Posts Tagged ‘Oscars’
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago “black site” should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 24, 2015 at 7:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alejandro González Iñárritu, algorithms, America, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, Batman, Birdman, black sites, books, Catholics, CFPs, chance, cheese, Chicago, climate change, clopenings, college, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, Cops, democracy, denials, diversity, drugs, ecology, education, England, English majors, European Union, fellowships, film, first contact, free speech, Genghis Khan, genocide, Glenn Reynolds, God, Golden Girls, Greece, guns, Harris Wittels, hate speech, housework, How the University Works, Hugh Jackman, hydrofracking, Idaho, Instagram, Instapundit, Jeb Bush, Joseph Kahn, Kentucky, kids today, labor, libertarians, Lord of the Rings, majors, male privilege, Marc Maron, Marquette, Mars, men's rights, meritocracy, microstates, misogyny, music, my scholarly empire, National Adjunct Walkout Day, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Octavia Butler, orcs, Oryx and Crake, Oscars, photography, playlists, police brutality, police state, police violence, poverty, Power Rangers, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, privilege, public authority, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, reboots, recycling, right to work, Robert Heinlein, robots, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexism, Silk Road, sitcoms, sperm donation, Starbucks, Starship Troopers, states of exceptions, STEM, Steven Spielberg, strikes, superheroes, Superman, Syriza, tech economy, television, Tetris, the courts, The Ecstasy of Order, the humanities, the law, the Left, the Singularity, Title IX, Tolkien, torture, Twitter, Two and a Half Men, UNC, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, welfare state, Wes Anderson, white privilege, Wisconsin, Wolverine, work-life balance, WTF, Žižek
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird
Spring Break So Close You Can Taste It Links
* Sing to me, Muse, of Fredric Jameson. I’ve never understood the “worst writer” slam against Fred; alongside all the other good things I’d have to say about his work I think he’s actually very clear and precise.
* CFP for the 2014 Marxist Literary Group at the Banff Centre: Energy, Environment, Culture.”
* CFP: Bruce Springsteen Studies.
* Once upon a time in America this was called advocating for justice. But in today’s America, it’s deemed a miscarriage of justice.
* Meanwhile. My god. And my god. And my god. And my god. The US courts are just a bottomless nightmare.
* Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims. Yes we can!
* Freddie deBoer on the unbearable lightness of always voting Democrat.
* The unbearable whiteness of Project X.
* 25 Years of Declining State Support for Public Colleges. Many Colleges ‘Hoard’ Endowments During Rough Economic Times. The Rising Cost of Not Going to College.
* Service, Sex Work, and the Profession.
* The SATs have been provably racist and classist for decades with no improvements; Canavan’s Razor would suggest that’s the entire point. But this time…
* The “trigger warning” has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped? Content Warnings and College Classes. The Trigger Warned Syllabus. We’ve gone too far with ‘trigger warnings.’ I think this kind of “trigger warning” — and even offering alternative assignments when circumstances warrant — is very often good pedagogy on the level of the individual classroom; I did so this semester when teaching Lolita, somewhat reluctantly, but I’d come to feel it was necessary. I’m very skeptical it would ever be a good idea at the level of administration or policy.
* An Elegy for Academic Freedom.
* 10 Unintentionally Horrifying Statues of Famous People.
* Tendrils of the invisible web: the undersea cables wiring the Earth.
* “Wearing Google Glass automatically means that all social interaction you have must be not just on yours, but Google’s terms,” Adrian Chen wrote at Gawker almost a year ago, when we all first cringed in fear.
* You know every cop is a criminal: David Cameron’s porn-filter advisor arrested for possession of images of sexual abuse of children.
* The Civ V files: Never Move Your Settler?
* The Fetishization of Lupita Nyong’o.
* Why Sweden has so few road deaths.
* Durham school board joins teacher tenure lawsuit.
* According to a New Study, Nothing Can Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.
* Activists Erect A Monument To Rape Survivors On The National Mall.
* How Gun Violence is Devastating the Millennial Generation.
* Sea Level Rise Threatens The Statue Of Liberty And Hundreds Of Other Cultural Heritage Sites. Chipotle Warns It Might Stop Serving Guacamole If Climate Change Gets Worse. But don’t worry! President Obama’s New Budget Is Peppered With Efforts To Tackle Climate Change. Peppered!
* Milwaukee shuts down Little Caesars for day over rodent droppings. A whole day! That’ll show ’em.
* Cheerleader Sues Parents for Refusing to Pay College Tuition. Gambler sues, says he lost $500,000 playing drunk. Having not heard any of the evidence or consulted any of the relevant laws, Canavan Court rules in favor of both plaintiffs!
* How do you remember a massacre?
* How did DC manage to cast anyone but Bryan Cranston as Lex Luthor — much less Jesse Eisenberg? It’s a crime.
* Pretty mediocre hoax. Everyone knows Mattel has had working hoverboards since the 80s anyway.
* A Letter From Ray Jasper, Who Is About to Be Executed.
* And I try not to get sucked into the wingnut-said-something-crazy! scene anymore, but every once in a while: my god.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 5, 2014 at 10:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, alcohol, America, austerity, automobiles, Back to the Future II, Barack Obama, Bryan Cranston, Canavan's Razor, car culture, casinos, CFPs, Chipotle, CIA, Civilization V, class struggle, classism, climate change, conferences, copyright, credentialism, creeps, cultural preservation, death penalty, Democrats, denialism, Department of Justice, domestic surveillance, domestic violence, Duke, Durham, ecology, endowments, energy, every copy is a criminal, Ezra Klein, feminism, Florida, gambling, games, Google Glass, guacamole, guns, hoverboards, How the University Works, insanity, Jacobin, Jameson, Kansas, Lex Luthor, Lolita, Lupita Nyong'o, Man of Steel 2, Marissa Alexander, Marxism, Massachusetts, massacres, Milwaukee, misogyny, morally odious morons, Morris County, music, Nabokov, National Mall, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Carolina, Norway, Oscars, pedagogy, personal heroes, politics, pornography, primaries, prison, prison-industrial complex, Project X, public health, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reformism, SATs, Sean Hannity, selfies, sex work, sexism, Springsteen, Statue of Liberty, statues, surveillance society, Sweden, syllabi, tenure, the courts, the Internet, the law, theory, trigger warnings, United Kingdom, upskirt photography, vaccines, violence, voting, what it is I think I'm doing, zero tolerance, zombies
All The Links
* CFP reminder: “SF/F Now” and “Irradiating the Object” at the University of Warwick, August 2014. Proposals due March 31.
* Legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois once said that the job of a science fiction writer was to notice the car and the movie theater and anticipate the drive-in – and then go on to predict the sexual revolution. I love that quote, because it highlights the key role of SF in examining the social consequences of technology – and because it shows how limited our social imaginations are.
* Median Salaries of Senior College Administrators, 2013-14.
* Where and When You Can See The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* The New Yorker covers fusion power.
* We need to update our nightmares: Zeynep Tufekci on the Internet.
* Unreal: Dartmouth Student Says She Was Sexually Assaulted After Website ‘Rape Guide’ Named Her. Campus Rape and the Rise of the Academic Industrial Complex.
* 800-year-old castle torn down in Ireland.
* $60 million high school football stadium, built in 2012, torn down.
* Curators at the new art museum at Kennesaw State University had some last-minute work to do before its grand opening Saturday night. They had to quickly pack up an installation — one the art museum had commissioned — after university administrators ordered it killed for being insufficiently “celebratory” for the event.
* The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics. Man.
* …one of the gravest threats the FBI saw in the Black Panther movement was their Free Children’s Breakfast Program.
* Agamben, horror, and the 90s.
* Universities being used as proxy border police, say UK academics.
* But at least one university says it has already begun denying admission to “risky” applicants — those who don’t meet the institution’s typical minimum standards for SAT scores and GPA — over fears of how it would be rated under the Obama ratings proposal.
* How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit.
* “That hurt.” On being Chevy Chase.
* Hitting rock bottom: they’re rebooting Santa Claus.
* And just one Oscar link is all you need: Lupita Nyong’o.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 3, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, Agamben, Amazon, bananas, Barack Obama, Black Panthers, BPA, castles, CFPs, Chevy Chase, class struggle, college rankings, conferences, corruption we can believe in, cultural preservation, Dartmouth, FBI, FEMA, film, full communism, fusion power, high school football, Hollywood, horror, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, immigration, Ireland, Lupita Nyong'o, museums, New Yorker, nuclear energy, nuclear war, nuclearity, Oscars, plastics, poliitcs, rape, rape culture, reboots, Santa Claus, science fiction, stadiums, superexploitation, surveillance society, Taylorism, Texas, the 1990s, the Cold War, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Holocaust, the Internet, Wes Anderson, what it is I think I'm doing
Tuesday Morning!
* The kids aren’t all right: on being 29 in 2013.
* Remaking the University: What’s bad for students has been good for Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that “Student-Loan Securities Stay Hot” even as student default rates climb. “Demand for the riskiest bunch” of student-loan backed securities sold last week by SLM Corp, formerly known as Sallie Mae, “was 15 times greater than the supply.” The riskiest securities have the highest yields, but investors don’t have to care, given the special impossibility of defaulting or erasing student loan debt. Meanwhile, the New York Fed reports that 90-day delinquency rates have risen from 24 to 31 percent since 2008, and that student debt nearly tripled in the last eight years. When the Fed breaks out the numbers for Intern Nation–graduates of the past eight years–they found that “the delinquency rate jumped to 35% last quarter from 26% in 2008.” Student Debt Is Perfectly Following the Financial Meltdown Script. Whose fault is the big student loan bubble?
* But I am fascinated by the contrasting rhetoric between the rapid-boil fervor over MOOCs and the barely simmering apathy for open-access policies, especially at the institutional level.
* Spider Robinson, rape culture apologist. Well.
* TNR rockets back to the top of the worst-things-ever-published sweepstakes.
But there’s a group that should be equally irate about “We Saw Your Boobs”: admirers of bare breasts. Because MacFarlane’s is exactly the type of frat-boy behavior that leads so many American women to keep their breasts hidden from public view for fear of just such humiliation.
FINALLY, SOMEONE SAID IT.
* Male and female authors reviewed, book reviewers, and bylines at major magazines.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 5, 2013 at 8:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, class struggle, crisis, How the University Works, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, misogyny, MOOCs, Open Access, Oscars, pedagogy, peer review, politics, publishing, rape culture, retrofuturism, science fiction, Seth MacFarlane, sexism, Soviet Union, Spider Robinson, student loans, the humanities, the kids aren't all right, the past is another country, underemployment, unemployment, what it is I think I'm doing, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing
Monday Night Links
* Accreditor Recommends Probation for University of Phoenix.
* The Oscar’s Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night. Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matters. Fantasy Fans: Where’s Your Outrage? There are no three-way mirrors in Hollywood. Seth MacFarlane, misogynistic Oscar host. The End of Men Oscars. The thing about being a little black girl in the world. The long death of the middle-brow. The Onion offers a rare apology.
* State of the Industry, Part II: And the Winner Is… The State!
* College Rape Survivor Faces Potential Expulsion For ‘Intimidating’ Her Rapist.
* Art Spiegelman offers up a secret history of Garbage Pail Kids.
* Django Unchained: A White Revenge Fantasy. Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why.
* More on AMC’s planned adaptation of The Sparrow.
* Bork: Nixon Offered Me SCOTUS Seat for Firing Archibald Cox.
* Arrested Development Not Getting Second Netflix Season.
* Post-work: A guide for the perplexed.
* The academic jobs beat: The Cost of The Job Application Process.
* I think I might have done this one already, but regardless: meet the handful of countries Britain’s never invaded.
* Keystone XL Decision Will Define Barack Obama’s Climate Legacy.
The novel, set in 2001, takes place in “the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11,” Penguin said in a release announcing its 2012 results.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 25, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic jobs, accreditation, AMC, America, Art Spiegelman, Barack Obama, books, Britain, class struggle, climate change, comics, Django Unchained, ecology, empire, film, for-profit schools, Garbage Pail Kids, How the University Works, Keystone XL, literature, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Nixon, Oscars, Philip Roth, politics, post-scarcity, Pynchon, race, rape, rape culture, Robert Bork, science fiction, Seth MacFarlane, sexism, socialism, Supreme Court, television, The Onion, The Sparrow, UNC, University of Phoenix, war, work
Monday Morning Links
* Of course you had me at “Sun Myung Moon’s lost ecotopia.”
In 2000, Moon paid an undisclosed amount for roughly 1.5 million acres of land fronting the Paraguay River. Most of that property was in a town called Puerto Casado, about 100 miles downriver from Puerto Leda. Moon’s subsidiaries wanted the land to open commercial enterprises ranging from logging to fish farming. But a group of Puerto Casado residents launched a bitter legal battle to nullify the deal. While that controversy continued to divide Paraguayans, the Puerto Leda project proceeded under the radar. Moon turned the land over to 14 Japanese men—“national messiahs,” according to church documents, who were instructed to build an “ideal city” where people could live in harmony with nature, as God intended it. Moon declared that the territory represented “the least developed place on earth, and, hence, closest to original creation.”
* Right now I am sitting at my computer, writing a post that I will receive no money for and which is not part of any career plan. It’s a little thing, obviously. But why do I do it? Because human beings aren’t little efficiency machines. Human life is what you experience when you aren’t busily accruing material resources.
* 1994 literature syllabus from David Foster Wallace, featuring Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Harris, and Mary Higgins Clark.
* Student Persistence in Bioelectricity, Fall 2012 (Duke University MOOC).
* New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning’s access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from — and may in fact be hurt by — digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.
* Five Experts Give College Scorecard a Barely Passing Grade.
* Accepting the Oscar for Marlon Brando, 1973.
* 9 Sexist Things That Happened At The Oscars.
* The Debt Everyone Is Freaking Out About Does Not Exist.
* “When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was, ‘You’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even to discuss that it exists,'” said Gibbs, now an MSNBC contributor.
* And an Angela Davis biopic comes out April 15.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 25, 2013 at 8:33 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Angela Davis, austerity, Barack Obama, C.S. Lewis, charts, class struggle, communism, David Foster Wallace, documenary, Don't mention the war, drones, Duke, Ecotopia, filmd, Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, ghostwriting, human beings aren't little efficiency machines, justice, literature, Marlon Brando, Mary Higgins Clark, misogyny, MOOCs, Narnia, Native American issues, online education, Oscars, Paraguay, pedagogy, politics, Robert Gibbs, Seth MacFarlane, sexism, socialism, student debt, Sun Myung Moon, Sweet Valley High, syllabi, the debt, the deficit, Thomas Harris, tuition, writing
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.
* 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.
* George Saunders, lapsed Catholic.
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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 24, 2013 at 9:32 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, affective labor, Aldous Huxley, animals, Barack Obama, books, Bowie, Britain, Carl Sandburg, cars, Catholicism, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, College of Cardinals, compulsory able bodiedness, Cooper Union, cruel optimism, disability, Don Quixote, drones, ecology, Emory, fantasy, feminism, film, flexible accumulation, food, George Saunders, Gertrude Stein, Glenn Greenwald, Harlem Shake, How the University Works, Ian Fleming, ideology, illness, income inequality, inspiration porn, James Joyce, James Thurber, Jesus wept, justice, kids today, labor, Langston Hughes, Lauren Berlant, Leo Tolstoy, literature, male privilege, Mark Twain, Mary Shelley, memes, mentoring, meritocracy, MSNBC, oligarchy, Osama bin Laden, Oscar Pistorius, Oscar Wilde, Oscars, papal conclave, pay equity, poetry, politics, post-Fordism, Pride and Prejudice, prison, prison-industrial complex, privilege, race, reparations, Salman Rushdie, slavery, student debt, student movements, T.S. Eliot, the Pope, the rich are different from you and me, the Vatican, torture, trolls, true crime, tuition, UCLA, veterinarians, Virginia Woolf, voting, war on terror, white privilege, women, women's suffrage, work, writing, YouTube, Zero Dark Thirty
‘Spaghetti Westerns Questioned the Underpinnings of Civilization’
Django Unchained is not so much the evil twin of the saintly Lincoln as its nasty, more clever kid brother, fighting for recognition against the favorite, acting out. If I prefer it to Lincoln it’s because I prefer the Tarantinian project, flaws and all, to Steven Spielberg’s entire career. Lincoln may be the culmination of the Spielberg-Lucas reimagining of the American cinema as family entertainment, a transcendent work beyond the blockbuster form that reimagines the official national myth of an official national father for current and future generations.
Tarantino is more interested in a pre-consolidated cinema that pre-dates Spielberg, in which national myths were put to use in tawdry, violent, and grandiloquent ways, and myth was open to interpretation by genre filmmakers outside the US. So however Tarantino has failed the actual history of slavery in the United States, the way he has opened it up for discussion strikes me as far more remarkable than the storybook of Spielberg’s Lincoln, which closes with a thump and sends us off to bed.
n+1 previews the Oscars. Via Twitter, Jesse Williams has, at length, a somewhat different take on the film.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 23, 2013 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with America, Django Unchained, film, George Lucas, Lincoln, myth, Oscars, race, Spaghetti Westerns, Steven Spielberg, Tarantino, Westerns
Two Named Female Characters Who Talk to Each Other About Something Other Than a Man
Written by gerrycanavan
February 22, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Alison Bechdel, film, Oscars
And a Few More Weekend Links
* Someone has adapted China Miéville’s The City and the City for the stage in Chicago. Sold.
* Republicans legislating what answers should get full credit on homework in Oklahoma.
* Last year’s program copped to the death of Hollywood cinema-as-art. All that was left was looking backward over a once-hallowed institution and weeping over the corpse. This year, though, the tears have dried. What we see instead is a clear vision of the utility of cinema. The 85th Academy Awards, like no show before it, will elevate films that are openly ideological, weaponized tools of the state.
* Evil Middle School Teachers Prank Students with Fake Disney World Field Trip.
* And your headline of the decade: U.S. Government Plans To Air Drop Toxic Mice To Fight Snake Invasion.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 22, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with China Miéville, creationism, Disney World, film, Lincoln, middle school, Oklahoma, Oscars, pedagogy, science, science fiction, snakes, The City and the City, theater, toxic mice, Zero Dark Thirty
Post-Racism, Post-Feminism Watch: Oscars Edition
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that votes for the Oscars, is nearly 94 percent white and 77 percent male, according to a Los Angeles Times study published Sunday. Blacks are about 2 percent of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2 percent.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 26, 2012 at 9:31 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with feminism, film, male gaze, Oscars, race, white people
You Win This Round, Franco
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with James Franco, MFAs, Oscars
Monday Night
* Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to donations to the Republican National Committee. But they really weren’t supposed to say that last part out loud.
* The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted its annual report on violent extremism on the right. Via MeFi. Immigration reform should be just the thing to cool these tempers down.
* Oscar-winning animated short “Logorama.”
* Benen and Klein remind everyone who needs reminding that health care reform is a major progressive victory. There’s never a final end to struggle; we take what’s here and start again.
* Lessons of a $618,616 death.
What I couldn’t know then was that the thinking behind my request—along with hundreds of decisions we made over the years—was a window on the impossible calculus at the core of today’s health-care dilemma. Terence and I were eager to beat his cancer. Backed by robust medical insurance provided by a succession of my corporate employers, we were able to wage a fierce battle. As we made our way through a series of expensive last chances, like the one I asked for that night, we didn’t have to think about money, allocation of medical resources, the struggles of roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, or the impact on corporate bottom lines.
Terence’s treatment was expensive. The bills for his seven years of medical care totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. Still, no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life.
* Elections have consequences: “Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly.”
* Every “Holy ______, Batman” from Burt Ward’s Robin.
* Conspiracy theory of the night: Did Leno add a laugh track to Sarah Palin’s appearance? Related: Was Palin indoctrinated as a child while receiving medical treatment from Canadian communofascists?
* And the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace. Book your flights now.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 9, 2010 at 1:34 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Barack Obama, Batman, black box voting, books, Canadian-style communofascism, class struggle, David Foster Wallace, Diebold, film, health care, immigration, Jay Leno, Logorama, New York, Nintendo, Oscars, politics, progressives, Republicans, Sarah Palin, violence
Spring Break Goes By Too Fast
* Colbert’s segment last Thursday on James O’Keefe, Sean Hannity, and the misleading ACORN tapes is must-see. Jon Stewart’s experiment with Chatroulette was pretty funny too.
* How porn invented the future. Via MeFi.
* Mars, bitches? “Obama to unveil ‘ambitious plan’ for NASA.”
* Steve Benen updates your dictionary.
* Top 10 Jeff Bridges movie his Oscar tonight was really for.
* Via Ze Frank, here’s a PBS Frontline piece based on perennial nonfiction workshop favorite The Undertaking.
* And I second Yglesias’s recommendation of “a great graphic in today’s NYT summing up the past uses of the budget reconciliation process and making it clear that pretty much everything Republican Senators have said on the subject is a lie.”
Written by gerrycanavan
March 8, 2010 at 2:12 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a vague mish-mash of identitarian buzzwords, ACORN, Barack Obama, Chatroulette, Colbert, Daily Show, death, Fox News, frauds, Frontline, funerals, Internet, James O'Keefe, Jeff Bridges, Jon Stewart, lies and lying liars, math, NASA, Oscars, outer space, PBS, politics, pornography, reconciliation, Republicans, Sean Hannity, the Senate, The Undertaking