Posts Tagged ‘roads’
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”
* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”
You can dance around it all you like, but the simple fact is that we need to curb our emissions and guide the rest of the world in doing so in an amount of time radically shorter than conventional politics and market solutions alone will allow. https://t.co/5u82WDnACF
— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 25, 2019
I have a 7 year old daughter & a 9 year old son. They are not going to meekly accept living in hell so that people can write essays laughing at them for The Atlantic. Millions and millions and millions of children won't accept it. Politicians have no idea what's coming for them.
— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) February 25, 2019
A very small group of rich people have condemned virtually every living thing on Earth to death—genocide on an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable scale—and not only will they get away with it, they’re actually rewarded for it. That’s what capitalism is.
— ☭ sicko modus ponens ☭ (@babadookspinoza) February 25, 2019
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.
One of my students is very cheeky. pic.twitter.com/2CfSRQ77mZ
— Roy Scranton (@RoyScranton) February 26, 2019
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
truly *perfect* that the question of "happiness" under capitalism vs marxism will be litigated (& represented!) by two male grifters of questionable charisma & almost infinite perversion in a space that charges a ticket if you bring a stroller. now that's traversing the fantasy!
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 28, 2019
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2019 at 4:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic labor, administrative blight, advertising, Afghanistan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, anti-capitalism, apocalypse, autism, Ayana Jamieson, Bernie Sanders, bibliographies, Black Mirror, Bolivia, California, capitalism, Catholic higher education, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, China, class struggle, climate change, clothes, clouds, comics, concrete, conferences, creative writing, debate, democracy, diabetes, disability, disability studies, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elon Musk, energy, fascism, games, Global Anglophone, Grant Morrison, grawlix, guns, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrogen, I grow old, ice sheet collapse, immigration, India, insulin, insurance companies, Jordan Peterson, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Erie, letters of recommendation, literature, Mark Waid, Marquette, masculinity, mass shootings, meat, medicine, men, metrics, MFAs, Michael Jackson, migrants, Moya Bailey, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, oceans, Octavia Butler, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pakistan, Parable of the Sower, parenting, photography, plastic, police corruption, police state, politics, Polygraph, postcoloniality, potholes, promotion, Pulp Fiction, R.D. Mullen fellowship, racism, rape, rape culture, rehab, remedial courses, reproductive futurity, retirement, rights of nature, roads, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, SEC, settler colonialism, SFRA, SFRA Review, social credit, social networking, soup, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, stocks, stratocumulus clouds, strikes, superheroes, tenure, Tesla, Texas, the draft, the Huntington, the Wisconsin Idea, ticks, traumatic repetition compulsion, true crime, University of Central Florida, University of Wisconsin, voter suppression, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, white supremacy, whiteness, Wisconsin, Wright State, X-Men, Žižek
Weekend Links!
The link post yesterday went up only partially finished by mistake, so here’s the other half and then quite a bit more…
* Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 is out, with articles on First on the Moon, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Orphan Black/Extant, and even a review of Kingsman: The Secret Service by yours truly.
* The crew of the Enterprise going back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination? Check. Some “mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff”? Check. Time travel that results in Spock being the reason that Vulcans turn to logic? Check! Jesus? Check. Elsewhere on the Star Trek beat: Being Simon Pegg. Sulu Is Gay in Star Trek Beyond and It’s Not a Big Deal, unless you’re George Takei.
* Why is Hollywood ignoring this incredible black science fiction writer? They certainly haven’t had any problem ripping her off without attribution.
* The Only Good Tarzan Is a Bad Tarzan.
* The Many Faces of Strangelove, or, The Grand Incineration.
* The Night Of will turn your love of Serial against you.
* The Moon Is An Even Harsher CEO.
* Farewell to Pnin: The End of the Comp Lit Era.
* Dialectics of the Clinton Tuition-Free-College Plan. Meanwhile, I predict this will be framed by the right as an illegitimate direct payout to her constituents, regardless of the merits.
* “Please accept our condolences on your loss,” a letter from that agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said. “After careful consideration of the information you provided, the authority has determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will continue to be sent to you.”
* Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. San Diego. Dallas. A truly terrible few days in America.
* Alongside the tragedy in Dallas, new debates: Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing.
* The Future of Archaeology Is ‘Spacejunk.’
* Nailing it: “Psychologists recommend children be bored in the summer.”
* This Man Keeps Getting Killed in Terrorist Attacks. Dibs on the screenplay but in my version it’s a glitch in the Matrix.
* Clinton’s emails today, Clinton’s emails tomorrow, Clinton’s emails forever.
* George Saunders: Who Are All These Trump Supporters? Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector.
* Syllabus as Terms of Service, Syllabus as Manifesto.
* Ah, the pure knowledge of the sciences.
* The Myth of the English Major Barista?
* When we accept as commonplace the idea that the study of art, especially art that appeals to the masses — television, video games, comics — is less important than the study of much-fetishized STEM subjects, when we claim that the objective and the concrete requires expertise but the subjective and the abstract do not, then we are making a dangerous assumption. We are assuming that because something is made for everyone, and accessible to everyone, that its existence is somehow simple and straightforward — a vehicle for testing out theories without an aura of its own. But, art, especially art that seems to require the least amount of scholarly attention — reality TV, video games, comics — is precisely the art that most needs history, context, and deep study. Media matters and media has consequences.
* What Game of Thrones characters look like in the books. Game of Thrones Season Seven May Be Delayed Due to Inclement Weather.
* Corey Feldman has some bad news about that supposed Goonies sequel.
* Pottermore problems: Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowling’s North American magic.
* Underwritten Female Character: The Movie.
* Return of the Great Lakes Avengers. A 15-Year-Old Black Girl Is Going to Replace Tony Stark As Iron Man.
* The Center for Communal Studies promotes the study of historic and contemporary communal groups, intentional communities and utopias. Established in 1976 at the University of Southern Indiana, the Center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarships, publications, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad.
* The Strange Perils of Running a Novelty Item Empire.
* New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape story.
* Neoliberalism and the end of roads. Judge Orders Macy’s to Quit Fining, Detaining Suspected Shoplifters in In-Store Jail.
* 400 athletes vie for US Paralympics Team spots.
* African Union launches an all-Africa passport. Against globalization, for internationalism.
* Here’s How That Wild Lawsuit Accusing Trump of Raping a 13-Year-Old Girl Hit The Headlines. Sounds like most major media outlets are staying away from the story for a reason. When your campaign should share images from social media: A flowchart. Only 75 times. “Trump Campaign Departures Suggest That Perhaps This Is a Highly Dysfunctional Enterprise.” A White, Male Reporter Goes to a Trump Rally.
* So in the short-term, Britain is likely to be an increasingly nasty and hateful place to live, thanks in no small part to Farage’s accomplishments as a politician; in the long-term, Farage was very much a product of his moment, that spasm of backlash on the part of declining socio-demographic layers still steeped in a colonial culture, which is unlikely to be repeated. With Farage at its helm, Ukip operated adroitly on the accumulating dysfunctions and crises of British politics, finally convoking a popular bulwark that pulled Britain further to the right than it has been since the 1970s. And in the next few years, the reactionaries will seek to use their victory to achieve maximum damage, maximum reversal on all fronts. And there will be other sources of reaction in the coming decades. Yet, Farage’s resignation signals the looming end of this end of the pier show. Even if Britain survives as such, this Britain is finished.
* This is a genuinely scary time: The newly elected Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, urged a crowd of about 500 people on Thursday to kill drug addicts, according to the Guardian.
* Hardly Any Former Felons Have Registered to Vote in Virginia Since It Was Made Legal.
* Why 13-year-olds can no longer marry in Virginia.
* Why Title IX Has Failed Everyone On Campus Rape.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Crowdfund Your Wheelchair.
* Condoms Don’t Necessarily Help Teen Girls Avoid Pregnancy.
* Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds. Shock finding.
* Great white sharks congregate every year to party in the middle of the Pacific. This new camera tag might help us understand why.
* A new theory seeks two explain childhood disintegrative disorder.
* Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb.
* Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport. As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying the Price. Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People.
* Sometimes the world really can get together and avert a major ecological catastrophe before it’s too late. Case in point: A new study in Science finds evidence that the Earth’s protective ozone layer is finally healing — all thanks to global efforts in the 1980s to phase out CFCs and other destructive chemicals.
* That’s a hell of an act: “As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.”
* Real talk: should I be more worried about snails?
#SharkWeek
People killed annually by
Sharks 10
Snails 10,000
Snakes 50,000
People 475,000
Mosquitoes 725,000 pic.twitter.com/rkxVLSNaau— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) July 3, 2016
* Nice try, US Navy, but Batman had shark-repellent technology decades ago.
* A watched pot never boils. Self-driving car ethics. Why humanity is doomed.
* Is there life after capitalism?
* The $80M Bomb Detector Scam.
* This answers a lot of questions for me actually.
* And I could watch this GIF forever.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 8, 2016 at 3:54 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, Adam Kotsko, Africa, Alton Sterling, anthropology, archaeology, artificial intelligence, austerity, baristas, Batman, Brexit, Britain, capitalism, childhood disintegrative disorder, children, class struggle, Clue, college, communal studies, communism, comparative literature, condoms, correlation does not imply causation, Dallas, debt, demonic possession, disability, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drones, ecology, emails, England, English majors, espionage, ethnography, eviction, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, film, fMRI, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, gay rights, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2016, George Takei, glitches, globalization, God, Goonies, Great Lake Avengers, guns, Harry Potter, HBO, Hillary Clinton, hoaxes, Hogwarts, homelessness, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Ian McDonald, Illinois, infrastructure, internationalism, Iraq, Iron Man, J.K. Rowling, Jesus, Juno, Jupiter, knowledge, liturgy, losers, Macy's, manic pixie dream girls, manifestos, marriage, Marvel, mass shootings, military-industrial complex, murder, my scholarly empire, mystery, NASA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, novelty items, nuclear war, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, online harassment, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, ozone layer, Paralympics, parenting, Philander Castile, physics, police-industrial complex, politics, pop culture, post capitalism, Pottermore, prison-industrial complex, psychiatry, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, revenue streams, roads, robots, Rolling Stone, San Diego, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, self-driving cars, Serial, sharks, Simon Pegg, snails, social media, space junk, sports, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, STEM, student debt, summer, superpowers, syllabi, Tarzan, teen pregnancy, terrorism, the humanities, the life of the mind, The Matrix, the Moon, the Navy, The Night Of, the Olympics, the Philippines, the Singularity, the tuition is too damn high, Title IX, true crime, Twitter, underwritten female characters, United Kingdom, UVA, Virginia, voting, war on drugs, wheelchairs, white supremacy, zunguzungu
Don’t Look a Day Over 240 Links
* SFRA Awards 2016. Congrats all!
* The Student Loan Suicides. New Jersey’s Student Loan Program is ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking.’
* There is money available in the digital humanities in a way that there has never been money in English departments, ever. With very limited exceptions, the idea that one could get a six-figure grant for doing something in English is just unheard of. The only types of grants people typically got — with the exception of major career-capping grants like Guggenheims — were salary replacement for a year to write a book. That was the best we could hope for. So the idea that all of a sudden there was some part of English where someone could get $300,000 to $400,000 grants was both politically striking and disturbing. It wasn’t like the leading figures in English were saying we have to have this large pot of money for DH. It was external people, especially Mellon and the NEH — under the influence of some of the big DH people, whose animus for the rest of English was palpable and explicit — who decided to do this. This has had a tremendously deforming effect.
* So the problem isn’t that we can’t win reformist victories for workers. History has shown that we can. The problem is what comes after victory, and we need a theory of socialism and social democracy that prepares our movements for that phase.
* Is it better to hope or to despair? Do you want to create better art, or do you want a better world in which to create? Are you an artist or an activist? Yes.
* Life after the end of the world: California Heat Wave Spells Doom For Avocados.
* The richest, most powerful, most prosperous nation in human history.
* Guy Leaves Fake Animal Facts All Over Los Angeles Zoo.
* Brain-drain as social justice.
* Butler and Trump (though I should say she was really thinking of Reagan, who used the same slogan).
* The greying of the homeless.
* Teen who urged boyfriend to kill himself will stand trial.
* A Look at the Use of Drones During the Obama Administration.
* Stereogum reports five years of hard paperwork for Apple has finally paid off, and the company has obtained a patent on technology that will disable your phone’s camera when it detects a specific infrared signal. In the time it took you to read that sentence, you probably also had the three seconds of reflection time it would take a reasonable person to think, “Oh, that sounds extremely problematic.”
* 2 weeks out, and Trump’s convention is a total mess. Sad! TPM continues to pound the Trump fundraising saga. Tracing Donald Trump’s Social Media Ties to White Supremacists. The latest example.
* Still one of my favorite images on the web ever: Richmond Golf Club, Temporary Rules (1940).
* You just can’t win: Closing apps to save your battery only makes things worse.
* The things you learn from Lazy Doctor Who: the original series one did an (now lost) Dalek episode without the Doctor or Companions.
* New Study Busts the Myth That Knights Couldn’t Move Well in Armor.
* We can either spend our time thinking and funding tentacle porn or we can spend our time thinking and funding civilization. I know what I’d pick…
Written by gerrycanavan
July 7, 2016 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, activism, aging, anti-Semitism, Apple, armor, art, avocados, Barack Obama, batteries, BBC, brain drain, bullying, California, China Miéville, Chris Christie, civilization, class struggle, climate change, copyright, corpocracy, daleks, debt, democracy, digital humanities, Doctor Who, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, drones, Dungeons & Dragons, dystopia, English departments, entrepreneurs, fantasy, Fermi paradox, futurity, general election 2016, golf, grants, guns, harassment, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, infrastructure, iPhones, knights, Make America Great Again, medieval times, medievalism, Mellon grants, meritocracy, money, Nazis, NEH, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, police state, politics, revolution, roads, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, science fiction studies, SFRA, shrapnel, social media, socialism, student debt, student loans, suicide, surveillance society, television, tentacle porn, texting, the Left, the Singularity, transgender issues, true crime, true facts, Twitter, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on terror, white supremacy, World War II, zoos
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
What Day Is It? Links
* Later today, at UC Davis: Environments & Societies: Gerry Canavan, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthroposcene.”
* Marquette Protest on Diversity, University Seal.
* The LAO and Permanent University Austerity.
* Proclaims British economist Noreena Hertz, who recently surveyed more than 1,000 teenage girls in the United States and England: “This generation is profoundly anxious.”
* Rebirth of the Research University.
* Our research indicates children learn 4% more efficiently when being slowly boiled alive.
* Natalia Cecire on resilience and unbreakability.
* The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore. The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray. Nonviolence as Compliance. Images of the Unrest in Baltimore. “I Blame The Department.” “Those Kids Were Set Up.” The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think. In Freddie Gray’s Baltimore neighborhood, half of the residents don’t have jobs. Why Baltimore Rebelled.
* How Often Do Officers Lie Under Oath?
* Police Cadet Turns in Cop for Turning Body Cam Off Just Before Pummeling his Victim.
* Sneaky crosswalk law in Los Angeles is a tax for the crime of being poor.
* How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color.
* The disturbing differences in what men want in their wives and their daughters.
* It was a group assignment for four of them, but one of them did any actual work.
* The Shining, Retold as an Atari 2600 Game.
* If a bug in a slot machine says you’ve won $41.8m, can you claim it? Not in the case of Pauline McKee, 90, denied the payout after Iowa’s supreme court sided with the house.
* I didn’t become a doctor for the money.
* Netflix’s numbers are much less impressive than you would have thought.
* I will burn this fucking place to the ground before I get rid of that mirror.
* The struggle is real: Zoo Keeper Helps Constipated Monkey Pass Peanut By Licking Its Butt For An Hour.
* Your Tumblr of the day: Samplerman.
* “Sucralose, better known as Splenda, and acesulfame potassium, which is often called Ace K”: parent, talk to your kids about drugs.
* Men Accused of Sexual Assault Face Long Odds When Suing Colleges for Gender Bias.
* Jane Goodall Says SeaWorld ‘Should Be Closed Down.’
* Wisconsin’s roads are the third-worst in the nation. That’s pretty grim: how could two different states possibly be worse?
* Sounds like Age of Ultron will disappoint you twice.
* Scenes from the class struggle in California.
* Who created Caitlin Snow on #TheFlash? According to @DCComics, nobody.
* And why not him? The Bernie Sanders Decade.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, academia, Age of Ultron, Albuquerque, animal rights, animals, apocalypse, Atari, austerity, Avengers, Baltimore, Bernie Sanders, butts, California, class struggle, comics, copyright, DC Comics, Democratic primary 2016, director's cuts, diversity, doctors, dolphins, don't say socialism, drugs, Freddie Gray, futurity, gambling, games, grades, group presentations, groupwork, How the University Works, intergenerational struggle, jaywalking, Joss Whedon, kids today, Kimmy Schmidt, Los Angeles, love, Marquette, men, misogyny, monkeys, my scholarly empire, Natalia Cecile, neoliberalism, Netflix, nonviolence, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, Pepsi, perjury, photography, police, police brutality, police corruption, police state, police violence, poverty, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, ratings, research, resilience, riots, roads, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Sea World, sexism, simulation argument, slot machines, soda, student movements, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the courts, the Flash, the house always win, the law, The Shining, Title IX, Tumblr, two-way mirrors, UC Davis, unbreakability, Utopia, virtual reality, war on education, water, whales, white people, white privilege, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work for hire, zoos
Thursday Morning Links!
* In Landmark Decision, U.S. Patent Office Cancels Trademark For Redskins Football Team. So the Redskins will be forced by lost revenue and unrestrained anti-Redskins bootlegs to change their name — at which time bitter Redskins dead-enders will be able to sell each other Redskins-branded merchandise in protest…
* We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work.
* That plan goes something like this: maximize constrained educational choices that are a function of labor market changes; commodify inequality by organizing for the highest need students; extract guaranteed funds from public coffers; call it access; wash and repeat.
* Guernica‘s special issue on class, including a report on adjuncts.
* BREAKING: The U.S. Has the Most Expensive, Least Effective Health Care System. BREAKING: Guns kill children. BREAKING: The American prison system is a nightmare. BREAKING: Capitalism is insanely corrupt. BREAKING: Uber is a scam.
* Self-plagiarism is a really weird concept to pin down.
* When innocent people are exonerated after wrongfully spending time in prison, some states pay money to the accused for their trouble. As data from NPR and the Innocence Project show, those payouts are often despicably low.
* This Is How Much More States Spend On Prisoners Than On Students.
* Does the alternatives-to-incarceration industry profit from injustice?
* The economics of nuclear war.
* Things instructional staff aren’t paid enough to do.
* The logic on display here shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for.
* And they say America’s best years are behind it.
* Münchausen syndrome by proxy, mommy blog edition.
* The horror of postpartum psychosis.
* Against the simplicity of “born this way.”
* It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.
* Louie. Louie. Lou-eeeee. Louie. Louie. Lou-iiiiiii.
* You can kill anyone with your car, as long as you don’t really mean it.
* Walker said it was important to have a smooth-running highway system to avoid gridlock “that would choke off the ability of businesses to come in and out of Milwaukee.” “I think the last thing you want to do is have employers look to go bypass the city of Milwaukee when they’re talking about jobs and commerce here,” he said. “So you’ve got to make sure there’s a good transportation system.” And just wait until he finds out human beings use roads too!
* My brilliant wife has a poem in TAB.
* How to Catch a Chess Cheater.
* Elon Musk “Hopeful” First People Can Be Taken To Mars in 10-12 Years.
* And even Colbert Report writers have to form tech startups now.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 19, 2014 at 8:17 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, America, Arizona State University, austerity, Barack Obama, boredom, born this way, Bush, capitalism, cars, chess, children, class struggle, Colbert, corruption, Diplomacy, Don't mention the war, economics, Elon Musk, football, for-profit schools, games, gay rights, general election 2016, genetics, Google, graduate school, graduate students, GREs, guns, health care, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, innocence, Iraq, Jaimee, job creators, Louie, Louis C.K., maps, Mars, Münchausen syndrome by proxy, mental illness, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mommy bloggers, mothers, murder, Native American issues, neoliberalism, NFL, nuclear war, nuclearity, outer space, pedagogy, places to invade next, poetry, politics, postpartum psychosis, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, Redskins, roads, schools, self-plagiarism, sexism, slurs, Space X, Starbucks, startups, teaching, television, the hustle, the Internet, the West, trademarks, true crime, Twitter, Uber, war on rducation, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing
Late Night Monday Links
* Government shutting down because everything is terrible that’s why. Federal workers who check their e-mail during a shutdown will be breaking the law.
* Shock at Berkeley: Campus officials declare emergency following explosion around California Hall.
* What kind of society emerges when it is governed by the market-driven assumption that the only value that matters is exchange value, when the common good is denigrated to the status of a mall, and the social order is composed only of individuals free to pursue their own interests?
* Towards a History of the Professional: On the Class Composition of the Research University.
* Vince Gilligan talks Breaking Bad alternate endings. This Is What Everyone Is Writing About Breaking Bad Today. And even more links.
* Adjuncts Should Do As Little Work As Possible.
* Memo: CUNY is Moving David Petraeus Seminar to Avoid Protestors.
* Before the Muppets, Jim Henson Tried to Build a Futuristic Nightclub.
* Color, Chromophobia, and Colonialism: Some Historical Thoughts.
* The Fantastic Four (1961-88) was The Great American Novel. (via)
* NASA’s abandoned plan for a re-usable, nuclear powered moon shuttle. (also via)
* And it turns out 2-to-1 of the people in this city are totally insane. Oh man.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 30, 2013 at 10:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, America, Bard, Berkeley, Breaking Bad, California, cars, class struggle, colonialism, color, comics, CUNY, double-decker highways, emails, Fantastic Four, government shutdowns, How the University Works, Jim Henson, Marvel, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Muppets, NASA, neoliberalism, pedagogy, Petraeus, politics, Republicans, roads, SATs, Soviet Union, superheroes, teaching, television, the law, the Moon, traffic, Vince Gilligan