Posts Tagged ‘personal heroes’
Weekend Links!
* If I weren’t going to DC on June 4th, I’d be going to this in Madison: Undercommoning the University: A Workshop.
* How writers of endangered languages are embracing sci-fi.
* With the recession over, are states investing in higher ed? Oh, honey.
* This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities.
* A local-interest explainer: Assata Shakur was convicted of murder. Is she a terrorist?
* New York University’s labor record epitomizes everything wrong with the neoliberal university.
* Report Blasts ‘Fantasy World’ of Presidential Benefits.
* FBI admits no major cases cracked with Patriot Act snooping powers.
* TIE Fighter and American Exceptionalism.
* The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
* While 45 percent of the roughly 1,000 respondents said they feel “somewhat prepared” to begin a career after college, slightly more than half said they did not learn how to write a résumé. And 56 percent did learn how to conduct themselves in a job interview.
* The Myth of the Garbage Patch.
* Up to 90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly US $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year, according to a report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
* 7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children.
* North Carolina receives NCAA notice of allegations in academic fraud case.
* New Study on Suicide Among College Athletes.
* BREAKING: Being competent is bad for you.
* io9 says the Supergirl pilot isn’t as bad as you’re expecting.
* This 85-Year-Old Nun Just Spent Two Years In Prison For Protesting Nuclear Weapons.
* Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?
* A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two-Thirds Of Europeans.
* Home, the latest animated kid flick, is actually about colonialism. No, really.
* Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade?
* Modernism is back, baby! A Plea for Culinary Modernism.
* Friends from grad school still tease me about the day I basically went off on this rant in a seminar day discussing Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.
* #abolishmen: Men get into fatal car crashes twice as often as women.
* And another round of gender-swapped Disney characters.
Cruel, Nasty, and Scary
The other side of Kurt Vonnegut.
And So It Goes was written by Charles Shields, who also wrote a controversial biography of Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird. The book paints a picture of a man who was often distant from his children, cruel to a long-suffering first wife, caught in an unpleasant second marriage and spent much of his later years depressed and angry. “Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes,” wrote one reviewer, Wendy Smith, on the Daily Beast website. The New York Times reviewer, Chris Buckley, called Shields’s portrayal “sad, often heartbreaking”.
…Shields’s book is unsparing in its portrayal of Vonnegut’s dark side. It reveals that the writer – whose experience as a PoW during the firebombing of Dresden scarred his psyche for life – had no qualms about investing in firms that made napalm or indulged in a host of other morally suspect activities. He fell out with friends, editors and relatives and had a shocking temper. In later life he appeared deeply bitter and lonely. In the opening part of the book Shields describes meeting Vonnegut just a few months before his death. He describes Vonnegut asking him to look up his name in a dictionary (it was not there) and then look up Jack Kerouac (it was there). “How about that?” Vonnegut then states with a frown. The chapter of Shields’s book dealing with Vonnegut’s final 15 years of life is called simply “Waiting to Die”.
Gerry Canavan 