Wednesday Links!

* Ruling over a world while destroying it has made the rich a bunch of clinical assholes.

* The grotesque corruptions of big-time intercollegiate athletics have become so glaringly obvious that there is simply no longer a question of whether the college sports-industrial complex is a cancer consuming the academy’s soul. With each new, familiar, and utterly predictable revelation of rampant greed, sexual violence, academic malfeasance, and player exploitation, the only real question is whom to blame.

* Why college rape victims don’t go to the police. Man Who Drugged His Wife And Raped Her While Sleeping Gets No Jail Time.

* North Carolina GOP Pushes Unprecedented Bill to Jail Anyone Who Discloses Fracking Chemicals.

* Is Lawrence Lessig really “the greatest radical at work in America today”? I like some of what Lessig does, but radicals need to step it up a notch.

* How Far Your Paycheck Goes, In 356 U.S. Cities.

* GOP cuts school lunches for urban schools, retains them for rural schools, because freedom I guess.

* Second Grader Handcuffed at School for Misbehaving. “The boy says he began yelling after some kids decided to taunt him, but he never got physical.”

* Stalinism on the Installment Plan.

Here in the US, we don’t need to force people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit (though we certainly do that, too). No, to truly validate our system, we conscript the defendant’s soul in a different way.

* A while back I wrote that Django Unchained is laudable for making us unable to watch Gone With the Wind uncritically; I believe that Thrones is working similarly to make us unable to watch The Lord of the Rings uncritically.

* Attention: Everyone should purchase this indoor slide the second it becomes available.

* Disneyland’s original prospectus revealed.

* And the Los Angeles Review of Books celebrates George Perec.