Posts Tagged ‘polar vortex’
Another Day of Extreme Cold, Another Link Post
* CFP: The State of the Single-Author Study (also MLA 2020, deadline March 15). As Sean Guynes-Vishniac noted hopefully an SF studies scholar will participate as this has been a major site of research in recent years, largely due to the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.
* Just for the record: Polar vortex: what is it and how is it linked to climate change?
* Greta Thunberg: Act As If Our House Is on Fire. Because It Is.
* Kamala Harris picked a fight with the wrong fandom.
* Sanders’s bill, the “For the 99.8% Act,” would tax the estates of the 0.2 percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million, while the rest of the country “would not see their taxes go up by one penny under this plan,” according to aides to the Vermont senator, who is considering a 2020 presidential bid.
* Democrats Must Reach Out to Moderates in 2020 — By Waging a Vicious Class War.
* How a frustrated blogger made expanding Social Security a reasonable idea.
* Joshua Tree national park ‘may take 300 years to recover’ from shutdown. And another shutdown is just a few short weeks away!
* Modern Weather Forecasts Are Stunningly Accurate.
How much better? “A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”
* Cop watch: This Is What Truancy Laws Do. Feds used fake Michigan university in immigration sting. ICE force-feeding detainees on hunger strike. An asylum seeker’s quest to get her toddler back.
* OxyContin Maker Explored Expansion Into “Attractive” Anti-Addiction Market.
* Once you have your sensitivity raised about a particular condition, you see the abuses they suffer everywhere. Florida School Staffers Charged With Using Dark Room, Whistle to Torment Autistic Kids.
* You can report the news in a way that doesn’t inform anyone.
* Bipartisan agreement that Donald Trump is God’s chosen instrument for destroying the United States.
* No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture.
* What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free?
* I basically pitched this story in Graz, talking about the difference between Aquaman and Namor: Namor, ecoterrorist.
* The Beginning of the End of Capitalist Realism.
* Today in the liberal media’s endless drumbeat for war.
* 1984.
* It looks like I’ve accidentally made a terrific financial decision.
“We find that LEGO investments outperform large stocks, bonds, gold and other alternative investments, yielding the average return of at least 11% (8% in real terms) in the sample period 1987-2015,” write the authors of a study titled LEGO – The Toy of Smart Investors. “Small and huge sets, as well as seasonal, architectural and movie-based sets, deliver higher returns. LEGO returns are not exposed to market, value, momentum and volatility risk factors, but have an almost unit exposure to the size factor. A positive multifactor alpha of 4-5%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.4, a positive return skewness and a low exposure to standard risk factors make the LEGO toy an attractive alternative investment with a good diversification potential.”
* What You Should Know Before You Start Watching Porn.
* Scenes from the Anthropocene.
* And just in time for teaching SimCity later this semester: Behind one of the most iconic computer games of all time is a theory of how cities die—one that has proven dangerously influential.
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.
* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We’re Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
No Bad News Today Links
* The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.
* Where Black History and Floods Intertwine.
* I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords.
* CFP: The David Foster Wallace Conference has extended its deadline to January 15.
* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.
* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.
* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.
* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.
* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.
* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.
* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.
* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.
* The birthering of the Democrats.
* Japanese American Historical Plaza.
* The smoke break and solidarity.
* Robots and literary criticism.
* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.
* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.
* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.
* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.
* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.
* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.
* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.
* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.
* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.
* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.
* This is some Black Mirror shit.
* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.
* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.
* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’
Do They Even Know It’s Wednesday Links
* Great visit yesterday to STS at Riverside! Really enjoyed it.
* For the black community in America, there has never been a “normal” baseline experience from which emergencies are exceptions: unfortunate but episodic deviations. Rather, it has been a rolling emergency, interrupted by brief windows of relative promise. And from this perspective, perhaps we can understand the enigmatic “real state of exception” that Benjamin calls for — because from the perspective of white power, those moments of promise are the true emergencies that must be shut down at all costs.
* Indicting A System Not A Man…. Indict the System, Not Just Darren Wilson. No more Missouri compromises.
* Apocalypse now: chocolate could disappear by 2020.
* Wisconsin as a Frontier of School Privatization: Will Anyone Notice the Looting?
* Just a short rumination on the greatness of comics from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* Marquette in the… sigh. Philosophy Grad Student Target of Political Smear Campaign.
* The potential benefit for higher-earning graduate students is “a policy accident,” says Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. “And who’s going to figure this out? Probably people with graduate degrees.”
* Ladies and gentlemen, your rising Democratic stars: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
* New Project to Digitize 10,000 Sci-Fi Zines.
* Museum on slave trade planned for Episcopal cathedral in Providence.
* Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15. Here’s Marquette:
* Exciting untapped market in higher education: Colleges Encourage Graduates to Seek Second Bachelor’s Degrees.
* In recognition of the evening, Ms. Stamm’s husband, Arthur Stamm, made a gift of $100,000. At the time, it was the largest gift the college had received from a single donor in its 42-year history.
Since January alone, by contrast, Duke University, which educates 14,850 students on its 8,709-acre campus, has received gifts and pledges of $1 million or more on the average of every six or seven weeks. In those gifts alone, the university has already raised about $49 million this year. And yet, according to the latest ranking, its endowment of close to $6 billion in 2012 did not earn it a place among the country’s 10 richest schools, a list led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
* More scenes from the class struggle at elite universities.
* Karl Stefanovic’s sexism experiment: Today presenter wears same suit for a year.
* To remember Mandela is to remember Robben Island.
* Police officers in Florida surprised students, teachers and parents Thursday with an active shooter drill. And by “active shooter drill,” we mean that a Winter Haven middle school went into lockdown as two armed police officers burst into classrooms, guns drawn, leaving the unsuspecting children terrified — and their parents furious.
* Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.
* What Shakespeare taught me about Marxism.
* No capital projects but the end of capital.
* The rich want everything. They even want to suffer most from inequality!
* To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.
* At This Rate, The World Will Have To Cease All Carbon Emissions In 2040 To Stay Under 2°C.
* Just another average November, nbd: Buffalo, N.Y., area in the midst of a truly insane lake effect snow storm.
* Mark Fisher has one of the better anti-identity-politics pieces I’ve seen on the left: Exiting the Vampires’ Castle.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond pre-figuration – they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself. We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the ‘debate’ that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle. The goal is not to ‘be’ an activist, but to aid the working class to activate – and transform – itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.
* It’s Not Your Kids Holding Your Career Back. It’s Your Husband.
* Academia for women: short maternity leave, few part-time roles and lower pay.
* Marriage, y’all, I just don’t know.
* I woke up this morning still black, still a woman, and still bothered by the Jezebel piece. So I’m here using my voice to encourage us all to speak up.
* The Most Popular Drug in America Is an Antipsychotic and No One Really Knows How It Works.
* Necro-streaming: Notes on Watching a Dead Show.
* The Biggest Lies About Science in the U.S. Government’s “Wastebook.” Just pure ressentiment.
* Actually existing government waste! White House announces push for next generation of hi-tech weapons.
* Twilight of the Indoor Mall.
* Secret Origins of the Black Panther. Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero.
* Five ways to pander to millennials in 2016.
* I wanted a bigger, better Bayside more than anybody: Company Halts Plan To Frack 3,000 Feet From Pennsylvania School.
* Bill Cosby Is An Alleged Serial Rapist. So, Now What?
* The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn’t just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.
* Gorbachev Tried To Get George Bush To Spoil Who Killed Laura Palmer.
* Has Uber Ubered an Uber too Uber this Uber?
* What’s most troubling about “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is not the music per se but the way it insinuates itself — and “us” — into a story about “them” and yet can’t be bothered to get even the most basic facts right.
* The uncomfortable origins of “Afrofuturism.”
* I have an idea for a mature, adult, fantasy roleplaying game.
* In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist.
* Some days you just need http://badkidsjokes.tumblr.com.
* And, finally, MTV is ready to tell my story.
So Many Wednesday Links It Is Guaranteed to Make You Sick
* Brian Thill on academia, labor, and the prestige economy.
* Freddie de Boer on the unbearable wretchedness of higher education journalism.
* The only situation in which one would treat free speech as an end would be one in which there were no fundamental problems: no iniquities, immiseration, exploitation. No need for free speech as means. So we might say Dirks is speaking from the position of campus-as-utopia, a campus of nothing but speech, where the sun always shines and all other issues have been resolved happily for all. A campus wherein there was no privatized public education, no massive debt- and labor-loads for students, no shitty working conditions for campus workers, no cops being called in to beat or pepper-spray students and faculty into the hospital. No struggle over BDS, no systematic racism, no burying of rape statistics and accompanying leniency for perpetrators — struggles in which the administration is an aggressive antagonist, a side.
* Remember the other day when I linked to that piece about colleges recruiting lacrosse players as a proxy for wealth? Totally and absolutely unrelatedly, colleges are now giving out athletic video game scholarships.
* Steven Salaita has now spoken publicly at UIUC about his firing by UIUC.
* The New Inquiry 32: Back to School.
School is the alibi for class society. Passage through it is supposed to be what makes the unequal distribution of violence and luxury in the bourgeois world a fair outcome, what makes the bodies it disposes of earn their disposal. It is also the house of knowledge and so a powerful node of induction into the mysteries of this bloody society. Those who want to approach the knowledge held there must also internalize its mechanisms. Some go on to help it reproduce itself, as teachers. Unexpected success in this self-transformation is sometimes called class mobility, but to celebrate those who are capable of moving admits that the majority are fixed in place.
* How long will we have to wait for the poll finding that most Americans “regret” having supported this new war in Iraq and Syria and view it as a “mistake”, as they prepare, in a frenzy of manufactured fear, to support the next proposed war? Even the liberal Kevin Drum hopes Obama can stop Obama before Obama invades Iraq.
* Against TFA: “I am, I am asking you to quit.”
* Crisis for the crisis in the humanities. The full report is here.
* Scalia wept: Death penalty fans reel as one of their go-to examples for the necessity of capital punishment turns out to involve two innocent men.
* Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields.
* From the archives: Almost everything in Dr. Strangelove was true. Capitalism Whack-a-Mole.
* Almost All the Books People Say Influenced Them Were Written for Children.
* Steve Almond on quitting football.
* Segregation forever: Share of white kids attending majority white schools. More links after the map.
* UC Berkeley police have obtained more than a dozen M16 rifles via the 1033 program, as of June 2014. That’s outrageous. I can’t imagine them needing more than four or five tops.
* The Economist Has a Slavery Problem. Reagan reviews Roots, 1977.
* A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. No! No! I simply won’t believe it!
* Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints.
* Cuomo (and de Blasio) after Teachout.
* Where MacArthur fellows were born and where they lived at the time of the award.
* How Much Carbon Dioxide Is in the Atmosphere? A Massive Increase in 2013 Sets a Record. “We are running out of time.”
* Milwaukee wept: Meteorologists Predict Record-Shattering Snowfall Coming Soon.
* Almost Half Of North American Bird Species Are Threatened By Climate Change.
* Amazon Indian Warriors Beat and Strip Illegal Loggers in Battle for Jungle’s Future.
* Louisiana doesn’t look like Louisiana anymore.
* The oceans are acidifying at the fastest rate in 300 million years.
* Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal. People Who Live Near Fracking More Likely To Become Sick, Study Finds.
* Twilight for alumni donations. As someone remarked on Twitter, this piece seriously undercounts the rise of student debt and twentysomething un- and underemployment as factors here.
* Dystopia now: Airlines have never been better at making certain your flight is full.
* Forty Percent of Police Families Experience Domestic Violence.
* Peacekeepers Sexually Exploited And Abused Women And Girls In Somalia.
* Video Shows NYPD Officers Taking Turns Beating Man After He Asked Why He Was Being Searched.
* Cops Are Sorry They Keep Losing Cool Guns That the Military Gives Them.
* “Driving while black” is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon. Look, if we’re going to make this about facts…
* BREAKING NEWS: Gambling is terrible city planning.
* License to kill: CBP Requests Federal Court Keep Identity of Border Patrol Agent Who Killed Teen Secret.
* Court rules Yelp has no obligation to publish positive reviews.
* For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. Turns out you actually have to teach the kids to get results. Crazy.
* And on the complete other end of the positivity spectrum: Teacher Allegedly Locked Kids in Closet to Teach Them “How to Survive.”
* Millennials aren’t using credit cards, and it might come back to haunt them.
* Now that I’m a parent, it’s hard for me to understand how roller coasters are allowed to exist.
* Silicon Valley’s Cult of Male Ego.
* The service, which launches September 16 in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, works with a fleet of women drivers and will only be available to female passengers. Drivers are hailed with an iOS app—like Uber or Lyft—and arrive wearing “hot pink pashmina scarves,”according to the New York Times.
* Marriage counseling before feminism.
* Today in the voter fraud fraud.
Striking down Pennsylvania’s voter ID law in January, its state court found “no evidence of the existence of in-person voter fraud in the state.” Plus, the state failed to establish any connection between photo identity cards and the integrity of elections. Courts in Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas ruled similarly.
Wisconsin federal district court Judge Lynn Adelman in Aprilstruck down that state’s voter ID law for violating the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Adelman found about 9 percent of registered voters – about 300,000 – lacked the government-issued ID required for casting a ballot under the Wisconsin law, enough to change election results.
* ‘Unprecedented’ Outbreak Of Rare Virus Strikes Hundreds Of Children In The Midwest.
* The Leaky Nuclear Waste Dump and the Town That Loves It Anyway.
* The kids are all right: LEGO Is Now the Biggest Toymaker on the Planet.
* 8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century.
* And Harvard has received a record $350 million donation. So glad those guys will be able to keep the lights on.
All the Weekend Links (100%)
* Jaimee has one of her phobia poems up at Drunken Boat’s “funny” issue: “Derrida Eats a Dorito.”
* CFPs: ICFA 36: The Scientific Imagination. Joss Whedon’s Comics. Assemble! The Making and Re-Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction.
* MLA Subcon is trying to raise some money for its operations at indiegogo.
* New Study Links Polar Vortex to Climate Change. Speaking for all of Wisconsin: this does not bode well.
* I have to say I really like what Freddie says about privilege and merit here.
Instead, the point should be to ask people to see the ways in which all of our lives are conditioned by vast forces we cannot control, that these forces in general work to the benefit and hindrance of certain broad groups of people in a way that conflicts with our conceptions of justice, and that we can build a more just, more equitable world if we acknowledge that no one’s life is the product only of their work ethic and intelligence.
The long-term project of those who decry the role of unearned advantage in human society should not be to try and parse who is most and least privileged. The project should be to deny the salience of “merit” as a moral arbiter of material security and comfort. The very notion of just deserts– the notion that some people have legitimate accomplishments that we must celebrate because they represent “merit,” whatever that is, distinct from their privileges– is what has to die. There is no space where privilege ends and legitimate accomplishment begins. There is, instead, a world of such multivariate complexity that we can never know whose accomplishments are earned and whose aren’t. Instead, we should recognize the folly of tying material security and comfort to our flawed perceptions of other people’s value, and instead institute an economic system based on the absolute right of all people to food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education.
* Kazuo Ishiguro to publish first novel since Never Let Me Go. I am on board. More links below the photo!
* And on the other side of the spectrum: Margaret Atwood’s new work will remain unseen for a century.
* Shock, horror: Most college classes cost more online than on campus.
* The Classroom of the Future.
* Q. How did you make the transition from professor to president? A. Maybe some of our problems in education today stem from the fact that someone like me is considered an unconventional choice. Maybe academic institutions should be run by academics, the way they used to be.
* Wisconsin inches closer to dubious obesity milestone.
* On Christopher Tolkien protecting The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales from New Line. I hadn’t realized that Peter Jackson was prohibited from making reference to those works in his films; that’s fascinating…
* If Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
* The New York Times pans a novel for being insufficiently pro-conquistador. The Economist wrings its hands over whether maybe we’re not being fair to slaveowners.
* The Justice Department will investigate the entire Ferguson police force. How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. Twitter Headquarters Has Painted #Ferguson On Its Office Wall.
* Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received “many” specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report.
* Feisal G. Mohamed and Cary Nelson debate the Salaita firing. Salaita and the Accreditors.
* This Is What It’s Like To Sit Through An Anti-Union Meeting At Work.
* Gaming doesn’t have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming’s advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.
* Five myths about California’s drought. The news is not good, friends.
* Here’s Who Really Controls California’s Water.
* Staff at an Arizona gun range reportedly told investigators that the release forms signed by the family of a 9-year-old girl who accidentally killed her instructor with an Uzi last week were unavailable because they had been “blown away by the wind.” I’ve head less convincing excuses, I guess.
* Biden’s warning to ISIS militants: ‘We will follow them to the gates of hell.’ 200 U.S. troops headed to Ukraine for ‘peace-keeping exercise’ as Obama condemns Russian aggression.
* Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead.
* Today in the rule of law: Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And When.
* But don’t worry: The system works. Antonin Scalia’s Favorite Murderer Is Innocent.
* Death Row Guard Has Always Had Soft Spot For The Innocent Ones.
* L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA.
* NYPD Pays $33K to Settle Suit After Mistaking Jolly Ranchers for Meth.
* Police telling victims to solve crimes by themselves.
* In New York, a human rights lawyer has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD after she was arrested for blocking the sidewalk while waiting for her husband and kids to use the bathroom at a Times Square restaurant.
* The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
* The Worst Airbnb in the Universe: 22 Beds in One Apartment. Imagine this being your home. Imagine this being your neighbor.
* The fight for the Senate is getting weird y’all.
* For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police.
* A horrifying new study says one in five women have been raped.
* “After the football season ended.”
* Vox says your revolution is over, the bums lost.
* Our congresswoman was arrested today at a fast food workers’ strike.
* For the first time ever, neuroscientists have demonstrated the viability of direct — and completely non-invasive — brain-to-brain communication in humans. Remarkably, the experiment allowed subjects to exchange mentally-conjured words despite being 5,000 miles apart.
* Science fiction classics in the news: Syfy Greenlights Six-Hour Miniseries Childhood’s End.
* BP May Be Fined Up to $18 Billion for Spill in Gulf. Almost 18 days revenue, less than a year’s profit…
* Workers At Coal Waste Landfill Told That Coal Ash Is ‘Safe Enough To Eat,’ Lawsuit Says.
* Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny. Joan Rivers and today’s comediennes.
* Downloaded Games Have A Larger Carbon Footprint Than Blu-Ray Discs. There’s some really questionable assumptions in here, but the argument that theres’s some point where this is true is an important one.
* A Child Helps Your Career, If You’re a Man.
Ms. Budig found that on average, men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children (if they lived with them), while women’s decreased 4 percent for each child they had. Her study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 2006, which tracked people’s labor market activities over time. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents, widening the gap.
* Here’s why CVS stopped selling cigarettes.
* Here’s why Twitter shouldn’t algorithmize users’ feeds.
* This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe.
* Bold new directions: Shazam will differ from other DC movies by being fun.
* Every popular text eventually gets an “it was all just a hallucination” rewrite. Today it’s Harry Potter’s turn.
* New Girl at School Had to Wear “Shame Suit” After Dress Code Violation.
* Werner Herzog will guest star on Parks And Recreation.
* Nothing good will happen anymore: Actually, HBO didn’t commission more Flight Of The Conchords.
* Here’s something I should probably waste all my money on.
* New Miracleman Comics Stories (Including One by Grant Morrison) Coming Soon.
* This Map Shows How Hunting Wiped Out Whales In Less Than A Century.
* And FiveThirtyEight is there with a hot take: If Tony Survived The ‘Sopranos’ Finale, He’s Probably Alive Today.
Weekend Links!
* Nice treat: my LARoB piece got namechecked in an Unexpected Stories review at NPR.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine the polar vortex making it unseasonably cold, forever.
* New Data Says Huge West Virginia Chemical Spill May Have Been More Toxic Than Reported. But don’t worry: Freedom Industries has been fined a whopping $11,000.
* The OECD says the party’s over.
These are that growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will increase massively; and that there is a big risk that climate change will make things worse.
* Here’s what the world would look like if we took global warming seriously.
* A Brief History of the Humanities Postdoc.
* On the huge screwed-uppedness of “studies show.”
* An oral history of LucasArts.
* A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
* What disapproving friends don’t understand about cesarean births.
* If A Man Takes Paternity Leave, His Coworkers Will Probably Take It Too.
* For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
* Analysis: Over Half of All Statements Made on Fox News Are False. I sincerely hope they included statements like “I’m Bill O’Reilly” and “You’re watching Fox.”
* Five Thirty Eight and screwing up predictions.
The measurement error in the World Cup case was simple: FiveThirtyEight and other sites had marked Brazil as having a strong defense, and a solid offense anchored by its star, Neymar, as measured by a statistical amalgamation called Soccer Power Index. In reality, Brazil had been aggressively fouling its way as a means of defense, elbowing and kicking its way, and not getting called for it by referees. I’m not just making this up as a day-after-big-loss armchair analysis: pretty much most punditry on soccer had been clear on this before the game.
In other words, the statistics were overestimating how good a team Brazil really was, and the expert punditry was fairly unified on this point.
In other words, this time, the hedgehogs knew something the fox didn’t. But this fox is often too committed to methodological singularity and fighting pundits, sometimes for the sake of fighting them, so it often doesn’t like to listen to non-statistical data. In reality, methodological triangulation is almost always stronger, though harder to pull-offs.
* What happened to the super-rich of yesteryear?
If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
* Let this AskMe post from an academic spouse ruin your morning!
* College Graduates and the Great Recession by The Numbers.
* Over Duke U.’s Protests, Estate of ‘the Duke’ Asks Court to Approve Use of ‘Duke.’
* The next-generation F-35, the most expensive plane ever built, may be too dangerous to fly. Why is Congress keeping it alive? What could possibly explain it!
* “Superhero stories are really about immigrants.”
* Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?
* Change.org petition inviting Department of Labor investigation into adjunct labor. I’m very skeptical there’s anything actionable here, unfortunately.
* Having Your Sleep Interrupted May Be As Bad As Not Getting Any at All.
* Losing to Germany Wasn’t Actually the Worst Thing to Happen to Brazil This World Cup.
* Colorado’s legal pot market is bigger than anyone anticipated. First person to legally purchase pot in WA fired after being seen on local news buying it.
* DEA Officials Responsible For Nearly Killing College Student, DOJ Watchdog Finds. Daniel Chong is the entirely predictable result of dehumanizing drug offenders.
* In ‘sexting’ case Manassas City police want to photograph teen in sexually explicit manner, lawyers say. You’ll be glad to know police have withdrawn the request.
* Two hundred years into the social experiment of modern imprisonment, and 40 years into the expansion of what is frequently called “mass incarceration,” America’s system of jails and prisons arguably constitutes the most prodigious system of torture the world has ever seen.
* …while Swartz’s death was a mistake, destroying him as a lesson to all of us wasn’t a mistake. It was policy.
* Tough Louisiana Catholic Church case goes to the heart of mandatory reporting law.
* The Atlantic has a challenging piece on helping intersex children, albeit with an absolutely terrible headline.
* What the Potato Salad Kickstarter Campaign Says About Tech, Silicon Valley, and Modern Life.
* On giving Title IX teeth. It does surprise me that no school has ever received a Title IX sanction for its approach sexual violence.
* SMBC on kind aliens. XKCD on a wraith called Timeghost. The adventures of Process Man.
* Predicting the end of Game of Thrones from George R. R. Martin’s repeated requests for a big-budget epic finale.
* Ideology at its purest is ripe for disruption: “Inside tech’s latest management craze.” Meanwhile: Silicon Valley wage fixing: Disney, Lucas, Dreamworks and Pixar implicated.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* 16-Year-Old’s Rape Goes Viral Because Human Beings Are Terrible. Awful story.
* Syfy orders a pilot for its adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
* The wisdom of markets: Social Network With No Revenue or Assets Somehow Worth $4.75 Billion.
* When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, Sebald said, “No serious person thinks of anything else.” On still trying to come to terms with the Holocaust.
* Trigger warning: breakfast. A confessional comic about the night after the artist’s rape.
* A Webcomic About A Time Traveler Trying To Comprehend Terminal Illness.
* A Field Guide To Unusual (And Hilarious) Harry Potter Patronuses.
* And Ian McKellan just won’t leave any franchise un-awesomed. He simply won’t!
Exactly One (1) Ton of Midweek Links
* Join us at the Science Fiction/Fantasy Now Conference at the University of Warwick this August!
* Go home, 2014, you’re drunk: Man Admits Eating Landlord’s Heart at End of Year-Long Chess Game.
* The richest nation in the history of the world: Three Children Died During The Polar Vortex After Their Heat Was Cut Off.
* MLA Subconference Wrap-Up (and teaser for 2015).
* Contingent Mother: The Role Gender Plays in the Lives of Adjunct Faculty.
* In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.
* Matt Bruenig pushes back against framing all NTT labor as adjunct labor.
* In 1998, a 20-something guy named Jesse Reklaw was doing some Dumpster diving on the campus of an Ivy League university that he’d rather not name when he came across a bunch discarded of Ph.D. applicant files from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Each file included a photo of the applicant, along with assorted paperwork, including feedback from university officials.
* If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people.
* Every cop is a criminal: Any arrest in New York City can trigger a civil forfeiture case if money or property is found on or near a defendant, regardless of the reasons surrounding the arrest or its final disposition. In the past ten years, the NYPD has escalated the amount of civil forfeiture actions it pursues as public defense offices have been stretched thin by the huge amount of criminal cases across the city.
* “These peace officers were doing their jobs…they did what they were trained to do.”
* What could possibly go wrong?
All these jobs are dangerous and involve carrying a deadly weapon. They entail giving a human being the power to detain another human being, and the benefit of the doubt if they should shoot one. And all the positions are unpaid.
* From the “Military & Defense” desk at Business Insider: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel.
* Legal challenges to the death penalty.
* Pannapacker: Shared Governance, Tenure, and Academic Freedom Are Worth the Trouble.
* …when his salary depends upon his not understanding it: Speakers at MLA generally are skeptical of idea of shrinking Ph.D. programs.
* Why does the man behind ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Sherlock’ still have a job?
* Eighteen months after the law took effect, over three-fourths of employers reported that they were very supportive or somewhat supportive of the paid sick days law.
* Man Poses as Woman on Online Dating Site; Barely Lasts Two Hours.
* Begun the Canon Wars have: Disney To Rip Out Star Wars EU Continuity “Like A Tumor.”
* Life is suffering: HBO renews ‘The Newsroom’ for third and final season.
* Legalizing murder maybe not the absolute best idea Florida ever had.
* Decades-Old Underground Jet Fuel Leak In New Mexico Still Decades From Being Cleaned Up.
* If the Supreme Court upholds this decision (or refuses to hear an appeal), net neutrality is dead unless the FCC or Congress decide to reclassify broadband internet as a telecom service regulated as a common carrier.
* The federal judge overseeing the concussion lawsuit brought by 4,500 former players against the National Football League denied a preliminary motion to approve the proposed settlement to the case Tuesday, saying that the agreement may not include enough money to compensate all players properly.
* Friends, they may say it’s a movement: Judge Rules Oklahoma Same-Sex Marriage Ban Unconstitutional.
* How administrators defeat student campaigns.
* Breaking: It Is Expensive to Be Poor.
* Chloe as Edward Snowden is actually a pretty great premise for a 24 movie. It seems like it’d be better without any involvement from Kiefer at all.
* The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.
* And it’s even worse than we thought: TEHRAN (FNA)- Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents providing incontrovertible proof that an alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, some media reports said.
* And we’ll finally know what Bruce Wayne was like as a twelve-year-old. Because you demanded it!
These Sunday Links Are Rated to Temperatures of -30 Below
* Baby, it’s cold outside. Behold the power of this fully operational polar vortex.
* Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For. #3 and #4 seem to imply an unstated ecological agenda that is really the zeroeth reform, the precondition for all the others.
* “We thought we were doing God’s work” — chasing down student debtors.
* Towards an open-ended commitment to our grad students.
* “The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.
* When Modernism Met Science Fiction: Three New Wave Classics.
* In the midst of a truly terrible piece calling for every bad higher ed reform ever proposed, Instapundit makes one suggestion we can all get behind: adjunct administration.
* Solve Hollywood sexism the Geena Davis way.
Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.
* American exceptionalism: The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries.
* Is Frozen letting young girls in on the secret that men are scum too early?
* Buzzkill! There’s not enough legal weed in Colorado.
* Daily Caller BANNED from MLA. Literal wailing about communofascism at the link.
In addition to The Daily Caller, all audio-taping and videotaping will also be outlawed at the 2013 MLA convention. The completely Orwellian-sounding Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession further demands that no one wear any scented products of any kind.
And I said nothing, because I did not wear perfume!
* Testimony of Langston Hughes before the McCarthy Committee.
* A local politician heroically overrode the concerns of his constituents to advance the cause of global capitalism, and the New York Times is ON IT.
* Brooks’ rumination on his stoner days is kind of funny. It’s certainly elitist. But it is also an example of the two Americas we’ve fomented through legislative, cultural, and organizational boundaries that disrupt every single path for opportunity available for those not born to wealth and privilege.
* “Why Obamacare isn’t implementing beheading.”
* Thank you for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower. I must decline, for secret reasons.
* Finally, Yale law professors reveal exactly which ethnicities are innately superior. A bit churlish to give themselves two of the top slots, but I guess the completely made-up facts speak for themselves.
* FREEDOM! U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson plans to file a lawsuit on Monday challenging a federal rule that allows members of Congress and their staffs to continue to receive health benefits similar to other federal employees.
* Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns.
* Good news, everyone! You’ll work until you’re dead.
* The bad news is you’re going to hell. The good news is the decision was made before you were born!
* Heaven on Earth: A History of American Utopias.
* Like a piece of equipment, the black athlete is used. The old cliché ‘You give us your athletic ability, we give you a free education’ is a bare-faced lie, concocted by the white sports establishment to hoodwink athletes, white as well as black. First of all, there is no such thing as a ‘free’ ride. A black athlete pays dearly with his blood, sweat, tears, and ultimately with some portion of his manhood, for the questionable right to represent his school on the athletic field. Second the white athletic establishments on the various college campuses frequently fail to live up to even the most rudimentary responsibilities implied in their half of the agreement.
* First dogs had magnetic poop powers; now foxes are magnetic too.
Gerry Canavan 