Posts Tagged ‘Peter Jackson’
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
No, *These* Are the Weekend Links
* I have a short entry in SFRA Review‘s ongoing “101” series for science fiction scholars, “Ecology 101.”
* Avoiding gender bias in reference writing.
* Presenting The Journal of Hate Studies.
* Peter Jackson Freely Admits The Hobbit‘s Production Was a Shambles.
* How property rights in outer space may lead to a scramble to exploit the moon’s resources.
* Academic job market watch: Simplify the Job Application Process.
* CNN Reporter Suspended Two Weeks For Tweet Expressing Sympathy Toward Syrian Refugees.
* Black Tape Over Black Faculty Portraits at Harvard Law School.
* I can’t believe they found a way to make it creepier.
* The hawk and the mouse are playing the same sport, but the hawk is playing it much better.
* Adaptation of Unfilmable Vonnegut Novel Now Has Slim Chance of Not Being Terrible.
* Goodnight Moon and modernism.
* The news for Obamacare just gets worse and worse. Death spiral?
* These Are the Most Spectacular Nature Photos of the Year.
* Most movies would be lucky to open to $50 million. Four weeks before its debut, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has more than that in the bank.
* Adaptation of Unfilmable Vonnegut Novel Now Has Slim Chance of Not Being Terrible.
* It was thirty years ago today.
* I won’t hear it, and I won’t respond to it.
* And old Klingons never die, they just fade away.
Weekend Links!
* South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder of Walter Scott. The police can’t police themselves. And now the public is too scared to cooperate with them. Police Reform Is Impossible in America. The Police Are America’s Terrorists. Man Who Recorded Walter Scott Murder Is Worried Police May Kill Him. White America’s Silence on Police Brutality Is Consent.
* Montreal professors stare down riot cops.
* Colleges are raising costs because they can.
* How self-segregation and concentrated affluence became normal in America.
* How to survive a mega-drought.
* The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct.
* In The Midst Of Toxic Oil Spill, Vancouver Announces It Will Go 100 Percent Renewable.
* Report: Hillary Clinton Overlooked Labor Violations After Millions in Donations. Guess what I’m #ready for?
* Is Hillary Clinton even any good at running for president?
* Elizabeth Warren Is Right About Everything.
* The Columbia Report on Rolling Stone‘s Rape Story Is Bad for Journalism.
* The Brontosaurus Is Back. Take that, science!
* A Map Showing UFO Hot Spots Across The United States.
* The analysis concluded that, over the past 10 years, the five pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said in an interview on Wednesday.
* The man who was accidentally released from prison 88 years early.
* What Was On a 1920s Membership Application for the KKK?
* Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale.
* Wired proves the laws of physics don’t apply to Legolas.
* Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to get even more boring spinoff. If that’s possible.
* Memorial for the “Unknown Deserter” – Potsdam, Germany.
* The Photographer Who Took This Picture Barely Escaped With His Life.
* This Probably Made Up Reddit Story About a Potato Is Incredibly Good.
* There’s nothing sweet in life.
* Lili Loofbourow takes the bait on the “is that all there is?” Mad Men and boredom thinkpiece. Also from Lili: You Should Be Watching ‘Fortitude,’ A Murder-Mystery That Makes Climate Change The Real Villain.
* Arrested Development returning for 17 episodes, according to Brian Grazer.
* A cheat sheet for figuring out where in the US you are by recognizing the background from movies.
* 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* And I really hope they catch him this time.
Course Descriptions for Fall 2015 (Yes, Already!)
Course Number: 4610/5610
Course Title & Subtitle: Individual Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien
Course Description: This decade will see the hundredth anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s earliest writings on Middle-Earth (The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917) alongside the completion of Peter Jackson’s career-defining twenty-year project to adapt The Lord of the Rings for film (1995-2015). This course asks the question: Who is J.R.R. Tolkien, looking backward from the perspective of the twenty-first century? Why have his works, and the genre of heroic fantasy which he remade so completely in his image, remained so intensely popular, even as the world has transformed around them? Our study will primarily trace the history, development, and reception of Tolkien’s incredible magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-1949, published 1954-1955)—but we will also take up Tolkien’s contested place in the literary canon of the twentieth century, the uses and abuses of Tolkien in Jackson’s blockbuster films, and the ongoing critical interests and investments of Tolkien fandom today. As Tolkien scholars we will also have the privilege of drawing upon the remarkable J.R.R. Tolkien Collection at the Raynor Library here at Marquette, which contains the original manuscripts for The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Major Readings: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and selected additional readings
Assignments: two shorter papers, one final paper, weekly forum posts, one presentation, class participation
Course Number: 6700
Course Title & Subtitle: Studies in Twentieth Century American Literature: American Literature after the American Century
Course Description: In 1941, Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce called upon the twentieth century to be “the first great American Century,” and it’s been ending ever since. This course takes up American literary and cultural studies from the post-everything standpoint of the “after.” What is it to study American literature today, after the American Century, after American exceptionalism, after modernity, after the university, after the idea of the future itself? Our shared investigation into contemporary critical and scholarly practices will focus on key controversies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary study, including the ongoing reevaluation of “the canon” (Lolita), popular culture studies (The Body Snatchers), identity and identity politics (Dawn), nationalism and transnationalism (Tropic of Orange), postmodernity and neoliberalism (the short stories of David Foster Wallace), and ecocriticism in the Anthropocene (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). Our reading will also draw heavily on recent scholarship in critical theory, especially “the new American studies” and the emerging discipline of critical university studies. Alongside weekly reflections and enthusiastic class participation, students in this course will produce a 15-20 page seminar paper on a subject of their choosing related to the themes of the course, as well as present their work to their peers in a conference-presentation format and develop a sample syllabus for an undergraduate course in American literary or cultural studies.
Readings: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers; Octavia E. Butler, Dawn; Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; the short stories of David Foster Wallace; selected additional readings
Assignments: weekly reflections, class participation, conference-style presentation, seminar paper (15-20 pages), sample syllabus
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
* Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette. Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long. As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to discuss this all at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example on Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a campus and for the students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21: “Indigeneities.”
* Climate change comes to Shishmaref, Alaska. Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
* But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: “hands up” transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages—the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, “hands up” isn’t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one’s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other—deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black—become the objects of state violence. “Hands up” cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
* Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man. Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops. California Cop Tweets That He Will ‘Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill’ Protesters. Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality. UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’ Cops Off Campus.
* Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse — If You’re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
* Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
* Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built. They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years. Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase. ASU English by the Numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
* Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
* The ‘Job Market’ That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile: According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp! The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
* The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It’s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
* The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
* Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions, suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
* This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
* Five Stories About Addiction.
* Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It’s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so. On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA’s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
* The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
* Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
* All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
* Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
* 18 Badass Women You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand — a stern “hush hush” to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens’s claim that “our belief is not a belief” could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, “atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.” He claims being an agnostic would be “a truer liberation” since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming — a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett’s Hamm when he exclaims, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”
* The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing—It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k altogether.
Super Ultra Mega Monday Links
* That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it. The American Justice System Is Not Broken.
* Why Should Anyone “Respect” the Law?
* Autopsy: Milwaukee cop shot mentally-ill black man from above and behind, 14 times. Wave of Protests After Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Officer in Eric Garner Chokehold Case. But they did manage to indict the man who filmed the murder. Worse Than Eric Garner: Cops Who Got Away With Killing Autistic Men and Little Girls. Prosecutors throwing grand jury inquiries to save killer cops. NYPD Abuse Increases Settlements Costing City $735 Million. Rookie NYPD cop who shot unarmed black man texted union reps before radioing for help. The cop who murdered Tamir Rice should never have been a cop. Grand Jury Clears Two Former Jasper Cops Who Beat Woman in Jail. Seattle Cop Who Punched a Handcuffed Woman in the Face Won’t Be Charged. Coastal Carolina students detained after writing unapproved chalk messages about Ferguson on campus sidewalks. Cop Fired for Beating a Non-violent, Handcuffed Man On Video, Gets Job Back AND Back Pay. Inside the Twisted Police Department That Kills Unarmed Citizens at the Highest Rate in the Country. The Deadly Self-Pity of the Police. Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose. Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. Where Are All the Good Cops? Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a riot. If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces. The real scandal of police violence is what’s legal.
* But body cameras that the cops can freely turn on and off and whose footage they completely control will definitely solve it. You don’t have to take my word for it.
* Hey! My tuition bought you that shotgun. More links under the photo.
* Stories of unseen lives and the effects homelessness in Milwaukee.
* Racial inequality is objectively worse than 30 years ago. And another deBoer instant classic: Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.
* On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014. Chris Rock vs. the industry.
* Marquette University response to Westboro Baptist Church protest.
* Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims. What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie’s fault. Blame Rolling Stone. The lesson of Rolling Stone and UVA: protecting victims means checking their stories. Reporters are not your friends.
* And just when I was thinking The Newsroom had actually gotten pretty good: Emily Nussbaum on The Newsroom‘s Crazy-Making Campus-Rape Episode. The AC Club: D-.
* Something I’d somehow missed when it was new, but came across in research for a new piece on zombies I’m working on: Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.
* Science fiction after Ferguson: An interview with Walidah Imarisha.
* SF as R&D for the very powerful: U.S. spy agency predicts a very transhuman future by 2030.
* Imagining an open source Star Wars.
* On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Oregon: Admin threatens to deport striking international grad students, just straight-up make-up grades. U Oregon and the Academic Labor System. Megapost at MetaFilter.
* The Democrats’ Education Plan: Class War. Resegregation.
* Cal Refuses to Pay Berkeley Minimum Wage.
* Colleges that pledged to help poor families have been doing the opposite, new figures show.
* An update on the Salaita case from Corey Robin.
* “If students have time to get drunk, colleges aren’t doing their job.” MetaFilter links to the full series at CHE.
* The Equipment 117 Colleges Have Acquired From the Dept. of Defense.
* What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings.
* The latest New Inquiry on illness is another stellar issue from a publication that always delivers. This piece on love and schizophrenia is the one making the rounds currently.
* Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report. John Kerry’s sad legacy.
* It Takes Nearly $100,000 a Year in Earnings Just to Buy a Crappy House in L.A.
* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”
* Milwaukee after the recession: the jobs are going to the suburbs.
* Social justice as a means to social capital.
* 12 Female Characters Who Keep Shaving Despite Constant Peril.
* The music industry is a horror show, like everything else.
* Remembering Bhopal, the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.
* We nearly saved the world, but we couldn’t give up our precious academic annual meetings.
* California drought the worst in 1,200 years, new study says. Won’t someone cancel the MLA before it kills again!
* First ever British sci-fi feature film released. Congratulations, England! Looking forward to your next one.
* 40 Years Ago, Earth Beamed Its First Postcard to the Stars.
* Court Hears Second Case for a Chimpanzee’s Legal Rights.
* Sony has apparently gone to war with North Korea. The future is weird, y’all.
* Someone Made A Map Of Every Rude Place Name In The UK.
* Shimer College: The Best Worst College in America.
* I mock the idea of “the law” around here a lot, but I never for the life of me imagined a scenario where the emergence of a video that shows a man accused of murdering his stepdaughter defiling her corpse could be bad news for the prosecution.
* Breaking news: the rich are different.
* So, for some reason, are the left-handed.
* But it’s not all bad news: The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like.
* The British Government Wants To Build A Tunnel Under Stonehenge.
* If I’m being perfectly honest I got bored watching the three-minute “What if The Hobbit was one movie?” trailer.
* Scholars, start your syllabi: New novel from Toni Morrison coming in April.
* Wes Anderson’s The Force Awakens. If only!
* And about 100 brains are missing from University of Texas. I’m late posting this, alas; all the easy jokes have already been taken…
Wednesday Links!
* Today at Marquette! Dr. Robin Reid, “Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.”
* Tomorrow at Marquette! The English Department pop culture group geeks out over The Hunger Games.
* Solving prostitution the Swedish way.
“In Sweden prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence against women and children. It is officially acknowledged as a form of exploitation of women and children and constitutes a significant social problem… gender equality will remain unattainable so long as men buy, sell and exploit women and children by prostituting them.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 13: Engagement.
The point of engagement in this sense is not to involve the public in making decisions, but make them feel involved in decisions that others will make. That this may be done with the best of intentions is important, of course, but ultimately besides the point. Like “stakeholder,” “engagement” thrives in a moment of political alienation and offers a vocabulary of collaboration in response. So if civic engagement is in decline, one thing that is not is the ritualistic performance of civic participation. The annual election-cycle ritual in American politics is a case in point here. In one populist breath, we routinely condemn the corruption of politicians who, it is said, never listen to the average voter. And in the next, we harangue the average voter for failing to participate in a process we routinely describe as corrupted. So it’s not the “apathy” or “disengagement” of the public that we should lament or criticize—it’s the institutions that give them so many reasons to be disengaged in the first place.
* A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks.
JR: In the past you have said that you are a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. Could you expand on this a bit: why are you pessimistic about the short term? What changes do you anticipate taking place between the near and far futures that change your pessimism to optimism?
IB: On a personal level, it’s damage limitation; a sanity-keeping measure. Expect the worst and anything even only half-decent seems like something to celebrate. The pessimism comes from a feeling that as a species we seem unable to pass up any opportunity to behave stupidly, self-harmfully (the Copenhagen climate talks being but the latest example). The long-term optimism comes from the the fact that no matter how bad things seem and how idiotically and cruelly we behave. . . well, we’ve got this far, despite it all, and there are more people on the planet than ever before, and more people living good, productive, relatively happy lives than ever before, and—providing we aren’t terminally stupid, or unlucky enough to get clobbered by something we have no control over, like a big meteorite or a gamma ray buster or whatever—we’ll solve a lot of problems just by sticking around and doing what we do; developing, progressing, improving, adapting. And possibly by inventing AIs that are smarter and more decent than we are, which will help us get some sort of perspective on ourselves, at the very least. We might just stumble our way blindly, unthinkingly into utopia, in other words, muddling through despite ourselves.
* “Gamechanging” climate deal that seems radically insufficient to the scale of the crisis. What could go wrong?
* Think Progress has a good rundown on King v. Burwell, the case that could kill Obamacare. Eight Reasons to Stop Freaking Out About the Supreme Court’s Next Obamacare Case.
* The growth of auxiliary activities was the primary driver in spending increases by the schools, the report concludes. From 2005 to 2012, $3.4 billion was spent on instructional and research facilities. The cost for nonacademic auxiliary facilities was $3.5 billion from 2002 to 2012. Limit athletic fees, check construction to control college costs, study says.
* The State Funding Sleight-Of-Hand: Some Thoughts on UC’s Proposed Tuition Hike.
* The Vitae Adjunct Retirement Survey.
* ProQuest says it won’t sell dissertations through Amazon anymore.
* Why Wall Street Loves Hillary
* It’s a start: Massachusetts Town Proposes First Complete Ban On All Tobacco.
* Inside America’s inept nuclear corps.
* The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is under attack by critics who say academe is colluding with the mainstream media to push a feminist agenda in video games. How deep does this conspiracy go?
* When we think about the collapse of communism, we should emphasize and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy — not free enterprise.
* Can You Gentrify America’s Poorest, Most Dangerous City?
* Today, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration announced through the New York Times that it may stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession, opting instead to issue tickets without detaining the suspect. This would feel like an important step toward reasonable weed policy if New York state hadn’t already mandated it 37 years ago.
* The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars. Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize.
* One in every 8 arrests was for a drug offense last year.
* Milwaukee Public Museum’s Sci-Fi Film Fest gathers large audience.
* Running a school on $160 a year.
* Is Pre-K academically rigorous enough? That’s a real question this real article is asking.
* Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry.
* Grace Dunham is now an adult and she read this book before it was published. She is managing her sister’s book tour and they are best friends. Are we really going to overlook this?
* Also on the subject of Lena Dunham: this is an extremely clickbaity headline, but the testimony from a juvenile sex offender is fascinating and horrible.
* Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.
* In America, today’s parents have inherited expectations they can no longer afford. The vigilant standards of the helicopter parents from the baby boomer generation have become defined as mainstream practice, but they require money that the average household earning $53,891 per year— and struggling to survive in an economy in its seventh year of illusory “recovery”— does not have. The result is a fearful society in which poorer parents are cast as threats to their own children.
* Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia.
* Scientists Have Finally Found The First Real Reason We Need To Sleep.
* Wes Anderson might be making another movie with puppets.
* In its gentle sadness, its deceptively light tone, and its inherent contradictions, this is the perfect ending to The Next Generation. One of these days, the crew will be dispersed. The Enterprise will be put in mothballs. Starfleet will complete its transformation into a body that none of them particularly want to serve in. But for now, their voyages continue.
* Peak Prequel: Sony Rumored to Be Prepping Aunt May Spider-Man Spin-Off Movie.
* And the best news ever: HBO Will Make Asimov’s Foundation With Interstellar‘s Jonathan Nolan. I may lose my mind over this show. I may even do a podcast. And a lot of what went wrong with Interstellar wasn’t even Jonathan Nolan’s fault!
All the Weekend Links You’ll Ever Need
* Key Findings in Chapel Hill’s Academic-Fraud Investigation. I find the scale of this thing totally amazing; that the NCAA is still claiming it has no jurisdiction here is also amazing. It’ll be interesting to see UNC’s next accreditation report.
* Another sportsball-related disaster that the NCAA, alas, just can’t do anything about: Many Athletes Receive Little Education on Concussion.
* Lawsuit Alleges College Athletes Should Be Paid at Least Minimum Wage. The NCAA wishes it could act.
* S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education.
* Miami University gave George Will four adjuncts’ yearly salary for this nonsense. But presidents of higher ed nonprofits say that’s chump change.
* Study: we should probably just abolish men.
* Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Birth Control. So old I can remember when giving employers direct veto power over health care was the reductio ad absurdum of the Hobby Lobby case.
* Surfers of the nightmare Internet: The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed.
* The Anti-Socialist Origins of Big Data.
* African Writers in a New World. The interviews in this series will lead up to the Symposium of African Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. The event, which will take place December 2-3, 2014, will feature conversations with Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and Taiye Selasi. “African Writers in a New World” will conclude with a conference report from the Symposium.
* It became necessary to destroy Detroit in order to save it. And Chicago. And pretty much everywhere.
* Rio has used mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics as a “state of exception” to push through private development projects and neoliberal reforms. The Jock Doctrine.
* America’s perpetual state of emergency.
* I said on Twitter that this “13th grade” pilot program in Oregon seems like an example of Goodhart’s Law, though I think I could probably be convinced otherwise.
* Republicans increasingly saying the quiet part loud.
* And that’s not even a link to this utterly bizarre video from AEI about roofies.
* Infidels defile the sacrament: I suspect some of the irrationality around voter ID laws might be linked to Stephen Keating’s notion of voting as religious ritual.
* Speaking of saying the quiet part loud: Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have A Constitutional Right To Use Excessive Force.
* At about 4 a.m., officers were dispatched to 3779 W. 5300 South to check on a man who had called a suicide hotline, according to Detective Matt Gwynn, the public information officer for Roy Police Department. A negotiator from the SWAT team was then brought in, and Gwynn says a 6- to 6 ½-hour standoff ensued. “At some point those negotiations failed and unfortunately the SWAT team was involved in a shooting, and the subject is now deceased,” Gwynn said.
* Cops Use Action-Movie Arsenal to Catch Teen Who Stole Cigarettes. I just thank god they caught the guy.
* CHP officer says stealing nude photos from female arrestees ‘game’ for cops.
* Cash damages for woman duped into having undercover spy’s child.
* Climate Change Is Causing Mountain Goats To Shrink. Will you act now, America?
* Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit Of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm.
* By pretending climate change isn’t real we develop the tax base to deal with climate change. With a plan this solid, what could go wrong?
* I’m sure Miami seceding from the rest of Florida would solve it. Of course Republicans have a better idea.
* The United States of Reddit.
* It’s nearly impossible to fire a tech millionaire.
* I mean really, we need to figure out how to fire some of these guys.
* On the Internet, Men Are Called Names. Women Are Stalked and Sexually Harassed. Cassandra among the creeps.
* Matt Yglesias Entirely Misunderstands Why [Anything] Exists.
* Peter Jackson vows Battle of the Fire Armies will be literally unwatchable.
* J.K. Rowling releasing new Harry Potter story about Dolores Umbridge.
* If you call slipstream “transrealism” it sounds like a new thing.
* You’re finally getting (another) dark, gritty Archie reboot.
* What’s my risk of catching Ebola? But that’s no reason not to panic.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on “Mount Thoreau” and the naming of things in the wilderness.
* Science proves I listen to Counting Crows because I’m just that smart. So it’s not my fault and no one can blame me. I’m as much a victim as anyone.
* And io9 has your Top 100 Science Fiction-Themed Songs Of All Time. That they left off “Nothing But Flowers” is a crime against all time and space.
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Monday Links
* 19 Regional Words All Americans Should Adopt Immediately.
* Take the New York Times‘s dialect quiz.
* CFP: Graphic Treatment: Zombies, Medicine, and Comics.
* The point is truth and beauty, without which our lives will lack grace and meaning and our civilization will be spiritually hollowed out and the historical bottom line will be that future epochs will remember us as a coarse and philistine people who squandered our bottomlessly rich cultural inheritance for short-term and meaningless financial advantage. And that is why you should major in English.
* Wisconsin ranks #1 in the country for our rate of incarcerating African Americans. The state’s incarceration rate is 12.8%, meaning that one in eight black men are currently in state prison. In Milwaukee, the numbers are even more stark. More than half of the black men in Milwaukee have been incarcerated at one point or another, leaving them virtually unemployable as more and more employers run routine background checks. 2/3s of them are in the cities 6 poorest zip codes.
* Rebecca Schuman v. Riverside.
* Remember Black Mountain SOLE, the big MOOC U experiment? No one could have predicted it would turn out to be a complete sham.
* Our research confirms that there is a direct correlation between institutional prestige and candidate placement. If we consider the highest ranked programs, the three tied at #1, we find that Harvard University has successfully placed 239 political scientists at 75 institutions—including twelve at Harvard. Princeton has successfully placed 108 political scientists at 62 institutions—including five at Princeton. Stanford has successfully placed 128 political scientists at 51 institutions—including three at Stanford. The highest ranked public university, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (ranked number four overall), has successfully placed 141 political scientists in 61 institutions—including seven at Michigan. These four schools contribute 616 political scientists; roughly twenty percent of the total tenure-track lines in the discipline at research-intensive programs. The median institutional ranking for the 116 institutions covered is eleven, which implies that eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political science PhD programs are graduating students that will contest the remaining 50 percent of openings. More links below the chart.
* On the ASA Boycott and Its Backlash.
* The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work.
* Peer review or smear review? Reflections on a rigged system.
* George Zimmerman discovers secret loophole to becoming a successful artist.
* Interactive graphic: median income across the US.
* These 2 Cities Are Now Exclusively For Rich People.
* Write A House Is Giving Writers Free Homes In Detroit.
* The bedroom tax was designed not just to reduce the welfare bill, but to make an example of those whose benefits were cut. Britain has a housing shortage and a costly welfare state, due to high unemployment, chronic low wages, and an unresolved global economic crisis for which British banks are partly to blame. The bedroom tax sharpens a structural economic problem into a attack on the poor and sick, who are now to be considered lazy, luxuriating in more space than they need in some of the most crowded cities on earth. It’s not just about the money. It’s about making sure people with disabilities and mental health problems no longer get the basic space to live.
* Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than 800,000 students. To maintain prerecession staffing ratios, public school employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
* FBI agent tries to copyright super-secret torture manual, inadvertently makes it public.
* Elf advocates are successfully delaying Icelandic road projects due to concerns over the possibility of elf nesting habitats in rural lava fields. Concerns over the “hidden folk” are central to Icelandic culture — according to a 2007 poll, 62 percent of Icelandic residents think it’s at least possible that elves exist.
* Bloomberg, Dasani, and the undeserving poor at Christmas.
* Compulsory monogamy in The Hunger Games.
* Why The Desolation of Smaug Is Peter Jackson’s Phantom Menace.
* How the New Yorker covered the Moon landing.
* More simply, as they say in the article, “the Republican Party has engaged in strategic demobilization efforts in response to changing demographics, shifting electoral fortunes, and an internal rightward ideological drift among the party faithful.” Those demobilization efforts are targeted towards black voters in particular, minority voters in general, as well as the poor, all of whom tend to vote Democratic, while they seek to avoid impacting elderly (white) voters who tend to vote Republican. It’s also worth noting that both the efforts and the research is not limited to voter ID laws, but includes proof of citizenship requirements, registration restrictions, and absentee and early voting restrictions. There is a tendency, even among liberals, to dismiss such efforts as simply a legitimate effort to ensure that people have ids. Leaving aside that this still can be a barrier to exercising a fundamental right, such arguments obviously don’t apply to all these restrictions. While they found a small influence for accusations of “voter fraud” this is dwarfed by these other considerations. Targeting the Right To Vote.
* Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal runs an op-ed just straight out calling for a return to white male rule. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Tuesday!
* OK, let us persist in the notion that I am an American citizen. Let us persist in the notion that I am the citizen of a self-governing political commonwealth. Let us persist in the notion that I have a say — and important and equal say — in the operation of my government here and out in the world. Let us persist in the notion that, in America, the people rule. If we persist in these notions — and, if we don’t, what’s the fking point, really? — then there is only one question that I humbly ask of my government this week. Please, if it’s not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what’s being done in my name?
* “Right to work” is the most dishonest phrase in American political discourse. It sounds like it’s defending people’s right to earn a living. But as used by its supporters, it means making it impossible for workers to form an effective union, couched in the language of “freedom” and “choice.”
* Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary.
* We Already Tried Libertarianism – It Was Called Feudalism.
* But the problem of eviction runs deeper and reaches back further than even the beginning of the 20th century. Modern history starts with eviction.
* Justin D. Martin has graciously volunteered to be the first person to lose his job to a MOOC.
* Remaking the university: Suffice to say that major cost savings cannot be the rationale for the Georgia Tech arrangement. In the ramp-up period, terribly high per-MOOC costs could be justified by mass enrollments, but unfortunately from the VC point of view the masses take these courses for free. These production costs also collide with increasing awareness of large faculty time inputs: Duke’s Dan Ariely and Cathy Davidson report 150 hours of their time per hour of “actual MOOC.” Prof. Davidson’s phrase in a subsequent post is “insanely labor intensive” — in exchange for a $10,000 stipend that she spent entirely on assistants. Many MOOC watchers are now concluding, as she does, that MOOCs do not have a way of making up for massive public funding cuts.
* The first issue of All-Star Superman is free from DC Comics today.
* And The Hobbit 2: Hardly Hobbitin’ has a trailer. My tentative reaction is pretty serious disappointment: however the final effects will look, at this resolution just about everything looks really fake, from the dwarf in the barrel in the river to Smaug to anything involving Legolas in any way. I like the one shot of Bilbo poking his head above Mirkwood, and that’s it. Nerd rant over! But for how long?
Wednesday
* William Lloyd Garrison on privilege-checking.
* An oral history of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing.
* China Wins Iraq War. Jon Stewart had a “kidding on the square” segment lamenting this the other night.
* Britain agrees settlement for Kenya’s Mau Mau victims.
* First look at Embarrassing Tolkien Cosplay The Hobbit, Part 2.
* “Stand Your Ground” is funny. It’s legal to murder your wife’s lover, but not to fire warning shot at your abuser.
* And all you people are saying “syrup” wrong. 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other.
This Week at Marquette! A Roundtable Discussion of Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’
Please join us for a lively discussion of the first installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movie trilogy, which opened in theaters on December 14, 2012.
Four Tolkien scholars will assess Jackson’s new film with audience comments and Q&A to follow:
Dr. Robin Reid, Texas A&M University (moderator)
Dr. Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Dr. Edward L. Risden, St. Norbert College
Richard C. West, UW-Madison
The event is free and open to the Marquette and Milwaukee communities. Space is limited so please telephone the library archives by noon on Wednesday, February 20th to pre-register: (414) 288-7256. Two parking structures (Wells Street between 12th and 13th; and 16th St. between Wisconsin and Wells) are open to visitors for a fee; a campus map and driving directions to campus are here. Questions about the event may be addressed to archivist Bill Fliss by e-mail or phone (414) 288-5906.
This event is the final for the 2012-2013 academic year to celebrate The Hobbit’s 75th anniversary. Read more about our 2012-2013 celebration.
It is made possible by the Tolkien Archives Fund established by the late Richard G. Blackwelder and augmented by a generous donation from trustee emerita Mrs. Mercedes Hurley Hughes.
‘I Could Have Read Past This Point in the Book in the Time It Takes Jackson to Show It’
I spent that time pondering what it would have been like if earlier movies had so stingily dealt out their adventure stories: If Star Wars ended with Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, “That’s no moon — it’s a space station.” If Raiders of the Lost Ark closed will Salah shouting, “Indy! I can see the map room!” If Gremlins ended at 11:59 p.m.
How Much of The Hobbit Can You Read During the Running Time of The Hobbit?
Gerry Canavan 
