Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Occupy

Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday!

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* Rob Latham’s anthology of essential historical science fiction criticism has a pre-order page. Here’s a table of contents.

* Elsewhere on Amazon: Star Trek Barbies! Rick & Morty Season Two DVDs (out today)!

The arrival of annual reports on the job market in various humanities fields this year left many graduate students depressed about their prospects and professors worried about the futures of their disciplines. English and foreign language openings were down 3 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively. History jobs fell 8 percent.

* Those of us working in the humanities must accept that our golden age lasted just one generation, argues Leonard Cassuto, and was not the norm.

* The end of the GRE?

* Some smart comparison between Game of Thrones and the Southern Reach trilogy from Phil Maciak.

Small-Town America Has a Serious Drinking-Water Problem.

* Bible Verses Where “Behold” Has Been Replaced With “Look, Buddy.”

* Teaching Philosophy on Death Row.

* “American conservatives are the forgotten critics of the atomic bombing of Japan.” Even they forgot about it!

* Antiuniversity now!

The Mercenary University.

* When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff. I have to say, this is getting pretty good.

* Inside Trump University. Maybe Trump Really Does Make Less Than $500k a Year.

* “When ‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ Are Tenure Requirements”: Faculty at Pomona College have set new guidlines—but the students who pushed for the change don’t agree among themselves on their implications.

* John Oliver Steals Rolling Jubilee’s Bad Idea, Doesn’t Give Credit.

The Creator of Settlers of Catan Has Some Important Gameplay Advice for You.

* A major Native American site is being looted. Will Obama risk armed confrontation to save it?

* Dialectics of The Little Mermaid.

Supergirl Is Finally Going to Show Superman as an Actual Character. This only compounds the original mistake; the solution was always to just say Superman is dead or missing and be done with it.

* Seems legit: State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election. But who’s counting.

* Contemporary architecture is more interested in mega projects for elites than improving ordinary people’s lives.

* Wisconsin, are you okay.

* And progress certainly has its advantages.

Thursday Links!

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* I’ll be speaking next Thursday at “Between Activism and Apocalypse: The Work of Margaret Atwood” at Indiana University. The schedule for the symposium is here.

* CFP: Stage The Future 2: The Second International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre.

* SF short-short of the day: Isaac Asimov’s “Silly Asses.”

* Here’s the calendar of events for C21 this semester.

* Cheryl Abbate has a blog post on the vicious hate mail she’s received after being thrust into the media spotlight.

* “Things like computer vision are starting to work; speech recognition is starting to work There’s quite a bit of acceleration in the development of AI systems,” says Bart Selman, a Cornell professor and AI ethicist who was at the event with Musk. “And that’s making it more urgent to look at this issue.” AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds.

* Of course it’s already worse than you think.

* Elsewhere in mad billionaire news: Internet! in! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

* Gender Differences in the Road to the Doctoral Degree. Less support, more debt, more time to degree.

* Forbidden Planet reviews Richard McGuire’s incredible graphic novel Here.

* Hours After State Of The Union, Senate Targets National Parks. Once again, it’s always worse than you think.

* Saul Goodman, the last difficult man.

* A smart observation from Peter Paik: “Common Core teaches students that there is only one way to read a text (to glean information) but there are many ways to solve a math problem (the target of much outrage on social media).”

* Some Colleges Are Moving Past Eve Ensler’s “Cisnormative” ‘Vagina Monologues’ — And That’s OK.

* Occupy the Syllabus.

* Milestone Media rides again.

* How ‘Harry Potter’ fans won a four-year fight against child slavery.

* English professors combine areas of study for new specialization.

The department, known for its expertise in disability and LGBT studies, is looking to newer faculty to blend the two topics into a common subject area.Robert McRuer, who chairs the English department, said he was the first scholar to combine LGBT studies with disability studies and call it “crip theory.” The theory looks at the histories of and issues within the LGBT and disabled communities, which have both faced marginalization. “Crip” is a term that people with disabilities have “reclaimed,” he said.

Personally I’d send that name back for another round of workshopping, but what do I know.

* Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia.

* I actually always thought Joss should have had a David Boreanaz cameo in the background of the Firefly pilot and then never mention it again.

* Marvel is teasing a big Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths-style reboot, for the first time in its history.

* Simon Pegg is co-writing Star Trek 3. [raises one eyebrow]

* And great news for KSR fans: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project.

This is a supercut of all the moments in A New Hope where characters interacted with machines, doors, screens, levers, knobs and buttons.

* Violent crime on college campuses is decreasing, but the number of sworn and armed police officers on campuses continues to rise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics… Nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities operated full law-enforcement agencies in 2012, and 94 percent of those officers are authorized to use a firearm.

* Meanwhile, on the town and gown beat: NYU decided not to report an attempted murder to the police.

* Abolish college sports watch: Before Gary Andersen goes on, he wants to make one thing clear. A part of his surprising departure from Wisconsin had to do with admission standards.

* When choosing between doing good and doing evil, don’t forget there’s always a third option.

* Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

* And a reminder that SFFTV is looking for your submission for its Star Trek at 50″ special issue.

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Weekend Links!

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* I liked this brief addendum to my academic job market as “game” piece from the other day.

One thing I might add is that the game metaphor also helps us see the job market as something that could be improved. If we view the market as a system of pure luck, then there’s nothing we can do to fix it. And if we think of it as a meritocracy, then we don’t have any reason to. But if the job market is a game, structured, as Canavan says, by “a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair,” then those in positions of power in the academy (including people on hiring committees) could work to change the rules. In large and small ways they could work to make it a more rational and fair game.

I agree the game framing suggests change is possible in a way that neither merit nor lottery does. I’d hoped I made that point at the end (“make alliances, change the rules, overturn the table”) but perhaps I could have put more emphasis on it.

* I’ve always been really skeptical of Rolling Jubilee, so I’m a sucker for any time Naked Capitalism dumps on it.

So while it is impressive to hear of the large amounts of debt being forgiven, the fact is that the people who are finding their debts erased more than likely won’t care much because they are either no longer under any legal obligation to pay the note and have long since forgotten about it, or never intended to pay the note in the first place, and never would! So these borrowers won’t likely be gushing with praise and thanks, and frankly won’t be helped much if at all by the repurchase of the debt. I suspect that people learning of their debt being purchased and erased were, instead of relieved and grateful, were more perplexed as to why anyone would go to the trouble of clearing up debt that they themselves had forgotten about long ago! By far, the happiest participant in these transactions, are the banks/collection companies who are thrilled to get anything for the loans!

* But the elusive nomads who wander that desert say California was once a paradise.

Courts do not give justice, because they do not try. They follow a formal procedure, at best.

* Run the university like a business, you know, have such radically lax oversight that one person can steal $700,000.

* When I was talking the other day about the similarities between my childhood plan to become a priest for the free housing and lifetime tenure and my current profession as a secular monk performing textual exegesis at a Catholic school, 1, 2, 3, 4, I guess I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.

The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.

Cutinella is the third high school football player to die in less than a week.

* On the life of PhDs working outside the US and Europe.

* Capitalism in 2014: “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”

* At least they got to waste all that money first: MOOC fever has broken.

* A gender-neutral pronoun is taking over Sweden.

* Elsewhere in the-Scandinavian-kids-are-all-right: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play.

Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien. No Milwaukee, but he did do Cleveland, Boston, and DC. Many more links below the image; you’re not getting off that easy.

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* Damn, Interstellar.

* I can’t figure out if Ascension is let’s-do-BSG-with-a-competent-showrunner or let’s-do-BSG-on-the-cheap. Mad Men in Space, though, so fine.

* Museum of Science Fiction Selects Design for Preview Museum.

We Still Don’t Know If This Tribe Discovered In The ’70s Was Real.

* An Apple Store employee has written the follow-up to I Am Legend.

* Ideology watch: “Let. Her. Go.” movie supercut.

* America was founded as a white supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.

* Here’s a lawsuit that seems deliberately calibrated to freak everybody out: Black sperm incorrectly delivered to white lesbian couple.

Talking White: Black people’s disdain for “proper English” and academic achievement is a myth.

* D.C. Attorney May Use FBI Headquarters As Leverage In Statehood Lawsuit.

* People are saying Homeland might be good again, but don’t you believe it. That’s exactly what they want us to think.

* Elsewhere in ideology at its very very purest. Mad Men: Lady Cops.

* The White Women of Empire.

* BREAKING: Startup Funding Is Given Almost Entirely To Men.

* Just imagine what England might accomplish if it ever gets a second actor.

* Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Controversial, really? Can’t imagine why.

* Freedom’s just another word for a $1200 machine that lets anyone manufacture a gun.

* Human civilization was founded as a human supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.

* Earth crosses the walrus threshold.

* Paid leave watch: Florida cop placed on leave after using taser on 62-year-old woman.

Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.

* Please be advised: Jacobin 15/16 looks especially great.

* Even baseball knows baseball is dull.

* And a UF study suggests peanut allergies could soon be a thing of the past. That’d be pretty great news for a whole lot of people I know.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 3, 2014 at 7:52 am

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Some Links for the Weekend!

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* After compiling extensive data from over 600 LEGO sets, students found that most Lego sets were marketed almost exclusively to boys and included very few female mini-figures. And, as one student wrote, “if there is a lego girl, she is either covered in make up or a Damsel in Distress.”

* Marvel and the war machine. Dragonlance and loneliness. Star Trek continuity: Talmudic and fundamentalist paradigms.

* Meanwhile the he-wasn’t-really-Khan heresy extends its influence.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is establishing a major new center for the analysis of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the only such center based in a public research library, Schomburg officials said on Thursday.

Milwaukee Bar Celebrates World Cup In Most Tone Deaf Way Possible. Could the 2022 World Cup really move from Qatar to the USA? Losing Brazil. The World Cup and Utopia.

The tournament is sold to us as the story of a level playing field from which a few deserving souls might be elevated to something more spectacular than equal access to opportunity. As if the latter were a given in our lives, and not, in fact, the elusive aim of an ongoing struggle. The level playing field of a bright green square of uniform grass produces a world of losers. What keeps the World Cup in place? What keeps national associations under FIFA’s sway?Who on earth really wants yet another tournament that concludes with a cynical exchange of fouls by two teams we imagine as enemies but who are, really, two sides of the same coin? Where, the fan asks, do we turn for a glimpse of some other possibility?

* The headline reads, “Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown.”

* Like Edge of Tomorrow, but every time he wakes up he has to invade Iraq again.

12 Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World.

* Only the young rich can save us now, Community ratings edition. Dan Harmon remains pessimistic about revival, but teases a potential sequel series.

* The violence of the system: A Pennsylvania mother of seven died in a jail cell where she was serving a two-day sentence for her children’s absence from school, drawing complaints from the judge that sent her there about a broken system that punishes impoverished parents.

Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.

* The Turing Test is complete nonsense, but this chatbot doesn’t even come close.

* How to design a warp drive.

* Ramona (at forty).

* Game of Thrones: Westeros High.

* Labor and/vs. the environment.

* Chris Hedges and plagiarism.

* Academic freedom watch 2014.

* And why didn’t anyone warn us! Baby No. 2 Is Harder on Mom Than Dad.

Tuesday Links

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* My favorite website is having big financial problems. The New Internet Gods Have No Mercy.

The museum as classroom: Marquette professors use art for pilot project.

* Insuring the apocalypse.

* Commencement speakers, reaction, and the hatred of students. In Defense of Protesting Commencement Speakers. Remember: writing a letter to a public figure is wildly inappropriate, but personally attacking students from the podium at their own graduation is just fine.

* A Commencement Address from Jonathan Edwards.

* Online Education and The Erosion of Faculty Rights.

* Whole Foods Realism: US-China Relations, futurity, and On Such a Full Sea.

It makes a canny kind of sense, then, that a 2014 incarnation of the film that bears his name would reprise visual scenes of global environmental catastrophes and dare us to think of them in tragic terms.   is a film for the anthropocene — the age when human actions have caused irreversible ecological damage.  Tragedies, like feelings, happen at a human scale.  But ours is a time when human actions work off the human scale, causing events in our world that require much more strenuous interventions than sympathy and tears.  It’s hard to know what to feel, in the face of the catastrophe we have made, or what difference our feelings would make.

* Silicon Valley Dreams of Fascism.

* NYU Issues Apology for Mistreatment of Workers on Abu Dhabi Campus. Well, that settles that!

* Executive Compensation at Public Colleges, 2013 Fiscal Year. Former University Presidents and Their Pensions. A new report finds that student debt and low-wage faculty labor are rising faster at state universities with the highest-paid presidents.

* NLRB May Reconsider Unionization Rights For Graduate Students In College Football Case.

What are the humanities good for? The negative magisterium of the humanities.

* …or what’s an MLA for?

* Disruptive Innovation! The original theory comes from Clayton Christensen’s study of things like the hard drive and steel industries where he realized that disruptive products tend to combine new technologies, cheaper production, and — crucially — worse products.

* Pamela Anderson, survivor.

* Torture of a mentally ill prisoner in a Miami jail.

* Buzzfeed and Schizophrenia. And they said theory is useless!

Economics in Fantasy Literature, Or, Why Nerds Really Like Stuff.

* Clickbait dissertations.

* We’ve hit Peak Should I Go to Grad School.

* Exit Through the Gift Shop: 9/11 Museum Edition.

* Three months in jail for Cecily McMillan.

The United States has 710 prisoners per 100,000 people. Iceland has 150. Total.

White House Promises To Never Again Let The CIA Undermine Vaccinations. Oh, okay, then all is forgiven!

‘There Will Be No World Cup’: Brazil on the Brink.

* Add “DUI” to the list of crimes rich people don’t have to worry about anymore.

* Duke Libraries is still running its Mad Men series of period advertising. Here’s the link for the latest episode.

* Presenting the Netflix Summary Glitch.

Washington Archdiocese takes to the heavens, with a drone. Can autonomous robot baptism be far behind?

* The water main breaks will continue until morale improves.

The actress who helped Lincoln defeat the Confederacy.

* Corey Robin: The Republican War on Workers’ Rights.

* David Harvey reviews Piketty.

* Law and Order: Westeros.

* If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your fond memories of Star Wars, forever. At least the maximally unnecessary Harry Potter prequels suddenly have a chance of being good.

* And the 90s are literally turning to dust.

Written by gerrycanavan

May 20, 2014 at 9:00 am

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Wednesday Links!

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* CFP: World Science Fiction Studies.

* We apply because it is absurd: The academic job market: A Kierkegaardian perspective. Also good from Adam: Some reservations about non-violent resistance. To what are “contrarians” contrary?

* 100 Years of Sun Ra.

* Can a Pope Help Sustain Humanity and Ecology?

* How The “Trigger Warning” Took Over The Internet.

There’s an old joke about economists: A mathematician, a statistician and an economist apply for a job. The interviewer asks, “What’s two plus two?” The mathematician says, “Four.” The statistician thinks for a second and says, “On average, four.” And the economist gets up, closes the door, turns to the interviewer and says, “What do you want it to be?”

* BREAKING: The U.S. Constitution Is Impossible to Amend. This is why we need to start over.

* BREAKING: New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having Broad Impact. This is why we need to start over.

* The end of Florida.

* “Check your privilege!” is a speech-act that intends the maintenance of anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist groups against the persistent threat of auto-corruption. One only says “Check your privilege!” to comrades, to those with whom you co-incline. It’s a locution that keeps political lines of communication clear from all of the fucked-up shit we bring, and can’t not bring, to our collectivities. … A simple way of putting this: One checks the privileges of one’s friends. One destroys those of one’s enemies. One does the former in the service of the latter.

Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste.

Los Angeles now spending more on Wall Street fees than on maintaining roads.

The Silencing Of Cecily McMillan.

Advocates Respond to White House Report on College Sexual Assault.

Universities and researchers all over the world have a problem with Microsoft. It’s not just that the company forces expensive and dated software on customers. Using products like Microsoft’s email service Outlook is potentially in breach of the ethical contracts researchers sign when they promise to safeguard the privacy of their subjects.

The nursery and the sitting room are part of a Mehrgenerationenhaus, literally a “multigeneration house”, which is a kindergarten, a social centre for the elderly and somewhere young families can drop in for coffee and advice. In theory, the sitting room is reserved for the over-60s, but in the practice the door to the kids’ area rarely stays closed for long.

* “With Porn Studies, there is no such ambiguity about the sheer world-making power of pornography.”

* Re-headlining the news.

* I just can’t accept that a movie starring a 72-year-old Harrison Ford is going to be called “The Ancient Fear.”

If the Center for Teaching and Learning were supported by a Center for Teaching and Learning, then all stakeholders could join the circle of excellence.

* Obama’s pretending he cares about climate again. Vox is straight-up advocating that America invade Iran I guess.

* W. Kamau Bell and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss Leslie Jones, blackness, and Saturday Night Live.

* Great moments in poorly thought-out pedagogy.

* Amherst College Officially Bans All Fraternities And Sororities — though friends of Facebook familiar with the place tell me that it’s not as big a deal as it sounds.

* Gasp! Conservative Money Front Is Behind Princeton’s “White Privilege” Guy.

Teen Pregnancies Are Plunging Because Young People Are Making Responsible Sexual Decisions.

* Science reporting is abysmal, sexual difference edition.

* Disruptive innovation, Soylent Green edition.

* Abolish prom.

A college degree is worth $831,000.

* And the future is finally here: Grilled Cheese Delivered By Parachute, Coming Soon to NYC.

Monday Morning Links Are Visible from Space

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* The schedule for the next four weeks of my Cultural Preservation course is up at the course blog. Benjamin! Fight Club! Ani DiFranco! Oh my!

Half of Sexual Abuse Claims in American Prisons Involve Guards, Study Says. Nearly 10 percent of inmates suffer sexual abuse.

* Black Chicago Residents Are 10 Times More Likely To Be Shot By Police Than White Residents. What could explain it?

* The comeback of guaranteed basic income. Alive in the Sunshine.

* David Graeber: What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

* After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him.

* On Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies.

* ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it.

That “distressed baby” who Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter. Armstrong could have paid for the full “cost” of both the babies directly out of his own salary and still made ten million dollars that year (in base salary).

* Dylan Farrow Responds to Woody Allen: “I Have Never Wavered.” 10 Undeniable Facts About the Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation. Just the Facts
. Brainwashing Woody.

What would Middle Earth look like from space?

South Bronx Students May Have Found Site of Slave Burial Ground.

* Duke’s Own Julia Gaffield describes her finding the first known copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

* I think about the ways to address people who think computers are magic, and there’s lots of them, the ways I mean although there are also lots of people sufficiently baffled by their own phones to presume that physical laws SHIT LIKE TIME AND SPACE don’t apply to digitization projects…

“The legislation is almost certainly unconstitutional, it’s a bad law, and it reinforces stereotypes about Jewish influence,” said one pro-Israel Democratic strategist familiar with the groups’ thinking. “It’s so bad that AIPAC and ADL oppose it.”

* At long last, the purges begin at Occupy Wall Street.

* No one likes Obama’s terrible college rankings.

Concerned with growing class sizes, teaching assistant union files complaint against UC.

Renowned science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the award-winning “Mars Trilogy,” will select the winners of a national flash-science fiction contest co-organized by Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated show “To the Best of Our Knowledge” and the Center for the Humanities and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gates “Beverly Crusher” McFadden will produce the scripts for radio.

* The Truman Show as eldercare: ‘Dementia Village’ – as it has become known — is a place where residents can live a seemingly normal life, but in reality are being watched all the time. Caretakers staff the restaurant, grocery store, hair salon and theater — although the residents don’t always realize they are carers — and are also watching in the residents’ living quarters.

* The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird.

* The prohibition and attempted eradication of drugs can be a nightmare for the climate and environment. Particularly in Latin America, the fight against drug production has led to deforestation, widespread contamination with toxic chemicals, and contributed to a warming climate. Meanwhile: Climate Change Comes for Your Cup of Tea.

* I used to be a good teacher.

* Ideology at its purest: Saying it needed to prevent inbreeding, the Copenhagen Zoo killed a 2-year-old giraffe and fed its remains to lions as visitors watched.

Scientists Think They Have Found The Mythical ‘Sunstone’ Vikings Used To Navigate Warships.

11 Alarming Weather Flukes That Happen When it Gets Really Cold.

The Way We Live Now, by David Brooks.

This Student Is On His Death Bed, But His Family Still Has To Prove He Can’t Take A Standardized Test.

* The worst people in the world: Four Long Island workers arrested for running ‘developmentally disabled fight club.’

* Sports Corner! How will news that Michael Sam is gay affect his NFL draft stock? 10 Points About College Hoops All-American Marcus Smart’s Pushing a ‘Fan.’ Why Superfan Jeff Orr Is A Much Bigger Problem For College Basketball Than Marcus Smart. More details on the Raiders’ cheerleaders wage theft suit. Olympic Committee Supports Russia’s Arrest of LGBT Activists. Why the Olympics Are a Lot Like ‘The Hunger Games.’ Detroit’s Unrealized Olympic Dreams. Only six of the previous 19 Winter Olympics host cities would be suitable to host the Games again by the end of this century due to warming temperatures, according to a new analysis. And The George Zimmerman-DMX Fight Has Been Cancelled, So At Least There’s That.

* How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine.

New York State has roughly 15,000 zombie homes and leads the nation in the time required to foreclose on a home, at almost three years, according to data from RealtyTrac, a company that tracks troubled properties.

* If you’ve been wondering how Mockingjay will handle Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sudden death, here’s your answer.

Nabokov’s immigration card. (Nationality: “without.”)

* If You Thought You Couldn’t Go To Jail For Debt Anymore, You’re Wrong.

* And standardized testing? Just opt out.

* Werner Herzog casts Mike Tyson, Pamela Anderson, and Russell Brand in his next movie, because life is chaos.

* Justice Department to give married same-sex couples equal protection.

* Good news: FX will make Redshirts a limited series.

* And can The LEGO Movie really be that good? MetaFilter is on the scene.

Written by gerrycanavan

February 10, 2014 at 8:00 am

Friday Morning Links

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Thursday!

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* What happened in Atlanta this week is not a matter of Southerners blindsided by unpredictable weather. More than any event I’ve witnessed in two decades of living in and writing about this city, this snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it.

* Accreditation Standards Should Include Treatment of Adjuncts, Report Says. This has been my revolutionary scheme for a while, glad to see it could actually be feasible…

Let Banks Fail Is Iceland Mantra as 2% Joblessness in Sight.

“I wouldn’t go so far,” writes Horton of Kincaid’s central thesis that short science fiction exhibits all the signs of exhaustion. “I don’t think that ‘all meaning has been drained from’ the tropes we use, but I do think they are becoming overfamiliar. And I do think that the field of science fiction has to a considerable extent become enamoured with explicitly backward-looking ideas.”

“These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty-student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.”

* Boom: A Journal of California interviews Kim Stanley Robinson.

* My friend Jack Hamilton eulogizes Pete Seeger.

What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jobs last year.

* Utterly horrifying: Hanover College Told Rape Victim That Attempting To Have Her Alleged Rapist Punished Is Harassment.

California is thirsty.

* UNC: We failed students “for years.”

* Maps of Hip America.

* Many watchdogs believe the police are killing more innocent Americans than ever. But here’s why they can’t be sure.

* Occupy and the Academy.

* Stradivarius violin stolen in armed robbery in Milwaukee. Said to be the biggest heist in city history.

* Some Notes on the MLA Job Information List.

* What do unionizing NCAA players want? NCAA Should Be Begging for a Union.

* Capitalism, the infernal machine: An interview with Fredric Jameson.

* The police union as philosophical problem.

* The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary.

* …41 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide, a rate far higher than the national average of 4.6 percent.

New York Senate passes bill punishing ASA over Israel boycott.

* More on Ezra Klein’s very strange idea.

* Batgirl advocates for equal pay for equal work.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wins every prize today.

* So does this Ice-T impersonator prank calling noted Ice-T impersonator Paul F. Tompkins (as played on the second episode of the new Ice-T podcast starring Ice-T).

New York City commissioner’s ancestors were slaves of Benedict Cumberbatch’s family.

Climate Change Is Already Causing Mass Human Migration.

10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future.

* And The State reunites (for a segment anyway)…

Friday Friday

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This is the fourth installment of a continuing series in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries: America’s Annual Pilgrimage Begins.

Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated. It was all Massasoit could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them. And the only solution he could see was fraught with perils of its own, because it involved the foreigners—people from across the sea. The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn’t enough to save them.

The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document.

SeaTac $15 Minimum Wage Barely Passes In Final Vote Tally, Recount May Follow.

* Marissa Alexander has been released from jail.

* Self-censorship and repressive regimes.

* The horror of scale: What scared H. P. Lovecraft.

* And okay, I’ll check it out: As presidents leave office, they also leave a letter for their successors. In Oni Press’ new comic Letter 44, the newest president is taken aback when he reads the letter from the man who preceded him — a man who seemed to tank the economy and embroil the nation in needless wars — but was actually secretly preparing America for an imminent alien invasion.

A British Teacher’s Archive of Confiscated Toys.

* K Punk watches Catching Fire.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about  the Hunger Games is the way it simply presupposes that revolution is necessary. The problems are logistical, not ethical, and the issue is simply how and when revolution can be made to happen, not if it should happen at all. Remember who the enemy is – a message, a hailing, an ethical demand that calls out through the screen to us …. that calls out to a collectivity that can only be built through class consciousness ….

* Judith Butler defends the humanities.

* And the New Yorker profiles David Graeber, “Robin Hood for the Debt Crisis.”

Wednesday Links!

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Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today. Instructions on how to opt out at the link.

* The state of work in the age of anxiety.

* A Living Death: Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses. Such a category plainly shouldn’t exist.

* Studies in the Fermi Paradox: How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy.

After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back.

Rutgers University has introduced a new theology course—with Bruce Springsteen as God. At least the facts check out.

* Afrofuturism exhibit in Harlem.

* The early Obamacare enrollment numbers are a disaster. So are the Democrats’ poorly thought-out quick fixes.

* The one thing obscuring the abject awfulness of US democracy is the fact that barely any races are competitive in the first place.

Climate Change Is Messing With Rainfall Across The Entire Planet.

Priscilla Wald on the Slow Future of Scholarly Publishing.

Hawaii legalizes gay marriage.

Craig Cobb, a white supremacist trying to establish a ‘whites-only’ enclave in North Dakota, appeared on NCBU’s The Trisha Show and agreed to take a test to determine his genetic ancestry. The test results were aired at the taping. Cobb’s genetic makeup is 86% European, and 14% sub-Saharan African.

* How to win every game on The Price is Right.

* Poll watch: PPP is the worst.

* An update from Rolling Jubilee.

* Inside the Unification Church.

And Prada presents “Castello Cavalcanti,” by Wes Anderson.

Even More Sunday Links!

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* Unleash the unschools: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses.

Whether intentionally or not, At Berkeley not only toes the administration’s line but faithfully brings to life the administration’s way of seeing. Students and workers are rendered (if, that is, they appear at all) as anonymous data points, the personification of tasks (e.g. mowing the lawns) and economic flows (e.g. scientific research), and occasionally inconvenient, illegible, and irrational obstructions.

* On Chronic Illness, Disclosure, and Impostor Syndrome.

In The Real World, Revenge Porn Is Far Worse Than Making It Illegal. But the abstract principle at stake…

An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it.

* The Royal Mounted Police send snipers to an anti-fracking protest.

* Stop worrying: Hungry Animals Would Take Down a Zombie Invasion.

To use Steven Teles’s preferred term, our new health care system is a kludge, meaning it is an inelegant, improvised, and complex solution to a problem that could be solved better and more simply.

* And Henry Louis Gates pitches a Django Unchained / 12 Years a Slave double feature. Sounds good to me.

Wednesday Links Have Been Deemed an Essential Service

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* MetaFilter has your shutdown megapost, including the list of all the “nonessential” government services that will be closed during the shutdown, including WIC, NIH, the CDC, and the EPA. Here (via Twitter) is the memo from 1995 by which OMB makes its determinations. But don’t worry; progress wealth transfer to rich people continues even in the face of this disaster. zunguzungu: “Essentially Vicious.”

* “Where the GOP Suicide Caucus Lives.” They will rule or ruin in all events. Blame the Constitution for this mess.

* Meanwhile, liberals have already been rolled on spending cuts with respect to the shutdown and it’s likely to only get worse.

* Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What would a non-Anglocentric understanding of science fiction and fantasy look like?

* Peter Frase takes up Graeber’s “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

* One in ten [student] borrowers across the country, 475,000 people, who entered repayment during the fiscal year ending in September 2011 had defaulted by the following September, the data showed. That’s up from 9.1 percent of a similar cohort of borrowers last year.

* Louisiana refuses to release former Black Panther despite court order.

Herman Wallace, who was held for more than 40 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana jails, is still being confined inside the prison although Judge Brian Jackson ordered on Tuesday that he be immediately released. Wallace, 71, is suffering from lung cancer and is believed to have just days to live.

* The charter school mistake.

We should do what works to strengthen our schools: Provide universal early childhood education (the U.S. ranks 24th among 45 nations, according to the Economist); make sure poor women get good prenatal care so their babies are healthy (we are 131st among 185 nations surveyed, according to the March of Dimes and the United Nations); reduce class size (to fewer than 20 students) in schools where students are struggling; insist that all schools have an excellent curriculum that includes the arts and daily physical education, as well as history, civics, science, mathematics and foreign languages; ensure that the schools attended by poor children have guidance counselors, libraries and librarians, social workers, psychologists, after-school programs and summer programs.

Schools should abandon the use of annual standardized tests; we are the only nation that spends billions testing every child every year. We need high standards for those who enter teaching, and we need to trust them as professionals and let them teach and write their own tests to determine what their students have learned and what extra help they need.

* The words men and women use on Facebook.

* American wages have declined 7% since 2007.

* DDoS attack on the health care exchanges? Or just a whole lot of people wanting to buy insurance?

* What The Monopoly Properties Look Like In Real Life.

* The Occupy Visa.

Monday, Monday

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* It’s job and grant application season, so let the Educational Jargon Generator do the heavy lifting.

* LinkedIn founder determines that only LinkedIn can save us now. True story.

* Huge adjunct survey seeks to determine who adjuncts are. Useful, but honestly this sort of thing is really only useful at the level of the discipline. There’s simply so much variation between business school adjuncts and English department adjuncts that there’s hardly any reason to discuss them together at all.

* Do you know where your PhDs are? A Look at Life After the Ph.D.

I Quit Teach for America.

* What the Northwestern adjunct study doesn’t show.

* Meritocracy, in its majestic equality… The College Degree Boom Is Leaving Poor Kids Behind.

America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups – minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class – are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

* Here comes the de Blasio oppo. A Sandinista-supporting Leftist? ¡Que lástima!

* The Cory Booker oppo seems a lot more powerful. If Republicans had a better candidate in New Jersey I could see him actually blowing the race.

* Vatican dialectics: Pope condemns economic inequality while the Vatican continues to censure nuns’ anti-poverty work.

* Huge floods in Colorado aren’t even making a dent in the West’s forever-drought.

* The ultimate #slatepitch.

* And it looks like my Rolling Jubilee skepticism may have been well-founded. Bummer.

His Royal Highness Prince Monday the First

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When Nada Al-Ahdal discovered that her parents had sold her she ran away. She is 11 years old, and this is her message. Wow.

Obama, Trayvon and the Problem That Won’t Be Named.

A study finds the odds of rising to another income level are notably low in certain cities, like Atlanta and Charlotte, and much higher in New York and Boston. 5.6% in Milwaukee. According to this map, without the Dakota oil boom America would have essentially no class mobility at all.

American children raised at the top, and at the bottom, are more likely to land on the same rung of the income ladder as their fathers than their Canadian counterparts. More than one-quarter of sons raised by fathers in the top 10 percent stay in the top 10 percent as adults, and another quarter fall no further than the top third. Meanwhile, half of those raised by fathers in the bottom 10 percent remain at the bottom or rise no further than the bottom third. In Canada there is less stickiness at the top, and children raised in the bottom are more likely to rise to the top half in earnings.

The American dream: Survival is not an aspiration.

* Occupy nowhere: Obama signs anti-protest Trespass Bill.

* The sequester is gutting the public defender system too. More here.

* Faint praise watch: “The Newsroom,” Season 2: Not an Unpardonable Train Wreck Like Season 1.

* A new language emerges in Northern Australia.

MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works. No! Gasp!

* Anthropocene art show at Duke.

Your ‘Distressed’ Jeans Are Wearing Out Workers’ Lungs.

* Dan Harmon! Dan Harmon! Dan Harmon!

* Republicans to gut the NEH.

* And everything in Iraq’s going juuuuuuuust fine.

Hundreds of convicts, including senior members of al Qaeda, broke out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail as comrades launched a military-style assault to free them, authorities said on Monday.

The deadly raid on the high-security jail happened as Sunni Muslim militants are gaining momentum in their insurgency against the Shi’ite-led government that came to power after the U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.