Posts Tagged ‘North Dakota’
Fritrump Links!
* Trump’s America Conference at University College Dublin.
* Midwest area research opportunity: Horatio Alger Fellowship for the Study of American Popular Culture, Northern Illinois University.
* See Marquette University’s $600M plan to transform its Milwaukee campus.
* Teens sue Wisconsin over nightmare conditions in juvenile jails.
* Like everyone, I mocked the tweet. Deep down, I never thought it could happen to me. Now I wish I had stopped to think things through, because I didn’t know how to respond. A terrorist had actually kidnapped my baby. By all indications, he had rigged the poor little tyke with a bomb set to go off in one hour. Somehow, miraculously, I had wound up in the same room with him. And now I faced a terrible choice: do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up, by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with, and then left the baby at some remote location while winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?
* Starvation in northern Nigeria’s Borno State is so bad that a whole slice of the population — children under 5 — appears to have died, aid agencies say.
* Amazing Twitter project: @Stl_Manifest.
* Astoundingly Complex Visualization Untangles Trump’s Business Ties. Trump: the lie list. Trump’s phone as security risk. Trump and the Republicans Are on a Suicide Mission Together. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era. You’re a little late. Is Trump Morally Unfit or Are We Facing a Constitution Crisis? Pretty dick move, Germany. This one’s unreal even by Trump standards. Sad! One week down.
* Not only is Obama, at only fifty-five, set to have one of the longest post-presidential careers of any president, but now freed from the shackles of the office — which often forced him to temper his true beliefs and triangulate — Obama can become the progressive hero his most fervent supporters always wanted him to be. Or so the theory goes.
* In a new book, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster), Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, reveals that Carolyn—in 2007, at age 72—confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. “That part’s not true,” she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her.
* ND House passes eliminating reporting of small oil spills.
* Trump Has Never Been Popular.
* Mark Weston at Time pitches a tax strike until the coasts get adequate representation in government.
* What the Hell Is the Opening Crawl for The Last Jedi Going to Be?
* Why don’t we drink pigs’ milk?
* Why don’t some people get brain freeze?
* Ten Ways Reading The Silmarillion Makes The Lord of the Rings Better, Part 1.
* I write out of disarray, from a field of compatriots in disarray. We’re drifting like astronauts, distantly tethered by emails like the one I just got from a friend: ‘i feel like he is making everyone sick, and bipolar./i feel like I am so incredibly ill-equipped to deal with any of this./i’m taking blind advice from all comers without feeling like anything is remotely adequate./ i feel nostalgic for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona Resort, Asks Rocks for “Guidance”’). At these moments we’re the special snowflakes we were wishing to see in the world, the canaries in our own dystopian coal mines. But we’ll brandish our sensitivities proudly (if not our safety pins, which may be too smug and lame a gesture), since they’re what we’ve got, and are anyway better than robotic numbness, better than ‘normalisation’.
* Paging Kim Stanley Robinson: Are scientists going to march on Washington?
* The starships of the future won’t look anything like the Enterprise.
* First as tragedy, then as farce, as the feller said.
* Great moments in headlines: Georgia lawmaker shot behind adult entertainment store; was carrying thousands of dollars in storm relief money.
* If you want a vision of Thanksgiving.
* And two Northwestern University professors have demonstrated it’s possible to be good at neither research nor teaching. Of course this is no news to me.
Skilled researchers and effective teachers are neither substitutes nor complements for each other — in fact, they have no relationship at all, according to a study by two Northwestern University faculty published by the Brookings Institution Thursday.
I Have (Not a Joke) 300 Tabs Open and This Afternoon I Am Closing Them All: Election Night Links!
I’ve been so ridiculously busy I haven’t been able to tend to my open tabs at all. There’s over 300 — and I’m not leaving this room until I’ve closed them all. Let’s go!
* Really, I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to shamelessly self-promote: I missed announcing my trip to Atlanta for SLSA 2016 and my presentations on “Literary Studies after Blackfish” and the upcoming almost-almost-done issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding,” as well as my New Inquiry review of the (fantastic) end to Liu Cixin’s (fantastic) Three-Body trilogy. My new essay on “Geriatric Zombies” from The Walking Med was namechecked as part of a larger zombie news report in the Seattle Times. Most importantly I haven’t been able to hype my Octavia Butler book, which is printed and apparently shipping. I’ve even held one in my hands!
* Meanwhile, here’s my guess for tonight’s final results, just to get it out of the way: 340-198.
* CFP: Letters to Octavia Butler. CFP: The Comics of Alison Bechdel. CFP: English Studies in Ruins? CFP: The World of Harry Potter.
* A new issue of the Eaton Journal in Archival Research in Science Fiction is out, including a piece from Larisa Mikhaylova on Star Trek fandom in Russia.
* French town upholds law against UFOs.
* Invisible Planets / Invisible Frameworks — Assembling an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF. I’ve been reading the Invisible Planets collection and it’s great.
* Why we should lower the voting age in America.
* Žižek on the lesser evil. Jameson on fascism, but not yet. Study Confirms Network Evening Newscasts Have Abandoned Policy Coverage For 2016 Campaign. Americans, Politics, and Social Media. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say. The 282 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List. No, “we” are not collectively responsible for anything. Journey to the Center of the Alt-Right. Ivanka is the real threat. A Reading Guide for Those in Despair About American Politics. And did someone order a Constitutional crisis with a 4-4 Supreme Court?
* What Happens if You Vote and Die Before Election Day? Too late for all of us, alas.
* In contrast to the Fordist society observed by Gramsci, power now seeks to circumvent the public sphere, in order to avoid the constraints of critical reason. Increasingly, it is non-representational codes—of software, finance, human biology—that mediate between past, present and future, allowing society to cohere. Where, for example, employee engagement cannot be achieved via cultural or psychological means, increasingly business is looking to solutions such as wearable technology, that treat the worker as an item of fixed capital to be monitored physically, rather than human capital to be employed. The key human characteristics are those that are repeated in a quasi-mechanical fashion: footsteps, nightly sleep, respiration, heartbeat. These metronomic qualities of life come to represent each passing moment as yet another one of the same. The New Neoliberalism.
* “We are all Thomas More’s children”: 500 years of Utopia. And at LARB.
* How America Outlawed Adolescence. The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Man-Child.
* Inside the NSA’s For-Sale Spy Town. The Indiana Town That Modernism Built.
* Where Ph.D.s Work. IPFW Community Shocked by Restructuring Recommendations. Last month’s strike at Harvard. And its results. A City Clerk Opposed an Early-Voting Site at UW–Green Bay Because ‘Students Lean More Toward the Democrats.’ Saudi college student in Wisconsin dies after assault. Johns Hopkins threatens to close its interdisciplinary Humanities Center, sparking outcry from students and faculty members. San Diego State University tuition, 1959. How State Budget Cuts Affect Your Education.
* The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity.
* The American Association of University Professors has launched an investigation focused on the dismissal of Nathanial Bork, who had taught philosophy courses at the college for six years before he was dismissed. The AAUP says that his dismissal raises concerns both because of the issues he raises about rigor and also because he was fired shortly after he complained about the situation to the Higher Learning Commission, the college’s accreditor. Further, Bork was active in efforts to improve the working conditions of adjuncts at the college.
* A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award. Love this.
* “University Paid for Bigfoot Expedition.”
* Starship Troopers coming back just as documentary footage of 2016. A darker, grittier Muppet Babies, for a tragic time.
* Quentin Tarantino still insists he’s going to stop at 10 movies.
* Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization.’
* “Capitalism Broke Earth, Let’s Protect Mars.”
* Inside Magic Leap, The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup Changing Computing Forever.
* The video for Soul Asylum’s 1993 smash hit featured real missing kids. Some eventually came home; some never did.
* Her toddler suddenly paralyzed, mother tries to solve a vexing medical mystery. Football Alters the Brains of Kids as Young as 8. Why treating diabetes keeps getting more expensive. The Other Sister: Returning Home to Care for an Autistic Sibling.
* Inmates Explain How They’d Run Prisons.
* If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women.
* Russia Reveals ‘Satan 2’ Nuclear Missile Capable of Destroying Texas in One Blow. Bathroom air freshener causes emergency response at nuclear site.
* Why can’t the Star Trek timeline advance?
* The Venom From This Snake Will Make Your Life a Living Hell.
* Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange.
* Why Did This Guy Collect 500 Screenshots of Soda Machines in Video Games? Because He’s a Genius. And elsewhere on the Jacob Brogan science beat: Everyone Poops. Some Animals Eat It. Why?
* Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Thumb U.N. won’t intervene.
* Now Is The Perfect Time For The Indians To Quietly Abandon Chief Wahoo.
* Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces. How the Concept of Deep Time Is Changing.
* The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year.
* In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history: The Pyramid at the End of the World.
* Penn State Fined Record $2.4 Million in Jerry Sandusky Case.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Yellowstone’s “Zone of Death.” And I’ll take this one too: The Canadian Military Is Investigating a Mysterious Noise In the Arctic.
* How Doctor Strange went from being a racist Asian caricature to a magical white savior.
* A new favorite poem:
* Animal minds: the new anthropomorphism.
* You weren’t educated, you were trained.
* Twenty-first century Victorians.
* How We Tell Campus Rape Stories After Rolling Stone.
* Native lives matter. Tribe vows to fight North Dakota pipeline through winter. The world watches. A Standing Rock Syllabus.
* Superheroes and sadness. Pixar and sadness.
* Presenting The Black Mirror Expanded Universe.
* Wildlife numbers more than halve since 1970s in mass extinction. Inside the Frozen Zoo That Could Bring Extinct Animals Back to Life.
* The secret history of Teaching with Calvin & Hobbes.
* A bad idea, but fine: The Adventures of Young Dumbledore.
* Kardashev Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist.
* And frankly you had me at LEGO, but I like the rest too: LEGO’s New Line of Female Superheroes Is the Toy We Deserve.
NYE Links!
* Finally, my moment has arrived: Smuggling LEGO is the new smuggling diamonds.
* The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.
* On Optimism: Looking Ahead to 2015.
* From climate denialism to climate cashing-in with nothing in between. Are We Approaching the End of Human History?
* Thanks to energy drilling operations, northern New Mexico is now covered by “a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud.”
* Serial, episode thirteen: 1, 2, 3 coming today or tomorrow I think. A sort-of out-there blog post on what it could all mean: The Serial Podcast: The Possible Legal Implications of Jay’s Interview for Jay & Adnan.
* UI Chancellor Responds To Salaita Report. This is actually a fairly significant walk-back of Wise’s position — I think she’s actually more progressive on academic freedom than Cary Nelson now — though since she’s still pretending Salaita wasn’t actually hired it doesn’t do much good for him.
* Professors are teaching less while administrators proliferate. Let’s find out how all that tuition is being spent. Colleges Need a Business Productivity Audit. Of course the actual text of the article zeroes in on instruction first, which is not the source of the problem…
* It’s the original sin of college football, and you’ll never guess what it is. In Harbaugh hire, excessive pay would send wrong message. How one former coach perpetuated a cheating scheme that benefited hundreds of college athletes. Shut down middling college football programs and shift the money back to instruction.
* The arc of history is long, but: New Michigan Law Bars College Athletes From Unionizing.
* Another angle on the growing Title IX mess: Mothers of accused college rapists fight back.
* Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play At Hard Work.
* Brent Bellamy reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization.
* 538 profiles the best damn board game on the planet, Twilight Struggle.
* Really interesting idea from Bleeding Cool about what might be happening with Marvel’s sliding timescale. I could honestly see them doing this, or something like it, at least until they start getting some rights back.
* Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America.
* Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.
* Is Wisconsin destined to be a Rust Belt backwater?
* Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond.
* Seriously, though, sometimes you can’t just switch the skin tones and have the story turn out the same.
* Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence.
.* BREAKING: Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.
* Counterpoint: Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri.
* To Discipline and Punish: Milwaukee Police Make Late Night Visits.
* I say teach the controversy: Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination.
* High School Basketball Team Banned From Tournament Over ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirts.
* This Deadspin piece has really made me regret softening my anti-Vox stance in recent months.
* Sounds like the Afghanistan war has ended again. This is #3 or #4 at least, right?
* How to destroy a city: just build a highway.
* The CDC is saying we’re all going to get the flu.
* And as if the IMF wasn’t bad enough.
* “Why should the legality of a sale of secrecy depend entirely upon who initiates the transaction? Why is bribery legal but blackmail not?”
* Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.
* No Charges for Police Chief Who Used Badge to Try and Intimidate Teen into Posing Nude.
* …but believe it or not it is possible for a cop to get fired over a fatal shooting.
* LAPD Launches Investigation Into ‘Dead, Dead Michael Brown’ Song Sung at Retired Cop’s Party.
* The labor movement should rally against police violence, whether police unions like it or not. I think we should let this whole work stoppage thing play out personally.
* Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine de Blasio. The headline actually undersells the severity of a story where they talk about planting drugs on his daughter.
* Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.
* Elsewhere in the richest city in the richest nation ever in the history of the world.
* Military Turns To Prison Labor For $100 Million In Uniforms — At $2-Per-Hour Wages.
* What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition.
* North Dakota to eliminate taxes because fracking fracking fracking forever fracking. What could go wrong?
* Real life Alien vs. Predator: Cuomo vs. the New York State Legislature.
But Cuomo has insisted he would agree to a pay hike only if the Legislature addressed a long series of criminal and ethical charges against many of its members by passing several reforms, such as a limit on outside incomes earned by lawmakers and a system of publicly financed campaigns.
The legislative leaders, however, responded that Cuomo was making demands he knew were unacceptable in a politically motivated effort to appear as a reformer because he’s under federal investigation for dismantling his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel.
* “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing.”
* Streetcars, maybe not so great?
* Heartbreaking story of a trans teen’s suicide, based on a suicide note that went viral. Now go hug your kid.
* Exciting new pioneers in research:
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors
ALLEN C. GOODMAN (Wayne State University)
JOSHUA GOODMAN (Harvard University)
LUCAS GOODMAN (University of Maryland)
SARENA GOODMAN (Federal Reserve Board)We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
* Bat-Kierkegaard: The Dark Knight of Faith.
* Want to feel old? This Is What the Cast of Doug Looks Like Now.
* For its first Star Wars spinoff Disney has selected the impossible task of recasting Harrison Ford. They chose… poorly.
* Austerity in everything: Science proves once-in-a-lifetime moments will just make you more depressed.
* And there’s more! You’re more likely to die on your birthday.
* Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide.
* “Deputies said the shooting appears accidental”: Idaho toddler shoots and kills his mother inside Walmart.
* Wake up, sheeple! Back to the Future predicted 9/11.
* From io9: Physics students at the University of Leicester claim to have calculated the amount of energy required to transform water into wine.
* Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses.
* And I guess I always knew I’d die on a roller coaster.
Avoid Your Family with This Very Special Thanksgiving Edition of Thursday Links
* 100 New Debate Topics You and Your Uncle Can Turn into an Argument about Republicans.
* Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Police violence. Ferguson. America. Ferguson. Turkey pardons. Ferguson. New York. Cleveland. Cleveland. Utah. Everywhere. Everywhere.
* Winners are mad when winning lights the shadows.
* Nation Doesn’t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing.
* We should get rid of local policing. Ferguson shows why the system just doesn’t work.
* Rescind Cosby’s honorary doctorates?
* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”
* An expert hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) argued in court that a 9-year-old girl seeking damages after she was sexually assaulted would be protected from emotional stress by her low IQ.
* 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes.
* While Detroit contended with largest municipal bankruptcy, its lawyers were robbing it blind.
* Tyler Cowen, for one, welcomes the hyper-meritocracy.
* Anthropology as white public space.
* Here’s the guy who wants to run to Hillary Clinton’s left. Democrats! Catch the fever.
* While he wasn’t second in command of the United States nuclear arsenal, Rear Adm. Timothy M. Giardina not only had a 15 hour a week gambling habit he also may have had a one-man poker chip counterfeiting operation in which he used paint and stickers to make $1 poker chips into $500 poker chips. This led to repeated bans from local casinos, eventually a lifetime ban and finally his nuclear weapons were taken away.
* What is your research agenda for the coming year?
* Just another Afrofuturism megapost.
* Town Bans Winnie The Pooh For Lack of Genitals, “Dubious Sexuality.” Finally, someone said it.
* At some point this guy took a moment and smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge that he’d covered all his bases.
* SDSU suspends all frat activities after members wave dildos, throw eggs at rape protesters.
* UVA has expelled 183 students for honor code violations — and none for sexual assault.
* Alexey Pajitnov, hero, creator of Tetris.
* Frederik Pohl Made Doing Literally Everything Look Easy.
* Strange Horizons reprints Darko Suvin’s “Estrangement and Cognition,” with a 2014 postscript.
All of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times. Perhaps the richer among us, up to 5% globally but disproportionately concentrated in the trilateral U.S.A.-western Europe-Japan and its appendages, have been cushioned from realizing it by the power of money and the self-serving ideology it erects. But even those complain loudly of the “criminality” and in general “moral decay” of the desperately vicious outside their increasingly fortress-like neighbourhoods. We live morally in an almost complete dystopia—dystopia because anti-utopia—and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective.
In a look backwards to my writing of the 1960s from this most endangered cusp of history, I see a main limitation to my “Poetics of SF” essay in its innocently and naively Formalist horizon. That is, I presupposed the tide of history was flowing, even if with regrettable eddies, towards socialism or democratic communism, and concentrated on the problems of understanding, pleasure, and form within that tide. Thus I seem to have felt I could freeze or even freeze out history, as all pursuits of aesthetics do: transcending the moment. I was wrong.
* The official SF short film of the Thanksgiving holiday: Survivors Of A Nuclear War Find A Secret Bunker—But There’s A Catch
* Maybe the most twenty-first-century artifact possible: ‘Sunburn!’, A Gravity-Based Puzzle Video Game Featuring a Doomed Spaceship Crew That Is Determined to Die Together.
* The good news: There is no substantial technical or economic barrier that would prevent the U.S. from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that would help put the world on track to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, there are multiple pathways to that target, each involving a different mix of technologies. Achieving the goal would cost only around 1 percent of GDP a year out through 2050, and if we started now, we could allow infrastructure to turn over at its natural rate, avoiding stranded assets. The bad news: Pulling it off would require immediate, intelligent, coordinated, vigorously executed policies that sustain themselves over decades.
* LEGO is dead, long live LEGO.
* Guys, it’s not all bad news: After The Sun Incinerates Earth, Life Could Evolve On Titan.
* And this blog’s most sacred annual tradition: William S. Burroughs – A Thanksgiving Prayer.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* CFP: Octavia E. Butler Society American Literature Association 26th Annual Conference May 21-24, 2015.
* Rob Nixon reviews Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age and the “good Anthropocene.”
* To Save the Humanities, Change the Narrative.
* Teaching evaluations and student buy-in.
If students know what they’re getting and know why it’s supposed to be beneficial, then education and satisfaction should go together. In a total vacuum of explicit pedagogical reflection, students will default to non-academic standards for satisfaction, because we’re giving them nothing else. If students don’t know how to evaluate whether we’re helping them to learn, it’s not because students are stupid and ignorant and we shouldn’t ask them anything — it’s because we’ve failed to teach them that. And the only way to lay the groundwork for actually teaching them that is to make focused discussion of pedagogical commitments, with both fellow faculty members and with students, a pervasive feature of the culture of a given school.
* Also from Adam Kotsko: Plagiarism and self-plagiarism: A defense of Žižek.
* The Federation and cultural decay.
* Time to move on to the next boondoggle: Universities Rethinking Their Use of Massive Online Courses.
* And speaking of boondoggles: Just say no to Wisconsin transportation boondoggles.
* Another triumph for the left! Obama Could Reaffirm a Bush-Era Reading of a Treaty on Torture.
* Membership has its privileges: A former Kentucky correctional officer who admitted to sexually assaulting inmates where he worked will not be going to prison.
* Patriarchy may be down but it still has its sense of humor: The First Person Charged Under Virginia’s New ‘Revenge Porn’ Law Is A Woman.
* …there’s no evidence that electing Democrats stops Ferguson-like situations from happening.
* Could it be? Is The Stock Market Driven Mainly by Bullshit?
* The idea that the inventors of an actually working hoverboard would need Kickstarter to launch the project just seems totally self-refuting, but I guess 2015 is just around the corner and we’ve all decided we’re going to go with it.
* Don’t like cigarettes but this seems like it’s got to be illegal.
* ‘It Will Never Be The Same’: North Dakota’s 840,000-Gallon Oil Spill One Year Later.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Max Landis’s 436-page script for a Super Mario movie, forever.
* Trailer for the return of The Comeback, which is all I can think about.
* Probably the most Reddit thing that has ever happened.
* And because it’s not all bleakness and horror: Photos of children playing around the world.
Easter Thursday and the Living’s Easy Links
* BREAKING: The NCAA has approved unlimited snacks. Can we please stop all this silly union talk now?
* Unintentional metaphor watch: In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.
* Extremism and the college classroom.
* Unpaid Interns Gain the Right to Sue. What a country!
* Women, confidence, and institutional sexism.
* “I’m sorry, that sounds horrible,” he continued. “I would have put my own wife or daughters there, and I would have been screaming bloody murder to watch them die. I would gone next, I would have been the next one to be killed. I’m not afraid to die here. I’m willing to die here.”
* Accreditors ask City College to voluntarily terminate its own accreditation. Tempting, but….
* Rare Video Of People Actually Riding Action Park’s Infamous Water Slide.
* A new study which statistically analyzed temperature data over the pre-industrial period and the industrial period has rejected the hypothesis that global warming is due to natural variability at confidence levels greater than 99%.
* North Dakota Finds Itself Unprepared To Handle The Radioactive Burden Of Its Fracking Boom.
* Informed awareness is the worst, part one: A Mrs. Doubtfire sequel is in the works. Because you demanded it!
* Informed awareness is the worst, part two: Why are they even calling this show 12 Monkeys?
* Democracy is a shell game: Cities in Oklahoma are prohibited from establishing mandatory minimum wage or vacation and sick-day requirements under a bill that has been signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.
* When Google Tried to Build a Space Elevator.
* Aaron Sorkin’s The Foodroom.
* The Secret “Ronbledore” Pages of Harry Potter Revealed By Court Order. I always knew.
* 1648: The first emoticon.
* What’s on Captain America’s to-do list in other countries that aren’t America.
* And your periodic reminder that child poverty is a policy choice. Maybe it’s time we just turn things over to the rats.
Cloudy with a Chance of Apocalypse Links
* CFPs for MLA 2015 from the discussion group for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature: Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Concept of Culture (guaranteed session) and From Siberia to the Planet Mars (fingers crossed).
* America’s fraternities, and the lawyers who serve them. Great piece.
* ‘Rasputin Was My Neighbor’ And Other True Tales Of Time Travel. Unlikely simultaneous historical events.
When pilgrims were landing on Plymouth Rock, you could already visit what is now Santa Fe, New Mexico to stay at a hotel, eat at a restaurant and buy Native American silver.
The first wagon train of the Oregon Trail heads out the same year the fax machine is invented.
Nintendo was founded in 1888. Jack the Ripper was on the loose in 1888.
1971: The year in which America drove a lunar buggy on the moon and Switzerland gave women the vote.
NASA’s Gemini program was winding down at the same time as plate tectonics, as we know it today, was becoming refined and accepted by the scientific community.
When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.
The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.
Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.
* A new genre had been born: the apocalypsticle.
* President Obama Pens Personal Apology to an Art Historian. Spoiler: it’s a pretty lousy apology!
* Football workers of the world unite. The cult of amateurism plaguing the sports world.
* This North Dakota Oil Town Has The Highest Rent In The Country.
* The film ‘Back to the Future’ provides the OED’s earliest recorded example of a colloquial sense of ‘hello’, used to imply (sometimes disbelievingly or sarcastically) that the person addressed is not paying attention, has not understood something, or has said something nonsensical or foolish. – See more at: http://oupacademic.tumblr.com/post/52859022183/the-film-back-to-the-future-provides-the-oeds#sthash.3jb8w2Nr.EuYbel9A.dpuf
* Making the rounds again: Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago.
* In Louisiana, which offers some of the most lucrative tax giveaways to Hollywood, the Legislative Auditor’s Office reported that the subsidies cost the state $170 million in lost tax revenue in a single year. By one estimate, the state is handing $70,000 per episode to the cast of Duck Dynasty – all while pleading poverty to justify deep cuts to public health care programs and to retirement benefits for police officers, firefighters and teachers.
* UNC Greensboro Students Walkout Against Budget Cuts.
* About a dozen faculty members and 30 students at St. Mary’s College, a public school in Maryland, have proposed a plan to limit the salary of the highest-paid employee to 10 times that of the lowest-paid employee.
* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?
* Basically, @BarackObama Is a Parody Twitter Account.
* [grabs popcorn] Emails Suggest Scott Walker Knew Of Illegal Campaign Coordination.
* Wednesday’s proposed reforms efforts — reached in negotiations between the civil liberties group and the state DOCCS — entail an end to the solitary confinement of prisoners under 18-years-old, pregnant women and prisoners with developmental disabilities. You mean to tell me they were using solitary confinement on — what? What?
* Missouri Likely To Drop Its Lifetime Food Stamps Ban For Drug Convicts. You mean to tell me they were — really?
* Another day, another coal waste spill.
* Cop Allegedly Shot And Killed Teenage Boy After Mistaking His Wii Controller For A Gun. “Allegedly” doing a whole lot of work in that sentence given that plain facts of the matter on which everyone agrees.
* What it’s like living in your 90s.
* Twitter lost $645 million last year, almost as much as its total revenue.
* The Pentagon’s whitewashed history of the Vietnam War provokes troubling questions about how the invasion of Iraq will one day be remembered.
* Frank despises most everybody—why should we be an exception?
* What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” Have a good weekend, everyone!
Friday Morning Links
* Yesterday Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
* Over 865,200 Gallons of Fracked Oil Spill in ND, Public In Dark For Days Due to Government Shutdown.
* The shutdown comes to Milwaukee too.
* He says his daughter might be alive if not for school-nurse cuts.
* You could save a lot of money abolishing the SAT and just testing directly for parents’ wealth. And in these tough times…
* We Are Teaching High School Students to Write Terribly.
* The Great Library at Alexandria was destroyed by budget cuts, not fire.
* Report: Foxconn using forced student labor to build Sony’s PS4.
* Disney Exec Says Women Are Hard to Animate Because of Emotions.
* Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is Coming to the Big Screen! Parents, better start your boundless weeping now just to get ahead of it.
* Minneapolis learns that publicly financed stadiums are all scams. Though I confess I’m heartened to see San Diego choosing a comics stadium boondoggle over a football stadium boondoggle.
* This is what a penny looks like after being on Mars for 411 days.
* This Man of Steel nonsense is the craziest casting rumor I’ve ever heard. I don’t care if it’s obviously made up!
* And rest in peace, Kumar Pallana. Another obituary.
Tuesday Night!
* This is probably the most American thing that has ever happened: A 70-year-old woman employed by the same court for more than 34 years was fired just nine months before her scheduled retirement, for helping an inmate obtain a DNA test that led to his exoneration.
* A people’s history of Oregon Trail.
* Harlan Ellison Isn’t Dead Yet.
* North Carolina Ends Teacher Tenure.
* Emissions From North Dakota Flaring (Visible from Space) Equivalent To One Million Cars Per Year.
* If McDonald’s doubled workers’ pay, your Big Mac would cost 68 cents more.
* The Sexy Lamp Test: When the Bechdel Test Is Too Much To Ask.
* Did I do this one already? Grad Students Are Ruining Everything.
Which brings me to the second intersection: Universities are saving a ton of money in this arrangement. Good jobs with health insurance and a decent salary are being replaced by grad students who are desperate to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Our own job descriptions are so vague (if they exist on paper at all) and our employment so tenuous (its common to not know if or how much you’ll get paid from semester to semester) that you can convince us to do just about anything: we’ll work 60, 80, maybe 100 hours a week on things that amount to maybe one line on a CV and another soon-to-be outdated software fluency skill. This is time that could be spent on a second job (if you’re contract lets you even do that) that might supplement your paltry living stipend. A grad student might need the money for all of the supplies and services that she’ll need to buy upfront on her credit card while she waits a few weeks or months for her reimbursement. Or maybe a grad student just needs to buy a new computer, something that every other white-collar corporate job would have waiting for you at your desk. Or $400-worth of books because your cash-strapped library hasn’t procured a recent title in your field since 2007.
* And MetaFilter perfects mansplaining as a bunch of dudes without kids hector poor moms about how to manage their diaper needs. Stay for the breastfeeding hectoring!
Saturday Night Links
* The Los Angeles Times profiles Nalo Hopkinson.
* Science Fiction Comes Alive as Researchers Grow Organs in Lab.
* North Dakota Becomes First State To Ban All Abortions By Defining Life At Conception.
* Prosecutors at his latest trial detailed how Sapina and those working with him spent at least $2.7 million in bribes to players, referees, and league officials. They gave evidence in Sapina’s trial of 43 fixed matches and say the total number the group rigged is more than 300. The ring sometimes scheduled professional games themselves—paying for the visiting team’s travel and accommodations—just so they could manipulate the outcome. They went so far as to buy their own team so they could order it to lose. The case has been called the biggest sports-fixing bust in European history.
* 20 Embarrassingly Bad Book Covers for Classic Novels.
* Hulu announces every episode of every series of Star Trek is free, until April.
* Watch the Prequel to Doctor Who’s “The Bells of Saint John.”
* Classic Ducktales Video Game Gets HD Do-Over With Voice Acting From The Cartoon’s Cast. Sold!
Gerry Canavan 