Christmas Eve Eve Links

* I was on On Point on NPR last week to talk about Star Wars. How to tell if someone read the EU novels. What We Talk About When We Talk about Star Wars. Medieval Star Wars. Smash the Force. Humorless Marxist Reviews: The Force Awakens. Starkiller Base: The Contractor Memos. Star Wars as Pastiche. “We now have something like proof that life for the average citizen in the Star Wars universe would have been better off if the rebellion had failed.” The Force Awakens as Jedi rewrite. Star Wars and the monomyth of Silicon Valley. George Lucas’s Secret Weapon. The only element that actually got me excited about what another galaxy might look and feel like was Rey’s instant bread. We Need to Make Room For This Gingerbread Darth Vader in the Smithsonian. This Lifesize BB-8 Cake Is Almost Too Beautiful To Eat. ‘Star Wars,’ if it were directed by Ken Burns. #WheresRey. An inversion of stakes so monstrous that it makes the film actually despicable. Please Stop Spreading This Nonsense that Rey From Star Wars Is a “Mary Sue.” Anyway, it did okay. And from the archives: “Hobbits in Space,” 1977.

* Another classic 1980s property gets a dark, gritty reboot.

* MLA Watch: 10 Years Gone But Change Goes On: Octavia E. Butler’s Public Legacy.

* A nine-month, non-tenure position teaching “What Is The Good Life?” to up to six hundred students. I’m not sure I know what the good life is but I think I can rule out at least one thing.

* Here’s Why the SpaceX Rocket Landing Is Such a Big Deal.

* What It’s Like to Be Noam Chomsky’s Assistant.

* The case for determinism has two basic parts, material affordances and ideological construction (also called social construction).

* In short, Orcs aren’t monsters. We are.

* Better Management Through Belles Lettres.

* Pete Seeger’s FBI File.

* Simon Pegg ‘Didn’t Love’ the ‘Star Trek Beyond’ Trailer, Asks Fans to ‘Hang in There.’

* The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge: The data centers that support the Internet use a huge amount of energy.

* “yes Virginia, there is a left-wing reform movement.”

* World’s largest Star Wars cosplay association says new Star Wars villains are not evil enough.

* Marquette falls behind its peer institutions.

* As part of their early schooling, Indonesians in the Soeharto era were deliberately traumatized by the state.

* That’s right. The same educational policies that are pushing academic goals down to ever earlier levels seem to be contributing to—while at the same time obscuring—the fact that young children are gaining fewer skills, not more.

* Against The Hateful Eight.

* Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?

* Racebending Hermione, now canon.

* Historians often undermine the hopes that activists live on.

* SNL: Meet Your Second Wife.

* The Star Wars Holiday Special Was The Worst Thing on Television Ever. Look for it on How Did This Get Made? this week.

* Immediately greenlit: Quentin Tarantino Almost Made A Luke Cage Movie And Wants To Create His Own Superhero.

* And I say teach the controversy: ‘Bleeding’ Communion Wafer Caused By Mold, Not A Miracle.

Thursday!

* What happened in Atlanta this week is not a matter of Southerners blindsided by unpredictable weather. More than any event I’ve witnessed in two decades of living in and writing about this city, this snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it.

* Accreditation Standards Should Include Treatment of Adjuncts, Report Says. This has been my revolutionary scheme for a while, glad to see it could actually be feasible…

* Let Banks Fail Is Iceland Mantra as 2% Joblessness in Sight.

* “I wouldn’t go so far,” writes Horton of Kincaid’s central thesis that short science fiction exhibits all the signs of exhaustion. “I don’t think that ‘all meaning has been drained from’ the tropes we use, but I do think they are becoming overfamiliar. And I do think that the field of science fiction has to a considerable extent become enamoured with explicitly backward-looking ideas.”

* “These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty-student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.”

* Boom: A Journal of California interviews Kim Stanley Robinson.

* My friend Jack Hamilton eulogizes Pete Seeger.

* What STEM shortage? Electrical engineering lost 35,000 jobs last year.

* Utterly horrifying: Hanover College Told Rape Victim That Attempting To Have Her Alleged Rapist Punished Is Harassment.

* California is thirsty.

* UNC: We failed students “for years.”

* Maps of Hip America.

* Many watchdogs believe the police are killing more innocent Americans than ever. But here’s why they can’t be sure.

* Occupy and the Academy.

* Stradivarius violin stolen in armed robbery in Milwaukee. Said to be the biggest heist in city history.

* Some Notes on the MLA Job Information List.

* What do unionizing NCAA players want? NCAA Should Be Begging for a Union.

* Capitalism, the infernal machine: An interview with Fredric Jameson.

* The police union as philosophical problem.

* The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary.

* …41 percent of transgender and gender non-conforming people have attempted suicide, a rate far higher than the national average of 4.6 percent.

* New York Senate passes bill punishing ASA over Israel boycott.

* More on Ezra Klein’s very strange idea.

* Batgirl advocates for equal pay for equal work.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wins every prize today.

* So does this Ice-T impersonator prank calling noted Ice-T impersonator Paul F. Tompkins (as played on the second episode of the new Ice-T podcast starring Ice-T).

* New York City commissioner’s ancestors were slaves of Benedict Cumberbatch’s family.

* Climate Change Is Already Causing Mass Human Migration.

* 10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future.

* And The State reunites (for a segment anyway)…

These Tuesday Links Surround Hate and Force It to Surrender

* Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1955. This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. Some recent articles and profiles. RIP.

* CFP: New Directions in Sherlock.

* Amazing moment: Northwestern University athletes have filed for union representation with the NRLB. Now, I don’t think they’ll get it — so the really interesting question is what happens when they don’t.

* Rabon, a veterinarian, said he believes House Bill 930 is too weak. He said its standards for humane treatment could too easily be interpreted by a judge to apply to livestock as well as pets. “It can’t spill over to the animal husbandry in this state, which is an $80 billion industry – larger than the other top five industries in the state,” he said. “There is a LOT of money involved.”

* Freddie deBoer has a nice demonstration of how statistics don’t always tell you as much as you think.

* Instead of guaranteeing that poor undergraduates can get through college debt-free, the University of Virginia decided it’s going to make low-income students borrow up to $28,000.

* More on the brokenness of the Common Core.

* The new face of food stamps.  Of the top five jobs projected to grow from 2012 to 2022, only one—registered nurse—provides an annual, full-time salary over $22,000.

* The Fantasy Politics of the Libertarian Alliance.

* BREAKING: The past isn’t done with you yet.

With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death-penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

* Kubrick’s alternate titles for Dr. Strangelove.

* Jonathan Banks is officially part of Better Call Saul.

* Lawsuit Blames Uber App for Death of 6-Year-Old Girl.

* West Virginia as colonized zone.

* Five years into his presidency, Obama has finally issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contracts. Can solving climate change be far behind?

* “Academic freedom” is a funny phrase: New York bill to punish ASA over Israel boycott picks up 48 supporters.

* Man Charged With Shooting And Killing Own Neighbors Because He Wrongly Thought They Were Trespassing.

* Florida Man’s Very Own Backyard Gun Range Is Perfectly Legal.

* Marquette just got $10 million to build a new JesRes.

* An 83-year-old nun faces up to 30 years in prison for breaking into a nuclear weapons facility.

* Here’s why Ezra Klein left the Washington Post. This is my skeptical face, but good luck.

* Horrific: After Being Denied A Snow Day, University Of Illinois Students Respond With Racism And Sexism.

* The crisis is over! Colleges are rich again!

* Queens Library president gets $390G salary, luxe office makeover while shedding 130 jobs.

* BREAKING: Austerity politics don’t work. No one could have predicted!

* A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Birds Attack Peace Doves Freed From Pope’s Window.

* Let kids be kids: Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

* The invention of jaywalking.

* Understand academic labor the Brady Bunch way.

* Rebecca Schuman hangs up on her “calling.”

* And some linkbait I can never resist: 22 Unbelievable Places that are Hard to Believe Really Exist.

Bill O’Reilly Has Finally Gone Too Far

Bill O’Reilly has finally gone too far.

Bill O’Reilly has a plan for the Republican Party to get its mojo back: Go after Bruce Springsteen!

…O’Reilly last night, in his Talking Points Memo segment, cites a remark Springsteen made at the Pete Seeger tribute concert the other night:

At 90, he [Seeger] remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. … He sings all the verses, all the time. Especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people.

This incensed O’Reilly — who nonetheless spotted an opportunity therein:

Now, Bruce Springsteen is not a PhD in political science, obviously. But his snide reference to America defines how the far left sees this country. And you know what? Most liberal and conservative Americans disagree with him.

So let me spell this out to that even the Republican leadership can understand it. Get solutions to problems. Explain your Culture War positions clearly and without spite. And most important, stick up for America! Because the Democrats are certainly not doing that. Use that strategy, GOP, and you’ll get back in the game.

Video at the link. Here’s “American Land” from the Greensboro show last week.

The McNicholas, the Posalski’s, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they’re still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down…

Needless to say I don’t think “snide” is quite the word. All the verses, without illusions.