithm that assigns gender to its users.
* Why top tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees.
* In Virginia, thousands of day-care providers receive no oversight. After a child’s death, parents grapple with second guesses.
* Unlike most other states, Wisconsin does not recognize prisoners’ good behavior with credits toward accelerated release. Wisconsin had such a “good time” program for well over a century, but eliminated it as part of the policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s that collectively left the state unusually — perhaps even uniquely — inflexible in its terms of imprisonment. Why No “Good Time” in Wisconsin?
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Meet The Guy Who Spent Seven Months Killing Everyone In Fallout 3.
* When Disney forbade Stan Lee’s original cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy. When they cut Hawkeye’s bit from Captain America 2.
* Rule of law watch: The Dumb Line In New York’s Constitution That Could Elect A Governor Most Of The State Doesn’t Want.
* For the geeks: How Randall “xkcd” Munroe wrote What If?
* Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox.” Bah! We need to go back in time and prevent this simulation from ever being devised!
* The arc of history is long, but: HBO has commissioned some sort of new Flight Of The Conchords show.
* The Most Compelling Athlete In America Right Now Is Here To Play Chess.
* And just because it’s gerrycanavan.wordpress.com: Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, alcohol, algorithms, America, animal personhood, animals, apocalypse, Apple, books, C.P. Snow, cameos, Captain America 2, chess, class struggle, climate change, college rankings, comics, communism, competency-based degrees, consumption, cura personalis, day care, Department of Education, diversity, Don't mention the war, drug addiction, Duke, Durham, ecology, ethics, Fallout 3, Fanon, federalism, feminism, Flight of the Conchords, Game of Thrones, games, gaming, gender, genetically modified organisms, get a haircut hippie, grandfather paradox, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hawaii, Hawkeye, HBO, Henrietta Lacks, how the sausage is made, How the University Drinks, How the University Works, hydrofracking, Jennifer Lawrence, journalism, juvenile detention, kids today, Kurt Busiek, Libya, limits to growth, local control, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Nashville, Native American issues, nature, New Haven, New York, NIH, nonprofit-industrial complex, North Carolina, now we see the violence inherent in the system, police cameras, police state, politics, preschool, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, quantum mechanics, Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, racism, rape culture, rule of law, Seattle, Stan Lee, stem cells, Steve Shaviro, student movements, taxes, Teach for America, televsion, Texas, the humanities, the kids are all right, theory, time travel, Title IX, Twitter, two cultures, Vikings, violence, Virginia, voting, war on drugs, war on education, water, We're screwed, what if, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, X-Men, xkcd, Yale
Today Is Tuesday!
* Gasp.
* Worker’s Comp Lessons From an Injured Adjunct.
* Progressive nonprofits that don’t pay their interns.
* At the beginning of April, one of the most important labor unions in U.S. higher education staged an unexpected two-day strike. It wasn’t the American Association of University Professors — the left-leaning professors’ union — or a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, representing service workers; it was United Auto Workers Local 2865. Auto workers might appear to be an odd group to strike across American university campuses, but Local 2865 represents 12,000 teaching assistants, associate instructors and undergraduate tutors at University of California campuses.
* The Minimum Wage Worker Strikes Back.
* Kavanagh is referring to the lowered rate-per-bed the GEO Group offered Arizona as the national economy cratered in 2008. The rate applied to emergency “temporary” beds at two of its facilities to house an overflow of prisoners. In exchange for the discount, the state agreed to meet a 100% occupancy rate for all non-emergency beds at both prisons.
* On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.
* Big Data: A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross.
* Coming soon: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler, edited by Tarshia L. Stanley.
* DC says it’s finally publishing Grant Morrison’s Multiversity.
* Avoiding Climate Catastrophe Is Super Cheap — But Only If We Act Now. I have some terrible news.
* How to Lie with Data Visualization.
* Casino Says World-Famous Gambler Cheated It Out of $10 Million.
* Zero tolerance watch: Police charge high school student with disorderly conduct for using iPad to prove he’s being bullied.
* KFC Selling Fried Chicken Prom Corsages as World Falls Into Darkness.
* Walt Disney presents: Firefly.
* Science has officially proven the exact age that men get grumpy. Still so many years for me to go.
* Fingers crossed! Wisconsin Republicans To Vote On Secession.
* BREAKING: The Grand Budapest Hotel is a huge hit for Wes Anderson.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 15, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, America, Arizona, austerity, Big Data, birthdays, Bob Ross, bullying, capitalism, casinos, class struggle, climate change, comics, disability, Disney, fast food, film, Firefly, gambling, general election 2016, Grant Morrison, grumpy old men, Harry Potter, Hogwarts, How the University Works, internships, iPads, Jameson, KFC, labor, lies and lying liars, Martin O'Malley, minimum wage, MLA, MOOCs, Multiversity, music, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, Occupy Cal, Octavia Butler, oligarchy, painting, pedagogy, prison-industrial complex, prisons, prom, science, statistics, strikes, taxes, teaching, the deficit, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wire, Tommy Carcetti, unions, We're screwed, Wes Anderson, workman's compensation
Weekend Links!
* Big fair use decision: specific commentary on the original work is not required for a fair use defense.
* Finding common ground with Senator Coburn: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude major professional sports leagues from qualifying as tax-exempt organizations.
* Gasp! Many students stay away from online courses in subjects they deem especially difficult or interesting, according to a study released this month by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The finding comes just as many highly selective colleges are embracing online learning and as massive open online courses are gaining popularity and standing.
* “What we’re saying is that bargain-basement (clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters,” John Hilary, executive director at British charity War on Want, told Reuters.
* Bad Robot will adapt 11/22/63.
* Canada gets it right: “The legal test for a true volunteer arrangement looks at several factors, but merely agreeing to work without pay does not in itself make you a volunteer,” Ministry of Labour spokesperson Jonathon Rose wrote in an email. See also Natalia Cecire:
Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for “fun,” the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. “I can get you a twenty-year-old!” is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.
* Whitewashing and manwashing cinema.
* Mother Jones profiles the great Tig Notaro.
* What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill.
* And 66 behind-the-scenes photos from the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 27, 2013 at 11:42 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11/22/63, academia, art, Bangladesh, BP, Canada, clothes, comedy, copyright, Deepwater Horizon, Empire Strikes Back, exploitation, fair use, film, gender, globalization, How the University Works, internships, IRS, J.J. Abrams, kids today, labor, manwashing, MLB, MOOCs, NBA, NFL, NHL, nonprofit-industrial complex, oil, oil spills, pedagogy, race, science fiction, sports, Star Wars, Stephen King, superexploitation, sweatshops, taxes, teaching, Tig Notaro, time travels, Tom Coburn, whitewashing, workplace safety
Lots of Monday Links But In My Defense They Are All Fascinating
* Margaret Thatcher dies. Glenn Greenwald on speaking ill of the dead. We’re still living in Thatcher’s world. We Are All Thatcherites Now. “If I reported to you what Mrs. Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.” Thatcher on the climate. Obama on Thatcher.
* Will Democrats destroy the planet? And pretty gleefully, too, it looks like.
* I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that not a single one of our major institutions, within government or without, is capable of confronting this problem. And if we can’t, that’s rather the ballgame, isn’t it?
* The Methane Beneath Our Feet.
* It’s Art Pope’s nightmare, North Carolinians just live in it.
* Imagine for a moment if a loved one found themselves in legal jeopardy in some foreign country that had a 99% conviction rate. You might ask what kind of illegitimate system are they up against. You would likely conclude that any system where conviction is nearly-assured is stacked against the accused. Yet this is exactly what the situation is in federal courts in the United States, the alleged bastion of liberty that does not hesitate to hold itself out as a beacon of freedom and poses as the benchmark of fairness that other nations are encouraged to follow.
* Pornokitsch considers one of my childhood favorites, Dragonlance Chronicles.
* Searching for Bill Watterson.
* How to make $1,000,000 at Rutgers. Rutgers Practices Were Not a Hostile Work Environment.
* Average Faculty Salaries, 2012–13. The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2012-13. Colleges Begin to Reward Professors for Doing Work That Actually Matters to Them.
* And with stretched budgets and public pressure to keep costs down, many colleges and universities are cutting back on tenure and tenure-track jobs. According to the report, such positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.
* The dark side of open access.
* Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.
* ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ Bring New Ideas, New Conflicts to Colleges.
* Coursera Takes a Nuanced View of MOOC Dropout Rates.
* Steinberg’s bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block’s overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.
* How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy.
* So imagine my surprise — and envy — upon learning that these networkers moonlight in a profitable little business using Shakespeare to teach leadership, strategy and management to businesses and organizations. For $28,000 a day!
* The relentless drive for efficiency at U.S. companies has created a new harshness in the workplace. In their zeal to make sure that not a minute of time is wasted, companies are imposing rigorous performance quotas, forcing many people to put in extra hours, paid or not. Video cameras and software keep tabs on worker performance, tracking their computer keystrokes and the time spent on each customer service call.
* The Problem with Nonprofits.
* A brief history of public goods.
* New York Is Shelving Prison Law Libraries.
* An editor rejects The Left Hand of Darkness.
* Game of Thrones as subway map.
* Dear Television premieres at TNR with a review of the Mad Men premiere.
* Bill Cosby will speak at the 2013 Marquette commencement.
* And your single-serving-site of the day: How far away is Mars?
Written by gerrycanavan
April 8, 2013 at 9:01 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjuncts, anti-utopia, Art Pope, austerity, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Bill Watterson, books, bullying, California, Calvin and Hobbes, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, Coursera, Dragonlance, ecology, efficiency, end of history, Exxon, flexible accumulation, flexible online degrees, Game of Thrones, How the University Works, justice, libraries, Mad Men, Margaret Thatcher, Marquette, Mars, methane, MOOCs, NCAA, neoliberalism, nonprofit-industrial complex, North Carolina, Occupy Cal, oil, oil spills, Open Access, outer space, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, productivity, public goods, Reagan, Rutgers, social media, Stanford, subway maps, Tea Party, tenure, the courts, the dark side of the digital, the law, The Left Hand of Darkness, there is no alternative, total system failure, United Kingdom, Ursula K. Le Guin, We're screwed