June Links — Supplemental

* The Department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton invites applications for two tenure-track positions at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin Fall 2017.

* A New Hope, as it was always meant to be experienced: as infographic.

* Really, actually ideology at its purest: ‘There is a future for Harambe’: Cincinnati zoo reveal sperm was removed from gorilla who was shot dead so he could still become a father.

* Modern zoos represent a worldview that no longer puts humanity at the top of a ladder of existence, but now in the middle of a web of life, distinguished mostly by our power to destroy or enhance the world around us.

* Murder-suicide at UCLA. Police are suggesting a student may have murdered a professor.

* Lost Superstitions of the Early-20th-Century United States.

* Airships and Reanimated Corpses from the Pages of Early Science Fiction.

* If Osama bin Laden had not existed, the United States would have had to invent him. Although William V. Spanos never quite puts it that way, this claim nevertheless encapsulates one of the fundamental insights of Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation — namely, that American exceptionalism entails a dense knotting together of the vitality of the nation and targeted killing. The very being of America as a more-than-merely-national nation hinges on its capacity to obliterate its enemies in the most spectacular fashion, while simultaneously arrogating the life-force or resources of its enemies for itself.

* “Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors.”

* “In terms of the labor market, 2016 is a great year to graduate.” The Graduate Opportunity Index. For-Profit College Grads Earn Less Money Than They Did Before College.

* The Trump University Scam seems pretty egregious even by Trump’s standards.

Though gaming this out it seems likely to lead to a worrying backlash against *all* college as fundamentally a scam: https://t.co/GsdEf0Wnz9

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2016

* Trump Has a Conflict-of-Interest Problem No Other White House Candidate Ever Had.

* I’m trying not to get tired of saying this, but just try to imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton came out to defend herself against some perfectly reasonable questions, and said “The press should be ashamed of themselves” or pointed to a reporter and said, “You’re a sleaze.” She wouldn’t be criticized or questioned, she’d be crucified. Reporters would ask if she had lost her mind and was having a nervous breakdown. There would be demands for her to pull out of the race immediately, since she had shown herself to be so unstable.

* If Trump is the ultimate media alpha dog, Weiner is the flawed prototype, equally repulsed by and addicted to his notoriety.

* Applications for TFA’s two-year teaching stints have plummeted 35 percent during the past three years, forcing the organization to reexamine and reinvent how it sells itself to prospective corps members. It has been focusing particularly on how to engage students at the nation’s most-selective colleges, where the decline in interest has been among the steepest. The improving economy probably has far more to do with this than any anti-TFA publicity campaign.

* The idea that young workers should cut their teeth by working long hours for low pay, or even for free, is the result of employers holding all the cards in the economy. It’s the same phenomenon that lets businesses get away with lax safety standards, unpredictable schedules, and offering scant benefits. By making it harder for employers to demand extra hours as part of the job, the overtime rule is an important tool to shift the balance of power towards working people.

* “Magic Is Ruining Game of Thrones.“

* Salvage Perspectives #3: Or What’s a Hell For?

* This stunning Korean thriller is the summer’s first great movie.

* But the future has always been several: how could it be otherwise, when it hasn’t happened yet? The millennial or apocalyptic future, the future that abolishes time itself, is not the same as the prophetic future of a possible or desired outcome, which is not the same as speculative future of science fiction, which is not the same as the future envisaged by a calendar or a to-do list, which is not the same as the future of the high-yield bond, which is not the same as the future which will involve you reading the next sentence, or deciding not to. But what all these have in common with the phenomenological future – the one involved in the direct sensation of time passing, the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it – is their slipperiness. Futures can never be touched or experienced, only imagined; this is why they’re as diverse as the human psyche, and why they tend to be so dreamlike: at turns ludic, libidinal, or monstrous.

* Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy.

* At thirteen, a neglectful foster system tore me from the only woman I ever wanted to call “Mom.” Decades later I tracked her down and finally got my happy ending.

* New Orleans’s New Flood Maps: An Outline for Disaster.

* Jay and Miles Overthink X-Men: Apocalypse.

* The last political compass test you’ll ever need.

* After a Life of Punches, Ex-N.H.L. Enforcer Is a Threat to Himself: Stephen Peat has symptoms — memory loss and headaches — often associated with C.T.E., a brain disease linked to head trauma.

* ‘It’s only working for the white kids’: American soccer’s diversity problem.

* And Another Small Private Closes Its Doors: Dowling College.

Run it like a business, just suddenly slam the doors with no planning or warning https://t.co/5OOPjDkopI

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2016

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.

* On unprofessional bodies.

* 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.

* On disliking poetry.

* 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.

* “We will make them appear less Asian when they apply,” he says. “While it is controversial, this is what we do.”

* 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.

* Six days in North Korea.

* “Officer Involved.”

* Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.

* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.

Friday Links!

* I’ll be speaking at this event on June 4th in DC: Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs.

* SF-flavored art exhibit at the Racine Art Museum.

* I think it’s fair to say Marquette has had a pretty rough year.

* Mass contingency is not compatible with shared governance.

* How Austerity Killed the Humanities.

* “If Students Are Smart, They’ll Major in What They Love.”

* Why Technology Will Never Fix Education.

* Alex Rivera on Hollywood and the War Machine. See also!

* Games Without Wages. The video game industry has long relied on the unpaid labor of “modders.” Is it ready to finally pay up?

* Nice work if you can get it: Yale Gives Former President $8 Million Retirement Gift.

* Professors Face Long Odds in Court Battles Over Speech Rights.

* Everybody Calm Down About Breastfeeding.

* The dangerous trick here goes like this: someone fantasizes about a world in which rape frequently occurs and consistently goes unpunished; to explore this emotional fantasy, they set it in a premodern narrative fantasy world where they can displace their own desire onto “history.” The dark impulse or desire isn’t theirs, then; it’s the world’s. It’s history’s. And once a dark personal fantasy becomes “realism,” gazing upon this dark thought or idea isn’t a kind of humiliating or dangerous self-reflection, it’s laudable: it’s an honest engagement with truth.

* “Most pro-life women oppose abortion with four exceptions: rape, incest, the life of the mother, and me.”

* I suspect even Notre Dame can’t really explain why it’s suing the federal government over contraception anymore.

* The New Mexico Law Review just published an issue dedicated entirely to Breaking Bad.

* Canadian Aboriginal Group Rejects $1 Billion Fee for Natural Gas Project.

* Study Links Record Dolphin Die-Off In The Gulf Of Mexico To Deepwater Horizon Spill.

* They paved built an oil rig in paradise.

* The $10 Hedge Fund Supercomputer That’s Sweeping Wall Street.

* Nearly one in four financial services employees say it’s likely their co-workers have acted outside of the law. Dismaying as that statistic may be, it is nearly double the 12 percent who said the same in 2012.

* This senior level position is responsible for developing and implementing best practices in fostering the development and launch of companies based on innovations generated from University faculty. Percent Effort: 100.

* If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever New Jersey.

* We Are Spending Quite a Bit of Money on Jails.

* A Dishonest History of the Last War. Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That’s Not What Happened. Bush and Cheney Falsely Presented WMD Intelligence to Public.

* Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war.

* Here’s the widely available supermarket cheese you should avoid if you don’t want to be complicit in prison labor.

* America Has Half as Many Hypersegregated Metros as It Did in 1970. Somehow, Milwaukee soldiers on.

* Scrabble adds even more garbage words to its dictionary.

* U.S. Releases Contents Of Bin Laden’s English-Language “Bookshelf.”

* Is there anyone who won’t run for the Republican nomination in 2016?

* Why Have So Many People Never Heard Of The MOVE Bombing?

* “We do not think anyone is going to dispute this at all,” he said.

* Uber, but for putting gas in your car.

* I can’t understand why on Earth Marvel wants to emulate the New 52.

* Not the E.T. sequel we need, but the one we deserve.

* Great moments in “our bad”: Norway’s ‘We’re Sorry’ Monument to 91 Dead Witches.

* You say “equality” like it’s a bad thing.

* How The Soviet Union Tracked People With “Spy Dust.”

* A Professor Tries to Beat Back a News Spoof That Won’t Go Away.

* The health insurance regime: still the worst.

* Israel knew all along that settlements, home demolitions were illegal.

* Very surprising, given the lawsuit: Emma Sulkowicz allowed to bring mattress into Class Day ceremony.

* These numbers are horrifying.

* Irregularities in LaCour (2014). Amazing story.

* Does Color Even Exist, Man?

* An oral history of Industrial Light & Magic.

* Western canon, meet trigger warning.

* 9. Should a nuclear apocalypse happen, The Sound of Music will be played on a loop.

* I wish to outlive all my enemies.

* Everything about this pedagogical model is insane.

* Study Suggests Intelligent Aliens Will Probably Be The Size Of Bears.

* Does Shakespeare pass the Bechdel Test?

* Monkey Day Care: Growing Up as a Child Research Subject.

* “Keep Foreskin and State Separate.”

* And Matt Weiner is sick of your bullshit misinterpretations of his genius. Do you hear that, Limbaugh?

Tuesday Links, So Many

* Special issue of Modern Language Quarterly on “Our Obstinate Future” from Ryan Vu and Sharif Youssef.

Historicizing the concept of the inevitable in literature presents many challenges. For inevitability is itself a theory of historical agency, and an adequate critical account must confront inevitability’s claims without simply falling back on conventional notions of freedom, originality, or creative expression. Indeed, the inevitable is not merely a discourse to be cataloged by positivist historiography; it names a threat to any attempt at making humanity the author of its own experience. In its antique versions, women and men chalked their situation up to fate and diagnosed their historical condition through prophecy. In the late medieval era, more sophisticated but equally deterministic accounts of humanity’s relationship to historical change came into circulation, such as Calvinist predestination, fatalism, modern compatibilism, probabilism, and the acceptance of political economy as a science. Eventually, Charles Darwin’s natural history posited the inevitability of extinction in conditions of scarcity. The politicization of inevitability and conflicting visions of civilizational collapse followed, with communism and capitalism each decrying the other as a doomed system to be overcome. Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return recast inevitability as the nonlinear recurrence of intensifying crises. Walter Benjamin wrote of an angel of history who is condemned to look back on the wreckage of civilization. Today, in the wake of both historicopolitical optimism and existential pessimism, notions of the Anthropocene present a fatal paradox: the effects of human industry have set in motion a geological transformation that modern civilization might well not survive. The concept of the inevitable spins these discourses into a common thread, as so many attempts to diagnose the fundamental problem of human agency’s internal limits as expressed in time, along with whatever consolatory freedoms we might draw from our constraints.

* It is easy for left academics to be seduced by a rhetoric of public consumption for our work, since most of us see theory and practice as intermingled. But the American case should stand as warning for British academics. For many years, Usonian scholars chased the mirage of being “public intellectuals”. Few realized, however, that this means depending on their institution to protect them from the onslaught of a rabid conservative media machine. When the dogs of reaction barked in the culture wars, though, American deans slunk away, fearing damage to their own managerial careers. Progressive scholars without the protective benefit of a strong Left were abandoned to fend for themselves against unfair odds, since the spectacular “public sphere” is never a level playing ground in the age of Fox News.

* The New York Times Confirms Academic Stereotypes: Two months of opinion essays on higher education.

* The athletic department’s four-year hidden tax may very well exceed $4,000 per student. In 2014 the subsidy rose to more than $27 million, a 25-percent increase.

* The women who originally celebrated Mother’s Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war.

* A Medievalist on Savage Love. Hi, Matt!

* “2015 is my 25th year of adjunct teaching.” Oh, oh no.

* Complaint Claims University Where Student Was Killed Failed To Act On Relentless Yik Yak Threats. Horrifying story on every level.

* Another moral panic against a left-wing academic. Six more weeks of winter.

* The University of California, Santa Cruz, was established in 1965 and has long been known for its radicalism. But officials’ reaction to a recent protest against tuition hikes suggests that times have changed. 

* The rise of “mama.” Interesting to see something we didn’t even know we were doing laid out like this.

* Alberta Loses Its Goddamn Mind for the Fourth Time: A Guide for the Perplexed.

* The End of Labour. Labour, Pasokified. The University after Conservative Victory.

* Baby kangaroo, goats stolen from Wisconsin zoo.

* For what it’s worth I think the latest big Hersh story is probably mostly garbage.

While I’m making myself unpopular: my advice is don’t trust reporting from celebrity journalists w/ spotty track records citing anon sources

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 11, 2015

Don’t bet credibility on celebrity journalist scoops, esp. unreliable ones, esp. when they won’t pay out any dividends even if you’re right.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2015

I understand pressures on left-leaning people to try to find some intervention point, but we need to learn not to be made to look stupid.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2015

* Report: Defense Dept. paid NFL millions of taxpayer dollars to salute troops. Would you like to know more?

* How roleplaying games and fantasy fiction confounded the FBI, confronted the law, and led to a more open web.

* The University of Nevada, Reno, a land grant research university, is recruiting for a Coordinator, Innovation and Transformation. This could be the most buzzwordy, administrative-bloaty job ad of all time. It gets better/worse.

* Are we reading and watching Game of Thrones wrong?

* Apples for the Teacher, Teacher is an Apple.

* After 46 years of playing Big Bird, Caroll Spinney has some great stories.

* The Joss Whedon Avengers 2 podcast.

* Marvel accidentally made a great female superhero, and now they have no clue what to do with her.

* Judge Dismisses Nebraska Woman’s Lawsuit Against All Homosexuals.

* Daily Express And Mail Celebrate The End Of Human Rights, A Horrified Twitter Despairs.

* The US payday loans crisis: borrow $100 to make ends meet, owe 36 times that sum.

* New York and the slave trade.

* Headlines from the nightmare future. And again. And again.

* How $45 worth of drugs landed a Baltimore man 20 years in prison.

* The most senior Baltimore police officer charged over the death of Freddie Gray used his position to order the arrest of a man as part of a personal dispute just two weeks before the fatal incident, prompting an internal inquiry by Baltimore police department.

* The mathematically proven winning strategy for 14 of the most popular games.

* After an Eighth Grader Stayed Seated During the Pledge of Allegiance, the School Nurse Refused to Treat Her.

* The ghetto was a deliberate policy invention, and investing in a path out of it would have been completely contrary to the point of creating it.

* “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great,” he said. “Public radio is ready for capitalism.”

* The death of the K-cup.

* How Marvel Is Killing the Popcorn Movie.

* Berkeley to Stop Adding Lecture Videos to YouTube, Citing Budget Cuts.

* UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation — not everyone loved it.

* How to Talk to Your Child’s Wary Professors.

* Don’t let the police teach your kid a lesson.

* Man Banned From Airline Over Frankly Hilarious Pinocchio Tattoo.

* An Interview with the Publisher of a Magazine Printed Using HIV-Positive Blood.

* In the Suburbs of Amaurotum: Fantasy, Utopia, and Literary Cartography.

* Why cloth diapers might not be the greener choice, after all. I’ll believe anything on this subject to be honest.

* Dictionary of Regional American English funded through summer 2016.

* People Have Misconceptions About Miscarriage, And That Can Hurt.

* “She’s likely to be in her twenties or thirties, middle-class, probably married, probably Christian, probably average intelligence,” Harrison said. “I just described, you know, your next-door neighbor.”

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal forever.

* The Pope just gave me the thumbs up.

* The arc of history is long, but.

* Mother Still Searching For Preschool That Focuses Exclusively On Her Son.

* Great TNG prehistory from David Gerrold on this Mission Log supplemental.

* Kim Stanley Robinson explains his great new novel, Aurora.

* Bigfoot Truthers Turn On Their Leaders.

* Four Myths About the “Freelancer Class.”

* The best way to nab your dream job out of college? Be born rich.

* And another great list of words that can’t be easily translated.

Almost Too Many Thursday Links, Really, If You Ask Me

* Extrapolation is seeking essays for a special issue on Indigenous Futurism, edited by Grace L. Dillon, Michael Levy and John Rieder.

* Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

* No state worse than Wisconsin for black children, says new national study. The Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul. Other People’s Pathologies.

* Why UWM Matters.

* Life and debt.

* Coffee pods and ecology.

* University of California graduate students explain why they’re striking. Students Occupy Dartmouth President’s Office. Coaches Make $358,000 In Bonuses For Reaching NCAA Tournament Final Four. Emory University Eradicates its Visual Arts Department. Dear Harvard: You Win.

* A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine. Armed guards at faculty meetings.

* Major attack on academic freedom in Michigan.

* Academia Under the Influence.

* Surveillance, Dissent, and Imperialism. NSA Surveillance and the Male Gaze.

* The secret history of Cuban Twitter. If this tweet gets 1000 favorites Castro’s beard falls out.

* Kingdom Prep is one of dozens of basketball academies that have popped up in recent years to cater to “postgrad” players—recent high-school graduates who need to improve their standardized-test scores to meet the NCAA’s academic requirements.

* Just when I thought I was out: Marquette hires Duke associate head coach Steve Wojciechowski.

* The really rich are different from the rich, who are different from you and me.

* An heir to the du Pont fortune has been given probation for raping his three-year-old daughter because you know damn well why.

* What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?

* Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

* Libertarian Police Department. Koch Brothers Quietly Seek To Ban New Mass Transit In Tennessee.

* Detroit: Then and Now.

* A new study shows how Lake Tahoe might serve as a mammoth reservoir that could significantly mitigate California’s chronic water shortages without tarnishing the lake’s world-renowned beauty. What could possibly go wrong?

* The geographic sublime, from the Rural Assistance Center.

* How to Think About the Risk of Autism.

* Sepinwall vs. How I Met Your Mother.

* How To Negotiate With People Around The World.

* Gasp! CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says.

* Gasp! Torture Didn’t Lead to Bin Laden.

* New G.O.P. Bid to Limit Voting in Swing States.

* Who’s afraid of Suey Park?

* You once said: “I’m part-android.” Has that revelation haunted you?

* The kids are all right: Talking With 13-Year-Old Leggings Activist Sophie Hasty.

* Bourbon and Girl Scout Cookie Pairings.

* How to Improve Aquaman.

* The Definitive Ranking Of Robin’s 359 Exclamations From ‘Batman.’ 25 Weird Batman Comic-Book Covers.

* Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy.

* Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rRise of the BBbad Fan.

* Original Star Trek II: Wrath Of Khan VFX Storyboards Are A Visual Feast.

* The greatest, richest, freest country in the history of the world.

* The wisdom of markets: Walmart Realizes It’s Losing Billions Of Dollars By Denying Workers More Hours.

* Classic good news / bad news situation: Television Without Pity Archives Will Stay Online. Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come.

* Weird science: Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death.

* On Moretti-ism: Knowing is not reading.

* The New Inquiry’s “Money” issue is out with some great pieces, including one on China that really highlights a key contradiction in American ideology, which simultaneously holds that capitalism is the only possible economic system and that the future belongs to China. And Rortybomb’s piece on human capital is super chilling: basically dystopian literature, and it’s pretty much already real. And then the freedom piece! And the egg donation one! Great issue all around.

A person may be free because she can choose among a broad range of possibilities, or she may be free while she undertakes some action about which she has no choice at all, but whose compulsion she deems legitimate. Or she may be free when she faces a range of options, one of which is clearly superior to the alternatives, so that her behavior is perfectly predictable despite a formal freedom to choose. Freedom is not, at bottom, about the range of possibilities one faces but about the degree of consent one offers for the action to be taken or the circumstance to be endured.

* Japan Ordered To Stop Killing Antarctic Whales For “Science.”

* Teen Wins $70,000 Settlement After School Demanded Her Facebook Password.

* Is being thin more deadly than being obese? Take that, skinnies!

*  I’ve had this dream: Student claims college instructor spent months teaching class the ‘wrong’ course.

* I dream of the day that Seattle and Portland can get along.

* And please don’t make me say it again.

Sunday Links

(some shamelessly borrowed from you-know-who)

* Britain paid reparations for slavery? That’s fantast–oh god.

The true scale of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade has been laid bare in documents revealing how the country’s wealthiest families received the modern equivalent of billions of pounds in compensation after slavery was abolished.

* Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300-500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.

* The Ambition Gap: When researchers have studied the ambition gap, they’ve discovered something peculiar: It’s not there. Women do ask for more. They just aren’t rewarded for it. Via Feminéma.

* 7 Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature. Joyce! Twain! Woolf! Eliot! Shelley! Tolstoy! Wilde! 7 (More) Obscure Children’s Books by Famous “Adult” Lit Authors. Huxley! Stein! Thurber! Sandburg! Rushdie! Fleming! Hughes!

* Actually existing media bias: Glenn Greenwald on what’s become of MSNBC.

I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?

* Mentoring and cruel optimism.

* Race and the cuts at Emory.

* Rehabilitating Zero Dark Thirty.

Susan Sontag once wrote that every mass art form is practiced and experienced as “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Zero Dark Thirty’s critics, unwilling to understand themselves as the film’s intended audience, instead imagined that “real Americans” were being made tools of power through one of their most important social rites: moviegoing. What these critics did not confront was their own need to fend off anxiety. For Maya, as for many Americans, the anxiety has to do with the inadequacy of Osama bin Laden’s death as consolation for all of the disasters that preceded it. How else to explain the manic focus on proving that torture did not contribute to the search for bin Laden? It suggests a kind of desperation, a desire to hold up just this one episode as separate and different from the rest of the war. This desire is Zero Dark Thirty’s true subject, as well as the object of its critique.

* ‘Welcome to Dystopia’: We Are ‘Entering A Long-Term And Politically Dangerous Food Crisis.’

* The Princess and the Trolls: The Heartrending Legend of Adalia Rose, the Most Reviled Six-Year-Old Girl on the Internet. People are the worst. Jesus Christ.

* Texts from Pride and Prejudice. Texts from Don Quixote.

* Ten Little Suffragettes.

* George Saunders, lapsed Catholic.

* Papal Conclave 101.

Perhaps the classic expression of this idea belongs to none other than the outgoing pope, Benedict XVI, who as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was asked on Bavarian television in 1997 if the Holy Spirit is responsible for who gets elected. This was his response:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the Pope. … I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.

Then the clincher:

There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked!

* Hayley Schafer chose her dream job at the age of 5. Three years later, her grandmother told her that if she wrote it down, the dream would come true. So she found a piece of blue construction paper and scrawled on it with a pencil: “Veterianian.” “No one told me how to spell it,” she remembers. “They just said, ‘Sound it out.’ ”

At the age of 30, she still has the sign, which is framed on her desk at the Caring Hearts Animal Clinic in Gilbert, Ariz., where she works as a vet. She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.

* The Cost of Prison.

* A brief history of the car cup holder.

* Oscar voters overwhelmingly white, male.

* Oscar Pistorius and the Media. The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp’s boyfriend. Inspiration porn and compulsory able bodiedness.

* Stay Free or Die Tryin’: Scenes from the student protests at Cooper Union.

* Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history.

* Could a president use drones to kill journalists?

* Being David Bowie.

* But what I wanted to talk about is the way that the Harlem Shake meme seems perfectly designed for the workplace.

Monday Links

* This weeks’s denunciation of the dissertation, yours at the Chronicle.

* The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden… Is Screwed. Esquire has been publishing some really interesting journalism lately.

“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

* marquette.edu is your source for Danny Pudi news.

* Rick Nolan, Minnesota Democrat, Unveils Constitutional Amendment To Overturn Citizens United. Sold.

* Artist claims to create 3D facial renderings based on discarded cigarette butts. I am extremely skeptical!

* DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared.

* Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is coming to Syfy.

* An Occurrence at the O.C. Bridge: “Arrested Development” is George Sr.’s death row fantasy.

* Couple engrossed in their wireless devices ignore each other (1906).

* And Slate asks the unthinkable: what if not every show premise can sustain itself forever?

Literally Every Weekend Link There Is

* It’s official: J.J. Abrams will ruin Star Wars (more).

* More drone fiction, please. Tweets not bombs. Lip-syncing the poetry of empire.

* Žižek vs. Zero Dark Thirty.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

* Anti-war activism at the University of Wisconsin, c. 1940.

* Stunning read on living as a victim of child abuse from the New York Times: The Price of a Stolen Childhood.

* David Foster Wallace and depression, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

* Steve Benen and Maddowblog has been all over the Republican vote-rigging scheme, even going so low as to cite one of my tweets. What The 2012 Election Would Look Like Under The Republicans’ Vote-Rigging Plan. Scott Walker, of course, is rigging-curious. And a delicious little bit of schadenfreude.

* It is a sin against the new world of mediocrity to be distinct or distinguished.  We are in the chain-store, neon-lighted era.  Almost every city looks the same.  The same people all dress the same – kids as Hopalong Cassidy, men with loud sportshirts and Truman suits, women in slacks.  Sometimes you can tell whether a trousered individual is a man or a woman only by the width of the buttocks.  Only a few cities have individuality.  They are the seaports, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.  Boston reeks of decay, and is not genteel.  The rest are all Cleveland.

* Today in legal hyperformalism.

Would you believe me if I told you that President Obama is in constitutional trouble—with hundreds of decisions of the National Labor Relations Board from the last year now potentially invalid—over the meaning of the word the?

* When The Shining had an optimistic ending.

* So we’re going to destroy the world: Australian shale oil discovery could be larger than Canada’s oilsands.

* The trouble with English.

None of these past challenges compares with the one under way now. While other humanities disciplines—philosophy, linguistics, and modern languages, for example—have relied upon a range of foundational practices at the modern mass university, many English professors have depended on literature (narrowly defined), written discourse, and the printed book as the primary elements in teaching and scholarship. But hidebound faculty members who continue to assign and study only pre-computer-based media will quickly be on their way toward becoming themselves a “historical” presence at the university.

That’s why I specialized in iPad-2-era Twitter-based fan-fiction, and frankly I’ve never looked back.

* Mainstreaming MOOCs.

* Open, New, Experimental, Aspirational: Ian Bogost vs. “The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age.”

* New research indicates tuition has little correlation with educational outcomes.

* If markets are efficient and if markets make things better, then there is no explanation for why we have the worst media in the world rather than the best. The problem is that markets don’t really make things better or more efficient. They make things cheaper and they’re responsive. That’s why we get the news we want rather than the news we need.

* Child labour uncovered in Apple’s supply chain.

* n+1 visits MLA.

* Defending freedom: A St. Paul man who recently purchased an assault rifle out of fear of an impending gun ban threatened his teenage daughter with it because she was getting two B’s in school rather than straight A’s, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday.

* For The Sixth Time In One Week, Man Shot At Gun Show.

* Adam Mansbach: My fake college college syllabus.

* Copy Of The Scarlet Letter Can’t Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In Margins.

* Debunkng the “the Soviets used a pencil” gag. The more you know!

* Occam’s Razor suggests it must be Cory Booker who is putting these people and animals in danger in the first place.

* More on the Arizona “loyalty oaths” issue, with a religious freedom focus.

* New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence.’ Republicans, honestly, we have to talk.

* Seriously, though, I could fix the whole damn system if they’d listen to me.

* Even the Pentagon doesn’t know what the the point of the draft is supposed to be.

* Xavier and Magneto Heading to Broadway for Waiting For Godot.

* And a little something just for the Harmenians: “I wanted a memorable Harmontown show in Kansas City, and for my sins they gave me one.” Dan Harmon predicts pain.

Thursday Night

* Any guild with half an ounce of integrity would be marching in the streets if their employers made that kind of threat to open up their market to all comers. We professors, on the other hand, have to navel gaze about the implications of our own obsolescence before anyone chooses to lift a finger. If there really are only ten universities in twenty years and that Ph.D. of yours ends up as a really expensive wall hanging, don’t say you weren’t warned. The professoriate is the worst guild ever.

* As with discourse about climate change policy, the persistence of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other forms of argument about the value of officially sanctioned torture represents a victory for those who would justify such abuse. Zero Dark Thirty has performed no public service by enlarging the acceptability of that form of debate. Sounds like it was good enough even-the-liberal Jon Stewart.

* After complaining for weeks that the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” erroneously implies that torture yielded key information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a trio of senior senators now want to know whether CIA personnel deliberately misled the filmmakers on that point.

* Wanted: Tenure-track professor of political science specializing in constitutional law to teach four courses per semester. Juris doctor degree highly desirable. Occasional weight-lifting required.

* Social Text forum on cruel optimism.

* Hitting Peak Topsoil.

* Obama has aged fifteen years in four.

* Via my friend @DanHF: a celebration of Tarantino’s Death Proof.

* And who had Mali in the places-to-invade-next pool? You’ve won some exciting violence.

Monday Links

* Welcome to the future: Another grandmother gives birth to her own grandchild.

* Whiteness and Breaking Bad: America isn’t flooded with pure meth, and it’s not because our chemists are too ethical. The illegal drug market simply doesn’t reward peerless expertise in the same way celebrity cooking shows do.

The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican, to the slightly less far-fetched Julia Stiles as ghetto-fabulous. But whether it’s a 3-D marine playing alien in Avatar or Bruce Wayne slumming in a Bhutanese prison, the story is still good for a few hundred million bucks. The story changes a bit from telling to telling, but the meaning is consistent: a white person is (and by extension, white people are) best at everything.

* Paging Kim Stanley Robinson: NASA seems to have violated its own Prime Directive by failing to consult its Planetary Protection Officer on the Curiosity mission.

* Teachers are striking in Chicago. Meanwhile: How Michelle Rhee Is Taking Over the Democratic Party. Thank goodness Obama’s winning, so he can finally crush the teachers’ unions once and for all!

* Solitary confinement in schools? Jesus Christ.

* Richard Posner is making sense: The notion of using the criminal law as the primary means of dealing with a problem of addiction, of misuse, of ingesting dangerous drugs — I don’t think that’s sensible at all.

* Debt Collectors Cashing In on Student Loan Roundup.

“I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represent — for our industry,” the consultant, Jerry Ashton, wrote in a column for a trade publication, InsideARM.com. “It was lip-smacking.”

Meanwhile, America’s defaulted student loans total more than yearly tuition at public colleges.

* Star Trek 2 has a title: Star Trek Into Darkness. Early returns: Pretty terrible! Star Wars on Poverty. Lord of the Rings That Bell.

* James Cameron always envisioned Avatar as 19 films.

I have an idea for a fourth. I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world. Because when we drop in, even in the first film in ‘Avatar 1,’ as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization.

But what happened before that? And before that? And…

* The director of Looper has a metaphor for a model of time travel logic I don’t think I’ve seen before: the universe as a body with an immune system that seeks to push out foreign objects.

* The problem isn’t that this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life; the problem is that it’s seven of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life glued together haphazardly, their inexorable badness amplified by their awkward juxtaposition. Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski wanted to make a movie unlike any other, and they certainly did: Cloud Atlas is a unique and totally unparalleled disaster.

*  Study: There is enough wind on this planet to meet our entire energy needs.

* Tressie McMillan Cottom reviews the captivating documentary The Queen of Versailles, which I caught at the local independent movie house this weekend. It’s quite good—a stunning portrait of the wealthy’s perspective of the “normal” workings of the economy and of the 2008-2009 economic collapse.

* And when polls fail: Do 15% of Ohio Republicans really think Romney killed bin Laden? Probably not.

Potpourri

* Jacob Remes explains May Day.

* My Joss Whedon zombie essay from PopMatters is out in Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion today. Last night I submitted my abstract for the upcoming Politics of Adaptation conference on Cabin in the Woods, drawing me ever closer to total Joss Whedon scholarly completism.

* Roundtable on Non-Western SF, at Locus.

* A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that “liking” a Facebook post is not free speech. To repeat my own Twitter quips, yeah, because it doesn’t cost money.

* New polling shows Amendment One will likely pass after all.

* al Qaeda’s discovered our only weakness: our insatiable love of porn.

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called “Kick Ass” — and a file marked “Sexy Tanja.”

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

* Hungry for good nerd press, Netflix is teasing it might resurrect Jericho.

* Five anarchists arrested by FBI for trying to blow up Cleveland bridge with fake bombs given to them by FBI.

* Aetna, according to the report, cited exclusions and said it would not cover the claim because Scott developed breasts after she changed sexes. N.J. transgender woman wins battle with insurance company to have mammogram covered.

* …legal chicanery has reached such high levels that the SEC is toying with the idea of going after it directly.

* And somebody page Nick Bostrom: Entire Observable Universe Modeled Using French Supercomputer.

Friday Afternoon About-to-Go-See-Harry-Potter Links

* Erick Erickson, cheering on apocalypse: Obama has a legacy to worry about. Should the United States lose its bond rating, it will be called the “Obama Depression”. Congress does not get pinned with this stuff. See also. Steven Benen on the reality gap. Ezra Klein: How default would harm homeowners, cities, businesses and everyone else.

* And then there’s Rick Perry.

I tell people, that “personal property” and the ownership of that personal property is crucial to our way of life.

Our founding fathers understood that it was a very important part of the pursuit of happiness. Being able to own things that are your own is one of the things that makes America unique. But I happen to think that it’s in jeopardy.

It’s in jeopardy because of taxes; it’s in jeopardy because of regulation; it’s in jeopardy because of a legal system that’s run amok. And I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God and say, “God, You’re going to have to fix this.” […]

I think it’s time for us to use our wisdom and our influence and really put it in God’s hands. That’s what I’m going to do, and I hope you’ll join me.

* Osama bin Laden was working to assemble a team of militants to attack the U.S. on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, according to communications Navy SEALs seized from his Pakistani hideout when they killed the al Qaeda leader this spring. The article claims that the planned attack targeted the U.S. train system.

* Fox News is comparing the News Corp. hacking scandal to companies that were hacked. The only suitable reaction is awe.

* And local news now: Lawsuit filed over Duke basketball tickets.

A woman filed a lawsuit Friday against her sister, her sister’s husband and Duke University regarding the transfer of two tickets that once belonged to her father for games at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Katina Dorton is seeking unspecified damages and asking the court to invalidate the “fraudulent transfer” to Gordon and Sophia Caudle that occurred without the knowledge or consent of her father or other family members, according to the complaint.

“This is important and it’s valuable,” said Randall M. Roden, an attorney for Dorton. “She’s a graduate. She genuinely wants to support the Blue Devils and go to the games. But she was shocked by the way Duke handled this.”

Wednesday Links: Breaking Bad, Divine Justice, Fake Vaccines, and More

* Just got an email alert from CNN: there appear to have been another set of terror attacks in Mumbai. Very sad news.

* Drug trials in Africa show two AIDS prevention drugs are apparently successful in preventing the spread of the disease.

* And the inevitable dark reflection of the previous link: The headline reads, “CIA used a fake vaccination campaign in hunt for Bin Laden.”

* Justice is sweet: News Corp. has lost $7B in the last four days, shareholders are furious, and Lautenberg is joining the call for DOJ and SEC investigations into Murdoch’s empire.

* ThinkProgress: Meet The Indonesian Workers Who Make Your Nikes.

* Reduce the deficit by stopping building pointless superweapons we can never use.

* Premature victory lap watch: Obama for America raked in $86 million for the last quarter, crushing the GOP. The bulk of the money came from small donors.

* Chuck Klosterman: Why AMC’s Breaking Bad beats Mad Men, The Sopranos, and The Wire.

* And RSA Animate explains why there’s no empathy in Heaven, or in Utopia:

Good Friday

* The New York State Senate just passed marriage equality 33-29, bringing the number of states allowing gay marriage to six but more than doubling the number of Americans eligible. Twitter tells me this is the first time a Republican-held legislature has passed a marriage equality provision. 44 states to go. Great news that in my own small way I’ve personally been waiting a long time to see.

* I feel so happy I can’t even get mad at news that the GOP walked away from the debt limit negotiations in order to protect tax breaks for people earning $500,000 a year. In fairness I’m pretty sure they were going to walk away from the table no matter what they were offered.

* Self-parody watch: bin Laden was looking to rebrand al Qaeda before he died.

* The streak is over: Cars 2 is the first Pixar movie to receive a “rotten” rating from Rotten Tomatoes.

* And Peter Falk has died. If I were home, I’d pop in The Princess Bride to mourn…

Saturday Night Links

* The Guardian has a large special section on SF this weekend, of which the Iain Banks piece I linked yesterday was only a taste.

* Popular in my Facebook newsfeed this weekend: Scientists cure cancer, but not capitalism. (Update: see the comments for some debunking.)

* Another must-read post from zunguzungu about the intergenerational war on higher ed.

Did California college students and parents suddenly and abruptly get exuberantly irrational about higher education starting in 1980? Or did Californians simply pass Proposition 13 in 1978, permanently destroying California’s ability to raise the tax revenues necessary to support itself? I think the latter is actually pretty much the whole story. After 1978, the state’s tax base went down substantially, so less money was available for public universities, and so tuition prices went up. This was the choice that was made, and we are now seeing its completely predictable and rational consequences: to pay for a sizable decrease in property taxes, the state of California has dismantled what was once the greatest and most egalitarian system of public higher education in the world. To put it another way, the price of giving tax breaks to people who are wealthy enough to benefit from lower property taxes has meant that the nearly-free education that primarily poor and middle class families were once able to take advantage of, now, is mostly gone.

* Five signs your Republican governor wants to be president. Early detection is the best protection.

* Disney Trademarks “Seal Team 6.″ This will be adorable.

* And Huck says no. Why, Huck, why?