Posts Tagged ‘Peppa Pig’
Tuesday Morning Links
* A new documentary will explore the life and legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Janelle Monáe on Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism at Spotify.
* How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public.
* But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today’s neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education’s sine qua non now dominates the landscape. The Culture Wars Are Dead! Long Live the Culture Wars.
* Among the Hottest Job Markets on Campus: Police Officer.
* Call for papers: Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University.
* A mother and child fled Congo fearing death. ICE has held them separately for months, lawsuit says.
* A DACA Recipient Graduates Amid Deportation Fears.
* The drug war is (still) a race war.
* Black Panther and the Black Panthers, at NYRoB.
* Sweet Briar Milkshake Ducked awfully fast.
* Social media has come under increasing scrutiny for reinforcing people’s pre-existing viewpoints which, it is argued, can create information “echo chambers.” We investigate whether social media motivates real-life action, with a focus on hate crimes in the United States. We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump’s Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign, and are uncorrelated with other types of hate crimes. These patterns stand out in historical comparison: counties with many Twitter users today did not consistently experience more anti-Muslim hate crimes during previous presidencies.
* Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang.
* If people on food stamps made Jared Kushner’s paperwork mistakes, they might starve.
* Not even 18 months in and they’ve completely dropped all pretense.
* There could be life on Europa, and they only have water cannons.
* Cobbled together in America by Americans, and inspired by contractual obligations and market demands, nothing about the Hey Jude album was “authentic.”
* Two X-Men fan letters from 1976, one who thinks Chris Claremont’s new run can only be saved by jettisoning the diverse cast, the other from a woman of color glad to see herself represented in the pages of her favorite comic. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
* Westworld against libertarianism.
* Workfare for the Private Equity Crew.
* In Praise of Alien3. I heard from a lot of these folks when I compared Infinity War to Alien3 the other week.
* The misassigned voters lived in a predominantly African American precinct that heavily favored Democrats in the fall, raising the possibility that they would have delivered the district to Simonds had they voted in the proper race.
* So inspiring: Disgraced congressman gets a second chance.
* For Peterson, the purpose of our politics and books and films and TV is to protect us from the feminine, which is a crazy and destabilizing energy. Certain culture is good for the brain and certain culture is bad, making you antisocial and destructive. Peterson loves both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories in which men save sleeping women with a kiss, and hates Frozen, a film in which Prince Hans turns out to be the bad guy. Frozen has “no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics,” he explained in Time this year. We must tell the same ancient story over and over, Peterson says, or we will all go insane.
* Literally no one could have predicted: Arrested Development’s Season 4 “Remix” Is an Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
* There’s nothing the human race can’t achieve.
* Retirement policy is basically alchemy.
* Self-driving cars are human experimentation.
* Defending the indefensible: What Isle of Dogs Gets Right About Japan.
* How you’re gonna die, by the numbers.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* And nothing gold can stay: goodbye, Peppa Pig.
Monday Morning Links!
* Mary Karr Reminds the World That David Foster Wallace Abused and Stalked Her, and Nobody Cared.
* They Revealed Harassment Claims Against a Professor, and Were Disciplined.
* The Real Free-Speech Crisis Is Professors Being Disciplined for Liberal Views, a Scholar Finds.
* Millennials Are Way Poorer Than Boomers Ever Were.
* America’s teachers on strike: ‘We are done being the frog that is being boiled.’
* The think piece doesn’t so much diminish art as render it wholly incidental. The mere existence of a work—and the contemporary proliferation of work after work after work—is enough to justify the think piece. The fundamental problem with so much contemporary criticism is that the prospective critic is structurally encouraged to not care, to treat the value of one-or-another book/TV episode/movie as wholly irrelevant to the task of writing about it. Sontag wrote that desperate, interpretive searches for meaning constitute “the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius.” (One thinks of Henry James’s yearning lit-crit protagonist.) The think piece effectively inverts this formulation. Now it is more common to see genius (or perhaps “genius,” the work of people who, to nip a phrase from the controversial and cuttingly mean critic Armond White, “think they think”) pay compliments to mediocrity. The clarity of critical judgment alights on every rotten movie, grating pop singer, or paperback book written for awkward adolescents alive in the throes of their protean horniness, and dissolves, ultimately, into a sprawling field of meaninglessness. It’s not that, following Sontag, erotics has replaced bloodless hermeneutics. It’s that we’re now subject to soft, dopey forms of both. Enormously erudite and intelligent expositions about extremely stupid things have degraded both the standard for writing about serious things and the seriousness of those serious things themselves.
* Yeah, you better run: China bans Peppa Pig because she ‘promotes gangster attitudes.’
* University apologizes to Native American students detained on college tour.
* The man who cracked the lottery.
* Misreading the manufacturing statistics.
* A team of scientists undertakes an ambitious experiment which could change thinking about welfare.
* “In America, you can be too poor to die.”
* And if you follow me on Facebook, you know that I’ve been raving all weekend about Nintendo Labo. Believe the hype! It’s truly great. Like Calvin’s magic cardboard boxes came to life. It’d buy three more kits if they were available, and might eventually buy a second robot one so my kids can play the Vs mode….
Gerry Canavan 