Wednesday Links!

*  I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career…

* The first episode of Kumail Nanjani, Jonah Ray, and Emily Gordon’s new show The Meltdown is available for free on Amazon. Watch it for the last comic alone.

* The Most Shocking Result in World Cup History. A note on Brazil’s loss and David Luiz’s tears. How Does Germany’s Blowout of Brazil Compare to Those in Other Sports?

* World Cup Soccer Stats Erase The Sport’s Most Dominant Players: Women.

* World Cup scandal, 1990.

* Dialectics of the Trigger Warning Wars.

* In a MOOC Mystery, a Course Suddenly Vanishes.

* The inertia of the suburbs.

* Jury nullification in The Nation.

* It’s Official: No One Wants to Host the Winter Olympics.

* BREAKING: There aren’t actually any moderates. In no small part this is because the band of acceptable political opinions in the US is already extremely narrow to begin with.

* Science Daily reported that researchers have discovered a means of predicting whether an individual will become a binge drinker by 16 years of age by imaging their 14-year-old brains.

* It’s a glimpse of what Britain’s chief medical officer Sally Davies calls the “apocalyptic scenario” of a post-antibiotic era, which the World Health Organisation says will be upon us this century unless something drastic is done.

* Smallpox discovered sitting in Maryland storage room.

* Kirkus has a long writeup on the life and career of Octavia Butler. I get a namecheck in the final paragraph as the premier scholarly authority on the size of the finding aid.

* Marvel Comics: The Secret History. Oh, what might have been!

17. Michael Jackson looked into buying Marvel Comics in the late ’90s because he wanted to play Spider-Man in a movie.

* Harry Potter at 34.

* Science fiction as R&D lab.

* And if you want to drive to South America, here are your options for crossing the Darien Gap. Good luck! You will not be ransomed.

Tuesday Night Links

* A Scholarship of Resistance: Bravery, Contingency, and Higher Education.

* Dear Professor James, #YOLO :). Riffing on this story, though this one is also in the background somewhere.

* Fat profits at NCAA while athletes play for free.

* Against creative writing.

* David Simon on America’s war on drugs and The House I Live In. Introduction to TNI‘s marijuana issue.

* Open Casting Call for History Based Reality TV Show.

* Plot to rig the mayor’s race in New York City.

* The headline reads, “Pope’s foot-wash a final straw for traditionalists.” Elsewhere on the Catholic beat: A suspended Roman Catholic priest in Connecticut accused of making more than $300,000 in sales of methamphetamines is expected to plead guilty to one of the charges.

* So that’s why they act that way: Refusing to apologize can have psychological benefits.

* Did Pacific Islanders reach South America before Columbus?

* As Canada scrambles to dig up some of the world’s dirtiest oil, a bush doctor tracks mysterious diseases, poisoned rivers, and shattered lives. From 2008. I’m sure we’ve sorted it all out by now.

* The Atlantic interviews Kim Stanley Robinson.

KSR: With capitalism, we can say that it has very strong residual elements of feudalism. It’s as if feudalism liquefied and the basis of power moved from land to money, but with the injustice of the huge hierarchical feudal differences between rich and poor still intact. What is emergent in capitalism is harder to identify, but there may be something to the idea of the global village, also the education of the entire world population, so that everyone knows the world situation and wants justice, that may be leading the way to a more just global society. Seeing and exaggerating these emergent elements is something utopian science fiction tries to do. So the dichotomy is a sort of x/y graph in a thought experiment.

* One night in the life of a Boston cabbie.

* Game of Thrones renewed for fourth of eighty planned seasons.

* Drawing the impossible? Fully dressed Superheroines.

* Wake up, sheeple! Only 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power.

* Presenting Adam Kotsko’s grading lexicon.

* Feminism for women who can’t cry at work.

* And your headline of the day: Why I Study Duck Genitalia.