Monday Morning Snow Day Links

I posted a link dump last night at sort of an odd time, so you might have missed it. It included my review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent New York 2140 at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Utopia in the Time of Trump, so read that! Here’s everything that’s happened since then…

you can’t restore civilization with someone else’s babies

the ritual requires the lives of your own children

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2017

same sort of joke but about making sure you have a save game from before the romans build the great library https://t.co/r0quBr43pC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2017

I hope Steve King has shelvesful of jars of his own semen to preserve the white race & I hope he trips & knocks them over & gets drenched

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) March 13, 2017

* Q&A: Kim Stanley Robinson Explains How He Flooded Manhattan.

* Fukuyama once declared the end of history. But lawmakers in several states, tired of turning the clocks back, want to
leave Eastern Standard Time and join the Atlantic Standard time zone.

* Welcome To Mars! Enjoy Perpetual Jet Lag Under An Eerie Red Sky.

* True stories of employed English majors.

* One of the most brutal reviews of anything I’ve ever read.

* The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

* Every day some clown in this administration does something that would have brought down the government 18 months ago.

Skeletor now reports directly to Gargamel, who reports to Cobra Commander, who reports to the giant robot sentinels, who report to Bannon. pic.twitter.com/yZVwb5p7GK

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2017

* Uncomfortable Friends: Revising the American Jesuits.

They decried nationalism as a source of division, materialism, and militarism. They warned that the unfettered pursuit of profit destroyed communities and undermined human dignity. They sued to have the King James Bible removed from public schools. Contemporary progressives? No: 19th-century Jesuits. The same 19th-century American Jesuits who allied themselves with slaveholders, believed that the ideal polity promoted one “true faith,” and considered modernity a bitter, but eventually vanquishable foe. In a deeply learned and delightfully readable new book, John T. McGreevy explains the principles, circumstances, and personalities from which this apparently contradictory set of positions emerged, and outlines the consequences for the nation’s religion and politics. At a moment when we are riveted anew by arguments over the meaning of community and liberty — and reminded that one man’s desired future can be another man’s rejected past — McGreevy’s account of these surprising Jesuits feels like an essential read.

* If every European secession movement succeeded.

* 1. AAA game developers attempt to remain relevant to an aging core demographic by producing an entire generation of games about sad dads protecting their kids; owing to the gaming industry’s collective discomfort with male-male emotional intimacy, nearly all of these kids are girls. You’ll never guess what happened next…

* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine documentary will boldly move forward with filming.

* Well, it’s not all bad news: A lot of people who make over $350,000 are about to get replaced by software.

* And Marquette made March Madness, with a surprisingly high seed! Who would win the NCAA’s Division I men’s basketball tournament if academics trumped athletic skill.

┳┻|
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┻┳|
┳┻| _ I don't care if your team
┻┳| •.•) made the tournament.
┳┻|⊂ﾉ Pay the players.
┻┳|

— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) March 13, 2017

 

Tuesday Night Links!

* In case you missed it, last night I put up my syllabi for the fall, on J.R.R. Tolkien and American Literature after the American Century.

* Mark your calendars, East Coasters: Jaimee Hills reads from her award-winning book How to Avoid Speaking at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC on October 26. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that preorders are available now at Amazon and Waywiser Press.

* The world’s most popular academic article: “Fuck Nuance.”

That is the kudzu of nuance. It makes us shy away from the riskier aspects of abstraction and theory-building generally, especially if it is the rst and most frequent response we hear. Instead of pushing some abstraction or argument along for a while to see where it goes, there is a tendency to start hedging theory with particulars. People complain that you’re leaving some level or dimension out, and tell you to bring it back in. Crucially, “accounting for”, “addressing”, or “dealing” with the missing item is an unconstrained process. at is, the question is not how a theory can handle this or that issue internally, but rather the suggestion to expand it with this new term or terms. Class, Institutions, Emotions, Structure, Culture, Interaction—all of them are taken generically to “matter”, and you must acknowledge that they matter by incorporating them. Incorporation is the reintroduction of particularizing elements, even though those particulars were what you had to throw away in order to make your concept a theoretically useful abstraction in the first place.

See also: nuance trolling as academic filibuster.

* More ACLA CFPs: Utopia Renewed: Locating a New Utopian Praxis. Innovation, Creativity, and Capitalist Culture.

* Trying to figure out what percentage of instructors are adjuncts is the world’s most dangerous game.

* But Thrun and other MOOC founders seem less than concerned about living up to their earlier, lofty rhetoric or continuing that tradition of bringing education to an underserved population. True, they haven’t entirely abandoned their rhetoric about equal access to educational opportunities. But they’ve shifted to what’s becoming a more familiar Silicon Valley narrative about the future of employability: a cheap and precarious labor force. That’s the unfortunate reality of “Uber for Education.”

* Artisanal college. Cruelty free, cage free, farm-fresh.

* Aggrieved students find books dangerous; neoliberal administrators say they’re useless. I’d take the former any day.

* From Corporate Leader to Flagship President?

* Reform Higher Ed? Treat Badmin Like Bankers.

* Literary magazines for socialists funded by the CIA, ranked.

* The strategic value of summer.

* Forty years of Born to Run. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

* Fun Home at Duke: 1, 2.

* Meanwhile, in today’s exciting new anti-academic moral panic: UNC’s The Literature of 9/11.

* As Murray Pomerance points out, plagiarism is a form of theft, and we don’t steal our own work. On the contrary, we expand its reach, and build on it, thereby making it more relevant as the contexts that produce it change.

* UT Knoxville encourages students to use ‘gender-neutral pronouns.’ Washington State University disavows syllabus with ban on certain words.

* The Largest-Ever U.S. Gallery Of Jack Kirby’s Comic Art Heads To California.

* And no one talks about it: Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins. More here. I’m an outlier on the progressive side of the fence insofar as I think Clinton might really have to pull out of the race over the emails — so it’s even worse than it seems.

* The cartoon bodies of Mad Max: Fury Road.

* How Many Men Did The Golden Girls Sleep With, Exactly?

* The FBI’s surveillance of Ray Bradbury. And the Sad Puppies.

* Cold Opening: The Publicity Campaign for Go Set a Watchman.

* The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina serves as a reminder that resilience is a function of the strength of a community. Gentrification’s Ground Zero: In the ten years since Katrina, New Orleans has been remade into a neoliberal playground for young entrepreneurs. The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover.

* Incredible essay by Lili Loofbourrow on her sister’s death by suicide this summer.

* Psychology is bunk.

* Žižek Says Thing.

* Against the Anthropocene.

* Whatever happened to DC Comics?

* Being Stephen Colbert.

* The free encyclopedia anyone can edit.

* Tinder as video game.

* Another Samuel Delany interview.

* Janelle Monáe Vows To ‘Speak Up’ On #BlackLivesMatter.

* I love dumb stuff like this, when the corrupt screw up and lose: Business owners try to remove all voters from business district, but they forgot one college student.

* Cancer cells programmed back to normal by US scientists.

* British Library declines Taliban archive over terror law fears.

* Upstate New York Secessionists Demand Freedom From City They Mooch Off Of.

* I told you that if there were something beyond the grave, I would contact you.

* RIP, Oliver Sacks.

* Inside Wisconsin’s Slender Man stabbing.

* I confess I am totally stunned by the Jared Fogle case. I thought I was cynical enough.

* The arc of history is long, but at least that Coach reboot has already been cancelled.

* The Racial Politics of Disney Animals.

* Mars by 2039?

* Renaming Denali.

* Why Dolphins Are Deep Thinkers.

* Fall In Love with Your Job, Get Ripped Off by Your Boss. Related: workers shouldn’t work for free.

* Firstborn Girls Are the Best at Life. Any Zoey could have told you that!

* The law, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike not to clean up their billion-dollar toxic oil spills.

* The New Servility.

* Militarized drones are now legal in North Dakota.

* Future Jails May Look and Function More Like Colleges. And, you know, vice versa…

* Never say “unfilmable”: The BBC is going to try to make a show out of The City and the City.

* Declare victory and go home to your panic room: America Has Lost The War Against Guns.

* And some things mankind was just never meant to know: See how easily a rat can wriggle up your toilet.

All the Midweek Links

* CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education. CFP: Anthropocene Feminism at the Center for 21st Century Studies.

* By now my students were getting a bit restless. The confidence with which they had gone into this testing situation was beginning to dispel. Just a bit. There were still 102 questions left to answer.

* Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown. Amtrak Is in Trouble, But Congress Won’t Care. Government shutdown ends North Carolina WIC benefits. Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut. DC Can’t Spend. Here’s how it’ll mess up higher ed (including freezing student loans). Secession by other means. Back Door Secession. Avenging the surrender of the South.

* The horror: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.

* Former Graduate Student Collects Placement Data He Wishes He’d Had.

* (Another) Intern Couldn’t Sue For Sexual Harassment In New York Because She Wasn’t Paid.

* A recent report shows that graduate students generate nearly a third of all education debt.

* Pay It Forward is a bad idea that doesn’t seem to make sense even in its own terms.

* “Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.”

* Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty–student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty–student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.

* How to Kill a Zombie: Strategizing the End of Neoliberalism.

* How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds.

High fees and black boxes are just part of the story. Some funds also allow their managers to make undisclosed side bets by trading ahead of or opposite to the fund’s trades.

Chicago-based Grant Park Futures Fund LP, which is marketed by Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says on page 90 of a 180-page, April 2013 prospectus that David Kavanagh, president of the $660.9 million fund’s general partner, may place such personal trades. “Mr. Kavanagh may even be the other party to a trade entered into by Grant Park,” it says.

* Adam Kotsko’s Contribution to the Critique of White Dudes.

* Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale.

* Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.

* Joseph Stalin, Editor.

* Vulture has an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.

* Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from League of Denial, on the NFL’s concussion denialism. You can also watch the Frontline documentary here.

* Soviet board-games, 1920-1938.

* In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.

* The rise of the portmanbro.

* Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The L.A. Times will no longer publish letters from climate cranks.

* But the kids are all right: Arin Andrews and Katie Hill, Transgender Teenage Couple, Transition Together.

S+U+Nd4+Y Li+N+K+S

* You Chose Wrong catalogues unhappy endings from Choose Your Own Adventure books, and is officially the world’s greatest Tumblr.

* …by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse.

* 35 Questions Mitt Romney Must Answer About Bain Capital Before The Issue Can Go Away. The Romney ‘Fact-Checking’ Scandal.

* That’s one way to do it: Iowa GOP State Senate Candidate Joins ‘Alternative’ U.S. Government.

* When Baldwin interviewed Letterman.

* Street art initiative uses LEGO to rebuild Beirut.

Politics Friday!

* Secession watch: now Tucson wants to secede from Arizona.

* American politics increasingly resembles a kind of total war in which each party mobilizes every conceivable asset at its disposal against the other. Most governors were once conscientious objectors in that struggle. No more. Ezra’s post rightly points to the courts as well:

The individual mandate has now been upheld by three district judges appointed by Democrats and overturned by two district judges appointed by Republicans. It’s a perfect partisan record — which is not what most legal scholars and analysts predicted. Dahlia Lithwick went back to the initial coverage of the GOP’s lawsuits. “It was an article of faith among court watchers that President Obama’s health care reform plan would be upheld at the Supreme Court by a margin of 7-2 or 8-1,” she concluded. Lee Epstein, a law professor at Northwestern University, told me the same thing. “Even my very, very conservative colleagues last year said that if the Court follows existing precedent, this is a no-brainer.”

* When a congressman at a town hall is asked “Who’s going to shoot Obama?”, of course the most appropriate reply is “I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president.”

* What could possibly go wrong? Newt says Republicans should impeach the president over DOMA, then immediately gets cold feet.

* This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn’t do. (via)

* And which Americans have passports, state by state.

Glenn Beck, James W. Von Brunn, and the Limits of Responsible Discourse

Crooks & Liars has an exhaustive post on Glenn Beck, James W. Von Brunn, and the limits of responsible discourse. The takeaway point, as always, is not some binary assertion of “guilt” or “innocence” but the simple observation that people gifted with mass media bullhorns should use them responsibly, not to promulgate known falsehoods or fan the flames of extremist hysteria. They shouldn’t—just for starters—use that bullhorn to validate fringe ideologies like Posse Comitatus or neosecessionism.

Monday Night Bloggity Blogs

Monday night bloggity blogs.

* Samuel Delany’s “The Star Pit” as a radio show. Really good.

* More on the surprise Dollhouse renewal, including word that “Epitaph One” will likely be aired after all and an interview with Joss. Too bad about Terminator; Bill Simmon links to a Fox executive explaining the one had nothing to do with the other, except insofar as it did.

“[Sarah Connor] has completed its run,” Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly confirmed at a press conference this morning. “I think it had a nice little run. It was a good show. It was not an either or [with Dollhouse]. We did see it tailing off a bit [in the ratings]. It had a nice creative core, but, ultimately, we made the bet on Dollhouse, so that’s it for [Sarah Connor]… We make no apologies. We gave it a lot of support and some consistent scheduling. We tried and thought it was time to move on.”

* Benen and Yglesias explain how the right’s schoolyard strategy on Pelosi and torture may be making a truth commission much more likely.

* Rick Perry has abandoned neosecessionism. Score one for the Northern aggressors.

* I was so outraged by the very idea of this I completely forgot to blog it: someone’s written a Catcher in the Rye sequel and their name isn’t J.D.

“Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he’s not at a prep school, he’s at a retirement home in upstate New York,” said California. “It’s pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He’s still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he’s disappointed in the goddamn world. He’s older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn’t have all the answers.”

Bunch of phonies.

* Maureen Dowd plagiarizes Josh Marshall and everyone has a really good time with it.

* The New Yorker covers the sixth mass extinction event. Print edition only, because analysis of an ongoing mass extinction event isn’t something you just give away for free. A few more links at Kottke.

* Kos and Yglesias on epically bad ideas to save newspapers.

Neosecessionism

Neosecessionism: because the Left hates America and only conservatives are patriots.

Gimme Fever

It’s Tuesday and I’m feeling just a little bit feverish.

* It’s come to this: they’re going to remake Drop Dead Fred. Don’t ask why.

* Oh, the wisdom of markets: Stephen Dunbar demonstrates that Peak Oil has “peaked” by citing the temporary crash in demand due to the financial crisis and speculative recovery technologies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Crisis averted!

* Meanwhile, the climate is still totally screwed. See also: The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. What’s their governor have to say about this?

* Superpoop messes with Texas.

* David Kurtz comes through with your daily dose of swine flu commentary, the first on the rhythm of pandemic and the second on the deep, pervasive rot throughout the global meat industry.

* Science has proved that conservatives don’t get Stephen Colbert.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Whenever I hear about this sort of thing I’m just shocked. Not only is the parody on The Colbert Report completely unsubtle—it’s so unsubtle I even wouldn’t say it counts as satire—but it’s not as even as if Colbert is trying to fool anyone. If you didn’t get the point just from reading the sidebar during “The Word,” he breaks character, both deliberately and undeliberately, all the freaking time. Multiple times every show. He’s practically holding the audience’s hand.

Let’s hope “more likely” still represents a rather small part of the sample…

Comedy

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who was last making headlines for suggesting that Texas may consider seceding from the Union, is requesting help from the federal government to deal with a possible swine flu pandemic.

Thursday Links

Thursday!

* Following up on my article in the Indy this week on the excessive costs of nuclear power, here’s a report from the head of FERC claiming “We may not need any [new nuclear or coal plants], ever.”

* Also at Climate Progress: Obama vs. the Ponzi scheme and what the climate of the U.S. might look like a hundred years from now.

* Republicans aren’t just talking about secession to rile up the base; they’re actually invoking neo-secessionist legal strategies. It’s funny, but it’s not a joke.

* Jonathan Martin on why the Republican noise machine can’t seem to get anywhere against Obama. It’s interesting that the issue that seems to have to most traction against this White House is his failure to prosecute the previous, Republication administration for its many crimes. It’s the only place where their attempts to derail Obama have worked, but it’s not a viable strategy for electoral success.

* And speaking of prosecuting the Bush White House: Vermont Senator (and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) Patrick Leahy is determined to move forward with a torture probe. Amen to that.

Closing My Open Tabs, LOLRepublicans Edition

I have a ton of tabs open representing the blogging I intended to do this week but never did. Let us begin with the ongoing implosion of the Republican Party.

* Secession! It’s everyone’s favorite new fantasy. Polls show a quarter of Texans like Gov. Crazy’s crazy idea, though said governor is now backpeddling. And if Texas does secede, some people are saying this time we should just let them go.

It would be the world’s thirteenth largest economy — bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

 

* In less hilarious eliminationist wingnuttery, an Illinois state senator has repeatedly suggested that “Illinois residents ‘are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes’ as much as Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing.” This talk never should have started back during the election, and really needs to stop.

* The ante’s likely been upped for forthcoming Republican antics because the tea parties were such a bust while Obama’s popularity remains consistently high, no matter what sort of shit they fling at the wall.

* How to become the Republican candidate for vice president. It’s easier than you think!

A.B. Culvahouse, a powerful Washington lawyer and former counsel to President Reagan, told an audience of Republican lawyers that for McCain, selecting a vice president came down to three questions: Why do you want to be vice president? Are you prepared to use nuclear weapons? And the CIA has identified Osama bin Laden, but if you take the shot there will be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?

 

Night

Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can’t convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don’t want to go there, because that’s suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right — people have a right to not commit economic suicide…

…Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket…it’s about time that somebody says that again.

He’s riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I’m rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features “comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)” and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham (“Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison”), and more.