Posts Tagged ‘Roald Dahl’
Sunday Morning Links
* Call for applications: The 2015-16 postdoc seminar at Rice, “After Biopolitics.”
* In the absence of sparrows: the front page story says you’ve been missing since / November 22, 2012. Everything else it doesn’t say. / In the absence of sparrows: you simply wandered off, past the Sunoco, pockets stuffed. / The door to your apartment is open still—
* Together, these forums, initiatives, and spy teams constitute a sustained effort to suppress meaningful resistance to the university’s privatization program by placing strict boundaries on dissent. Policing Civility.
* Elsewhere in campus civility: The Pentagon Is Giving Grenade Launchers to Campus Police.
* Hence I propose that, roughly speaking, one’s privilege level correlates with the likelihood that expressing anger will make people take your concerns more seriously rather than less — or at the very least, that it will prompt a reaction to you as an individual rather than triggering an immediate generalization about your demographic profile. This is one of the most intimate and insidious things about privilege dynamics: even the right to express perfectly natural and justified human emotions can’t be taken for granted.
* The Paris Review interviews Ray Bradbury.
If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
* …and translates Umberto Eco.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence. Schulz’s children are not a sly instrument to handle our adult problems: they experience these problems according to a childish psychology, and for this very reason they seem to us touching and hopeless, as if we were suddenly aware that our ills have polluted everything, at the root.
* God, I wish these J.G. Ballard books for children were real.
* Previously unknown final chapters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Detroit’s Under-Funded Fire Departments Use a Soda Can For a Fire Alarm.
* Gape in amazement as The New Yorker‘s famous fact-checkers seriously drop the ball.
* Vox gets nostalgic for the 1994 AT&T “You Will” ad campaign.
* As fast-food workers demonstrate nationwide for a $15 hourly wage, and congressional Republicans fight off a $10 federal minimum, little SeaTac has something to offer the debate. Its neighbor, Seattle, was the first big city to approve a $15 wage, this spring, but that doesn’t start phasing in until next year. SeaTac did it all at once. And, though there’s nothing definitive, this much is clear: The sky did not fall.
* Profiles in courage: Obama to delay his big move on immigration until after election.
* Saving some time before the next invasion.
* Not really how it’s supposed to work: An atheist airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment last month for refusing to take an oath containing “so help me God,” the American Humanist Association said Thursday.
* Peace activism vs. environmental activism.
* Geographers prove no one likes the Jets.
* Female privilege is real: Sharks nine times more likely to kill men than women, study says.
* The eight white identities. I’m not 100% clear on the daylight between White Traitor and White Abolitionist, but otherwise it seems to taxonomize approaches to white supremacy I see on the Internet all the time.
* Could it be possible that police departments are lying when they say suspects handcuffed behind their backs are shooting themselves in the chest with hidden weapons that were somehow not found when they were searched? Truly, a bold provocation. Perhaps it will always be a mystery.
* Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.
* And: you fools: every day is Bill Murray Day.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction has a pre-order page! Open your wallets! Contact your local librarian! Get your Hugo nomination ballots ready!
* It’s a shame about Joan Rivers. The documentary about her is great. She was good on the Nerdist podcast too.
* Amazing, astounding: The Eaton Collection just got a $3.5 million gift.
* Through its increasing corporatization in the last two decades, the university in the United States has implemented an organizational ideology that has created a climate unfavorable for women faculty. By overvaluing and intensifying managerial principles, the university in the United States has strengthened discursive masculinity and has worsened women faculty’s likelihood of professional advancement. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of managerialism in higher education in the United States is a question of gender equity for the academic profession. Feminist educational scholars have been relatively quiet on the growth of managerialism in the university and its impact on gender equity. In particular, feminist scrutiny of managerialism’s discursive masculinity and its effects on gender equity in the university has been lacking. This conceptual article presents a feminist analysis of managerialism and its implications for women faculty in the United States; it examines how managerial culture and practices adopted by universities have revived, reinforced, and deepened the discourse of masculinity.
* inconsequential research kills don’t inconsequential research today
* The future’s just a little bit janky: Awesome Home-Built Elysium Exoskeleton Lifts 170 Pounds Like Nothing.
* The Freedom to Starve: The New Job Economy.
* California is the state of sunshine, movie stars— and Supermax prisons.
* This 3D-rendered Spider-Woman will haunt your dreams.
* People don’t like Spider-Woman’s butt because of Islam, says illustrator.
* The coming student debt apocalypse.
* The arc of history is long, but: Rams Cut Sam, First Drafted Openly Gay Player.
* In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.
* When police catch “contagious shooting.” Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don’t Count on Seeing the Footage. Police Body Cameras Don’t Address the Real Problem: Police.
* Cop Charged With Sexually Assaulting Eight Women Under Threat of Arrest.
* All about how airlines cancel flights. Okay, but listen, I’m still mad.
* Headlines from the Anthropocene: Drought-Stricken California Makes Historic Move To Regulate Underground Water For The First Time. Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?
* Cataclysm in suburbia: The dark, twisted history of America’s oil-addicted middle class.
* The Moon Landing Went Far Better Than the Practice Landing.
* A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Astronomers Discover A Planetary Impact Outside Our Own Solar System.
* And a radical communist provocation to shake your delicate sensibilities to the core: Shaking Down the Elderly for Student Loan Debt Should Not Be Allowed.
