Saturday Links

* Pope Calls for Church Austerity, Wants to Focus on Poor.

Meeting with journalists this morning, Pope Francis laid out his vision for the Catholic church, which includes cutting spending on ornate ceremony and instead spending that money on the poor. He urged excited fellow-Argentines to skip the costly trip to Rome to visit the first non-European Pope in almost 1,300 years, and instead give that money to the poor.

“Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor,” he told the gathered journalists. He explained the reason he took the name, Francis, after St. Francis of Assissi, was because of St. Francis’s devotion to the poor and love of animal life. On climate change, the Pope remarked, “Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.”

* The rich are different from you and me.

The report, authored by David Callahan and J. Mijin Cha, found that “wealthy interests are keenly focused on concerns not shared by the rest of the American public, like keeping taxes low on capital gains, and often oppose policies that would foster upward mobility among low-income citizens, such as raising the minimum wage.”

* Chicago tried to ban Persepolis? Why? Why?

* The letters of Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee.

* Your Own Private Google: The Quest for an Open Source Search Engine.

* Ricky Gervais: The Office Revisited.

* Idiocracy watch: When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a Big Gulp.

* Last Survivor of Plot to Kill Hitler Dies at 90.

Years later von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”

“He got up from his chair,” von Kleist remembered, according to an account by The New York Times, “went to the window, looked out of the window for a moment, and then he turned and said: ‘Yes, you have to do that. A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life.’”

* The dissertation is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

* Why are working conditions for restaurant employees so bad?

Monday Night Links

* Bernard Pollard doesn’t think the NFL will exist in 30 years… because it’s just becoming too darn safe.

* Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor’s degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

* Also in local news: Milwaukee sheriff says the police won’t protect you, so get a gun.

* And again! Wisconsin’s Abortion Restrictions Deny Women The Right To Terminate A Pregnancy In Privacy.

* Presenting the quinoa backlash backlash.

* Thomas Friedman op-ed generator. Even better than the real thing.

* And with each new technology, the same hyperbole, the same evangelism. On-line education is great. MOOC is a wonderful concept. But most of the institutions in the world that are over 400 years old are universities and there is a reason for that. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the impending demise of the traditional university may be much exaggerated.

* All about Siri.

* What Are Low-Ranked Graduate Programs Good For?

*  …far from being merely escapism, fiction – especially speculative fiction – is a fantastically useful arena in which to do social theory, yet it’s one that most social scientists roundly ignore.

* New Arctic Death Spiral Feedback: Melt Ponds Cause Sea Ice To Melt More Rapidly.

* Big Surprise: Yet Another Ed Reform Turns Out to be Bogus.

* Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever.

* MetaFilter has a post on the Maria Bamford Show.

* Sarah Palin slinks offstage.

* And the CW presents The Sopranos Diaries.

Tuesday!

* And so begins my biennial worrying about whether Wes Anderson’s next movie will (1) be good (2) be any different than the others. The Grand Budapest Hotel sounds like yet another intricate dollhouse, and I generally don’t care for Johnny Depp, so that’s two strikes. At least it isn’t family friendly.

* Harry Reid promises filibuster reform if Dems win the election. So he must think Democrats will lose the Senate…

* Breaking: The Newsroom Is Incredibly Hostile Toward Women.

Aaron Sorkin was on “Fresh Air” Monday afternoon, and he told Terry Gross that he “like[s] writing about heroes [who] don’t wear capes or disguises. You feel like, ‘Gee, this looks like the real world and feels like the real world — why can’t that be the real world?'” Yes, a fantasy land where male privilege goes unchallenged, forever, and bosses can spend meetings riffing on the attractiveness of their dates’ legs (as MacAvoy did in “Fix”), where the male gaze is the only gaze, where men have ideas and women are interrupting. Tell us more about this magical place.

* Universities Reshaping Education on the Web. All hail MOOCs! What could possiblygowrong and we’re already onto the next fad.

* [Point] My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids. [Counterpoint] Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher?

* Ouch. John McCain: I Didn’t Pick Romney Because ‘Sarah Palin Was The Better Candidate.’

* Penn State Plane Gives Warning: Take Down Paterno Statue “Or We Will.” This could get ugly. Uglier.

* How much Force power can Yoda output? “At current electricity prices, Yoda would be worth about $2/hour.”

Friday Linkfest

* The Portal 2s that could have been. I do, I happily admit, want to play all of these.

* Drop everything! My brilliant friend and colleague Melody Jue is now blogging at Philosophy of Water.

* At right is your photo of the day: An aurora over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.

* Joss Whedon explains how to write a sequel.

* Steal $80 million in a Ponzi scheme, get 18 months. Steal $4,367 in food stamps, get 3 years.

* “A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth,” Ohio oil and gas regulators said today.

* The year without a winter. Things are going to get weirder. But don’t worry: God told James Inhofe global warming is a hoax.

* “I have not heard of another hug”: Janet Bell, Derrick Bell’s widow, speaks out.

* Pat Robertson gets one right: he says we ought to legalize it.

* The Seuss book no one’s bought us (yet): The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.

* Jacob Burak crunches the odds on Russian Roulette. But he’s completely failed to account for the quantum immortality factor.

* Science quantifies the Tina Fey effect.

“When all other variables in the model are held at their mean, those who watched the SNL clip had a 45.4 percent probability of saying that Palin’s nomination made them less likely to vote for McCain,” they write. “This same probability drops to 34 percent among those who saw coverage of the debate through other media. Exposure to the clip had no significant effect on the likelihood of voting for Obama.”

* When Terry Kneiss wins a Showcase Showdown, son, he wins it.

* On chess, gender, and Laszlo Polgar’s Grandmaster Experiment.

* For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. I’m shocked, shocked! Followup to this This American Life story.

* The headline reads, “Breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment stops brain damage in mice.”

* And TPM has today’s sci-fi architecture porn.

Sunday Links

* Breaking Bad *and* Curb Your Enthusiasm tonight. I’m in TV heaven.

* Former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was arrested Sunday in connection with British police investigations into phone hacking and police bribery, her spokesman told CNN. And there’s more: Ed Miliband has demanded the breakup of Rupert Murdoch’s UK media empire in a dramatic intervention in the row over phone hacking. UPDATE: And the head of Scotland Yard has now resigned.

* Class struggle: 11 states receive more in lottery revenues than they do in corporate taxes.

* Twitter Mona Lisa. Via zunguzungu’s always wonderful Sunday reading.

* Scadenfreudelicious: Sarah Palin hagiography The Undefeated currently has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

* Local color: Scenes from the pun contest at the Regulator Bookshop.

* And from Al Jazera: “Mass psychosis in the US: How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.”

Wednesday (Nothin’ But) Links

* If my Internets are any guide, the most-linked article of the day by a mile: Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”

* There is literally nothing you can say to me that will make me disbelieve the Post‘s Lady Gaga/Žižek scoop. Do not try! It’s definitely, definitely true.

* Somebody in the Democratic leadership has finally noticed Republicans are sabotaging the economy on purpose.

* Al Gore takes on Obama’s failure to lead on climate change in the latest Rolling Stone. Great piece.

* Also in Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi voyages into the heart of darkness Michele Bachmann.

* Also in change we can believe in: Obama will reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to the level they were at when he took office. Yes we can!

* More from the Mother Jones special report on work in America: Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans.

* The headline reads, “Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions.”

* Of course you had me at Muppet Game of Thrones.

* Life imitates the Onion: Sarah Palin has quit her bus tour halfway through.

* Behold Randall Munroe’s terrible power, and despair: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich.

* And Katy Perry comes out as a communist. It’s really no surprise; all her friends are red…

NY-26

The Democrats’ big win tonight in GOP-leaning NY-26 should be all the proof anyone needs that the Republican plan to kill Medicare is completely toxic. And they all voted for it.

And some bonus good news: it looks like Sarah Palin may be running for president in 2012 after all.

Sunday Morning Post-Rapture Links

* Pharyngula, buzzkill, makes the whole “Rapture” craze this weekend seem a lot less funny. At least we’ll always have alternative_eschatology.jpg.

* The headline reads: “Utah law makes acting sexy illegal.” Just don’t tell the atheists.

* How a third-party Palin run might benefit the GOP.

* How the Big Bird puppet works. I don’t know that I ever really thought enough about this to have a “theory” on how Big Bird works, but I definitely thought Big Bird was more of a suit than a puppet—which I realize in retrospect is about as close to “I always thought Big Bird was real” as an adult can comfortably get.

* Mitch Daniels won’t run. This is very good news for Pawlenty, who looks increasingly unbeatable—though a number of my right-wing relatives who used to think experience was the most important qualification for the presidency seem quite enraptured with pizza magnate Herman Cain. The rest of my Republican relatives appear, unbelievably, to be waiting for Jeb.

* Mark Schmitt on intergenerational warfare from Paul Ryan and the GOP. Via Matt Yglesias, who highlights once again the centrality of 1973/1974 as the key turning point in U.S. economic and political history.

* More intergenerational warfare from the GOP: Newt wants poll tests for “young people.”

* And a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx’s thought are mistaken?

Closing All My Tabs Links

* For all my brothers and sisters: “What did you do the summer before you went on the academic job market? What do you wish you had done?” Duke Lit’s Job Market Resources page has been ramped up considerably in the last year, which helps.

* To immerse yourself in literary theory as an impressionable young person is a little like squinting at a piece of toast until the face of Jesus materializes. It’s a slight perceptual shift (all you have to do is unfocus your eyes) but risky, because there’s no going back to plain toast after Jesus. Similarly, once you have engaged in enough feminist readings of “The Iliad” or performed close textual analyses of “Alf” or written papers limning the intertextual relationship between “Videodrome” and “Madame Bovary” — once, in other words, you’ve glimpsed the social, political, historical and ideological underpinnings of every text ever constructed — you’ll never again see stories the same way again. They’ll shed their innocence and expose their dirty secrets and reveal the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it once seemed. (Thanks, Lindsey Fiona!!)

* Recent college grads facing mal-employment, while incoming Duke students are rightly anxious about debt. Not anxious enough, frankly.

* Affirmative action for white kids: Asian-Americans and diversity today.

* D.I.Y. Detroit: How the Alternative Press shaped the art of a city left for dead.

* At Mother Jones: The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science. Related: Kate Shepard explains the Climategate fraud. Also: Confessions of a Climate Change Convert.

* This CIA press release about their eco-friendly document destruction processes has got to be an Earth Day prank.

* Rule of law watch: Gov. Chris Christie Considers Defying Court Order.

* Debunking Trig Trutherism once and for all.

* A gaffe is when you accidentally say what you actually think: Minnesota state House Speaker Kurt Zellers (R), who is strongly pushing for passage of a voter ID law, has now backed away from comments he made in a radio appearance on Wednesday — when he said of the act of voting: “I think it’s a privilege, it’s not a right.”

* The great thing about neoliberalism is that it’s the answer to every question. The answer is the same regardless of whether your public institutions have too little money, or too much. More on how austerity works from Glenn Greenwald.

* Ideal and actual representation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

* Inside Obama ’12. John Judis explores one area in which this will be a tough sell.

Obama has tried to carve a liberal niche within this retrograde political framework by charging that the Republican plan to cut the deficit would get rid of Medicare and would keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s all well and good, but Obama is still playing on Republican turf. And it might not work. The last Democratic presidential candidate who based his campaign on deficits was Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale probably would have lost to Ronald Reagan in any case, but he would have won more than Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The other Democratic candidate who tried to make deficits an issue was Al Gore in 2000, and he lost to a candidate he should have defeated easily. And you can be sure that Bill Clinton in 1992 didn’t focus on deficits in running against George H.W. Bush.

Via digby.

* I’d never heard of either Kiki Kannibal or StickyDrama, but I read this Rolling Stone article on her weird, tragic adolescence from beginning to end (a rarity for anything they publish not written by Matt Taibbi).

* Parallel worlds are still the hottest trope in SF: Here’s a trailer for indie drama Another Earth, and a description of SyFy’s next new terrible show.

* Portal 2 news! The story is much more complicated and interesting than I noticed while I was playing.

* And mission (creep) accomplished: Unmanned drones now flying missions in Libya.

Midday Thursday Mostly Nuclear Links

* Atomic City Underground (via Boing Boing) and Scientific American discuss better- and worse-case scenarios for Fukushima. Here’s something a little less apocalyptic: Tokyo Radiation Risk Limited Even in Worst Case, U.K. Says.

* It’s something of a cheap shot, but it’s somewhat stunning how much better the publicly funded television station NHK did than its privately owned, commercial counterparts in breaking the news of the earthquake.

* Nuclear near-misses in the U.S.

* Michigan’s Constitution Allows Governor Snyder To Be Recalled In July.

* It even sounds futuristic: Michigan State University has patented the wave disc engine.

* In non-disaster news, your poll of the day: Independent voters prefer Charlie Sheen to Sarah Palin for president by 5 points.

Tuesday!

* Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Depending on the breaks. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 336.

* Aside from the question of whether the crisis would have been so acute in the first place, a labor-oriented Democratic Party almost certainly would have demanded a bigger stimulus in 2009. It would have fought hard for “cramdown” legislation to help distressed homeowners, instead of caving in to the banks that wanted it killed. It would have resisted the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman. These and other choices would have helped the economic recovery and produced a surge of electoral energy far beyond Obama’s first few months. And since elections are won and lost on economic performance, voter turnout, and legislative accomplishments, Democrats probably would have lost something like 10 or 20 seats last November, not 63. Instead of petering out after 18 months, the Obama era might still have several years to run.

* Duke is number 9 of the 10 Greenest Colleges in America.

* Another Detroit obituary.

* Sarah Palin’s sockpuppet Facebook account.

* Syllogism watch: “If Dick Lugar,” Danforth said, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

* Have I done this one before? Glenn Beck Conspiracy Theory Generator. I clicked on it enough times to get a few he’s actually said.

* Headline of the day (category: airy whimsy): What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator.

* Headline of the day (category: existential horror): Dead Baby Dolphins Washing Up Along Gulf Coast at 10 Times Normal Rates.

Friday!

* Michael Denning on wageless life in New Left Review.

* New Orleans is 29% smaller than 2000. Heckuva job.

* Census estimates show big gains for U.S. minorities. The word “minority” really starts to lose its meaning in this context.

* Liberal media ignores another legal victory for Obama administration on health reform. I am shocked, shocked…

* Making email rounds in the Vermont contingent of my family: “Federal Government Continues To Sub-Contract All Functions of Conscience and Testicularity To Great State of Vermont.”

* Notabilia: visualizing Wikipedia deletions.

* And “Palin” is now officially a brand.

You Had Me At Privet

The Daily Show has what should be (please God) the last word on Sarah Palin. And they didn’t even have to reach for the obvious.

Monday!

* Oy: Florida federal judge voids entire health care law. Somebody wake up Anthony Kennedy, he’s got a coin to toss.

* RT @daveweigel: BREAKING: Florida Court rules Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential hopes unconstitutional

* TPM has your GOP-led voter suppression watch.

* ‘Pay China first’: don’t they deserve at least that much?

* Can someone sketch me out an even moderately plausible scenario in which a moderate Republican governor who broke with his party on civil unions and cap-and-trade and then joined the Obama administration wins both the GOP nomination and the presidential election in 2012? Easy: unemployment stays above 9%.

* Nearly half of Palin’s GOP backers may vote third-party if she isn’t nominated.

* Adults With College Degrees in the United States, by County. The Research Triangle really stands out. A poster at MetaFilter has a not-necessarily-illuminating comparison to the county-by-county election results from 2008.

* Nabil Fawzi, the Arab Superman. Via io9.

* xkcd learns to cook.

* IKEA Model Kitchen Demonstrates Jevons Paradox.

* And at last, some good news: the Michael Steele puppet will (almost certainly) come out of retirement.

Everything Right Is Wrong Again

Steampunk Palin.