Posts Tagged ‘Peru’
Monday Morning Links!
* In Milwaukee, I lived two lives. On the East Side was the liberal Catholic school I attended for nine years; on the North Side was everything else. Dateline Milwaukee: Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation. Some Lesser Known Justice Facts about Milwaukee and Wisconsin. And a more positive Milwaukee profile: How Milwaukee Shook Off the Rust: The Midwestern hub reclaimed some of its industrial glory by doing a surprising thing. It cleaned up.
* Google’s response to inquiries was chilling: “Google News Archive no longer has permission to display this content.” Entire Google archive of more than a century of stories is gone. Why?
* A narrow street dead-ends at the Detroit River, where a black-and-white boat bobs in the water, emblazoned with a Postal Service eagle. This is the mail boat J.W. Westcott II, the only floating ZIP code in the United States.
* Hugo Awards Celebrate Women in Sci-Fi, Send Rabid Puppies to Doghouse. Special congratulations to N.K. Jemisin, whose The Fifth Season I’ve been meaning to read for a while, and to Nnedi Okorafar, whose “Binti” I have read already and is fantastic. Relatedly, Abigail Nussbaum asks: Do the Hugos actually need saving?
* In Conversation With Colson Whitehead.
* This seems like a pretty big deal: Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail.
* U.S. Army only fudged its accounts by mere trillions of dollars, auditor finds.
* An Indiana City Is Poised To Become The Next Flint.
* Another late-summer syllabus: Problems in Posthumanism. #WelfareReformSyllabus. And a study guide for a world without police.
* “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world. I may have half my squad there for hours.”
* Ranking the Most (and Least) Diverse Colleges in America. Marquette sneaks in at #86, while my alma mater Case Western is a surprisingly high #40 and Duke gets #32.
* The strangeness of deep time.
* “The jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. In other words, only the best-educated humans will compete with machines,” Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist, told Pew. “And education systems in the US and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what is told to them, preparing them for life in a 20th century factory.” Nothing can stop Judgment Day, but with the liberal arts you just might have a chance of surviving it…
* 98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you.
* Hot.
* Only about a hundred groups of isolated indigenous people are believed to still exist, with more than half of them living in the wilderness that straddles Peru’s border with Brazil. Fiona Watson, the field director of the tribal-people’s-rights group Survival International, told me that the situation was dire for the region’saislados, as isolated people are called in Spanish. In a cramped London office, Watson laid out satellite maps to show me their territory, small patches in a geography overtaken by commerce: arcs of slash-and-burn farmland; huge expanses where agribusinesses raise cattle and grow soy; mining camps that send minerals to China; migrant boomtowns. Some of the indigenous groups were hemmed in on all sides by mining and logging concessions, both legal and illegal. One tribe in Brazil, the Akuntsu, had been reduced to four members. Near them, a man known to anthropologists only as the Man of the Hole lives in a hollow dug in the forest floor, warding off intruders by firing arrows. He is believed to be the last of his tribe.
* The poet and activist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
* Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore.
* Pittsburgh and the birth of the self-driving car.
While people around the world will no doubt continue to project various fantasies onto the tiny island republic, the fact remains that Iceland has yet to see any surge in left mobilization comparable to that in Portugal and Greece — or even the more modest adjustments being made inside the two trans-Atlantic establishment left-liberal parties in the form of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns.
* This brilliant map renames each US state with a country generating the same GDP.
* 88 College Taglines, Arranged as a Poem.
Lang will reprise his role as Colonel Miles Quaritch, Avatar’s villain who appeared definitively dead at the end of the film after taking several huge Na’vi arrows through his chest. Despite that setback, Quaritch is expected to be resurrected in some way and will appear in all the remaining sequels.
Eywa* save us all.
* Reader, I googled it.
* Lovecraft and suburbia and Stranger Things.
* Anyway, the point I’d like you to take away from this is that while it’s really hard to say “sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible”, the smart money says that it’s extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We’d need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances … and that’s for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.
* I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.
* My new favorite Twitter bot: @dungeon_junk.
* Viacom is hemorrhaging money, in part on the basis of the struggling Star Trek (and Ninja Turtles, and Ben Hur) reboot franchises.
* Friend acquires a lot of cheese. What to do with it?
* And of course you had me at Historic Midcentury Modernist Motels of the New Jersey Coast.
Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!
* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.
* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!
* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.
* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.
* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).
* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.
* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?
“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”
* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.
* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.
* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.
* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.
* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.
* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.
* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’
* Behind the Scenes at the Met.
* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.
* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.
* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.
* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.
* A(other) New Map for America.
* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!
* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.
* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!
* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.
* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.
* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!
* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.
* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.
* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.
* I was a men’s rights activist.
* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.
* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.
* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.
* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.
* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.
* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.
* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.
* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.
* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.
* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.
* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.
* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.
* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.
* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.
* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.
* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.
* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?
* And they said culture was dead!
* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.
* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.
* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.
* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.
* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?
* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?
* If you want a vision of the future.
* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.
Friday Morning Links!
* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket
* Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s rare. ‘1 in 5’: how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault statistic. Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College. Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.
* University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.
* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.
* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.
* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial’s Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.
* Good news from Rome: “All Animals Go to Heaven.” I’m really glad we settled this.
* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.
* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.
* CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn’t work, but why aren’t the architects of torture in jail? Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who “went too far.” The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That’s why they did it.
* First, do no harm: Medical profession aided CIA torture.
* “Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.” A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.
* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.
* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.
* Why James Cameron’s Aliens is the best movie about technology.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.
* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.
* Censorship (Pasadena, California).
* The nation’s millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.
* Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.
* Meet The Oldest Living Things in the World.
* And this used to be a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.
The Tuesday Links
* It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.
* So, to recap, nationalization of the health insurance industry in 2009 would have cost no more (and almost certainly a lot less) than $240 billion. The savings in waste resulting from replacing the health insurance racket with an extension of Medicare would have resulted in no less than $158 billion a year. That’s an annualized return on investment of 66 percent. The entire operation would have paid for itself in less than 18 months, and after that, an eternity of administrative efficiency for free. And, of course, happy shareholders.
* The owners of Kiko, Hercules and Leo could not be reached Monday night.
* Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.
* Academia as horror show: The Chronicle‘s 2013 “Influence” List.
* The end of tenure at Kean University?
* BREAKING: MOOCs don’t work.
* Brad DeLong says save Berkeley by “(partially) transforming it into a finishing school for the superrich of Asia.” What could go wrong?
* The latest numbers on PhDs with job commitments at graduation.
* A vote being held tomorrow and Wednesday could secure union recognition for New York University graduate students, which the administration withdrew and then withheld from them — with help from congressional Republicans and Obama’s now-Treasury Secretary — for the past eight years. If the United Auto Workers emerges victorious in the vote, NYU will become only private sector U.S. university to bargain collectively with graduate student teachers and researchers — though such workers will remain excluded from U.S. labor law.
* “This comic is shaping up to be, in many ways, a departure from the sometimes light-hearted series.” He’s taking, impossibly, about the Serenity comic followup Leaves on the Wind.
* There’s a 1,200-year-old Phone in the Smithsonian Collections.
* Good news! FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light. 1984 as instruction manual.
* The NSA has been spying on World of Warcraft.
* Inept ATF Uses Children and People With Low IQs In Sting Operations.
* Texas Student Asks Campus Cop, “You Gonna Shoot Me?” So Cop Shoots Him. Dead.
* Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, 2312, and Shaman) debates the merits of utopian thinking with Aeon Magazine’s Marina Benjamin and political theorist Alex Callinicos.
* Nice work if you can get it: Fox News Paid Fired Executive $8 Million to Keep Quiet.
* The trailer for season five of Community is out.
* And Disney can now ruin Indiana Jones, too. This is the darkest timeline.
Tuesday Links – 2!
* When Compared to Other Military Cases, How Long is Bradley Manning Likely to Be Sentenced to Prison? Just two examples of people who received lighter sentences:
US Army Specialist Albert Sombolay, in 1991, was sentenced to thirty-four years in prison for agreeing to spy for Iraq during the Gulf War for $1,300. Sombolay served 12 years of a 34-year sentence for “selling military information to foreign agents.” He was “convicted of aiding the enemy” (a charge which Manning faced but was acquitted) and committing espionage.As the Cold War was winding down, in 1989, Army Specialist 4 Michael Peri was sentenced to thirty years in prison for “passing sophisticated defense secrets to communist East Germany.” He served as an “electronic signal interceptor in the S-2 intelligence section of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Fulda” and “crossed the border into East Germany with a small computer and discs containing classified information.” He pled guilty to espionage charges and could have been sentenced to life in prison.
John Walker Lindh, of course, received only twenty years for fighting alongside the Taliban.
* When I saw the headline “Isolated Peruvian tribe attempts to make contact, asks for food,” I knew only one man could help me.
* Average faculty salaries (2012-2013).
* The “Shadow Resume”: A Career Tip for Grad Students.
* Breaking: Incomes haven’t risen since 2000.
* Federal Court To Michigan: Stop Tossing Homeless People In Jail For Begging. But what about locking them up in special camps?
* Today in psychology: Adults still suffer the effects of childhood bullying. How Being Rich Increases Narcissism.
* Steve Martin and Kermit The Frog perform “Dueling Banjos.”
* Mike Tyson plays Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! for the first time.
* And today’s headlines are yesterday’s dumb science fictions: A dentist wants to clone John Lennon from his rotten tooth.
Wednesday Links
* Since yesterday there have apparently been small earthquakes in Los Angeles and Iran, and a large one in Peru. I’m ready to call it: S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has an earthquake machine.
* Did Fracking Cause the Virginia Earthquake?
* National Level Exercise 11: a high-magnitude quake hits the New Madrid Fault, which lies on the border region of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi and on which fifteen nuclear power plants sit. More scary news: Virginia Nuclear Plant Had Quake Sensors Removed Due to Budget Cuts.
* Future Shocks: Modern Science, Ancient Catastrophes and the Endless Quest to Predict Earthquakes. Via longform.org.
* The Wire: The Complete Series is on sale today only at Amazon for $72.
* Lots of buzz today around truly outrageous exploitation of international student labor (and an eventual work action) at Hershey’s; good posts can be found at How the University Works and New APPS.
* I linked this on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth repeating: this short Portal fan film is pretty stellar.
* Hegemony watch: “The Chinese want to make Superman an honorary citizen.”
* Laughably Freudian symbolism watch: “Washington Monument may be cracked, could be closed indefinitely.”
* A big part of the problem is precisely that climate efforts so far have been almost entirely driven by liberal elites. It’s been an extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking, and as we saw with painful clarity during the climate bill fiasco, an elite-driven strategy isn’t going to cut it. Why Isn’t the Climate Left Stronger?
* As things now stand we are producing a generation of graduates whose lives are being wrecked by debts they will never be rid of (or, if they go into the Income-Based Repayment program, will be rid of in 25 years, which to be fair is only five years longer than the term of service for ordinary soldiers in the Roman Legions when that empire was at its height). The Road to Serfdom.
* And just for laughs wry, knowing half-smiles: How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker?
Crackles with Romantic Heat
Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The best inadvertently hilarious coverage comes from Entertainment Weekly:
Many Americans may know Vargas Llosa best for his 1977 comic novel, Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter, which was adapted into American director Jon Amiel’s widely praised movie Tune in Tomorrow, starring Peter Falk as a larger-than-life creator of radio soap operas who manipulates the May-December relationship of a young aspiring writer (Keanu Reeves) and his older, twice-divorced aunt by marriage (Barbara Hershey). (EW’s Owen Gleiberman said the film “crackles with romantic heat.”)
UPDATE: Couldn’t resist posting this to MetaFilter, along with some additional links.
Gerry Canavan 