Posts Tagged ‘run it like a sandwich’
Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night
- Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
- Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
- What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
- The College Degree Is Dividing America.
- Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
- 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
- Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
- Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
- Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
- If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
- The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
- It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
- Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
- How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
- ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
- Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
- From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
- The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
- Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
- Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
- Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
- Great, more work.
- And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – The Morning After!
* Two especially good stories from Wired‘s SF issue: N.K. Jemisin’s “The Evaluators” and Charles Yu’s “Subtext®.”
* Three ways of looking at the arc of history.
Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” We can take this to be the standard liberal-progressive way of looking at the arc of history.
There are two other possible variations:
the reactionary right: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward vengeance.”
the revolutionary left: “The arc of history is long and it’s going to keep getting longer unless we put a stop to it.”
* You’ve seen the meme. Here are some actual college administrator titles.
* The road from Saddam Hussein to Donald Trump.
* Enrollment trends place different facilities pressures on institutions of different sizes, the report found. Many small institutions that recently borrowed money to renovate or build in a bid to attract more students are now facing enrollment declines. They have seen enrollment drop by 3 percent since 2012 even though they’ve increased facilities development by 4 percent. Comprehensive institutions are opening new space just as they’re hit by enrollment stagnation — they increased their space by almost 14 percent cumulatively since 2012 but only posted a 1 percent enrollment increase over the same time period.
* Thus the nation-state is not with the common people – it is an enemy of the peoples. Some timely political theory from Abdullah Ocalan.
Essentially, the nation-state is a militarily structured entity. Nation-states are eventually the products of all kinds of internal and external warfare. None of the existing nation-states has come into existence all by itself. Invariably, they have a record of wars. This process is not limited to their founding phase but, rather, it builds on the militarization of the entire society. The civil leadership of the state is only an accessory of the military apparatus. Liberal democracies even outdo this by painting their militaristic structures in democratic and liberal colours. However, this does not keep them from seeking authoritarian solutions at the highpoint of a crisis caused by the system itself. Fascist exercise of power is the nature of the nation-state. Fascism is the purest form of the nation-state.
* When the oligarchy assembles itself out in the open.
* Democrats: we’re with him.
* Guys, not to alarm you, but what if Trumpism is actually bad.
* We regret to inform you that Pantsuit Nation is a sham.
* Democrats shouldn’t assume their “Trump loves Putin” argument is a political winner. Oh, I think that ship has sailed.
* Smog refugees flee Chinese cities as ‘airpocalypse’ blights half a billion.
* Let’s Geek Out Over All The Fascinating Technology Used In Rogue One. Rogue One and the troubling promise of one Star Wars film per year every year until you are dead. And I think Wired has the best “let’s try to figure out what Rogue One was originally going to be like” breakdown yet.
* Just in time for my animals book, Wes Anderson makes it official: his next movie is Isle of Dogs.
* And all’s well that ends well.
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
* The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book
* Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
* The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.
* Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
* We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
* The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
* My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Closing Every Tab Not In Anger But In Disappointment Links
* I have a new essay out on zombies and the elderly in this great new book on zombies, medicine, and comics: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image. And if you’re interested in my Octavia Butler book, podcaster Jonah Sutton-Morse (@cabbageandkings) is going through it piece by piece on Twitter with #mmsfoeb. Also, check out this LARB interview with Ayana Jamieson on her work in the Butler archives!
* CFP: Comics Remixed: Adaptation and Graphic Narrative, University of Florida. CFP: ASLE 2017 (Detroit, MI). CFP: Special Issue of Green Letters on Crime Fiction and Ecology. CFP: Global Dystopia.
* Maybe the best thing you’ll read this year: Clickhole’s Oral History of Star Trek.
* Wes Anderson made a Christmas commercial. Updated Power Rankings coming soon!
* ‘Feast or Famine’ for Humanities Ph.D.s.
* Las Vegas is a microcosm. “The world is turning into this giant Skinner box for the self,” Schüll told me. “The experience that is being designed for in banking or health care is the same as in Candy Crush. It’s about looping people into these flows of incentive and reward. Your coffee at Starbucks, your education software, your credit card, the meds you need for your diabetes. Every consumer interface is becoming like a slot machine.”
* Jesuit university presidents issue statement supporting undocumented students. Catholic college leaders pledge solidarity with undocumented students. Dissent on sanctuary cities.
* Public universities and the doom loop. UW-Madison drops out of top five research universities for first time since 1972. Student visas, university finances, and Trump.
* Stealing it fair and square: In split decision, federal judges rule Wisconsin’s redistricting law an unconstitutional gerrymander. And so on and so on.
* The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.
* How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red.’ Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All. Postelection Harassment, Case by Case. Here are 20 lessons from across the fearful 20th century, adapted to the circumstances of today. Making White Supremacy Acceptable Again. Trump and the Sundown Town. No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design. If only someone had thought of this eight years ago! A time for treason.
* Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him. Trump and the End of Expertise. On Taking the Electoral College Literally. Some Schmittian reflections on the election. Stop Calling the United States a Banana Republic. Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President. Emoluments. A running list of how Donald Trump’s new position may be helping his business interests. A billionaire coup d’etat. Wunderkind. Voting under the influence of celebrity. We have an institution that could stop this (no not that one), but it won’t. Wheeeeee! Wheeeeeeeeeeee!
* And I’m afraid the news only gets worse.
* “I would rather lose than win the way you guys did,” Ms. Palmieri said.” Respectfully disagree! The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt. Who Lost the White House? Careful! We don’t want to learn anything from this.
* I was reminded recently of this post from @rortybomb a few years ago that, I think, got the Obama years right earlier and better than just about anyone. And here he is on the election: Learning from Trump in Retrospect.
* Maybe America is simply too big.
* Inside the bizarre world of the military-entertainment industry’s racialized gamification of war.
* Trump’s already working miracles: Dykes to Watch Out For is out of retirement.
* The Nitty-Gritty on Getting a Job: The 5 Things Your English Professors Don’t Teach You.
* Remembering Scott Eric Kaufman.
* Huge Cracks In the West Antarctic Ice Sheet May Signal Its Collapse.
* Four Futures: Life After Capitalism review – will robots bring utopia or terror?
* If I developed a drug and then tested it myself without a control group, you might be a bit suspicious about my claims that everyone who took it recovered from his head cold after two weeks and thus that my drug is a success. But these are precisely the sorts of claims that we find in assessment.
* A world map of every country’s tourism slogan. Here Are the Real Boundaries of American Metropolises, Decided by an Algorithm.
* The youth concussion crisis.
* Cheating at the Olympics Is at Epic Levels.
* Mr. Plinkett and 21st-Century Star Wars Fandom. An addendum.
* Moana before Moana. This one’s pretty great by the way, my kids loved it.
* From the archives: Terry Bisson’s “Meat.”
* Stanislaw Lem: The Man with the Future Inside Him.
* U.S. Military Preps for Gene Drives Run Amok.
* Fidel Castro: The Playboy Interview.
* Cap’n Crunch presents The Earliest Show.
* Coming soon: Saladin Ahmed’s Black Bolt. Grant Morrison’s The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ.
* Parker Posey Will Play Dr. Smith and Now We Suddenly Care a Lot About Netflix’s Lost in Space. TNT fires up a Snowpiercer pilot. Behind the scenes of the new MST3K. The Cursed Child is coming to Broadway.
* “Magneto Was Right”: Recalibrating the Comic Book Movie for the Trump Age.
* Now my childhood is over: both Florence Henderson and Joe Denver have died.
* Of course you had me at “Science fiction vintage Japanese matchbox art mashup prints.”
* A brief history of progress.
* The first, last, and only truly great object of our time.
* And say what you will about OK Go, this one’s pretty damn good.
Wednesday Links!
* The Department of English invites candidates holding the rank of Associate or Full Professor to apply for the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature honoring the department’s most celebrated graduate.
* Next week at Marquette: Cuban science fiction authors Yoss and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo!
* 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium: A Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Inside The Octavia Butler Archives With L.A. Writer Lynell George.
* I am writing to apply for the job–or rather “fellowship”–advertised on your website. As a restless member of the creative class, I agree that secure employment, renewable year-to-year, can be a suffocating hindrance. And besides, you specify “tons of snacks and beverages” as part of your benefit package. As a job-seeker motivated by a combination of desperation and snacks, I am an ideal candidate for this position.
* The report finds that the cost of forgoing tuition revenue from two- and four-year public institutions could run into the billions for some states: $4.96 billion in California, $3.89 billion in Texas and $2.53 billion in Michigan.
* Pence and gaslighting. Kaine’s tactical defeat. A Con Man of Epic Proportions. Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for A Mere Two Decades. The mind-blowing scale of Trump’s billion-dollar loss, in one tweet. Trump Foundation ordered to stop fundraising by N.Y. attorney general’s office. I want to believe! This seems legitimate. If Donald Trump Published an Academic Article. If you want a vision of the future.
* Bananas possible endings to the election, New Mexico edition.
* The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Visions of the Future.
* All told, however, Xiberras feels Louise could have done better. “We hoped for more followers to take notice of Louise’s behavior,” he says. “There were a few people who sensed the trap—a journalist among others, of course—but in the end, the majority just saw a pretty young girl of her time and not at all a kind of lonely girl, who is actually not at all that happy and with a serious alcohol problem.”
* Here’s a piece we can all get mad about, regardless of our pedagogical inclinations: Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?
* The Luke Cage Syllabus. 15 Essential Luke Cage Stories.
* Teaching the controversy: The Identity of a Famous Person Is News. The outing of Elena Ferrante and the power of naming. Ars longa, vita brevis.
* Yahooooooooooo: Yahoo built email spying software for intelligence agencies, report says.
* Tracing the path of one of the world’s most in-demand minerals from deadly mines in Congo to your phone. More here.
* That’s a hell of an act! What do you call it? The Mets. Relatedly: in search of the Korean bat flip.
* Nostalgia for World Culture: A New History of Esperanto.
* Harvard loses a mere $2 billion from its endowment. My favorite part of these stories is always the comparison to passive management by an index fund.
* More running it like a sandwich: More than ever, college football programs are finding it difficult to draw and retain the young fans who grow up to be lifelong season-ticket holders. In many athletic departments, the reasons can practically be cited as catechism: high-definition televisions, DVRs, diffuse fan bases and higher ticket and parking costs.
* American University Student Government Launches Campaign in Support of Mandatory Trigger Warnings.
* Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.
* Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today.
* The last days of Robin Williams, as told by his wife Susan Schneider Williams.
* ‘Killer Clowns’: Inside the Terrifying Hoax Sweeping America.
* No one knew then that Springsteen, like Smith, would provide a through-line for his fans as things got worse, shifted in unimaginable ways, shifted again. Springsteen has himself changed with the times, becoming more sensitive to the issues his most-adored music still raises. Born To Rundemonstrates that. The decency at the heart of his memoir is a balm. He’s not only survived a life in rock and roll; he shows how a true believer doesn’t have to get stuck within its illusions, no matter how much they also attract him. After all, to Springsteen, a worthwhile dream isn’t an illusion; it’s a form of work.
* Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates: You know, humans.
* One of the most important lessons of Ghosh’s book is that the politics of climate change must not tiptoe around the questions posed by colonial encounters. Issues of climate justice cannot be solved without first addressing questions of equitable distribution of power, historically rooted in imperialism. And therein lies Ghosh’s disagreement with those who find the source of the problem in capitalism itself (Naomi Klein, for example). For him, even if “capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.”
* Wealth of people in their 30s has ‘halved in a decade.’ Probably definitely totally unrelated: Federal student loans facilitate a pernicious profit motive in higher education.
* Patent application for a method of curing kidney stones.
* I think it’s 50/50 at this point that the Purge is a real thing before I’m dead.
* So You Want to Adapt The Tempest.
* No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously. Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene.
* The secret lives of New Jerseyans.
* On our phenomenal (recent) accomplishments in space.
Every Possible Monday Link
* 8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension. 21st Century Blacklists in New York.
* The second issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* Huge, if true: Ongoing Weakness in the Academic Job Market for Humanities.
* 13 Ways of Looking at the Humanities.
* Apparent murder of a professor follows a day of terror on campus and reflects a kind of violence that is rare but feared. Hundreds gather to honor slain UCLA professor. Police Say UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar Also Killed Woman in Minnesota.
* Brigham Young professor told not to give fake urine to his students to drink.
* When universities try to behave like businesses, education suffers.
* Nobody knows how to torpedo their own brand like a university outreach office.
* Looks Like We Were Wrong About the Origin of Dogs.
* Who Gives Money to Bernie Sanders? Understanding Sanders voters. Bernie Sanders Has Already Won California.
* “I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in,” said senior strategist Tad Devine. “It was ‘How do we become credible?’ ”
* Interesting trial ballon: Reid reviews scenarios for filling Senate seat if Warren is VP pick.
* Miracles and wonders: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke patient walk.
* Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker. The Stanford Rapist’s Father Offers An Impossibly Offensive Defense Of His Son.
* Report: Milwaukee conducted deceitful water testing for lead. Chicago residents take action to be rid of lead pipes as fear of toxic water grows.
* These findings are very preliminary, but they support a decades-old (and unfortunately named) idea called the hygiene hypothesis. In order to develop properly, the hypothesis holds — to avoid the hyper-reactive tendencies that underlie autoimmune and allergic disease — the immune system needs a certain type of stimulation early in life. It needs an education.
* SFMOMA Visitor Trips, Falls Into $82 Million Warhol Painting.
* This Is How Elon Musk Wants Government to Work on Mars. Elon Musk believes we are probably characters in some advanced civilization’s video game.
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* In the scope of the scheming, corruption, and illegality from this interim government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense. But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who — though not legally barred from being installed — is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.
* Claypool: Without State Funding Chicago Public Schools Won’t Open in Fall. Total system failure.
* UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market. Kean U. Broke Law in Purchasing $250,000 Table, State Office Says.
* Jay Edidin on how to be a guy.
* The case for abandoning Miami.
* Huge, if true: Game of Thrones’ Dany/Dothraki storyline doesn’t make any sense. Is Dany the villain? But the real villain is the one you never see coming: Game Of Thrones Season Seven May Be Seven Episodes Long.
* Call for Contributors: Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones.
* The media have reached a turning point in covering Donald Trump. He may not survive it. Why Trump Was Inevitable. Why Donald Trump Is Flailing. Why Trump Will Lose. Donald Trump Does Not Have a Campaign. Why Trump Is Losing. Clinton’s case.
* The Amazing Origins of the Trump University Scam. State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.
* Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone.
* Alas, Babylon: David French won’t run.
* Steph Curry and the Future of Basketball.
* The Amazing Story of Rio’s All-Refugee Olympic Team.
* In Praise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
* In a panic, they try to pull the plug: A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. It’s hard not to think Skynet won’t view this as a provocation.
* “Researchers Confirm Link Between High Test Scores In Adolescence And Adult Accomplishments.”
* Legal trolling: One of the Leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement Has Been Charged With Lynching.
Also unbelievable is that someone would purchase a used, $30 freezer without opening it first.
* No one wants year-round schooling. The Families That Can’t Afford Summer.
* Department of Precrime, Chicago edition.
Sometimes only minutes after the gunshots end, a computer system takes a victim’s name and displays any arrests and gang ties — as well as whether the victim has a rating on the department’s list of people most likely to shoot someone or be shot.
Police officials say most shootings involve a relatively small group of people with the worst ratings on the list. The police and social service workers have been going to some of their homes to warn that the authorities are watching them and offer job training and educational assistance as a way out of gangs.
Of the 64 people shot over the weekend, 50 of them, or 78 percent, are included on the department’s list. At least seven of the people shot over the weekend have been shot before.
For one man, only 23 years old, it is his third time being shot.
* The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month.
* The Chinese government and science fiction.
* Star Trek reboots and the merchandising game.
* Uber and the sub-prime auto business.
* What’s it like to work construction on a skyscraper?
* Louis on Maron convinced me to finally buy Horace and Pete. The Julia Louis-Dreyfus half of the episode is great too.
* Well, this seems questionable at best: Catholic Church spent $2M on major N.Y. lobbying firms to block child-sex law reform.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Science finally proves I was right all along: it’s better to be right than happy.
* A Shakespearean Map of the US.
* The Weird Not-Quite-Afterlife of Harry Potter.
* In praise of the punctuation mark I abuse more than any other: the dash.
* Every Californian Novel Ever.
* Suits getting started on ruining Story of Your Life early.
* And RIP, Ali. Being Ali’s personal magician. Watching Rocky II with Muhammad Ali.
June Links — Supplemental
* A New Hope, as it was always meant to be experienced: as infographic.
* Really, actually ideology at its purest: ‘There is a future for Harambe’: Cincinnati zoo reveal sperm was removed from gorilla who was shot dead so he could still become a father.
* Murder-suicide at UCLA. Police are suggesting a student may have murdered a professor.
* Lost Superstitions of the Early-20th-Century United States.
* Airships and Reanimated Corpses from the Pages of Early Science Fiction.
* If Osama bin Laden had not existed, the United States would have had to invent him. Although William V. Spanos never quite puts it that way, this claim nevertheless encapsulates one of the fundamental insights of Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation — namely, that American exceptionalism entails a dense knotting together of the vitality of the nation and targeted killing. The very being of America as a more-than-merely-national nation hinges on its capacity to obliterate its enemies in the most spectacular fashion, while simultaneously arrogating the life-force or resources of its enemies for itself.
* “Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors.”
* “In terms of the labor market, 2016 is a great year to graduate.” The Graduate Opportunity Index. For-Profit College Grads Earn Less Money Than They Did Before College.
* The Trump University Scam seems pretty egregious even by Trump’s standards.
* Trump Has a Conflict-of-Interest Problem No Other White House Candidate Ever Had.
* I’m trying not to get tired of saying this, but just try to imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton came out to defend herself against some perfectly reasonable questions, and said “The press should be ashamed of themselves” or pointed to a reporter and said, “You’re a sleaze.” She wouldn’t be criticized or questioned, she’d be crucified. Reporters would ask if she had lost her mind and was having a nervous breakdown. There would be demands for her to pull out of the race immediately, since she had shown herself to be so unstable.
* Applications for TFA’s two-year teaching stints have plummeted 35 percent during the past three years, forcing the organization to reexamine and reinvent how it sells itself to prospective corps members. It has been focusing particularly on how to engage students at the nation’s most-selective colleges, where the decline in interest has been among the steepest. The improving economy probably has far more to do with this than any anti-TFA publicity campaign.
* The idea that young workers should cut their teeth by working long hours for low pay, or even for free, is the result of employers holding all the cards in the economy. It’s the same phenomenon that lets businesses get away with lax safety standards, unpredictable schedules, and offering scant benefits. By making it harder for employers to demand extra hours as part of the job, the overtime rule is an important tool to shift the balance of power towards working people.
* “Magic Is Ruining Game of Thrones.“
* Salvage Perspectives #3: Or What’s a Hell For?
* This stunning Korean thriller is the summer’s first great movie.
* But the future has always been several: how could it be otherwise, when it hasn’t happened yet? The millennial or apocalyptic future, the future that abolishes time itself, is not the same as the prophetic future of a possible or desired outcome, which is not the same as speculative future of science fiction, which is not the same as the future envisaged by a calendar or a to-do list, which is not the same as the future of the high-yield bond, which is not the same as the future which will involve you reading the next sentence, or deciding not to. But what all these have in common with the phenomenological future – the one involved in the direct sensation of time passing, the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it – is their slipperiness. Futures can never be touched or experienced, only imagined; this is why they’re as diverse as the human psyche, and why they tend to be so dreamlike: at turns ludic, libidinal, or monstrous.
* Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy.
* At thirteen, a neglectful foster system tore me from the only woman I ever wanted to call “Mom.” Decades later I tracked her down and finally got my happy ending.
* New Orleans’s New Flood Maps: An Outline for Disaster.
* Jay and Miles Overthink X-Men: Apocalypse.
* The last political compass test you’ll ever need.
* After a Life of Punches, Ex-N.H.L. Enforcer Is a Threat to Himself: Stephen Peat has symptoms — memory loss and headaches — often associated with C.T.E., a brain disease linked to head trauma.
* ‘It’s only working for the white kids’: American soccer’s diversity problem.
* And Another Small Private Closes Its Doors: Dowling College.
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).
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
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.
Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!
* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!
* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.
* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.
* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.
* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.
* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.
* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.
* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!
* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.
* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.
* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.
* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?
* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.
* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”
* The Verdict on Charter Schools?
* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.
* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.”
* Social networking and the majority illusion.
* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!
* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.
* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”
* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?
* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.
* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.
* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.
* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.
* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.
* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.
* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].
* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.
* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.
* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.
* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.
* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.
* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.
* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.
* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.
* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.
* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.
* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.
* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.
* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.
* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.
* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.
* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.
* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)
* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.
* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.
* So you want to announce for the WWE.
* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.
* I’m not happy about this either.
* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.
* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”
* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.
* Another round of the polygamy debate.
* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.
* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.
* And then there’s Whitesboro.
* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.
* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.
* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.
* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.
* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.
* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!
* And there’s nothing sweet in life.
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
‘The Case for Faculty Self-Governance’
In my ideal system, literally no university would ever do an outside search for dean or provost, ever, and there would be a minimum time served requirement before any new faculty hires could do administrative tasks. This would ensure that all administrators are absolutely tied to the future of their current institution and would be anticipating rejoining the regular faculty in the future. If they screwed over their colleagues, they would have to live among them as a peer for decades to come.
Adam has a post building on my mismanagement post from yesterday arguing for maximally strong faculty governance as the solution to the administrative class’s production of permanent crisis. I agree wholeheartedly. The class of transient, careeriest administrators has brought waste, looting, and an irresponsible boom-bust cycle to higher education everywhere they have taken hold, regardless of how nice or good any individual administrator is. Hence my satirical, wildly unpopular proposal for reverse tenure for admin: they only get to leave with faculty approval, otherwise they have to stay and deal with the fallout from whatever short-sighted stat-juking they instituted while they were polishing their CV.
But Adam’s proposal is what I would actually implement systemwide if I could snap my fingers and just do it: limited admin terms for tenured faculty, constitutionally behold to faculty senates, would produce a class of administrators invested in the institution’s long-term health rather than its very-short-term movements and manipulations, without producing pocket fiefdoms or another class of unaccountable gods to contend with down the road. As Adam says:
This system would also presumably inculcate broader loyalty to academia as such, pushing against the destruction of the teaching profession via adjunctification, etc., etc. But even if it didn’t have such wide-ranging effects, it would at least keep administrators from actively destroying their own institutions, simply out of self-interest.
Check out his whole post.
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it yesterday: “Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis.”
* Chomsky: How America’s Great University System Is Being Destroyed.
* “Faculty and Students Are Walking Out Today for Catholic Identity.”
* CFP: Porn Studies Special Issue: Porn and Labour.
* Igbinedion’s production company Igodo Films recently shared Oya: Rise of The Orishas in full online. They also revealed that the Oya project has been adapted for the silver screen with principal photography on the feature-length film version scheduled to begin later this year in Brazil. The London-based filmmaker shared in a recentinterview that he made the short film in order to prove that there is a market for sci-fi films revolving around African characters and storylines. In this regard, Oya joins Ethiopian post-apocalyptic flick Crumbs in forging a path for future film projects from the continent within the realm of speculative fiction. In addition to the full-length project, Oya‘s creators have also confirmed plans for a comic book adaptation of the film, which is currently available for pre-order.
* Neil Gaiman reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Sounds bizarre and great.
* Study: Killers are less likely to be executed if their victims are black. What could explain it?
* First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims.
* London, the city that privatised itself to death.
* Once-homeless Baylor player ineligible, allegedly for accepting a place to live.
* How Facebook is changing the ways we feel.
* The creators of that (great!) Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan film might be in trouble.
* Meanwhile everything old is new again: Duck Tales, Inspector Gadget, even Danger Mouse.
* The day we all feared is upon us.
* It’s important that the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots succeed, either at achieving an outright ban or at sparking debate resulting in some other sensible and effective regulation. This is vital not just to prevent fully autonomous weapons from causing harm; an effective movement will also show us how to proactively ban other future military technology.
* Meet Your Republican 2016 Front-Runner.
* Thousands of oil refinery workers are striking for safer working conditions. Their fight is central to the struggle against climate change.
* Choose Your Own Adventure: So You’ve Accidentally Gotten Pregnant in South Dakota.
* And xkcd maps the future and the past.
Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis
Some loose, probably incautious thoughts, adapted from a couple of Twitter rants essays I’ve been writing the last few days.
A multi-generation, multimillion-dollar institution (like a college) that has to administrate by emergency decree has in nearly every case been grotesquely failed by its leadership. And in the US today that describes nearly every college and university, in management rhetorics and policies dating back at least to the mid-2000s (when I first entered the profession as a graduate student).
If your college faced drastic emergency cuts after 2008, it was mismanaged. You expanded on an unsustainable basis, made the wrong commitments, spent too much.
If your college faces drastic emergency cuts now because enrollments will tick (slightly) downward in the 2010s, it was mismanaged. You had 18 years warning that this demographic wave was going to hit, 18 years to plan for what to do when it did.
As every college administration invokes generalized, free-flowing “emergency” as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones that contradict the other ones — they are arguing that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!
Nor is there ever any accountability, or so much as an explanation, for how the crisis was ever allowed to happen in the first place. (Very often, of course, the guilty parties have already fled the state.)
Eternal organizations designed to last forever simply should not have to implement policy on a crisis basis — much less be forced to implement every policy in this way. Colleges and universities should have been managed so carefully up to now so that they can afford to phase in new policy changes over time, running experiments and pilot programs where necessary to ensure success. That’s what neoliberal shibboleths like “nimble” and “flexible” would actually mean in a world of rational management — graceful, deliberate movements, not wild lurching and uncontrolled crash-landing.
Careful management, good management, is the full and sole justification for the administration class that has bloated so entirely over the college landscape since the 1980s (and whose growth is still accelerating, even in the face of permanent cuts everywhere else). Simply put the promise of the management class was that they could manage colleges better than faculty. Even by their own estimation they have completely failed at this task on every possible level. Thirty years of running it like a sandwich has every college in the country living admission cycle to admission cycle, cutting budgets and services and wages every year, careening from supposed emergency to supposed emergency without any stabilization or improvement.
Even bracketing endowments and donations altogether, generally speaking colleges have a built-in client base, already own all the land and buildings, can borrow freely, and don’t pay taxes. I could devise a harder test of management acumen. So it seems to me the approximately 100% of college administrations that are now claiming emergency and desperation year after year need to cop either to their own incompetence, or else their dishonesty, or else their active malice.
Canavan’s Razor would tell us that permanent crisis is a management strategy, the unacknowledged goal of every plan. But whichever precise combination of incompetence, dishonesty, and malice best describes a particular university administration is irrelevant. The management class simply has no reason to exist at all if their interventions in the university produce not stability but crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis…
Gerry Canavan 