Star Wars Day Links! Yay!

* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).

I realized recently, with surprise, that ROTJ is the only one that actually seems philosophically interesting to me. https://t.co/UzR5aMALac

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Yeah, that, but also the weirdly unsettled politics of pacifism and forgiveness that undergird the Luke-Vader plot. https://t.co/99HGF12U2C

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

.@traxus4420 Oh, by “unstable end” I thought you meant more the “okay, well, I guess we did it!” aspect the EU novels viciously take apart.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH Yeah, that’s what’s so singular about it. He gets to be a ghost too, Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t even seem mad at him.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

@SoylentHHH From the standpoint of our usual narratives it’s almost obscene! It’s really striking.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Is it “fear” when it’s something you know is definitely going to happen? https://t.co/9YZUbl819A

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Fully prepared to spend the next ten hours before I see THE FORCE AWAKENS arguing RETURN OF THE JEDI is underrated.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.

* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.

My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.

When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“

* Running the Red Cross like a business.

* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.

* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.

* “If tenured faculty teaching high-demand courses can be fired without cause, as they were at St. Rose, then tenure no longer exists,” Lemieux said.

* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.

* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.

* The law school collapse continues.

* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.

* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?

* My life story: Tsundoku.

* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.

* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?

* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.

* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.

* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.

* The DEA warns that drugs are funding terror. An examination of cases raises questions about whether the agency is stopping threats or staging them.

* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.

* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.

* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.

I’ve listened to the first episode of the new season of SERIAL now, and it really strikes me as deeply unethical on just about every level.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Serial = bad media form for covering ongoing story; tainted by commercialization, also by exploitation of someone who appears mentally ill.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

Idea that SERIAL’s “brand” is refusal of definitive conclusions also seems like serious problem for their ability to report going forward.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

I’ll admit, though, I still feel burned by their irresponsibility in the previous story, and probably wouldn’t have liked anything they did.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015

* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.

* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.

* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).

* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?

* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.

Today’s 10-year-olds will be serving in the wars the next president starts. https://t.co/jhuRGQwFs6

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015

Resolved: Thursday Links Will Take All Our Links

* Tonight! DC! 6:30! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs!

* Help, University Administration Is Terrible! Kids these days.

Let's grant that today's students make more complaints by and large. It's still administrators who are acting on them.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) June 3, 2015

It's not students' fault that they've become pawns in admins' proxy war against faculty.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) June 3, 2015

“The bad faith of administrators” is still the single cause that explains everything wrong with the university.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 3, 2015

* Statement by PROFS in response to JFC omnibus motion #521, item #39. Foxes in the Henhouse: The Republican Takeover of the University of Wisconsin System. A turning point for the UW Colleges.

UW faculty were told to do X for Y. Now… no Y. That's called a broken contract.

— Chuck Rybak (@ChuckRybak) June 4, 2015

.@ChuckRybak I have never understand the labor basis of the US university system, where admins can just arbitrary change the terms at will.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 4, 2015

* Han’s wife shot first.

* Forgetting Lolita: How Nabokov’s Victim Became an American Fantasy.

* Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth: Time for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track.

* How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes.

* Every United Airlines flight was grounded this morning in the US.

* More People Work at Fusion Than Are Reading Its Most Popular Post.

* The problem is that the IRB system is so fundamentally misconceived that it is virtually a model of how to regulate badly.

* French Court Rules It Is Unconstitutional To Cut Off Water To Anybody.

* Teen got arrested after cop tried to pick her up, failed. Warrants issued for people who cheered at Senatobia graduation. In the last seven years at least 29 police K-9s have sweltered to death after officers left the dogs inside hot patrol vehicles.

* School kitchen manager fired for giving lunches to hungry students.

* Sepp Blatter resigns. Something something joke about George Lucas character names.

* The Secret 1949 Radiation Experiment That Contaminated Washington.

* How Ridic Are the New Scrabble Words?

* How Ridic Are Call-In Shifts?

* Alternative Idea for Resolving Sexual-Assault Cases Emphasizes Closure. “Administrators promised to keep her charges confidential and to protect her from retaliation.” For what it’s worth, I had some general thoughts on Title IX earlier this week that I Storified on the off-chance anyone is interested. I don’t think the outlook is good.

* The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire. Is Hillary Clinton in trouble?

* Draft, uh, let’s say Bloomberg.

* The Tampon: A History.

* Google NBA Jam truth.

* New Study Confirms Self-Evident Truth: Time Warner Is Literally The Worst.

* Hell is working at the Huffington Post.

* Teach the controversy.

* And the arc of history is long, but Arrested Development season five will air in spring 2016.

First Tuesday after the First Monday in November Links!

* ICYMI: An edited and expanded meritocracy, lottery, game blog post got republished at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. Here’s a reply suggesting a better metaphor than games might be the casting process.

* Cool stuff happening at Marquette: Conflicting Audience Reception of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. A student-curated exhibit at the Taggerty. And of course there’s my pop culture group geeking out over The Hunger Games.

* A college can’t fire an adjunct professor for criticizing it, so long as the issues raised are matters of public concern and the adjunct has reasonable expectation of continued employment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Thursday in a decision regarding Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois.

* Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays. You Know, for Kids.

* A Manifesto for the Freelance Academic.

* Colorado Community College Faculty Bill of Rights.

* Is academic science still sexist? No! Yes!

* Colleges have no business being vehicles for mass entertainment any more than they have business selling widgets or maintaining a fishing fleet. It is no proper part of a university’s mission to provide quality television programming and year-round gambling opportunities for the rest of the country. That this has become the norm in America’s system of higher education is a monstrous accident of history and of academic neglect, but there it is, and it is not going anywhere, and the only way to do it is simply to make an honest business out of it.

* Gasp! …the average student in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job.

* Cura personalis: The maturation of the student—not information transfer—is the real purpose of colleges and universities. Of course, information transfer occurs during this process. One cannot become a master of one’s own learning without learning something. But information transfer is a corollary of the maturation process, not its primary purpose. This is why assessment procedures that depend too much on quantitative measures of information transfer miss the mark. It is entirely possible for an institution to focus successfully on scoring high in rankings for information transfer while simultaneously failing to promote the maturation process that leads to independent learning.

* The end of the Red Cross.

* The latest from Aaron Bady’s ongoing interview series at Post45: “Not in a million years did I expect some people to be upset about the portrayal of the conquistadors.”

* My Grandma the Poisoner.

* Happy election day! The empty election. The Democrats are doomed. Ginsburg Was Right: Texas’ Extreme Voter ID Law Is Stopping People From Voting. New Voting Restrictions Could Swing the 2014 Election. Black people, white government. Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here’s How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012.

EVIL, INC ORG STRUCTURE do not circulate Greater Evil | | | | | | | | Lesser Evil

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 4, 2014

* Lawyers, judges, and even journalists tend to have trouble finding people like Eric Kennie—the people who are the most completely disenfranchised by a law like SB14—precisely because such people are, in many areas of life, completely disenfranchised.  If they had the kind of economic and social wherewithal to make their voices heard in political or legal spheres—if they knew lawyers or journalists or legislators or people who knew such people—then they most likely would also have the kind of economic and social wherewithal to obtain the documents SB14 demands.  Their very lack of money, lack of a car, lack of knowledge of how the system works, and lack of options also tend to make them invisible to the more elite actors who, in distant courtrooms and legislative hearing rooms and newsrooms, fight out the disputes that affect whether they can vote.  From the point of view of those more elite actors, looking for Eric Kennie is indeed, as Pilkington puts it, like looking for a vacuum.  It like an anti-social-networking puzzle in our networked age: please find me the people who are the most distant from, the least connected to, me or anyone I know.

* And as if the whole stupid thing weren’t irrational enough: Sense of disgust is ’95 percent accurate’ predictor of whether you’re liberal or conservative.

* Tom Steyer spent $57 million to get voters to care about climate change. It didn’t work. Oh, if only he’d spent $58 million!

* Cancel the midterms! There’s still time!

* Viewpoint Magazine, Issue 4: “The State.”

* 2016 and imperial feminism.

*The dependence of the poor on payday loans is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the result of neoliberal policies. The New Loan Sharks. Payday Loans, You Know, for Kids.

* They’re Still Redlining.

* BREAKING: The stock market is an irrational casino and we have no idea how it works.

* Huge congrats to Obama for triumphing here over a really tough field.

* Bullshit Jobs, the Caring Classes, and the Future of Labor: An Interview with David Graeber.

* Historical Futurology. Check the footnotes for some nice citation of Green Planets!

* The sharing economy has a race problem. The Sharing Economy: 21st Century Technology, 19th Century Worker Protections. The Sharing Economy’s ‘First Strike’: Uber Drivers Turn Off the App.

* Nudes and female corporal ownership.

* Hollaback and Why Everyone Needs Better Research Methods.

* How Racism Stole Black Childhood.

* Fracking Wells Abandoned in Boom/Bust Cycle. Who Will Pay to Cap Them?

* Americans Are Working So Hard It’s Actually Killing People.

* The justice system is a monster: Why Innocent People Plead Guilty.

* Finally, someone has put transubstantiation to a rigorous scientific test.

* On Saturday, Brittany Maynard used Oregon’s Death With Dignity law to end her life.

* Erwin Chemerinsky read a 500-page biography of Antonin Scalia so you don’t have to. Spoiler alert: he’s the worst.

* In praise of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Really bad third act problems, though.

* People can feel lots of different things about Lena Dunham and her body of work. What I’m not comfortable with, and certainly not under the mantle of supporting victims and building a culture of consent, is for people to create a narrative of victimization and abuse for Grace Dunham that she has never claimed for herself.

* Losing My Career to Illness: Academia and Parkinson’s Disease.

* Bruce Springsteen by the book.

* Cheat-Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design.

* FBI Files on African American Authors and Literary Institutions Obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

* Mr. Rogers Talks To The Wicked Witch About Being Misunderstood.

* “The court finds that Secular Humanism is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes,” the ruling read.

* In 2014, countries are still paying off debt from World War One.

* UK cultural institutions leave their WWI cases empty to protest insane copyright.

* Dachau’s notorious ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate stolen.

* Secret Fantasies of Adults.

* The legendary comics author Alan Moore has written a million-word novel, tribute to every eternal speck in his universe.

* A Melancholy List of Edgar Allan Poe’s Debts, From His Bankruptcy Petition of 1842.

* How to stop global warming, in seven steps. Oh, if only it’d been six steps!

* Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.

* And kiss your free time goodbye: you can now play 900 pre-1996 arcade games online for free.

8.9

When I went to bed last night the Japanese earthquake was still 7.9; it’s since been upgraded to 8.8 or 8.9, which has devastated the country and left much of the Pacific world at risk of tsunami, as far away as Los Angeles and San Francisco. (I’m seeing reports on Twitter as I write this of 7-foot waves being sighted in Hawaii.) Scientific American has a running list of effects and major developments, but keep your eye on Twitter too.

UPDATE: The Atlantic’s In Focus blog has some stunning photos. There’s more at the New York Times.

UPDATE: It sounds as if the Red Cross is the best location for donations, if you’re interested in that. They don’t seem to have a dedicated stream for Japan up yet.

Tips for the Inauguration

Preparedness tips for the inauguration from the American Red Cross. Via my Twitter feed and #inaug09.