* Kenya sci-fi series imagines European immigrants fleeing to Africa. A very different premise, but it reminds me a bit of some of what happens in Abdourahman A. Waberi’s excellent short novel The United States of Africa.
* Map of the week: 57% of languages do not have gendered pronouns.
* How comics portray psychological illness.
* New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators. With searchable database so you can see how your school has changed since the 80s.
* UCLA spends 2% of its budget on sports, while UO spends 13%. 13%!
* The Council of UC Faculty Associations did the math, and showed to get tuition back down to 2000-01 levels $5300 in today’s dollars), and state funding back up to spend 20001 amounts per student, would cost to the median individual California taxpayer, each year, a total of $50. Restoring full quality and affordability for the state’s 1.6 million public college and university students would cost the state median taxpayer about the same as a holiday bottle of single malt scotch. That would get us halfway back to a Free UC
* Grad school’s mental health problem. When education brings depression.
* “Teachers can’t strike, so we’ll strike for them.”
* Functioning democracy watch: The rise of the blank-slate candidate.
* Lawrence Lessig: Only the super-rich can save us now.
* But when it comes to the narcissism of war, as the example of Christopher Hitchens reminds us, no one has quite the self-deluding capacity of the intellectual.
* Friends, it gets worse: California aquifers contaminated with billions of gallons of fracking wastewater.
* U.S. Emergency Rooms Are Bracing For An Ebola Panic. The nightmare Ebola scenario that keeps scientists up at night. ‘Breach of Protocol’ Led to 2nd Ebola Infection. Cuba leads fight against Ebola in Africa as west frets about border security. But don’t worry, we’re tweaking all our incentives: US government offers $1m for best hazmat suit design as demand surges.
* Prison to Table: The Other Side of the Whole Foods Experience. Pennsylvania’s addiction to prison-building a moral, economic disaster.
* BREAKING: White people are radically misinformed about just about every salient question in American politics.
* Yes, they are killing young black males. Documents Show NYPD Has Paid $428 Million in Settlements Since 2009. Asset seizures fuel police spending.
* Why is the recovery so weak? It’s the austerity, stupid.
* They did, however, find the case significant enough to notify their sergeant — “due to the fact that it was an F.S.U. football player,” the report said. The sergeant, a Florida State University sports fan, signed off on it and the complaint was filed away as “unfounded.” It was hardly the first time that the towering presence of Florida State football had cast a shadow over justice in Tallahassee.
* Cultural preservation watch: There Is A Nine-Foot Tall Statue Of Edward Snowden In New York City.
“When the story broke about Edward Snowden, I was thinking a lot about surveillance and monumentality and how we remember things,” Dessicino told BuzzFeed News on Friday. “How public space is used and how people in history are remembered.
“And I got the idea that maybe people who are major actants upon history aren’t always represented properly, and those people could be written out of history by not having something more permanent made of them.”
* Elsewhere in Snowdenmania: news that he has apparently inspired a second leaker, still at the agency, as well as a nice button on the love story that dominated so much of the early coverage.
* I’ve been a Moffat-skeptic and didn’t like Twelve’s introduction or first few episodes at all, but I have to admit the new Doctor Who is probably as good as it’s ever been. Each of the last few episodes has been better than the last. Sid & Nancy on the TARDIS.
* Nielsen: still the absolute worst.
* The oldest struggle: Hawk v. drone.
* Yet, there is something incomprehensible and inconsistent about this brand of “evil.” Mordor presents these characters in incredibly high fidelity—and I mean that both aesthetically and narratively. Some of the Orcs wear visible jewelry. One dev pointed out during a video preview that “some of them are poets.” But we’re told again and again that these Orcs want to destroy beautiful things. It just doesn’t hold up, and this tension extends to every element of their narrative and systemic characterizations. These Orcs have fears, interests, values, rivalry and friendships. Some Orcs are lovingly protective of their bosses or underlings. But they are “savage creatures” that “hate beauty,” so go ahead and enslave them.
* Matt Yglesias is making sense: The real problem with Nate Silver’s model is the hazy metaphysics of probability.
* The LEGO Batman Movie is the moment reboot culture begins to learn at an algorithmic rate. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
* “He soon resigned.” A chess column had run in the New York Times since 1855, until today.
* Here come the self-driving cars.
* Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired.
* This Is How Judges Humiliate Pregnant Teens Who Want Abortions.
* Marissa Alexander will have a new trial.
* Unpopular opinion watch: This is not a perfect article, but the proposition that universities are not equipped to be courts and shouldn’t try to be seems basically right to me. I can’t imagine how people are looking at the last few decades of Title IX implementation and saying the answer is to give schools a larger role in this.
* Dystopian road signs.
* Understanding Homestuck.
* Understanding the Great Zucchini, DC’s most in-demand clown.
* Well, that explains it. Hitler was ‘a regular user of crystal meth’, American Military Intelligence dossier reveals.
* The age of miracles: cure for type-one diabetes imminent.
* And I’m so old I can remember when “full of bees” seemed like the worst possible thing.

Thursday Links!
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* A reminder: Marquette English has three open TT positions this year, two in rhet-comp and one in transatlantic Anglophone. The deadline is October 28.
* If I were going to encourage you to take any one class simply because it’s good for the freshman soul, I would say this: Take some introductory literature class that forces you to memorize poems, heaps and gobs and mounds of poems, old poems.
* Jameson on time travel in the LRB.
* AAUP v. LSU.
* Leftist academics need to understand they are embattled both as leftists and as academics.
* This afternoon at two o’clock the New York State Attorney General will announce the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Committee to Save Cooper Union, a group of activist students, faculty, and alumni against the Cooper Union trustees. The settlement will impose various reforms to Cooper Union governance, establish an independent financial monitor for the college, and begin the slow, difficult process of re-establishing Cooper Union as a free, healthy institution. Incredible turn of events. The tragedy of Cooper Union.
* A Proposed Heuristic for Academic Budgeting Decisions.
* NY Fed Study Should Redefine How We Think About Student Loans and College Costs.
* “Thanks, UCF, for having lecture-capture courses so I don’t have to go to class ever.”
* A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself. I continue to think Democrats are completely in denial about how bad this story could get.
* Massive hurricanes striking Miami or Houston. Earthquakes leveling Los Angeles or Seattle. Deadly epidemics. Meet the “maximums of maximums” that keep emergency planners up at night.
* The Moral Panic Over Sexting. Today’s obscenity.
* The Accreditation Wars: Where are the Faculty?
* Some rules for teachers.
* Films for the feminist classroom.
* The proportion of people with intellectual disability who have been treated with psychotropic drugs far exceeds the proportion with recorded mental illness. Antipsychotics are often prescribed to people without recorded severe mental illness but who have a record of challenging behaviour. The findings suggest that changes are needed in the prescribing of psychotropics for people with intellectual disability.
* Boom shakalaka! Read an interview with the NBA Jam voiceover artist.
* Concrete Action, the Wikileaks for architects.
* I’ll take three.
* Yahoo has added commentary tracks from Dan Harmon to its Community episodes.
* Harvard will let students select their own pronouns.
* Iceland Caps Syrian Refugees at 50; More Than 10,000 People Respond With Support for Syrian Refugees.
* American Chess May Finally Emerge From The Shadow Of Bobby Fischer.
* Meet the Twitter Bot Generating Unnervingly Plausible Think Pieces.
* Another Colbert profile.
* California Uber Drivers Can Proceed With Their Class Action.
* Wow, finally: Octavia Butler’s Dawn is allegedly being developed for TV.
* Goonies forever.
* Piggy, Kermit, and domestic violence. Next up: why Elmer Fudd hunting animals out of season is actually no laughing matter…
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2015 at 3:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, accreditation, administrative blight, architecture, BB-8, Bobby Fischer, boom shakalaka, cartoons, catastrophe, category errors, CEOs, chess, Colbert, come work with me, comedy, Commentary, Cooper Union, Dan Harmon, Democratic primary 2016, Department of State, disability, disaster, documentary, domestic violence, endowments, faculty, feminism, film, Florida, games, general election 2016, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Iceland, Jameson, Kermit, kids today, labor, LSU, Marquette, medicine, Miss Piggy, MOOCs, Muppets, NBA Jam, Octavia Butler, pedagogy, poetry, pronouns, psychopharmacology, refugees, sexting, Star Wars, student debt, student loans, Syria, teaching, television, tenure, The Late Show, the law, the Left, thinkpieces, time travel, toys, transgender issues, trigger warnings, tuition, Twitter, Uber, Wikileaks, Xenogenesis, Yahoo, zunguzungu