Posts Tagged ‘parental leave’
Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly
* In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.
* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.
* A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!
* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:
* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.
* Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.
* What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?
* Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:
* 19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.
* So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.
* New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.
* Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.
* Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.
* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.
* Science Fiction: For Slackers?
* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.
* How to be a fan of problematic things.
* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.
* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.
* Can Americans update their ideas about war?
* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?
* The Political Economy of Enrollment.
Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.
* UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.
* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.
* Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.
* How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.
* How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.
* What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.
* Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.
* A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.
* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.
* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.
* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.
* This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.
* Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.
* Stunning photos of the California drought.
* The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.
* Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?
* Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.
* Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.
* Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.
* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.
* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.
* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.
* The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.
* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.
* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.
* Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.
* U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.
* The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.
* 10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.
* So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…
* Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.
* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.
* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.
* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.
* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.
* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.
* Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.
* The Proof That Centrism is Dead.
* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.
* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.
* Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.
* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.
* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.
* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.
* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.
* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.
* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.
* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.
* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
* Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.
* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.
* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.
* The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.
* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.
* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.
One Thousand and One Wednesday Links!
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and things are only going to get worse in the next few weeks. But for now, some links!
* I made a Twitterbot that I’m pretty pleased with: @LOLbalwarming. It’s the only authentic voice left to us in these tough times.
* Book plug: Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism is really good. It’s the #3 book you should buy right now after the longstanding #1 and #2.
* And while I’m hawking stuff on Amazon: they discontinued my Swiss Army canvas wallet, so I had to find a new one. It’s leather, alas, but this Fossil wallet is everything else I want. It’s great.
* Submitted without comment: Letters in support of John McAdams from FIRE and AAUP.
* The shame of America’s parental leave.
* Why, in this day and age, is there even a Save command in any application? Its very presence implies — indeed, guarantees — that the default state of the world is unsafe. This breaks the rule our ancestors learned over billions of years of interaction with the objective world: when you do something, it stays done, until undone. Saving considered harmful. After what happened to me the other week, I am 100% on board with this.
* Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.
* On Weird Fiction and the Interstitial.
* Chris Ware, The Art of Comics No. 2.
* Great job alert: Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured).
* Salaita Goes After University Donors in Lawsuit Over Job Loss at Illinois. UIUC responds.
* The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation.
* Against professors as mandatory reporters.
* Scott Walker budget cut sparks sharp debate on UW System. Deep cuts in Wisconsin. Anticipating budget cuts, nervous UW System tried to strike deal. Republican UW Professor Has Sharp Words For Walker Over Faculty Comment. Scott Walker’s State of Ignorance. A reckless proposal. A self-inflicted wound. Be skeptical. Chasing away UW’s stars. Cut athletics.
* Of course there’s time to kill primary and secondary ed, too.
* From the archives, apropos of absolutely nothing: Stalin, CEO.
* “No Crisis” is a Los Angeles Review of Books special series considering the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. A new installment to the series will be released at the beginning of each month through the fall of 2015. Our aim, as our introductory essay explains, is to “show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.”
* As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities. I want to suggest further that their disinterest is right and even salutary, because what I really mean is that undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.
* Exciting new degradations: Bill Would Allow Texas Teachers To Kill Students.
* Howard Middle School Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History.
* Detroit Cop Who Killed 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones While She Slept Walks Free.
* Texas school suspends 9-year-old for making ‘terroristic threats’ with magic ‘Hobbit’ ring.
Kermit Elementary Principal Roxanne Greer told the Odessa American that she could not comment on the suspension, because “all student stuff is confidential,” but Steward said that she told him that any and all threats to a child’s safety — including magical ones — would be taken seriously by the school.
* Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor tries to put a good spin on what for all the world looks like elder abuse.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15, Cont’d: “Wellness” and the Anti-Vaxxers.
* In France, police bravely defend liberal democracy from an eight-year-old boy.
* The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland.
* Why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?
* Grace has Type 1 diabetes, for which there is no cure. Now 15 years old, she has endured approximately 34,000 blood tests, 5,550 shots and 1,660 medical tubing injections to keep her alive.
* The War Photo No One Would Publish.
* On running and street harassment.
* Bring the Jubilee: Croatia Cancels Debts For Tens Of Thousands Of Its Poorest People.
* Boing Boing reviews David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* Understanding The Man in the High Castle.
In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick’s version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it’s a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death.” That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick’s novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it’s still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.
* Americans Are Working So Hard, It’s Actually Killing People.
* Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.
* Let’s politicize vaccines because why not.
* But friends, I’m here to tell you: it gets worse.
* Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they’d committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he’d committed 40.
* Great read about one of the founders of the Men’s Rights Movement, a former national feminist.
* Inside that creepy Nationwide ad. “Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun.”
* Which Racist UNC Building Are You Today? The University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam Statue Represents a Legacy of White Supremacy.
* Clergy Send In Photos To Replace Images Of Black Youth Police Were Using For Target Practice.
* Food Not Bombs Sues Fort Lauderdale Over Homeless Feeding Law.
* A brief history of the Star Wars expanded universe.
* A brief history of the Super Bowl points spread.
* The shame of the Patriots fan. They even managed to sneak in one more on their way to the championship last weekend.
* Study Links Playing Tackle Football Before Age 12 To Cognitive Impairment.
* Watching football after a traumatic brain injury.
* Florida says parents can’t opt out their kids from standardized tests.
* The Cops Don’t Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
* BREAKING: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.
* Propaganda has gotten way more sophisticated since the old days.
* Man Wakes Up From Bender With Financial Problems Solved.
* Consumption Of Buncha Crunch Reverently Paused During Unsettling Scenes Of ‘American Sniper.’
* Report: Most Americans Can’t Even Name Their State’s Shadow Lord.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Student evaluations are terrible, episode 281.
* Transgender Kids Identify With Their Gender As Completely As Cisgender Kids.
* Coming out as poor at an elite university.
* Probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I had that kind of cash, but: The Vatican Will Offer Free Shaves And Haircuts To Rome’s 3,276 Homeless People.
* Disability, the state, and minimum wage.
* Pettiness and the human condition.
* UVM Recognizes “Neutral” as a Gender Identity.
* Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
* How to tell if you are in a soft science fiction novel.
* Fun With Conspiracy Theories: Did the Chernobyl Disaster Cover Up Something Even Worse? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
* New York cooks up a special unit for kicking hippies.
* When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild.
* Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults.
* When you stare too long into the abyss.
* The #1 reason people die early, in each country.
* Useless but Interesting Facts About America’s Married Couples.
* No, you’re lonely and depressed and lack self-control.
* The United States is becoming a terrible place for air travel. “Becoming.”
* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is back.
* And you can always spot the children of sociologists.
All the Wednesday Links!
* “Universities do not seem to care if staff and faculty are parents unless legally obligated to do so,” said my colleague Richard King, a professor of critical culture, gender, and race studies at Washington State University. “Do the work. Have kids on your own time. Any conflict is your responsibility to manage so long as you prioritize us over them.”
* What Do 2,358 College Administrators Do? More at reclaimUC.
The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself. While budget cuts at the state level are an important piece of the crisis of higher education, the administrative bureaucracy at both campus and system level is by no means an innocent actor. It is the UC administration that must be held responsible for expanding, intensifying, and accelerating the processes of privatization.
- [USC student Tucker] Reed, the lead complainant, said USC dismissed her claim that her ex-boyfriend had raped her, despite her providing audio recordings of him admitting to it. At one point, Reed said, a USC official told her the goal was to offer an “educative” process, not to “punish” the assailant.
- When a student went to the DPS to report a sexual assault at a frat, an officer told her and a friend, also a sexual assault survivor who had accompanied her, that women should not “go out, get drunk and expect not to get raped.”
- A DPS detective told one student that the campus police determined that no rape occurred in her case because her alleged assailant did not orgasm.
A university is not a bubble to which you invite the best faculty members and the best students from all over the world and expect to share and produce cutting-edge knowledge. A university that is cut off from its immediate environment, that has no links with neighboring institutions of higher learning, that does not engage with the social, economic and political problems of the society in which it is embedded does not deserve the title of “university.” Sadly, I believe that most U.S. universities working in the Gulf suffer from these fatal problems: They are hermetically sealed establishments that have little or no contact with the societies they are in. The latest episode of censorship belies this philosophy. It is as if the UAE government is saying “You can have the most impressive campuses, with cutting edge scientific labs, libraries and sports facilities, but you have no right to discuss the pressing political and cultural issues of the society just beyond the campus gates.”
* Shock! Horror! Emails show Detroit’s emergency managers always intended to declare bankruptcy.
* America Has a Stadium Problem: Despite every number suggesting they shouldn’t, why do American cities keep building sports stadiums funded with public money? They’re even promising to save the stadiums even as they let the rest of Detroit go under.
* The NCAA’s History With Concussions: A Timeline.
* Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes and contends that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people. Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health. Key words: anxiety; decline of play; depression; feelings of helplessness; free play; narcissism; psychopathology in children; suicide
* They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners. The true finding of game theory is that the most sociopathic people in society become economics theorists.
* Full faith and credit: Ohio Officials Ordered To Recognize Gay Couple’s Marriage.
* When we say we want to critique privilege, we mean that we want to critique the privilege of ordinariness. How awkward that sounds. Even impossible. But it is what we mean. More concisely, we want to critique the experience of “ordinariness” that permits daily life, permits civic engagement, even permits civil disobedience. And it becomes difficult to critique the experience of “ordinariness” because it is a moving target: ordinariness experienced in one location is not the same as ordinariness in another. My ordinariness in Nairobi is not the same as my ordinariness in Baltimore, although both depend on the presence of majority black populations.
* SyFy is destroying America: the only thing worse than a pointless 12 Monkeys TV series would be Warriors of Oz.
* North Carolina not even bothering to pretend post-VRA-evisceration.
* Hollywood Actress Has Played a 17-Year-Old for Over 17 Years.
* Francis Ford Coppola’s potential cast list for The Godfather.
* I know I link to it a lot, but Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal consistently has the best SF going.
* And we’re gonna need a bigger moral panic: science demonstrates poverty is much worse for babies than crack cocaine.