Posts Tagged ‘princesses’
Monday Morning Links Has Tied the Record for Most Wins in a Single Season
* Ecotopia 2121: Visions of Our Future Green Utopia.
* Kids Can Sue Over Climate Negligence, Judge Says.
* This is all to say that it would be very surprising, not to mention ill-advised, for DC/WB to go forward with the franchise without making significant adjustments. Every other studio has either scrapped a franchise or made significant changes to movies that had far higher multipliers than BvS. Also, people should be careful not to simply look at the total gross of a movie to gauge its success, particularly franchise movies. For instance, although BvS will have a similar gross to Guardians of the Galaxy and be in the ball park of Deadpool, the high multipliers for those movies indicate that fans crave sequels or are eager to watch similar movies. BvS’s low multiplier suggest that people were curious to check out the movie and/or were lured in with the heavy marketing, but ultimately decided that the movie was not for them.
* Inside the New DC Fan Schism.
The feminist critique of comics has made “not asking” a lot harder. That, in itself, is a victory. The point is not to change the thinking of the active sexist. (Highly unlikely.) The point is to force the passive sexist to take responsibility for his own thoughts.
* Huge, if true: They Don’t Just Hide Their Money. Economist Says Most of Billionaire Wealth is Unearned.
* The Coming Left-Wing Majority.
* Faculty Salaries Show Strong Recovery From Recession. NO COMMENT
* What We’re (Really) Talking About When We Talk About “Time to Read.”
* Every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000. Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
* Rejected Princesses. The backstory.
* Unraveled: The Mystery Of The Secret Street Artist In Boston.
* Scenes from the Dem primary: Bernie Sanders, socialist mayor (1985). Past cases suggest Hillary won’t be indicted.
* The U.S. Is Failing Miserably on Six of 10 Markers of Gender Equality.
* What could possibly go wrong? Gun Company Turns Real Handgun Into Clone Of The Nintendo ‘Duck Hunt’ Zapper.
* For the First Time In A Century, Wild Tiger Populations Are Beginning to Rebound.
* The Wire Creator Eyes Series on Spanish Civil War.
* At HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure.” One day this happened to a friend of mine. She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her.
* Consider this: for almost 2,000 years and counting the entirety of Western culture has been brainwashed. The fields of biology, economics, religion, and psychology are built on a lie. Even those who self-consciously reject this falsehood are subconsciously shaped by it. It’s unavoidable and all pervasive. It’s made us who we are. Indeed, it’s turning us into monsters. What is this lie exactly? It’s the assumption that humans are born bad.
* I called Sweden’s new national number to talk to a random Swedish person.
* What Are The Demographics Of Heaven?
* The criminal justice system encourages prosecutors to get guilty verdicts by any means necessary—and to stand by even the most questionable convictions. Can one crusading court stop the lying and cheating?
* And getting ready for Wednesday: a people’s history of the Crying Jordan meme.
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
Wednesday Links!
* This is the only movie franchise Disney should produce from now on.
* It’s not time to degree, it’s time from degree.
* Horrifying, tragic triple murder in Chapel Hill.
* Professors and other university employees wouldn’t be able to criticize or praise lawmakers, the governor or other elected officials in letters to the editor if they use their official titles, under a bill introduced in the Legislature. Having solved every other problem in existence, the Legislature now turns its eyes towards…
* The University of Wisconsin cuts as queen sacrifice.
* What University Administrators Gain from $300 Million in Cuts. Notes from the conspiracy against UW.
* First Louisiana, then Wisconsin, now South Carolina ups the ante. Now they want to shut it down for two years. Would it shock you if I told you this was a historically black college? Would it completely blow your mind?
* What Even is African Literature Anyway.
SOFIA SAMATAR: Lately I have been thinking about African literature as the literature that becomes nothing.“African subjectivity…is constituted by a perennial lack: lacking souls, lacking civilization, lacking writing, lacking responsibility, lacking development, lacking human rights and lacking democracy. It is an unending discourse that invents particular ‘lacks’ suitable for particular historical epochs so as to justify perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations and to authorize various forms of external interventions into Africa.” (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Empire, Global Coloniality And African Subjectivity)This was kicked off when I read Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on lack. We know that all literary works are copies, but Africanliterature is a copy in a way that obliterates it (Ouologuem, Camara Laye, whatever, choose your plagiarism scandal). All literature is political, but African literature is political in a way that makes it cease to be literature (it’s “too political,” “didactic,” etc.). All literature is produced to suit a market, but African literature is produced to suit an illegitimate, inauthentic, outside market (it’s always in the wrong language). Its market also makes it nothing…
* Crumbs is a new feature-length film project from award-winning Addis Ababa-based Spanish director Miguel Llansó boldly touting itself as “the first ever Ethiopian post-apocalyptic, surreal, sci-fi feature length film.” Its cryptic official trailer, which we first spotted over on Shadow and Act, takes us deep into a bizarre universe inhabited by the beautiful Candy (played by Ethiopian actress Selam Tesfaye) and her diminutive scrap collecting partner Birdy (played by Ethiopian actor Daniel Tadesse Gagano), who sets out on a journey to uncover strange happenings in their otherwise desolate surroundings.
* Jon Stewart quits. Brian Williams suspended. Tough times in fake news.
* Another preview of Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* To all the young journalists asking for advice.
* I asked Mr. Trachtenberg if it was morally defensible to let students borrow tens of thousands of dollars for a service that he himself had compared to a luxury good. He is not, by nature, one for apologies and second-guessing. “I’m not embarrassed by what we did,” he said. “It’s not as if it’s some kind of a bait and switch here. It’s not as if the faculty weren’t good. It’s not as if the opportunities to get a good degree weren’t there. There’s no misrepresentation here.” He seemed unbowed but also aware that his legacy was bound up in the larger dramas and crises of American higher education.
* Whatever happened to the teenage entrepreneurs whom Peter Thiel paid to forgo college?
* I’m Autistic, And Believe Me, It’s A Lot Better Than Measles.
* Rosa Parks — because of her arrest, because of her activism — loses her job at the Montgomery Fair department store, where she was an assistant tailor. She wasn’t fired, they just let her go. And Raymond Parks also loses his job as well. And neither one of them is able to find sustainable employment in Montgomery after that — because of their activism, absolutely. They are basically boycotted. …
This is a 1955 tax return, and of course her arrest is in December of that year, and their combined income is $3,749. So they’re, you know, the working poor, but they’re holding their head above water. And here is their tax return in 1959 when they’re living in Detroit. Their combined income is $661. They have descended into deep, deep poverty.
* On June 30th, 1974, Alberta Williams King was gunned down while she played the organ for the “Lord’s Prayer” at Ebenezer Baptist Church. As a Christian civil rights activist, she was assassinated…just like her son, Martin Luther King, Jr.
* Five Dials has a special issue devoted to Richard McGuire’s amazing comic Here.
* Review: Jupiter Ascending Is The Worst Movie Ever Go See It Immediately.
* So what would have made Jupiter Ascending work?
* NASA’s latest budget calls for a mission to Europa. OK I think as long as we attempt no landings there.
* Milwaukee streetcar boondoggle project approved.
* Secret Teacher: exams have left my students incapable of thinking. “Incapable” is a bit strong, but elites have certainly turned education into a nightmare.
* TOS for Samsung’s exciting new 4o-inch telescreen.
* What appears to happen during this time—the years I look at are 1994 to 2008, just based on the data that’s available—is that the probability that a district attorneys file a felony charge against an arrestee goes from about 1 in 3, to 2 in 3. So over the course of the ’90s and 2000s, district attorneys just got much more aggressive in how they filed charges. Defendants who they would not have filed felony charges against before, they now are charging with felonies. I can’t tell you why they’re doing that. No one’s really got an answer to that yet. But it does seem that the number of felony cases filed shoots up very strongly, even as the number of arrests goes down.
* Text adventure micro-game of the day: 9:05.
* Fantasy short of the day: “The Two of Us.”
* Sharing companies use their advertising to build a sort of anti-brand-community brand community. Both sharing companies and brand communities mediate social relations and make them seem less risky. Actual community is full of friction and unresolvable competing agendas; sharing apps’ main function is to eradicate friction and render all parties’ agenda uniform: let’s make a deal. They are popular because they do what brand communities do: They allow people to extract value from strangers without the hassle of having to dealing with them as more than amiable robots.
* 38 Percent Of Women Earn More Than Their Husbands.
* The Worst Commutes In America.
* “I was keenly aware of my Jewishness when I enrolled at Hogwarts in that faraway fall of 1949.”
* The-price-is-too-high watch: Study says smelling farts may be good for your health.
* Black girls are suspended from school 6 times more often than white girls.
* From the archives: The New Yorker‘s 2013 profile of American Sniper Chris Kyle.
* Human sociality and the problem of trust: there’s an app for that.
* Adnan Syed is getting an appeal.
* Detroit needs Sun Ra more than ever.
* But Manson, 80, does not want to marry Burton and has no interest in spending eternity displayed in a glass coffin, Simone told The Post. “He’s finally realized that he’s been played for a fool,” Simone said. Poor guy.
* “This AI can create poetry indistinguishable from real poets.” Finally, we can get rid of all these poets!
* Peace in our time: Marvel and Sony have concluded a deal that will allow Spider-Man to appear in Avengers movies.
* Zoo Security Drills: When Animals Escape.
* Jonathan Blow says The Witness, his followup to Braid, is finally almost done.
* The news gets worse, academics: Your lifetime earnings are probably determined in your 20s.
Closing All My Tabs Before I Flee The Country Links
* The new issue of Extrapolation is out! This one was put together before I was an editor, but it’s still really great stuff.
* CFPs: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2015. Tolkien at the University of Vermont. The Marquette Undergraduate Humanities Conference.
* Dear English Major: A 7-Step Guide to Your Final Semester as an English Major.
* It’s syllabus prep week at universities all across America. Here’s a provocative one from Vanderbilt: PHIL 213: Police Violence and Mass Incarceration.
* #MLA: Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There’s No Easy Fix.
* Solidarity without Affect: The MLA Subconference Enters Its Second Year. Via Freddie deBoer.
* Give me the child at 18 or so, and I will give you the man: Nine Percent of 114th U.S. Congress Are Alumni of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.
* Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory.
* California colleges see surge in efforts to unionize adjunct faculty. Washington University adjunct faculty vote to form a union.
* Is depression a kind of allergic reaction?
* Why we can’t have nice things, 2015 edition: The Senate’s 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than its 54 Republicans.
* Pot Tax Adds $40+ Million To Colorado’s Economy: Crime, Traffic Deaths And Unemployment Are Down.
* The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls.
* Great moments in headcanon, Guardians of the Galaxy edition.
* I say teach the controversy: “Creationist: Aliens Will Go to Hell and Not Even Jesus Can Save Them.”
* Actual Supreme Court decisions: To remain silent, one must first speak.
* Dog bites man: 2014 Was The Hottest Year On Record Globally By Far.
* On the 60th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the Los Angeles Review of Books has assembled a group of female authors, artists and performers who, dedicated to examining the faces, bodies and voices of the young girl, consider the significance of Nabokov’s pubescent protagonist as both a literary conceit and an object of patriarchal fetish.
* The process used is ridiculous and would result in termination if used.
* As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set ’em free.
* Here’s a comic strip about children dying of preventable diseases.
* Horrible attack on a satirical magazine in Paris.
* A Colorado NAACP Office Was Bombed Today. A gasoline can near the bomb, apparently intended as a firebomb, failed to ignite.
* People diagnosed with serious mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe depression — die 20 years early, on average, because of a combination of lousy medical care, smoking, lack of exercise, complications of medication, suicide, and accidents. They are the most discriminated-against and neglected group in the U.S., which has become probably the worst place in the developed world to be mentally ill.
* Tangled, Brave, and Frozen All Made the Same Critical Mistake.
* Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* Few things we criminalize because they are ‘harmful’ are anywhere close as harmful as prison.
* How White Liberals Used Civil Rights to Create More Prisons.
* Ferguson Grand Juror Sues Prosecutor To Lift Gag Order.
* “The little girl come to my door,” 71-year-old Larry Wilkins told NBC News. “She told me that her mom and her dad were dead, and she was in a plane crash, and the plane was upside down. She asked if she could stay here.”
* “I’m no longer watching television in which middle-aged men figure out how to be men. I’d rather watch shows about teenaged girls figuring out what it means to be a monster.”
* A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below 25 grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: If you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) “As you move up the class ladder,” says Keltner, “you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”
* Our New Politics of Torture.
* The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: a mere $1.6 Trillion.
* The CIA has to approve every script for spy drama The Americans.
* Here’s what’s in the new issue of The Journal of Puerile Mathematics.
* Preach! Scientists Agree Work Makes You Wake Up Too Early.
* United States Passes Old Soviet Union For Largest Prison System In History.
* Visibility As Violence On Social Media.
* ‘Bullsh*t jobs’: Guerrilla posters welcome commuters back to work.
* In Preventing Trans Suicides, ‘We Have Such A Long Way To Go.’
* The True Cost of Teach For America’s Impact on Urban Schools.
* I can’t believe I’d never read this before: the original script to Back to the Future is wonderfully bananas, including the “nuke the fridge” scene from Crystal Skull thrown in as a sweetener.
* Peak neoliberalism: eventheliberal Kevin Drum says an AI revolution that will be “pretty brutal for the 90 percent of the population that occupies the middle classes and below” will be a “basically positive” development.
* PS: Drum might have been overestimating the timetable here. In 10 years, your job might not exist.
* The paper makes no claims about in-person classes or very large online courses, but says that the study’s findings provide “the first evidence that increasing class sizes in the online context may not degrade the quality of the class.” And the paper says that “these results could have important policy and financial implications.”
* ‘Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds’ – why are there so few women?
* What To Do When You Discover Your Co-Worker Writes Erotic Hulk Fanfic.
* Anti-terror plan to spy on toddlers ‘is heavy-handed.’ Well, that’s debatable.
* 67 Science Fiction And Fantasy Movies To Watch Out For In 2015.
* The 10 Most Insignificant Wars in History.
* A Nuclear Plant Leaked Oil Into Lake Michigan For Two Months Straight.
* Police say at least 30 people are sleeping permanently in Madrid airport’s terminal 4 but the number goes up in winter.
* In 1997 the Swedish parliament wrote into law a “Vision Zero” plan, promising to eliminate road fatalities and injuries altogether. “We simply do not accept any deaths or injuries on our roads,” says Hans Berg of the national transport agency. Swedes believe—and are now proving—that they can have mobility and safety at the same time.
* Cell Phones Don’t Seem to Cause Brain Cancer.
* We lost our son to football and brain disease. This is our story.
* They Might Be Giants, Again: The Adult Comeback of a Cult Band. Even Dial-a-Song is back.
* Science fiction poetry: “Sci-Fi Violence.”
* Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation in forty hours.
* It’s good to get ahead of things: Should Martians Pay U.S. Taxes?
* “Hold for release till end of the world confirmed.”
* And the winner of the Worst Thing Written in 2015 has been announced. Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you again in 2016.
Monday Morning!
* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
* Smartly realizing that nothing is going to change on the climate change beat, NPR guts its environmental reporting.
* Epigrams for my research agenda: That’s to say nothing of the fact that the people involved in GamerGate that Grieco defends are, in fact, not poor bullied kids. They are, overwhelmingly, employed, educated, privileged adult men, many of whom work for some of the most powerful and profitable industries in our economy. Their beloved sci fi and comic books and fantasy genres and media– those aren’t reviled and disrespected properties that people are ashamed to like. They’re economically dominant and critically lauded, and given the way the internet makes culture spread more broadly and intensely than ever before, are probably the most powerful force in the history of the arts.
* Different Bodies & Different Lives In Academia: Why The Rules Aren’t The Same For Everyone.
* Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns.
* 6 Brilliant Art Projects That Ruin Classic Kids’ Characters.
* Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps.
* All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone.
* Top Health Official Warns That Ebola Quarantines Could Backfire. And yet.
* Spock was right: Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion.
* National insanity watch: Students at a Nebraska High School Can Now Pose With Guns in Their Senior Portraits.
* I want to talk about how badly we’re failing the boys who can’t see their way out of a totally lethal, totally toxic distortion of masculinity — the kind that says that if boys aren’t manly, or gentlemanly, they can be gunmanly.
* Forty percent of mass shootings start with the gunman targeting his wife, girlfriend, or ex. And access to firearms makes it seven times more likely that a domestic abuser will kill his partner.
* Yes, Mass Shootings Are Occurring More Often.
* Elon Musk: Developing artificial intelligence would be as dangerous as ‘summoning a demon.’
* The “Southern Belle” Is a Racist Fiction.
* LARoB interviews David Mitchell.
* Why Google wants to replace Gmail. They should have nationalized Google fifteen years ago.
* Now we see the violence, &c: Wisconsin cops deploy armored vehicle to collect fines from 75-year-old man for messy land.
* “The city’s new budget includes $25,000 to buy one-way bus tickets for homeless people.” “Hawaii even passed a measure that offers paid flights off the state to homeless people.” (via)
* Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required.
* Building a Better Panopticon: The Wire as melodrama.
The Wire extends and elaborates melodrama in remarkable ways. But, as Williams says, melodrama remains a broadly liberal medium — and as Williams doesn’t say, liberalism and neoliberalism are not especially distant cousins. Liberalism can critique neoliberalism for its inequities, its cruelties, and its callousness. But to neoliberalism’s call for data and surveillance, liberalism can only respond with a call for better data and more nuanced surveillance; to neoliberalism’s doctrine of individuality as sameness, liberalism can only offer a deeper individuality subsumed within a deeper sameness. The Wire is undoubtedly one of the greatest melodramas extant, and an object lesson in how powerful the form can be. Its limitations aren’t a failure on the part of its creators so much as an indication that melodrama, having gotten us to this particular liberal democratic impasse, is unlikely, on its own, to get us out.
* Hackers of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
* And I learned today that Star Trek secondary canon features a running subplot where an unfrozen Wall Street guy slowly takes over the Federation. This is going in the Khan essay for sure…
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.
Saturday Roundup – 2!
* How Dan Harmon breaks a story – 2!
* ‘Fallen’ Disney Princesses. The Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine ones are the best, I think.
* Scientific Paper of the Night: Could we blow up the sun?
* Architects for this 47-story building in Spain forgot to put in an elevator.
* Academic freedom and tenure: the case of National Louis University. Just awful.
* This Is How Your Brain Becomes Addicted to Caffeine.
* And via @reclaimUC, a blast from 2011: Delegitimate UC.
I’d like to suggest that given the significance of bureaucracy as an administrative stronghold, the arena of bureaucracy is worth intervening in if and only if the legitimacy of governance by upper administration is negated by the intervention. A professor who agrees to be on a committee thinking that from that position she’ll be able to limit damage and fearing that if she is not on it things will be even worse is not negating the legitimacy of the administration, so that should not be done.
But a resolution introduced in the Academic Senate, or issued by an individual department, stating that the Regents should not be allowed to set the salaries of upper administrators would reject their legitimacy and would be worth doing, not least because it would be news…
An Especially Worthy Entry in Our Ongoing Series of Wednesday Links
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* ‘Well, Here’s What Won’t Pass,’ Obama Says Before Listing 35 Proposals.
* Aaron Bady’s amazing “African Writers in a New World” interview series at Post 45 continues with Teju Cole.
* Daniel Maguire on the McAdams Case at Marquette. Really hard to believe they’ve somehow managed to create a situation where McAdams has the better side of the argument.
* Ashon Crawley on Ferguson and utopia.
* Cruel optimism and the NFL (or, Life in the Factory of Sadness).
* Meanwhile: Patriots Black Ops Division Kills Opposing Team Leaders In Three States; “All in the Game,” Says Belichick.
* The NCAA, Last Seen Claiming It Has No Jurisdiction Over Decades-Long Academic Fraud at UNC, Says It’s Investigating Academic Fraud at 20 Colleges.
* …or live long enough to become the villain: The Vagina Monologues is now reactionary.
* Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stint as an Advice Columnist for Ebony Magazine. Happy Robert E. Lee Day! …anytime the same state and culture invites you to worship a human being they tried to kill, we should be suspicious of the ways they want us to remember.
* I think I rediscover this fact with the same surprise every couple of years: In 1991, a Boston University investigatory committee concluded that King had indeed plagiarized parts of his dissertation, but found that it was “impractical to reach, on the available evidence, any conclusions about Dr. King’s reasons for failing to attribute some, but not all, of his sources.” That is, it could have been anything from malicious intent to simple forgetfulness—no one can determine for sure today. They did not recommend a posthumous revocation of his degree, but instead suggested that a letter be attached to the dissertation in the university library noting the passages lacked quotations and citations.
* Neoliberalism and the Degradation of Education (Alternative Routes, Vol. 26). A ton of good links here.
* Teach or perish. Teach and perish.
* 80 rich people now have as much as 50% of the rest of humanity combined. Let’s meet our overlords!
* Science Fiction Under Totalitarian Regimes, Part 2: Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Here was Part 1: Germany.
* Coming soon: Keywords for Radicals.
* On the failure to reclaim the word “slut.”
* When the trains stopped coming down the track, Tryon, NC began to crumble, and since then something disappears each day.
* Groundbreaking Artwork Reimagines Disney Princesses As Office Supplies.
* ‘Cultural Marxism’: a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim. This is a term you see in the comment threads no one is supposed to be reading more and more.
* ‘Overworked’ drone pilots are baling out. Chomsky: Obama’s Drone Program ‘The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times.’
* Lonesome Alito Declares Marriage Only Between A Man And The Sea.
* True crime watch: Milwaukee man says stabbing sister, father was ‘right thing to do.’ Spoiler alert: no.
* I want to believe! Russia Orders Obama: Tell World About Aliens, Or We Will.
* It’s already working! U.S. Air Force Releases Thousands of Pages Of Declassified UFO Files.
* 10 Rules For Making Better Fantasy Maps.
* Trustees Refuse to Reconsider Salaita’s Firing: “That Decision Is Final.”
* Scenes from the class struggle at the University of California.
* How Did We Get Here? The AAUP’s evolving emphasis on collective bargaining.
* The twilight of a particular organizational form should not be confused with the end of worker organization itself. Institutions are not permanent, but workers’ interest in organization is. And besides, the current model is disappearing whether we like it or not.
* Can you name these cities just by looking at their subway maps?
* Broken clock watch: Cuomo wants a train to La Guardia.
* Star Wars considering casting Tatiana Maslany for every role, one assumes.
* Pay Attention, 007! On the Usability of James Bond’s Gadgets.
* Majestic Animals That Could Go Extinct This Century.
* A lifetime of being paranoid about this confirmed.
* The trouble with Harley Quinn. Via io9.
* Sid Meier’s next: Starships.
* And doctors, who have already taken everything from us, want our pizza too. The line must be drawn here!
Written by gerrycanavan
January 21, 2015 at 7:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic fraud, academic freedom, advice, aliens, America, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Barack Obama, Batman, Bill Belichick, Boston University, broken clocks, cities, civilization, class struggle, college sports, comics, cruel optimism, cultural marxism, cultural preservation, die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, Disney, dissertations, doctors, don't read the comments, drones, dying towns, ecology, empire, fantasy, FBI, feminism, Ferguson, football, gadgets, games, gender, Harley Quinn, history, How the University Works, I want to believe, income inequality, interviews, Israel, James Bond, La Guardia, labor, maps, Marquette, marriage equality, mass extinction, medicine, memory, Milwaukee, misogyny, MLK, murder, NCAA, neoliberalism, New England Patriots, New York, NFL, Noam Chomsky, North Carolina, office supplies, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, pizza, plagiarism, politics, princesses, protest, radicals, resistance, revolution, Robert E. Lee, Samuel Alito, science fiction, Sid Meier, Star Wars, State of the Union, Steven Salaita, subways, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, Teju Cole, tenure, terrorism, the line must be drawn here, the rich are different, the truth is out there, totalitarianism, trans* issues, true crime, UFOs, UIUC, UNC, unions, University of California, Utopia, Vagina Monologues, war on education, war on terror, words, writing, zunguzungu