Posts Tagged ‘public domain’
New Year’s Links!
* A nice endorsement of Octavia E. Butler from Steve Shaviro. Some bonus Shaviro content: his favorite SF of 2016. I think Death’s End was the best SF I read this year too, though I really liked New York 2140 a lot too (technically that’s 2017, I suppose). I’d also single out Invisible Planets and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, both of which had some really good short stories. In comics, I think The Vision was the best new thing I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot I bought this year and didn’t have time to look at yet, though, so maybe check back with me in 2019 and I can tell you what was the best thing from 2016.
* Introducing the David Foster Wallace Society, including a CFP for the inaugural issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.
* Call for Papers: The Poverty of Academia.
* Oh, fuck this terrible year.
* 30 essential tips for succeeding in graduate school.
* The University in the Time of Trump.
* Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme.
* Who’s Afraid of the Student Debt Crisis?
* Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right. Some Michigan and Denver faculty members have received similar emails but from different source.
* The age of humanism is ending.
* The New Year and the Bend of the Arc.
* Marina Abramović and Kim Stanley Robinson perform “The Hard Problem.”
* Osvaldo Oyola reads Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Leia Organa Solo: A Critical Obituary.
* BREAKING: There Is No Such Thing as “White Genocide.” Academic Freedom, Again. Buffalo skulls.
* I don’t think Children of Men was ever actually “overlooked” — and I’m shocked it was considered a flop at a time — but it certainly looks prescient now.
* From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck. Remembering Caravan of Courage, the Ewok Adventure Star Wars Would Rather You’d Forget. Anti-fascism vs. nostalgia: Rogue One. How to See Star Wars For What It Really Is. And a new headcanon regarding the Empire and its chronic design problems.
* Good News! Humans No Longer Caused Climate Change, According to the State of Wisconsin.
* How did A&E let this happen?
* On fighting like Republicans, or, the end of America.
* Scenes from the class struggle in Berkeley. And in Chillicothe, Ohio.
* The seduction of technocratic government—that a best answer will overcome division, whether sown in the nature of man or ineluctable in capitalist society—slides into the seduction in the campaign that algorithms will render rote the task of human persuasion, that canvassers are just cogs for a plan built by machine. And so the error to treat data as holy writ, when it’s both easier and harder than that. Data are fragile; algorithms, especially when they aggregate preferences, fall apart. Always, always, power lurks. The technocrats have to believe in mass politics, believe for real that ordinary people, when they organize, can change their own destinies. Whether that happens depends on the party that gets built, and the forces behind it.
* Four Cabinet nominations that could blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump: New Strategies, New Alliances. Why Donald Trump Might Not Be All That Good for Art. How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler. This all certainly seems on the up-and-up. And today in teaching the controversy: Nuclear diplomacy via Twitter is a bad idea.
* Democrats: Time to Win! Why the Democrats’ 2017 comeback dream is like nothing we’ve seen before.
* The Russia Conundrum: How Can Democrats Avoid Getting Entangled in a Losing Issue?
* House Republicans will ring in the new year with a plan to permanently cripple government.
* The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.
* The UBI already exists for the 1%.
* The arc of history is long, but Google Search will not longer return Holocaust-denying websites at the top of page one.
* Same joke but about not being allowed to ban plastic bags in Michigan anymore.
* The Champions of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started.
* “It was a pleasure to cull.”
* Geoengineering could ruin astronomy.
* Haiti and the Age of Revolution.
* A Utopia for the Deaf in Martha’s Vineyard.
* Why the ‘Ghost Ship’ Was Invisible in Oakland, Until 36 Died.
* Nine charts that show how white women are drinking themselves to death.
* It wasn’t just your imagination: more famous people did die in 2016.
* How long can Twitter go on like this?
* The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think it Is. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn.
* Special ed and the war on education.
* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.
* Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.
Rise and Shine, It’s 2015! Links
* 2014 Kinda Sucked: A Look at Our Slow Descent Into Dystopia. I didn’t think it was all that slow.
* That annual tradition: What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?
* B^F: “Ryan North reviews George Gipe’s insane novelization of Back to the Future, published before the book was released.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 14.5: “Errors in Judgment.”
* This City Eliminated Poverty, And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It.
* How to be politically optimistic in Wisconsin.
* In an alternate universe, the New York Police might have just solved the national community-policing controversy. Routine harassment of citizens is down as much as 94%!
* I say teach the controversy: No matter what vernacular is employed, the time has come for other alternatives to the handcuffs, leg irons and waist chains routinely used on incarcerated youth in the District.
* Carcetti for President: Maryland Governor Will Commute All Remaining Death Sentences To Life Without Parole.
* “DA Who Failed to Indict Killer Cop Now GOP Front Runner for Congress.” 2015 starting out great!
* “Girls from a variety of backgrounds were featured within the campaign, reflecting that anyone can embody the spirit and character of Annie.” Oh, Target.
* Look, I get that the football players are angry. I even get that all the boosters who hadn’t stepped up before are now swearing that they would have donated millions of dollars to keep the program alive if only Watts had asked them. But the Faculty Senate? At a bare minimum, shouldn’t they have had the back of a president who wanted to stop draining money from academics into football, even if no one else did? Yeesh.
* “This book review by 13-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, known for her brilliant work on queer theory) appeared in the January 1964 issue of Seventeen. You’re welcome.”
* Researcher: Sony Hack Was Likely an Inside Job by a Woman Named “Lena.”
* U.S. Solar Is 59 Percent Cheaper Than We Thought It Would Be Back In 2010.
* Salon’s charter school scam roundup for January 1.
* White Flint isn’t completely dead, but the outlook is not good. The only stores still in operation are a Lord & Taylor and a P.F. Chang’s. On Jan. 4, the P.F. Chang’s will close. Why I’m Mourning The Death Of A Mall.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal rings in the New Year right with the Uncomfortable Truthasaurus.
Weekend Links
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Unreturned library books can mean jail time.
* It’s intuitive but wrong to picture the public debt as private debt we’re all on the hook for. In reality, public debt isn’t really properly thought of as borrowing at all, according to Frank N. Newman, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury under President Clinton. Since the U.S. doesn’t need to borrow back the dollars it originally spent into existence in order to spend them again, the purpose of issuing Treasuries is really just for “providing an opportunity for investors to move funds from risky banks to safe and liquid treasuries,” he writes. Investors aren’t doing the U.S. a favor by buying treasury securities; the U.S. is doing investors a favor by selling them. Otherwise, without the option “to place their funds in the safest most liquid form of instrument there is for U.S. dollars,” would-be bondholders “are stuck keeping some of their funds in banks, with bank risk.”
* We frack the places we’ve already abandoned.
* Sherlock Holmes, First Published in 1893, Is Officially in the Public Domain in the US.
* Twitter account of the night: @ClickbaitSCOTUS.
* The problem with white allies.
* An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself. How the “Wolf of Wall Street” Is Still Screwing His Real-Life Victims.
* Institutional Prestige and the Academic Caste System.
* What happens to workers when jobs becomes gigs? The Fear Economy.
* An administrative law judge in Florida this week upheld new rules by the State Department of Education that require significantly more of state college faculty members — particularly in the areas of student success — for them to earn continuing contracts (the equivalent of tenure).
* Slate covers the US’s insane hostility towards presymptomatic genetic testing.
* Connecticut just hands ESPN sacks of money every year.
* Degenerate, Inc.: The Paranoid and Obsessive Life of a Mid-Level Bookie.
* Reality Pawns: The New Money TV.
* Why I voted for an academic boycott of Israel.
* Wisconsin finds another use for cheese.
* The kids are all right — they’re abandoning Facebook.
* The 38 Most Haunting Abandoned Places On Earth. Some new ones in the mix here.
* And good news everyone! Your dystopian surveillance nightmare is legal again.
Finally Back in Milwaukee Links
* The fact that animals were for a long period of European history tried and punished as criminals is, to the extent that this is known at all, generally bracketed or dismissed as amere curiosity, a cultural quirk.
* Arrested Development Season 4 episode titles revealed.
* H.P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Young Writers.
* January 1, 1946: two Marine divisions faced off in the so-called Atom Bowl, played on a killing field in Nagasaki that had been cleared of debris.
* The future is bright at Monsters University. I agree wholeheartedly with my Marquette colleague who hopes there’s a ton of confusion about MU in the future.
* Traxus and Kotsko on Django Unchained. Bonus Kotsko New Year’s Resolution! Stop paying attention to non-stories.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?
* The Death of the American Shopping Mall.
* The Penn State shitshow continues: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett will announce a federal lawsuit against the NCAA tied to the historic sanctions levied against Penn State in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Corbett will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning in State College, Pa., to announce the suit, which will be filed by the state.
* “I don’t think I would do a terrible job at a Han Solo backstory. I could do that pretty well. But maybe that would be better as a short.” An interview with Wes Anderson.
* The Macroeconomics of Middle Earth.
* Could going to Mars give future astronauts Alzheimer’s disease?
* Can being overweight actually make you live longer?
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
* A moment of dreaming about higher education.
* And Jaimee has some new poems up (with rare audio!) at Unsplendid.
Public Domain Gets a Little Less Public
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 6-2 ruling, the court said that, just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”
The Measure of a Muppet
The Awl hosts a long, by turns interesting and puzzling piece on creativity, copyright, and the post-Henson Muppets, premised on the horrifying thesis that they should have killed off Kermit. Via MeFi.
Happy Public Domain Day!
Via MeFi. Here’s a few of this year’s authors:
Isaac Babel
Walter Benjamin
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Emma Goldman
Paul Klee
Leon Trotsky
Nathanael West
And here’s the alternate universe version, including much of Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Dr. Seuss.