Posts Tagged ‘skills’
Start Monday Off Right with Monday Links, Half-Price for the Entire Month of August with Offer Code CANAVAN
* Things are bad all over: No new novel cracked the top 20 print bestsellers in the first half of 2016.
* Stranger Things thinkpiece roundup! The Solution to Our Political Problems Lies in ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Homophobia Is the Real Monster in Stranger Things. The Problem of Barb. This Stranger Things supercut shows how meticulous the show’s ’80s references really are. And the inevitable remix.
* Elsewhere in 80s nostalgia: a brief history of The Thing.
* Teach the controversy: Was Philip K. Dick a Bad Writer? Meanwhile, it turns out there is no Man in the High Castle!
* Reports: 2 Professors at American U Afghanistan Abducted.
* Several private universities are boosting stipends and benefits ahead of a federal ruling that could clear the way for graduate students to form unions. To some grad students, it’s an attempt to persuade them that they don’t need collective bargaining to get a raise.
* Curated by Mohammad Salemy and a team of researchers from The New Centre for Research & Practice, Artificial Cinema is a large collaborative effort which explores the history of science fiction cinema and its potentials for arriving at a synthesized vision for the future of art. The exhibition traces a trajectory away from “Anthropocinema” — human-centered cinema — towards more open and complex collaborations between humans and machines.
* Online fandom isn’t all smiles and rainbows.
* How Katie Ledecky became better at swimming than anyone is at anything.
* Abandoned Olympic venues from around the world.
* One central fact about the global economy lurks just beneath the year’s remarkable headlines: Economic growth in advanced nations has been weaker for longer than it has been in the lifetime of most people on earth.
* A start-up’s race to harvest the moon’s treasures.
* The American Psychiatric Association issues a warning: No psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. They’re working for Putin too! And so is George P., looking for the Bush family’s revenge some dark day a decade from now.
* Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump.
* Trump’s shrinking electoral map.
* Send First-Gen Students to Grad School.
* Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university.
* The last word on cargo shorts and neoliberalism.
* It’s George R.R. Martin’s media ecology, we just live in it.
* The fight over H.M.’s brain.
* Teaching in the Age of Trump.
* Suicide Squad Sets Box Office Record Because We Don’t Deserve Better Movies. Allow me to recommend Improv4Humans #251, Mattman v. SupArmen, which is better than anything this incarnation of the DC Universe has put out so far.
* Where are the Natives in Hamilton?
* Ideology disguises itself as common sense, as what everybody already knows.
* And a helpful questionnaire.
31. Do you take on extra work because you are concerned that it won’t otherwise get done?
32. Do you take on extra work because you do not believe other people can do it as well?
33. Do you underestimate how long a project will take and then rush to complete it?
34. Do you delay beginning a project and experience a surge of adrenaline as you prepare at the last minute or go forward unprepared?
35. Do you believe that it is okay to work long hours if you work for justice?
36. Do you get impatient with people who have other priorities besides work?
37. Are you afraid that if you don’t work hard you will be a failure?
38. Is the future a constant worry for you even when things are going well?
39. Do you feel that others are not doing enough?
40. Do you feel that you are not doing enough?
Sunday Morning Links!
* CFP for SLSA 2016. It’s in Atlanta this year.
* The Pillaging of America’s State Universities.
* The Cashless Society and Total Surveillance.
* Inaugurating the Sputnik Award.
* Wisconsin’s right-to-work law, championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker as he was mounting his run for president, was struck down Friday as violating the state constitution. But don’t get too excited.
* Presenting 9/11: The Musical.
* Critics loved their preview of Civil War.
* If Skills Are the New Canon, Are Colleges Teaching Them?
* An oral history of Comedy Central.
* The History of Femslash, the Tiny Fandom That’s Taking Over the Universe.
* What I Learned from Tickling Apes. Octopus Brains Are So Much Cooler Than You Think.
* A Profile of the Greatest Character In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Hoar.
* Like the Doof Guitar, but for trombones.
* The Baffler goes deep inside the new man of 4chan.
* If you want a vision of the future: Sesame Street partners with a VC, will invest up to $1 million in a bunch of startups.
* And if you don’t: Photographed from a shuttle training aircraft, space shuttle Endeavour and its six-member STS-134 crew head toward Earth orbit and rendezvous with the International Space Station.
Monday Links! Quite a Few!
* I had a review of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest in The Los Angeles Review of Books last week. Can’t wait for Death’s End.
* “Star Trek style teleportation would take billions of years.” Not if you reverse the polarity of the inertial dampeners, you nitwits!
* The same website has a piece hyping cryonics, so you know it’s legit.
* Meanwhile: AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed.’
* Trek at 50: The quest for a unifying theory of time travel in Star Trek.
* The Discovery of Gravitational Waves. Gravitational Waves and Neoliberalism.
* The Mount St. Mary’s situation is even more astounding than you’d think when you refocus attention back on the “culling” survey itself. A Violation of Trust. From embarrassing to appalling to surreal. Twenty-first-century legal paradoxes: You can’t re-hire me, I wasn’t legally fired.
* Cleveland Files Claim Against Tamir Rice’s Family For Unpaid EMS Bill.
* Fathers and Childless Women in Academia Are 3x More Likely to Get Tenure Than Women With Kids.
* The Crisis Facing America’s Working Daughters.
* For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications.
* Antonin Scalia, in memoriam.
* The end of SCOTUS. Laying out the recent vote totals like that really does give credence, alas, to the idea that Democrats started it and now Republicans are going to finish it.
* Term Limit the Supreme Court. Don’t Term Limit the Supreme Court. No, I Mean It, Term Limit the Supreme Court.
* The end of Louisiana. Worth it for, what, fourteenth place in the GOP primary?
* A Rallying Cry for A Second-Chance School: The Fight to Save Chicago State.
* Antitrust Case Against Duke and UNC May Move Forward.
* Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming.
* Climate and Empire. (Sounds like a book Asimov would write today if he were still alive.)
* How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones.
* “Killing a million people was just the sort of thing a superpower had to do.”
* Bernie Sanders and Palestine. The Washington Post found a political scientists who thinks he wouldn’t get blown out. Could Superdelegates Really Stop Bernie Sanders? Clinton now managing exceptions in Nevada, and has shockingly few staffers in South Carolina. And it’s fine. It’s fine.
* Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department. To be fair, though, those don’t seem super hard to get.
* The skills gap: still a fraud to lower labor costs.
* The Internet ruins everything, even Jeopardy!.
* From the nice-work-if-you-can-get-it files: Concordia executive gets $235,000 in severance after 90 days on the job. No public bidding on major University of Nebraska contracts. Michigan Coach’s jet travel valued at more than $10,000 a day.
* Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: They found BoShek. Hyperspace Maps, Graphs, and Trees.
* Are you an academic superhero?
* Adjuncts and/as freelancers.
* Why So Few American Indians Earn Ph.D.’s, and What Colleges Can Do About It.
* When Is Campus Hate Speech No Longer Protected Speech?
* The Coen Brothers and the defeat of the American left. I knew it was them.
* Marvel’s The Vision Is Telling a Story Unlike Any Superhero Comic I’ve Ever Read.
* Day late, buck short: Suffragette valentines.
* The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.
* “I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy”: An interview with Margaret Atwood.
* And SMBC catches on to my philosophical method.
Getting into the Real Good Procrastination Now Links
* Bush-era flashback and general-election-2016 flashforward, courtesy of Chris Hayes: George Saunders’s The Braindead Megaphone.
* Today in stadium boondoggles: St. Louis has stadium debt, but doesn’t have a team.
* An ecological argument sure to catch fire: What we can do is learn to offer each other patience, compassion, courage, and love. We can learn to accept that just as every human life has its natural end, so too does every civilization. Contrary to what Purdy argues, we don’t need more politics. We need more hospice. We need to learn how to die.
* It doesn’t have to be this way, though. While neoliberal capitalism has been remarkably successful at laying claim to the future, it used to belong to the left — to the party of utopia. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future argues that the contemporary left must revive its historically central mission of imaginative engagement with futurity. It must refuse the all-too-easy trap of dismissing visions of technological and social progress as neoliberal fantasies. It must seize the contemporary moment of increasing technological sophistication to demand a post-scarcity future where people are no longer obliged to be workers; where production and distribution are democratically delegated to a largely automated infrastructure; where people are free to fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. It must combine a utopian imagination with the patient organizational work necessary to wrest the future from the clutches of hegemonic neoliberalism.
* Eugene V. Debs, accelerationist.
* Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical.
* Inside the Police-Industrial Complex.
* Sesame Street has heard your gentrification jokes, and they have decided they are really into it.
* From my friend James Tate Hill: On Being a Writer Who Can’t Read.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 25: Competencies.
* Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law.
* Relax, nerds: It Turns Out the Next Game of Thrones Book Isn’t Late at All.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. A counterpoint.
* My favorite little bit of fan fiction/overthinking from The Force Awakens, I think. Elsewhere on the Star Wars front: The 13 Most Nonsensical Theories About The Identity of Supreme Leader Snoke.
* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice.
* An interview with Ahmed Best. From the archives.
* Successful squirrel cyber attacks as of January 2016.
* Angry Militia Leader: Stop Mailing Us Dildos.
* Life in Wisconsin: Was it a ‘frostquake’ or an Air Force sonic boom? And then there’s the education beat.
* If left-liberal people don’t stop embarrassing themselves with this Ted Cruz eligibility stuff I might vote for Cruz in protest. Okay, no, but seriously this is embarrassing.
* More Than Half of Americans Reportedly Have Less Than $1,000 to Their Name.
* This Professor Fell In Love With His Grad Student — Then Fired Her For It. And you’ll never guess what Caltech did next!
* I’m considered adding a running closer to these link posts that’s just headlines from the day’s Journal-Sentinel that amuse me. Today, that’s Shorewood man pursues insanity defense in voter fraud case.
* But for now, nothing gold can stay: Mysterious Wow! Signal Came From Comets, Not Aliens, Claims Scientist.
Gerry Canavan 