Posts Tagged ‘Persepolis’
All the Weekend Links, Existential Despair on the Side
* In case you missed it: the call for papers for SFFTV‘s special issue on the Mad Max franchise. And our Star Trek special issue is still open, too!
* Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.
* What that means is that in South Carolina, the Confederate flag abides by its own rules. While governors—as well as the president—can usually order that all state and national flags within their jurisdiction be flown at half-staff, this one is exempt. Instead, the Confederate flag’s location can be changed only by a two-thirds vote by both branches of the General Assembly. “In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag,” said a press secretary for Haley. “Only the General Assembly can do that.” Take down the flag.
* Confederate flag in Orlando to be burned in symbolic burial.
* Denmark Vesey, Forgotten Hero. A recent flashback.
* Meet Debbie Dills, Florist Who Called in Tip that Led to Dylann Roof’s Arrest.
* We still need to talk about white male pathology.
* The Treasury is going to put a woman on the $10. That’ll fix it!
* What Would Happen If We ALL Stopped Paying Our Student Loans, Together?
* California Says Uber Driver Is Employee, Not a Contractor.
* Tech isn’t really making a “sharing” economy. So what is it making? The Servitude Bubble.
* Reasonable Doubts About the Jury System.
* We Regret to Inform You That in 4 Days You and Your Family Will Be Deported to Haiti.
* Women’s soccer will only achieve greater growth when we have a FIFA not run by sexist men.
* Performance-Based Funding Can Be Fickle, One University’s Close Call Shows. Florida State would have lost $16.7 million if its median graduate had earned just $400 less.
* 7 Seriously Bad Ideas That Rule Higher Education.
* The sheep look up: don’t drink the water edition.
* Did abortion cause the drought? I say teach the controversy.
* It’s a weird, weird world: Obama is going to be on WTF. I’ll never accept this is real.
11. Enthusiasts have hitherto only loved the world in various ways; the point is to hate it (too).
* Maladministration killed Sweet Briar, says former board member.
* The Best And Worst Airlines, Airports And Flights, Summer 2015 Update.
* ‘Screen Time’ For Kids Is Probably Fine.
* Your Children Won’t Be Able To Live In Space, Without A Major Upgrade.
* Another pedagogy gimmick, but at least it’s cheap: roleplaying games.
* Science explains why you hate the word “moist.”
* There Have Only Been 9 Days This Year When Police Didn’t Kill Someone.
* Another piece on the trolley problem and the self-driving car.
* Vermont vs. the Affordable Care Act.
* Euthanasia and non-terminal illness.
* Harris Wittels’s sister remembers her brother.
* SethBling wrote a program made of neural networks and genetic algorithms called MarI/O that taught itself how to play Super Mario World. This six-minute video is a pretty easy-to-understand explanation of the concepts involved.
* Making the world safe from Marjane Satrapi.
* Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation.
* A people’s history of Singled Out.
* Everything you want, in the worst possible way: please god don’t ever let Captain Worf happen.
* No pricey pension plans, some argued. No promotions based solely on seniority. No set hours for a given workweek. No prohibitions against layoffs. Unions! Catch the fever!
* The arc of history is long, but Mitch Horwitz is doing a Netflix comedy series with Maria Bamford.
* Didn’t we do this one already? All six Star Wars films at once.
* And if you want to know why there’s no future for our civilization, just read this.
Midweek Links!
* Another scene from the death of the university.
* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.
* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.
* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.
* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.
* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.
* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.
* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.
* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.
* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.
* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.
* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’
* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.
* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.
* California and the literature of water.
* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.
* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.
* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.
* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.
* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.
* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.
* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.
* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.
* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.
* Tech bubble about to burst again.
* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.
Saturday Links
* Pope Calls for Church Austerity, Wants to Focus on Poor.
Meeting with journalists this morning, Pope Francis laid out his vision for the Catholic church, which includes cutting spending on ornate ceremony and instead spending that money on the poor. He urged excited fellow-Argentines to skip the costly trip to Rome to visit the first non-European Pope in almost 1,300 years, and instead give that money to the poor.
“Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” he told the gathered journalists. He explained the reason he took the name, Francis, after St. Francis of Assissi, was because of St. Francis’s devotion to the poor and love of animal life. On climate change, the Pope remarked, “Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.”
* The rich are different from you and me.
The report, authored by David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha, found that “wealthy interests are keenly focused on concerns not shared by the rest of the American public, like keeping taxes low on capital gains, and often oppose policies that would foster upward mobility among low-income citizens, such as raising the minimum wage.”
* Chicago tried to ban Persepolis? Why? Why?
* The letters of Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee.
* Your Own Private Google: The Quest for an Open Source Search Engine.
* Ricky Gervais: The Office Revisited.
* Idiocracy watch: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a Big Gulp.
* Last Survivor of Plot to Kill Hitler Dies at 90.
Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”
“He got up from his chair,” von Kleist remembered, according to an account by The New York Times, “went to the window, looked out of the window for a moment, and then he turned and said: ‘Yes, you have to do that. A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life.’”
* The dissertation is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
* Why are working conditions for restaurant employees so bad?
Persepolis 2.0
Persepolis 2.0 is a recaptioned remix of Marjane Satrapi’s original Persepolis around the current Iranian election protests. Via Boing Boing.
Friday Already?
Really, it’s already Friday?
* Michael Jackson and SF: Michael Jackson “cameo” in Back to the Future II. (And here’s a real cameo from Men in Black II.) io9 remembers Captain EO.
* At right, of course, there’s a panel from Persepolis.
* NASA thinks it’s solved the 1908 Tunguska mystery.
* Happy birthday to the toothbrush.
* ‘How Wall Street Will Ruin the Environment’: Robert Bryce at The Daily Beast slams Waxman-Markey.
In short, given its length and complexity, the cap-and-trade bill would be better named “The 2009 Lawyer-Lobbyist Full Employment Act.” Proponents are ignoring the fact that Enron (remember Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay?) desperately wanted caps on carbon dioxide because they saw huge profits in being able to trade carbon allowances. And now Congress wants to give Wall Street traders—the same pirates who helped engineer the financial meltdown—a mandate that requires a massive new trading business that has the potential to be gamed in the same way that Enron gamed the California electricity market? Hello?
* And Wired has a detailed look at swine flu hysteria, just in time for the outbreak at Duke.
Satrapi on Iran
Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, has now protested the situation in Iran before the European Parliament. Via Bleeding Cool.
Marjane Satrapi, Iranian author and director and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian filmmaker and Mousavi spokesman, presented a document that they claimed had come from the Iranian electoral commission.
The document said liberal cleric and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi came second in the election with a total of 13.3 million votes, while president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came third with only 5.49 million votes.
However, there is no certainty about the legitimacy of the document.
These are the same numbers that have been floating around the Internet all week.
How to Draw a Movie
Marjane Satrapi lets us know how to draw a movie.
“As a cartoonist, I am very solitary,” she says.
“For the first six months, I felt like killing everybody at the studio every day. In front of them I was, like, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ and as soon as they were gone it was, ‘Die, die, die!’?”
Peak Oil, Raymond Carver, Environmentalism, God, Larry David, Comics
Links for this fine Monday:
* Marjane Satrapi interviewed in the New York Times.
I don’t very much like this term of graphic novel. I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics. Like, Oh, this is the kind of comics you can read.
* Using Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is having a terrific creative renaissance in its sixth season, by the way) to treat schizophrenia, in the New Yorker.
* The PETA article up today at Salon is interesting insofar as it demonstrates the hostility to environmental and animal-rights movements that dominates popular discussion of these issues. Even though (aside from the hyperbolic “#1 cause!!” claim) PETA is otherwise correct that a meat diet significantly contributes to global warming and other environmental hazards, the article is still framed from the headline on as “Suck on this, PETA.” I’m not even sure why the PETA angle was necessary in the first place; couldn’t the same article have been written without name-checking a hated fringe group?
* In other environmental news, another new report argues that we passed peak oil in 2006.
* I haven’t commented yet on this whole Raymond Carver kerfluffle, and I don’t have much to say now, except that I think there’s a good argument to be made that Gordon Lish was the actual writer of those stories, not Carver, and that in any event it’s as certain that they should be left alone as it is that a collection of the “original versions” will be out next year.
The case is complicated by the fact that Carver himself, unlike Eliot, seems to have persisted in preferring his own original versions (though this is a murky matter too). He went on to publish a rewrite of The Bath entitled A Small Good Thing. In it, the painfully bleak ending is replaced by an upbeat reconciliation scene, with the baker turning out to be a sweet, vaguely Christ-like guy, and the parents reconvening at his store where he plies them with some heavily symbolic warm bread and pastries – a scene of saccharine religiosity that betrays the hard truth of the tale, replacing it with the sentimental wishfulness of the teller. A lot of people prefer it, but then a lot of people prefer bad art that makes them feel good to good art that makes them feel bad.
* Searching for God in the brain. Bet he’s not in there, either.
The Return of Ze Frank! and Three More
I was thinking just the other day how much I miss The Show (with Ze Frank). This little song doesn’t make me miss it less. Via Waxy.
Salon reviews Persepolis, which I’m really looking forward to. Salon also wants to abolish the electoral college, just a few hundred years too late.
AskMe: Help me survive the coming apocalypse. Remember: Zombies hate sunlight, and always aim for the head.
And at New Scientist: How does it feel to die? You might ask Funky Winkerbean’s Lisa Moore, who has just died of cancer. The funny pages sure seem to have gotten a lot less funny since I stopped reading them on December 31, 1995.
Gerry Canavan 