Thursday Links!

* Marquette makes Slate’s vaunted “ridiculous phrases universities have trademarked” list. Meanwhile, Danny Pudi’s Marquette-flavored entry in the 30 for 30 series is up at Grantland. Jesuit author featured on ‘The Colbert Report’ to speak at Marquette University commencement.

* The academic outrage of the year is Nazareth College rescinding an offer following a request for more salary, research accommodation, and “official” maternity leave. I’ve been ranting about this on Twitter (1, 2, etc) (and now MetaFilter) all day but I can’t see how people can see this as anything but naked gender discrimination. I hope she sues.

* I know there’s a whole secondary argument on Twitter about the propriety of Buzzfeed’s appropriation here, but I found @steenfox‘s thread incredibly powerful last night. What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?

* This is one of my favorite endlessly recurring Internet images: “Do colleges have to hire RED professors?” asks The American Legion Magazine in Nov. 1951.

* The Humanities Crisis Industry.

* Workers Sue McDonald’s For Wage Theft Violations In Three States.

* Chicago Police Cannot Keep Complaints Of Brutality Secret Anymore, Court Rules. Why could they ever?

* Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner walks free after 30 years.

* My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.

* Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired.

* “Is it time to rethink the 40 hour week?” Yes, it’s time to think about bringing it back.

* University of California Credit Is Downgraded by Moody’s.

* I’ll give it to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this regard. I had, up until last night, found Ward to be one of the blandest characters on the show. But now he has my sympathies. Because that character is stuck in a world where terrible things happen and, when they happen to him, no one cares.

* Free markets! Disruption! Innovation!

* Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men. How To Make A Pundit. And I can’t wait to see how they voxplain this.

* I want to return to a thread I introduced in that earlier piece with much greater force: That those who write for free or very little simply because they can afford to are scabs. I don’t endorse this piece, honestly, because I think it significantly misunderstands the terms under which TT academics are employed — but I found it an interesting provocation nonetheless.

* WI school officials seize control over student paper after ‘rape culture’ article appears.

* Paul Ryan: Just The Worst.

* I have never seen anything as utterly nihilistic as the position Andrew Napolitano proudly puts his name on here. It’s unreal.

* The Sheep Look Up: Radioactive ‘Oil Socks’ Found Illegally Stockpiled In Abandoned North Dakota Gas Station. North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links From Website. Panasonic First Multinational Company To Pay Air Pollution Hardship For Overseas Workers In China. NASA Study: Climate Sensitivity Is High So ‘Long-Term Warming Likely To Be Significant.’

* The economics of prostitution.

* Seinfeld After People.

* The best TV show you may not be watching: Review from Andy Daly. Also starring another Comedy Bang Bang stalwart, Jessica “Marissa Wompler” St. Clair.

* Hands Off My Kid’s iPad.

* Abolish letter grades.

* Reuters auctioning off unpaid internships. My god.

* The only thing Americans care about less than climate change is race relations.

* “They cry because they are not allowed to be children at all.”

* Scott Aukerman explains BetweenTwoFernsGhazi.

* Teju Cole: @apieceofthewall.

* And the future is terrible.

Waiting for the Green Light Links

* Oakland Mayor backs down, says she supports 99% movement and will minimize police presence.

* Greetings from Zuccotti Park.

* One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is the way it confuses and ignores the shrill pundit class.

* Business Week profiles David Graeber.

At the end of his book, Graeber does make one policy recommendation: a Biblical-style “jubilee,” a forgiveness of all international and consumer debt. Jubilees are rare in the modern world, but in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt under the Ptolemies they were a regular occurrence. The alternative, rulers learned, was rioting and chaos in years when poor crop yields left lots of peasants in debt. The very first use in a political document of the word freedom was in a Sumerian king’s debt-cancellation edict. “It would be salutary,” Graeber writes, “not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.”

* Žižek on Charlie Rose.

A Debate McCain Can Win?

A debate McCain can win? Both presidential candidates attended the Al Smith dinner this year, a rare occasion for elites to drop the pretense of real antagonism between pro-corporate plutocrats of different parties, much less the media millionaires who happily transcribe their every lie.

Both candidates were funny, but McCain was really in his element, and won more good will from me in this fifteen-minute segment than anything else he’s done in eight years.

Instapolls

It’s been said before, but Kos is absolutely right: these instapolls have been a tremendously important bulwark against the neverending bullshit of the pundit class. They’ve been so devastating, in fact, to the fine art of pro-Republican spin—an art which went a long way towards giving us eight years of Bush—that I genuinely wonder whether we’ll see them again in 2012. I sure hope we do.