Reading® for Sunday™

* From the archives: Vonnegut on hearing the voice of God on Armistice Day. Image from @watsdn.

* Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers.

* Diversity Is Magic: A Roundtable on Children’s Literature and Speculative Fiction.

* The Humanities Must Unite or Die. “And.”

* Gasp: High Pay for Presidents Is Not Shown to Yield Any Fund-Raising Payoff.

* Novelist Marilynne Robinson warns Stanford audience against utilitarian trends in higher education.

* English departments and original sin, continued.

* Campus Cops: Authority Without Accountability.

* The seasons come, the seasons go, / The earth is green or white with snow, / But time and change shall naught avail / To break the friendships formed at Yale.

* Academic Journals: The Most Profitable Obsolete Technology in History.

* Academic CVs: 10 irritating mistakes.

* So You’re Getting a Ph.D.: Welcome to the worst job market in America.

* A mind-bending, award-winning science fiction trilogy that expertly investigates the way we live now. I’m quite late, but I’ve been looking forward to reading these. Perhaps I’ll start tonight!

* “My beef with Hillary is mainly that she is an enemy of the poor.”

* Chile admits Pablo Neruda might have been murdered by Pinochet regime.

* The life and slow death of a former Pennsylvania steel town.

* ‘I’m praying for you’: MSF posts grim details from Afghan hospital strike. U.S. Journalists Who Instantly Exonerated Their Government of the Kunduz Hospital Attack, Declaring it an “Accident.”

* Kinder Without God: Kids Who Grow Up In A Religious Home Less Altruistic Than Those Without Religion. Relatedly: Atheism contain multitudes.

* As it turns out, the non-profit co-op model for health insurance turns out to be unsustainable without government subsidies. More than half of the co-ops have been shut down this year, and nine of the 12 have shut down since October 1, either by HHS or by the states in which they operate.

* Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair.

* Welcome to Heaven.

* Critical Algorithm Studies: A Reading List.

* The man who killed the SAT essay.

* Politics is really confusing.

“We are excited to reward the Larry David with $5,000 cash for ‘standing up’ to Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live and speaking the truth about his anti-Latino racism, even though he was joking,” Deport Racism campaign director Luke Montgomery said in the statement.

* The Keystone defeat. Happy version. Unhappy version.

* Apocalypse watch: The Future of Climate Change Is Widespread Civil War.

* How did this ever get out of beta to begin with? Elon Musk Admits Humans Can’t Be Trusted with Tesla’s Autopilot Feature.

* And Sorry, Alien Hunters: No Signs of Life From KIC 8462852. I want to believe! Also this is aliens too.

It's not a UFO, it's just the military testing missiles in case we have to fight a nuclear war with Russia. So, don't worry.

— mat honan⭐️ (@mat) November 8, 2015

Weekend Links

* Annals of so totally completely missing the point: “Hunger Games’ producers working on ‘potential theme park opportunities.”

* The Public Option for Higher Education.

* Instructed at 4 p.m. Thursday to cut $55,000 — or 20 classes — by 5 p.m.

* How to Write a Lifeboater Manifesto.

* ‘You Can Sleep Here All Night’: Video Games and Labor.

* Socialize Social Media! A Manifesto.

* Postal Service Insolvent Since 2006 Law Requiring It to Be Insolvent. Better privatize it!

* Humanities degrees at Marquette remain steady despite national statistics.

* Colorized historical photos. Secluded Cultures on the Brink of Extinction. Michael Galinsky’s Retro Photos of 1980s Shopping Malls Are, Like, Totally Rad.

* Senate passes ENDA 64-32, now the House will completely ignore it. Obama Backs $10 Minimum Wage Secure in the Knowledge It Will Never Be Passed.

* The Chris Christie Hegemony. I Can’t Believe Terry McAuliffe Is Going to Be Governor of Virginia. Here comes 2016.

* No, Crime Is Not Going to Start Soaring Under Bill de Blasio.

* Terrible Columnist Richard Cohen Shocked To Learn That Slavery Was Really, Really Bad.

* “A Very Dangerous Boy”: the ten-year-old boy who killed his neo-Nazi father.

* Secret ‘Bay Bridge Troll’ Guarded the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge for 24 Years.

* Advanced Readings in D&D.

* The eleven nations of North America.

* School Named For Former KKK Leader Reconsiders Its Legacy. Christ, Florida, why the rush? Let’s be sure we really think this thing through.

* Declaring a war on warrior culture in the wake of the Miami Dolphins bullying scandal. “The NFL’s Bully Problem”: Sports Columnist Dave Zirin Connects Violence in Sports to Rape Culture. Tony Dorsett Has CTE. More Living Football Players Show Signs Of CTE. Why It Matters That Tony Dorsett Is Showing Signs Of CTE. Why a Denver Broncos player suddenly walked away from the NFL and more than $1M.

* You can tell the human body was poorly designed by evolution. I mean, who puts sanitation next to recreation?

* Happens all the time: Super typhoon Haiyan just broke all scientific intensity scales.

* Since 1890 every Wisconsin officer who took a life was cleared of any wrongdoing. Every single one.

* Black students scored lower this year in every category of the nation’s benchmark reading and math test, which also showed that for all the dynamism in Wisconsin’s education scene, student achievement remains stagnant.

* Sweden formalizes the Bechdel Test.

* Pablo Neruda: Not Poisoned.

* The new normal: Black woman shot in head seeking help in white neighborhood.

* This Is How Much Money Twitter Owes You.

* And at last some good news: That Saul Goodman Breaking Bad spinoff may be both prequel and sequel.

Monday Night Links

* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.

* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.

“I get this call from San Jose State: ‘Uh, we have a problem,'” recalled Mark Ryan, superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute, a public school set up on a military model.

It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach.

To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.

* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.

* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.

* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.

* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.

* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?

* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.

* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).

* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?

* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.

Perhaps the most intriguing news: “Sony said they’re very interested in recording me watching it as a commentary track” for the Season 4 DVD set, he said. His co-host for the evening, Rob Schrab, asked if the DVD commentary could also include a visual in the corner of the screen of Harmon’s facial expressions as he watches the season he was aced out of.

* Assange v. Google.

* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.

* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.

* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?

Tuesday Night MOOCs and More

* 20 Things the Matter with MOOCs.

* Also from Richard: What do asteroids, MOOCs, and medical records have in common?  All are examples, currently in the news, of the way in which public policy in the US is driven not by the common good or professionals or expert knowledge, but by the generation of mediashock in the service of the entrepeneurial desire of cybercapitalism to monetize data.

* On drone ethnography.

All of us that use the internet are already practicing Drone Ethnography. Look at the features of drone technology: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Surveillance, Sousveillance. Networks of collected information, over land and in the sky. Now consider the “consumer” side of tech: mapping programs, location-aware pocket tech, public-sourced media databases, and the apps and algorithms by which we navigate these tools. We already study the world the way a drone sees it: from above, with a dozen unblinking eyes, recording everything with the cold indecision of algorithmic commands honed over time, affecting nothing—except, perhaps, a single, momentary touch, the momentary awareness and synchronicity of a piece of information discovered at precisely the right time. An arc connecting two points like the kiss from an air-to-surface missile. Our technological capacity for watching, recording, collecting, and archiving has never been wider, and has never been more automated. The way we look at the world—our basic ethnographic approach—is mimicking the technology of the drone.

* The ACLU on what Rand Paul achieved.

* Six-Month-Old Baby Dies From Gunshot Wounds In Chicago.

*  “Defense attorneys believe the girl, who lived across the river in Weirton, W.Va., made a decision to excessively drink and — against her friends’ wishes — to leave with the boys. They assert that she consented to sex,” reports the Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Rachel Dissell. Richmond’s attorney, Walter Madison, is getting specific, citing “an abundance of evidence here that she was making decisions, cognitive choices … She didn’t affirmatively say no.” She was unconscious at the time.

* I think it’s possible Natalia is the reckoning of Girls.

* The Herbalife war: Hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman has vowed to bring down Herbalife, the 33-year-old nutritional-supplement company, which he views as a pyramid scheme. With his massive shorting of Herbalife stock, the price plummeted, prompting two fellow billionaires—Ackman’s former friend Dan Loeb and activist investor Carl Icahn—to take the opposing bet on Herbalife. As the public brawl rivets Wall Street, William D. Cohan learns why, this time, it’s personal.

* The most influential songwriter of his time has become the first rock star voted into the elite, century-old American Academy of Arts and Letters, where artists range from Philip Roth to Jasper Johns and categories include music, literature and visual arts.

* New data confirms that the unsatisfyingly named “Higgs-like particle” announced at CERN last year really is a Higgs boson.

* Exhumation of Pablo Neruda’s remains set for 8 April.

* 6 ÷ 2(1+2) = RAGE

* The Law Graduate Debt Disaster Goes Critical.

* Ezra Klein gets it very wrong.

* The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die.

* Here comes the asteroid mining.

* The insane plan to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena by submarine.

* 14 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.