Posts Tagged ‘Roger Ebert’
For His Unwavering Devotion to Weekend Links, Gerry Canavan Has Been Awarded the Nobel Prize for Linkblogging
* Every so often the Nobel Committee accidentally picks a genuinely deserving, genuinely inspiring recipient of the Peace Prize. This year was one. A 2013 profile of Malala Yousafzai. A speech to Pakistani Marxists. What did one Nobel laureate say to the other?
* Every so often the Supreme Court accidentally makes a good decision. Last night’s overturning of Wisconsin’s voter suppression law was one.
* What would the twentieth-century history of English studies look like if we had thought to preserve the records of our teaching? How could that history be different if we had institutional archives of syllabi, student notes, lecture drafts, handouts and seminar papers, just as we have archives of journal articles, drafts of novels, recordings of performances, and committee meeting minutes? What if universities had collected classroom documents alongside other records and traces of the knowledge they create and culture that they value?
* Another lovely Chomsky rant on the university.
So the university imposes costs on students and on faculty who are not only untenured but are maintained on a path that guarantees that they will have no security. All of this is perfectly natural within corporate business models. It’s harmful to education, but education is not their goal.
* Recent cuts have unfortunately made future cuts inevitable: The University of Wisconsin System is about to do some wholesale, strategic belt-tightening, according to its president. But it’s not all absolutely miserable news:
Regent Janice Mueller noted that of the $1.6 billion total paid to unclassified staff on UW campuses, faculty accounted for $550 million, leaving more than $1 billion going to non-faculty. “That seemed a little out of whack to me,” Mueller said. “I would think faculty salaries would be the larger share.”
I didn’t think Regents were allowed to notice things that like.
* The Excessive Political Power Of White Men In The United States, In One Chart.
* Phil Maciak on the greatness of Transparent.
* Why we need academic freedom: On Being Sued.
* Neoliberalism is the triumph of the state, not its retreat. The case of Mexico.
* On the cultural ideology of Big Data.
* It Would Actually Be Very Simple To End Homelessness Forever.
* It seems that all of Pearson’s critical foundational research and proven classroom results in the world couldn’t get the question 3 x 7 x 26 correct.
* Federal spending was lower this year than Paul Ryan originally asked for. Ha, take that Republicans! Another Obama-led triumph for the left!
* But things will be different once Obama finally becomes president. Obama Plans to Close Guantanamo Whether Congress Likes It Or Not.
* Nightmares: Could Enterovirus D68 Be Causing Polio-Like Paralysis in Kids?
* NYC airport workers walk off job, protesting lack of protection from Ebola risks.
* SF in everything: Malware needs to know if it’s in the Matrix.
* Lady Ghostbusters will be a reboot, almost assuredly a terrible one.
I love origin stories. That’s my favorite thing. I love the first one so much I don’t want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let’s just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn’t gone through it so it’s like, oh my God what’s going on?
* It’s happening again: Vastly Different Stories Emerging In Police Shooting Of St. Louis Teen. The Associated Press is On It:
* Teenagers in prison have a shockingly high suicide rate.
* Roger Ebert: The Collected Wikipedia Edits.
* The many faces of capitalism.
* The University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department issued an apology Wednesday after a list of safety tips posted to the department’s website was criticized for appearing to blame victims of campus crimes, particularly survivors of sexual assault.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Trigger Warnings.
* Today in theology: Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church decided Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control.
By the 15th century, the Holy Prepuce had become the desirous object of many mystics’ visions. Bridget of Sweden recorded the revelations she received from the Virgin Mary, who told the saint that she saved the foreskin of her son and carried it with her until her death. Catherine of Siena, the patron saint of Italy, imagined that her wedding ring—exchanged with the Savior in a mystical marriage—had been transmuted into the foreskin. In her Revelationes (c. 1310), Saint Agnes Blannbekin recounts the hours she spent contemplating the loss of blood the infant Christ must have suffered during the circumcision, and during one of her contemplative moments, while idly wondering what had become of the foreskin, she felt the prepuce pressed upon her tongue. Blannbekin recounted the sweet, intoxicating taste, and she attempted to swallow it. The saint found herself unable to digest the Holy Prepuce; every time she swallowed, it immediately reappeared on her tongue. Again and again she repeated the ritual until after a hundred gulps she managed to down the baby Jesus’ cover.
* Two Bad Tastes That Taste Bad Together: The US Doesn’t Have Enough Railroads to Keep Up With the Oil Boom.
* For some unfathomable reason somebody handed Cary Nelson another shovel: A Civility Manifesto.
* Another piece on the law and Tommy the Chimp.
* And maybe there are some doors we just shouldn’t open: I’m Slavoj Žižek, AMA.
What Is It, Thursday?
* Via my once and future roommate Tim: 7 unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals.
* Meet the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch.
* But let’s be very clear: our legislative process–which allows parochial short-term interests and massive corporate lobbies to undermine the long-term common interests–has proven shockingly inadequate to the monumental task before us: the preservation of the conditions of life for much of the human species.
* Hard to believe we’re still trying to get whaling banned.
* To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! Future generations are reading your tweets.
* Words circled by David Foster Wallace in his American Heritage Dictionary.
* Joss Whedon to rewrite Captain America too? Marvel could definitely put worse people in charge of its film franchise.
* Roger Ebert declares Kick-Ass “morally reprehensible.” I’m pretty sure I have to see it now.
* Zonal Marking: a soccer blog. Highlights here.
* And In Living Color is twenty. I am become old. So old.
Already Thursday! How?
* Brian K. Vaughn, you had me at “post-apocalyptic heist movie.”
* “You’d better sit down,” he said. “The finger is not human.”
* Disgraced Pope to be quietly reassigned to another Vatican on the other side of the state.
* Welcome to the official Twitter page of the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
* Thirteen ways of looking at Liz Lemon.
* I linked to this before, years ago, but here it is again: Kurt Vonnegut on the impossibility of telling the difference between good news and bad.
* And Roger Ebert, who admittedly likes every movie he sees, likes Hot Tub Time Machine.
Thursday Daytime Links
* Alastair Reynolds, Vernor Vinge, Karl Schroeder and Charlie Stross chat about the Singularity. Via MeFi.
* A school district in Pennsylvania is being sued for spying on students in their homes with school-provided laptops. WTF? What lawyer cleared this?
* Duke undergraduates can have their so-called “rights” when they’ve clawed them from my cold, dead hands: Really interesting (and, I think, ambitious) initiative from Duke Student Government. I wonder how it’ll turn out.
* Has the Democratic Party had a secret brain/spine transplantation? The OpenLeft whipcount now has 30 Democratic Senators on board for the totally obvious step of using reconciliation to pass health care, with an additional 17 officially on board with the Clyburn-tested, Canavan-approved step of using reconciliation to reinsert the public option.
* GOP to filibuster jobs bills entirely on procedural grounds. These guys should definitely be put back in charge. P.S.: There’s no way they’ll ratify a test ban treaty, either.
* Thomas Geoghegan at Democracy Now on killing the filibuster.
* Two more high-ranking Taliban commanders have been captured in Pakistan.
* The odds a United States president owned slaves are 1 in 3.58. Via Eric Barker.
* Eat the rich: 400 families “earned” $345 million each in 2007. Taxing these 400 families at the marginal tax rate of 1951 would net an additional 125 billion dollars for the federal government each year, which by itself would more than pay for health care. of course, that’s just my opening bid; I’m open to compromise. For instance we could split the difference between 91% (1951) and 35% (today) at 63%—this would net $87 billion a year, also enough to pay for health care by itself.
* And every blog on the Internet is required to link to the Esquire Roger Ebert profile, as well as Ebert’s reply on his blog. Consider me in compliance.
Wednesday Night MetaFilterFilter
Wednesday night MetaFilterFilter.
* NASA climatologist James Hansen, recently arrested at an anti-mountaintop-mining demonstration in West Virginia, says we’re almost too late to stop climate change. I wonder about that “almost.”
* Nate Silver considers the legislative strategy at work in the upcoming Waxman-Markey vote.
* Mapping relationships in the X-Men Universe.
* An early Christmas present for my father? Corzine trails badly in New Jersey.
* Lots of talk lately about Robert Charles Wilson’s anti-Singulatarian Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Here’s an interview at io9 that takes up that angle, while Cory Doctorow highlights this blurb:
If Jules Verne had read Karl Marx, then sat down to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he still wouldn’t have matched the invention and exuberance of Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock.
* Dancing plagues and mass hysteria. Via MeFi.
* How complexity leads to social collapse: some intriguing historical exploration from Paul Kedrosky. Also via MeFi.
* Roger Ebert explains how Bill O’Reilly works.
O’Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can’t read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn’t watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or “news” that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. “All news” radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.
In those days, if you quoted The New York Times, you were bringing an authority to the table. Now O’Reilly–O’Reilly!–advises viewers to cancel their subscriptions to a paper most of them may not have ever seen. In those days, if the wire services reported something, it probably happened. Today the wire services remain indispensable, but waste resources in producing celebrity info-nuggets that belong in trash magazines. Advertisers now seek readers they once thought of as shoplifters. If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Brittny Spears than the causes of their death.
Discussion (where else?) at MeFi.
Wednesday 2
Wednesday 2.
* My North Carolinian readers should consider sending a letter expressing their displeasure to the offices of our senator, Kay Hagan, who as Facing South reports is currently one of the major stumbling blocks for health care reform.
Sen. Kay Hagan
521 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-6342
Fax: 202-228-2563
You can contact her via email at her web site, but a snail mail letter is still best.
* Climate Progress analyzes the concessions made to Collin Peterson to get Waxman-Markey to the floor this week. Kevin Drum and Yglesias has more, as well as a teaser for how much worse the Senate version will be.
* Also from Yglesias: (1) a post on Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves that intrigued me enough to drop everything and read the book and (2) a report that the Iranian soccer players who wore green in solidarity with the protesters have been banned from the sport for life. The Gods Themselves, I can report, is a great read: in addition to the environmental allegory Yglesias highlights there’s also some really intriguing queer sexuality stuff in the “how aliens have sex” section—very rare for Asimov—and a nice Star Maker-style cosmology regarding the origin of the universe and the fates of planets that don’t solve their energy crises. I think Asimov’s probably right that it’s his best book.
* Squaring off on the suckiness of Transformers II. In this corner, Roger Ebert:
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
And in this corner, Walter Chaw:
The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie.
* And your webcomic of the day: Warbot in Accounting.
Closing a Few Open Tabs
Closing a few open tabs.
* The New York Times has an article on Fermi problems and the importance of intuition in mathematics. (There’s a game.) (Via Boing Boing.) Kottke links to some such calculations at 3quarksdaily, saying they used to be part of the interview process of Microsoft and Google.
* Roger Ebert explains why some people say he gives movies too many stars.
* The new season of the Ricky Gervais podcast is out.
* More radio: an episode of This American Life from May that explains the origins of the mortgage crisis.
* And Bill Gates is investing heavily in algae fuel. We’re saved!
Best Film of 2007?
Roger Ebert says Juno is the best film of 2007, while blucarbnpinwheel says it’s just okay at best. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m inclined to trust Ben, especially insofar as we apparently had the exact same reaction to Napoleon Dynamite right down to the Rushmore comparison. (Although in fairness to N.D. I have grown a little more fond of it in retrospect and upon a subsequent viewing.) In Ebert’s plus column, he does note the greatness of No Country for Old Men, which I’ve been meaning to write about but am having trouble improving upon the Candleblog review: Holy crap. I was just punched in the face by the Coen brothers. Every single individual moment of this film is perfect. I am in awe. How dare they make this film?
But Ebert maliciously and incorrectly snubs by omission The Darjeeling Limited, obviously my choice for best film of Oh Seven, almost as if he’s deliberately trying to provoke me into a blind rage. Winner: blucarbnpinwheel!
I’m still hoping I like Juno, though. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, literally everything Michael Cera does makes me laugh, so the outlook is good.
Gerry Canavan 