Posts Tagged ‘Steven Salaita’
Thursday Links!
* Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.
* Graduate Worker Organizing is Scholarly Praxis.
* Scenes from dystopia: MUPD updates active shooter training for students.
* Steven Salaita: My Life as a Cautionary Tale.
* Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah.
* Bodies Aren’t Binary, So Why Are Sports?
* Why Aren’t More Women Working? They’re Caring for Parents.
* The slide of the professoriate into the gig economy remains one of the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses today. It’s hard to fire a tenured professor except in extreme cases. It’s easy to let adjuncts go the moment there’s any kind of ruckus, even one created in bad faith.
* Jeffrey Epstein and the power of networks.
* Trump Pushes to Open the World’s Largest Remaining Temperate Rainforest to Logging and Mining. America’s own rainforest tragedy.
* Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Arrives In New York After Sailing The Atlantic. The Misogyny of Climate Deniers.
* The growing narrative around Joe Biden’s gaffes, explained. Calling this a “narrative” seems like a bit of a stretch — it’s more like the simple facts of the matter. Elsewhere on the Biden beat: Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare. How Much Of A Threat Is Elizabeth Warren To Joe Biden’s Front-Runner Status?
* Every day a new degradation: The Trump administration is no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants.
* We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is.
Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.
Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party.
* Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims, Denied a Trial, Vent Their Fury: ‘He Is a Coward.’
* 10,872 New Yorkers to See Their Marijuana Convictions Disappear.
* I just witnessed the most extraordinary moment. Judge David Carpenter in Bessemer, AL has resentenced Alvin Kennard to time served after he got life without parole for robbing a bakery of $50 in 1983. He is now 58 & was 22 when he committed the robbery.
* Several high-profile game developers publicly accused of sexual assault.
* Telltale Games is being revived, presumably without any of the workers they were abusing the first time.
* And the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past: Huge hoard of Norman coins reveals medieval tax scam.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 29, 2019 at 9:22 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolitionism, academia, activism, America, apocalypse, apps, Brazil, Captain America, class struggle, climate change, crunch time, darts, DEA, debt, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, dinosaurs, Donald Trump, drugs, eldercare, Elizabeth Warren, free speech, fully automated luxury communism, games, gender, gig economy, graduate student movements, Greta Thunberg, guns, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, Kenya, kids today, labor, Los Angeles, marijuana, Marquette, Marvel Comics, mass shootings, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, networking, New York, over-educated literary theory PhDs, police corruption, politics, post-industrial cities, prison abolition, race, racism, rainforest, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, segregation, socialism, Steven Salaita, taxes, Telltale Games, the Amazon, the kids are all right, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trans issues sports, true crime, war on drugs, white nationalism, white people, white supremacy
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
This is a genuinely incredible video of a senator scolding frightened children who are begging her for a chance to live, like it’s their fault for disturbing her. https://t.co/JyEs9UPxTt
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2019
This entire generation of ostensibly liberal leaders has failed in every conceivable way by every conceivable metric, their entire careers, and their final act on the global stage is this endless petulant temper tantrum that anyone has dared to notice.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2019
I don’t want to hear any Democratic politician say anything to children but “I’m sorry, and I will never stop fighting to make up for what we’ve done.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 23, 2019
The year is 2020. Democrats have won control of the White House and Congress. A new President declares a National Emergency on climate change and guns. Their bold plan: an exciting new web site where businesses and private persons can decide which tax-deferred advantage plan they
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 14, 2019
Decline in global population, past decade.
Butterflies: 53%
Beetles: 49%
Bees: 46%
Dragonflies: 37%
Flies: 25%(Biological Conservation)
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) February 12, 2019
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
In the debrief for that one I realized: my colleagues think they’re being taught how to survive.
They don’t know this technique is intended to slow down our deaths, to give law enforcement more time to respond
— Dr. Lisa Gilbert (@gilbertlisak) February 14, 2019
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
R2-D2’s career is also a century long legacy of failure and catastrophe, culminating in catatonic depression, while C-3PO’s nihilism allows him to attach himself to the ruling class of any political order he encounters.
The analogy is flawless. https://t.co/27TCF5QXV0
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 14, 2019
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
— matthew miles goodrich (@mmilesgoodrich) February 23, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
February 25, 2019 at 12:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, Amazon, America, animal cognition, animals, apocalypse, Arizona, Atlantic City, Aunt May, Bandersnatch, Barack Obama, basketball, bathrooms, Black Mirror, Bush, capitalism, Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, CFPs, chimpanzees, China, cities, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, conferences, dark side of the digital, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic National Convention, Democratic primaries 2020, Democrats, deportation, diet soda, disability studies, Disney, DNC, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Duke, dystopia, ecology, education, Einstein, EJ Levy, Elizabeth Warren, email, empire, esports, extrasolar planets, Facebook, fascism, finance, Fortnite, Frankenstein, game theory, games, Google, Grand Canyon, guilty pleasures, guns, Hamilton, Harvard, Harvard Square, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, income inequality, infrastructure, KKK, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literary criticism, living wage, Lyft, Marquette, mass markets, mass shootings, mere genre, migrants, Milwaukee, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, narcissism, Native Americans, NCAA, neoliberalism, Nintendo Switch, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, politics, race, racial slurs, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, sea level rise, segregation, Sesame Street, sexual assault, sexual harassment, SFRA19, Silent Sam, slavery, snow, speculation, Spider-Man, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, strikes, strong female characters, student debt, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Tetris, Tetris 99, the courts, the Internet, the Knicks, the law, The Wandering Earth, theory, this is fine, Title IX, trans* issues, Uber, UNC, Utopia, war on education, windfalls, words, Wright State, YouTube
Weekend Links! Tabs Bankruptcy! All Links Must Go!
* Podcast: What is Irish Science Fiction? I’d also recommend a few new podcasts, Off Book (weekly improvised musical) and What Trump Can Teach Us about Con Law.
* Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again.”
* Researchers Just Launched a Prototype of Humanity’s First ‘Interstellar Spacecraft.’
* ‘Make It So’: Star Trek and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism.
* Star Trek: Discovery is the first Trek TV series in over 15 years. Here’s everything we know.
* Republicans don’t trust higher ed. That’s a problem for liberal academics.
* Three years after Steven Salaita lost a promised tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over the tone of his anti-Israel tweets, he’s leaving academe.
* How a New Field Could Help Save the Humanities.
* Why the Myth of Meritocracy Hurts Kids of Color.
* They’re still fighting at Hypatia.
* “If There’s an Organized Outrage Machine, We Need an Organized Response.” Recovering academic freedom in an age of social media mobbing.
* Any parent could have told you this: Ravens plan better than four-year-olds.
* How to raise an optimistic human in a pessimistic world.
* Among the dead was a so-called Dreamer, a migrant who had been brought to the United States as a young child. Frank Guisseppe Fuentes, 20, spent much of his life in the U.S. and had crossed the border in an attempt to reunite with family members living in Maryland after he was deported to Guatemala City, Jose Barillas, the Guatemalan consul general in Houston, told Univision. The Mothers Being Deported by Trump. Slain girl’s father, sister denied visas, miss her funeral. A Veteran Agent Speaks Out.
* New Jersey raised its smoking age to 21. The change will likely save lives. Honestly, just ban them outright, and soda too.
* Wisconsin is paying as much as $1 million per job, which will carry an average salary of $54,000. I’ve thought about it, and I think I’d rather have the iPhone.
* The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills.
* Don’t let your employer microchip you! Ever!
* A 21st-century form of indentured servitude has already penetrated deep into the American heartland.
* Woman turns home into museum after getting sick of black women being ignored by the art world.
* When there was a Lyme disease vaccine.
* Snopes Faces an Ugly Legal Battle.
* North Dakota’s Norway Experiment.
* Reverse Robin Hood: The Historical Scam of Global Development.
* Dungeons and Dragons in America’s dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons and the Left.
* Hemingway just got beat by four words.
* Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child.
* The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values.
* 110/111.
* The next Matt Groening series isn’t just a Futurama-but-fantasy but a joke Futurama already did. But fine I’ll give it a chance.
* A definitive mapping of the decline of The Simpsons. It’s just math, folks.
* The attack on Poland’s judicial independence goes deeper than you may think. Here are 5 things to know. Dodged that bullet. Coming soon to a collapsing empire near you!
* On 500 episodes of Comedy Bang Bang.
* When Pokémon Go defeated Milwaukee County.
* Et tu, Roomba? I trusted you.
* The World May Have Less Time to Address Climate Change Than Scientists Thought.
* And yet there’s more dicks around than ever before.
* The knife’s edge between utopia and apocalypse: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.
* #NotAllTVIsDarkAndFullOfTerrors.
* And July 30 can’t come fast enough.
And because Trump is a nightmare from which none of us will ever awake:
* We’re Approaching a Major Turning Point in Trump-Era Pop Culture.
* The Scariest Nuclear Threat Is Coming From Inside the White House.
After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”
* Turtles all the way down: Scott Pruitt wants to hijack the peer-review process to push bad climate science.
At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.
* This guy is running communications now! Come on! COME ON!
* A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable. It’s not too early, or too nutty, to discuss grounds for impeachment. This presidency can’t be saved. A Trump Tower of Absolute Folly. Hot mic. 1 in 4. On the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis, the Nation Goes Numb.
* Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals. Sixteen years. We’ve long lost even the pretense that there is a rational reason for this.
* 64 years after Korean War, North still digging up bombs.
* William Regnery II, a man who inherited millions but struggled in business, tried for 15 years to ignite a racist political movement — and failed. Then an unforeseen phenomenon named Donald Trump gave legitimacy to what Regnery had seeded long before: the alt-right. Now, the press-shy white separatist breaks his silence.
* How Breitbart Media’s Disinformation Created the Paranoid, Fact-Averse Nation That Elected Trump.
* This is the tradition Ryan Alford sets himself against in Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law. It is from a position of deliberate disinterest in institutional personality, particularly presidential personality, that Alford builds his account of the lawlessness of US counterterrorism efforts since the 9/11 attacks and charts our country’s official passage across the “threshold between an imperial presidency and an elective dictatorship.”
* What if Trump Ordered a Nuclear Strike on China? I’d Comply, Says Admiral. Not great, Bob!
* When you’ve lost the Boy Scouts.
* Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.
* Trump administration is sitting on tens of thousands of student debt forgiveness claims.
* Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated.
* RIP CBO.
* There’s nothing he can’t ruin.
* How to put Trump on Mount Rushmore, something he’s never even thought about.
* #Actually Stubbs’s tenure as mayor was deeply problematic.
* John McCain Just Proved He Is the Senate’s Biggest Fraud (Again). Your enemies are human too.
The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.
* Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.
* Understanding skinny repeal.
* Don’t forget: they win because the system is rigged in their favor. Not that they don’t get a lot of help.
* And yet! Sometimes they don’t. Good for Collins, Murkowski, McCain, and literally every Democrat in Congress, and remember that Trumpcare isn’t truly dead (no matter how many bullets you put in it) until Democrats get a veto point back…
Written by gerrycanavan
July 28, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic writing, actually existing media bias, brains, capitalism, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Comedy Bang Bang, concussions, cultural preservation, debt, delicious Coca-Cola, deportation, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, education, emergency rooms, football, Foxconn, Futurama, gifted children, globally, health care, Hemingway, high fives, How the University Works, immigration, improv, indentured servitude, Ireland, kids, Lyme disease, Matt Groening, meritocracy, Milwaukee, mobbing, museums, musicals, NASA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Dakota, Norway, Octavia Butler, optimism, outer space, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parenting, pessimism, philosophy, podcasts, Pokémon Go, Poland, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, ravens, Republicans, robots, Roomba, science fiction, short stories, Sinclair, smoking, social media, socialism, soda, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Steven Salaita, television, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Simpsons, trans* issues, vaccines, Wisconsin, work
Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag
* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.
* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.
Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU
— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016
* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.
* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.
* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.
* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.
* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.
* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.
* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.
* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.
7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.
— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016
* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.
* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.
* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.
* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.
* The First Trans*Studies Conference.
* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
A bit more here.
* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.
* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.
* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.
* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.
* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.
* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.
* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?
* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.
* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.
* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.
* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.
Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL
— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.
* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.
* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.
* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.
* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.
* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.
* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.
* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.
* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.
* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?
* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.
* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.
* The largest strike in world history?
* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.
* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.
* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”
* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.
* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM
— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016
* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?
* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.
* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.
* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.
*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.
* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.
* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.
* What’s the Matter with Liberals?
* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.
* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.
* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.
* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.
* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!
* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.
* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.
* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.
* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.
* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.
* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.
* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.
* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.
* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.
* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.
* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.
* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.
* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.
* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.
* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.
* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.
* Finally.
* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.
* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 11, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, Adam Kotsko, adjectives, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Alan Moore, alcohol, algorithms, Alice in Wonderland, America, animal personhood, animal research, animals, Apple, art, Art Spiegelman, austerity, Avatar, Balance of Terror, Barack Obama, basket of deplorables, Benjamin Robertson, Bill Clinton, Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter, Booster Gold, breastfeeding, Brexit, Britain, Bro Adams, Bugs Bunny, Camus, capitalism, Catholicism, CFPs, charity, China, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Newfield, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, cities, Civil War, class struggle, Clemson University, climate change, college majors, comics, communism, concussions, conspiracies, container ships, corporal punishment, credit scores, cryptozoology, cultural preservation, Dakota Access Pipeline, Dan Hassler-Forest, Darwing Duck, David Foster Wallace, DC Cinematic Universe, death, debt, deep time, Disney, Disney afternoon, Donald Trump, Donna Haraway, Douglas Adams, drama, Drug Enforcement Agency, drugs, DuckTales, Duke, Earth First, ecology, education, English, English departments, eschatology, eviction, Ewoks, faking your own death, fan culture, fantasy, fashion, first contact, FiveThirtyEight, flame trombones, Flat Earth, floods, FOIA, football, for-profit schools, Fordism, Fox News, Fred Moten, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Jameson, free speech, freedom of speech, games, gay issues, Gene L. Coon, Gene Roddenberry, general election 2016, genius, giraffes, graduate student life, graduate students, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda Jane, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, HBO, Hellboy, Henry Jenkins, heroin, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, homelessness, hydrofracking, illegal immigration, India, Infinite Jest, iPhones, Israel, ITT Tech, J.K. Rowling, Jack Daniels, James Tiptree Jr., Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, John Brunner, John C. Calhoun, John Carpenter, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindergarten, King Lear, Klu Klux Klan, Kratom, labor, language, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Lewis Carroll, liberals, libraries, literature, lockouts, loneliness, Long Island University, magic, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, Making a Murderer, maladministration, mannequins, maps, Margaret Atwood, Maus, medical humanities, Mel Gibson, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, monsters, Montana, monuments, moral panic, Mother Theresa, musicals, my media empire, Nadja Spiegelman, names, narcissism, Nate Silver, Native Americans, NEH, neoliberalism, New York, NFL, nonprofit-industrial complex, nonprofits, nostalgia, novels, obituary, oil spills, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, pennies, philanthropy, philosophy, Poe's Law, poetry, Pokémon Go, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, polls, Polygraph, pre-K, pregnancy, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, public universities, Quebec, queer readings writing themselves, race, racism, rape culture, Raymond Chandler, reaction, reactionaries, reading, religion, retirement plans, Richmond, rising sea levels, Roger Ailes, Romulans, sabotage, saints, Salvador Dali, Samsung, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scabs, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Shakespeare, slave trade, slavery, socialism, sound, Soviet Union, speculation, speculative fiction, speculative finance, sports, Stand on Zanzibar, Standing Rock, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, stillbirth, Stranger Things, strikes, student debt, student loans, student movements, surrealism, taste, teaching, tech trash, tenure, text adventures, textual histories, the Anthropcene, the avant-garde, the Capitalocene, the Chthulhucene, The City on the Edge of Forever, the courts, the Flood, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the humanities, the law, The Night Of, the oceans, The Passion of the Christ, the revolution, The Space Merchants, The Stranger, The Thing, the university in ruins, theater, theory, Thirteenth Amendment, TIAA-CREF, TNG, Tolkien, totality, trans* issues, transmedia, trees, trigger warnings, true crime, Trump TV, UIUC, Underground Railroad, unions, University of Chicago, Utopia, Virginia, Vonnegut, Vox, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Westeros, white people, wilderness, Wisconsin, words, WPA, writing, Zack Snyder
Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!
* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.
* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!
* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.
* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.
* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).
* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.
* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?
“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”
* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.
* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.
* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.
* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.
* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.
* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.
* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’
* Behind the Scenes at the Met.
* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.
* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.
* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.
* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.
* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.
* A(other) New Map for America.
* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!
* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.
* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!
* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.
* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.
* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!
* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.
* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.
* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.
* I was a men’s rights activist.
* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.
* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.
* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.
* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.
* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.
* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.
* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.
* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.
* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.
* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.
* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.
* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.
* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.
* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.
* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.
* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.
* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?
* And they said culture was dead!
* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.
* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.
* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.
* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.
* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?
* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?
* If you want a vision of the future.
this is craaaazy. I mean, PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE much? no one wants your avatar, cameron! pic.twitter.com/zFHsohnibD
— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) April 15, 2016
* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 18, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1099s, 2030, Aborigines, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Afro-pessimism, Al Qaeda, aliens, Alpha Centauri, alt-right, America, Andrew Jackson, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, apes, apocalypse, art, Australia, Avatar, Avatar 5, Barack Obama, basketball, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Beirut, Ben Affleck, Ben and Jerry, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, blackness, books, capitalism, CEOs, CFPs, Cherie Berry, Chernobyl, child care, Childrens Hospital, circumcision, class struggle, Cleverman, climate change, coffee, college, contract employees, coral reefs, Cornell, creeps, Death Star, Democratic primary 2016, disability, disability studies, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, elevators, emoji, emoji movie, feminism, film, Florida, FOIA, food, Foon, Game of Thrones, games, Georgetown, gig economy, Golden State Warriors, Great Barrier Reef, Greenland, Haiti, Hamilton, Hello from the Magic Tavern, How the University Works, huge if true, ice sheet collapse, independent studies, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, intelligence, James Cameron, Jesuits, John McAdams, journamalism, just peace, just war, Keurig, kids today, Kimmy Schmidt, Kumail Nanjiani, LEGO, librarians, libraries, literary theory, local news, Los Angeles Review of Books, maps, Marquette, men's rights activism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, minimum wage, misogyny, Mississippi, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, modernity, monarchism, Monica Lewinsky, monkey news, monkeys, moral panic, Mount St. Mary's, music, musical theater, musicals, my scholarly empire, neoliberals, Netflix, North Carolina, obituary, Octavia Butler, Offices and Bosses, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, pepper spray, Peru, philosophers, podcasts, Poland, politics, prison-industrial complex, public relations, rape, rape culture, reactionaries, recycling, Republican primary 2016, Rogue One, Scalia, science film, SeaWorld, Shakespeare, slavery, songs, Srinivas Aravamudan, Star Trek, Star Trek 2017, Star Wars, statehood, Stephen Curry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Salaita, student debt, Supreme Court, Tampa Bay, teaching, television, tenure, the $10 bill, the $20 bill, the courts, the humanities, the law, the Pentagon, tigers, Timbuktu, Title IX, Twitter, UC Davis, United Nations, University of Toledo, Vatican-City-style communofascism, Washington DC, what it is I think I'm doing, word processing, working moms, Wow! signal, you don't exist, zoos, Žižek
Tuesday Links!
* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.
* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:
Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”
* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:
October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction
October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)
October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference
* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.
* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).
* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?
* The Humanities at the End of the World.
* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.
* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.
* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.
* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.
* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.
* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.
* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* A Centre for Laziness Studies.
* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.
* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.
* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.
* The politics of the campaign mixtape.
* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.
* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”
* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.
* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?
* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.
* First, they came for my assault rifle.
* Nihilistic password security questions.
* The end of the Perkins loan.
* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.
* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.
* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.
* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.
* If it’s good enough for Zappos…
* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.
* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.
* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.
* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.
* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.
* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.
* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?
* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”
* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.
* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.
* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.
* Hydrofracking ruins everything.
* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”
* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.
* End zero-tolerance school discipline.
* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.
* The law, in its majestic finality…
* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.
* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.
* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?
* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.
* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.
* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.
* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.
* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”
* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.
* What’s the most American ______ ever made?
* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”
Written by gerrycanavan
October 6, 2015 at 3:01 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2015, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, active shooter drills, actually existing academic bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, animal personhood, animals, apocalypse, Back to the Future, Bangalore, baseball, batteries, Bill Cosby, bioterrorism, blindness, Britain, children, class struggle, collateral damage, Comcast, Crumbs, death penalty, delicious Coca-Cola, disability, Doctors without Borders, ecology, Elon Musk, energy, English departments, English majors, environmentalism, fairy tales, fantasy football, fantasy sports, film, finality, flooding, football, for-profit colleges, free speech, Fury Road, futurity, gender, genius grants, Google, guns, He-Man, history, hoaxes, honorary degrees, hospitals, How the University Works, hydrofracking, indigenous futurism, kids today, laziness, laziness studies, lightsabers, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max, malls, Marquette, Mars, mass shootings, Masters of the Universe, memory, mental health, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, mixtapes, MLB, Moore's Law, mothers, my scholarly empire, Nabokov, New England Patriots, New New Deal, New York, NFL, noncitizens, nuclear war, nuclearity, obesity, Octavia Butler, Oregon, orphans, our brains work in interesting ways, Ozymandias, pan analysis, panopticon, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Pennsylvania, Pepsi, plastic bags, play, poetry, politics, postdocs, pregnancy, preschool, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, public health, race, racism, recycling, religion, Rush Limbaugh, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, security questions, sexism, slavery, soda, Star Wars, Stephen Colbert, Steven Salaita, student debt, student newspapers, SuperPACs, superstorms, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, tenure, Tesla, textbooks, texting, The Hobbit, the humanities, the law, the Left, The New Inquiry, the Taliban, Tolkien, tontines, Toshi Reagon, toxic waste, Twilight, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, United Kingdom, USC, voter suppression, voting, war crimes, war on education, Whole Foods, Yelp, Yelp for People, Zappos, zero tolerance
Weekend Links!
* I have a short essay in the New Orleans Review‘s science fiction issue. Check it out! (Sorry, it’s not online.)
* CFP: Special Issue of American Literature: “Queer about Comics.”
* Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror.
* Cornell Grad Students Form Unrecognized Union.
* The Irony of Catholic Colleges.
69% NTT faculty already (https://t.co/r9iXfWWbZL) | State College of FL eliminates tenure http://t.co/I2KZo9ToEk via @miriamkp @gerrycanavan
— Andrew Goldstone (@goldstoneandrew) September 24, 2015
* Fake traffic is rotting the Internet.
* So weird: John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress.
* The College President-to-Adjunct Pay Ratio.
* The Journal of Academic Freedom has a special section devoted to Steven Salaita.
* Science proves you like being ripped off by airlines.
* Fordham, Marquette rescind honorary degrees they gave Cosby.
* Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. Yet!
* What a massive sexual assault survey found at 27 top U.S. universities. Counterpoint: The latest big sexual assault survey is (like others) more hype than science. Counter-counterpoint: The University of Chicago’s message to the Class of 2019: Don’t be a rapist.
* Speech and the campus newspaper at Wesleyan. And from the Southern Poverty Law Center: Campus Newspaper Thefts since 2000.
* Today in the apocalypse: Why some scientists are worried about a surprisingly cold ‘blob’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.
* Ahmed’s Clock, Banneker’s Clock, and the Racial Surveillance of Invention in America.
* “Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges.”
* A recent study suggests that acetaminophen—found in Tylenol, Excedrin and a host of other medications—is an all-purpose damper, stifling a range of strong feelings. Throbbing pain, the sting of rejection, paralyzing indecision—along with euphoria and delight—all appear to be taken down a notch by the drug.
* Volkswagen and the Era of Cheating Software. Volkswagen hires BP’s Deepwater defense team as the lawsuits start. But it’s not all bad news.
* Stojcevski was sent to the Macomb County Jail in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on June 11, 2014, to serve a 30-day sentence after failing to appear in court over a ticket for careless driving, according to the lawsuit. During the 16 days between his imprisonment and his death, the lawsuit alleges, staff at the jail knowingly allowed him to suffer through “excruciating” acute withdrawal without treatment.
* Inside the collapse of Scott Walker’s presidential bid.
* Inside Salvador Dali’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
* Rather than fighting for more and better work, we should fight for more time to use as we please. Proposals like a universal basic income may well lead to this. Most importantly, in thinking about the time bind, we should keep in mind what it would mean to be really free from it. We should keep in mind the full possibilities of liberation: what we want is not to be allowed to work more or in better conditions, but to be allowed to live as we see fit.
* Counterpoint: Against UBI.
* I had nightmares like this: What If the Answer Isn’t College, but Longer High School?
* A Urine Collection Bag from Apollo 11 marked with the initials “NA.”
* The Bowe Bergdahl case is a weird choice for Serial season two, but I suppose nearly anything would be.
* Netflix Data Reveals Exactly When TV Shows Hook Viewers — And It’s Not the Pilot.
* …the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.
* Honestly this would work pretty well for academics too.
* Listen, this is just getting silly now.
* We have burned all the furniture for fuel and we’re starting to chop away at the deck. We are a terrible, dispirited society and we finally have the terrible, dispirited Muppets we deserve.
* What Can ‘Star Trek’ Teach Us About American Exceptionalism?
* Rude hand gestures from around the world.
* And I’m devoting the rest of my career to the Mysteries of the Unknown books, now that I’ve been reminded they exist.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 26, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, affirmative action, Afrofuturism, Ahmed Mohamed, airlines, Alice in Wonderland, aliens, American exceptionalism, American literature, apocalypse, architecture, austerity, Benjamin Banneker, Bowe Begddahl, campus newspapers, cars, Catholic education, Catholicism, CEOs, CFPs, climate change, college, comics, content, copyright, Cornell, corpocracy, DC Comics, digitally, diversity, eBooks, galactic empires, golden parachutes, graduate student life, graduate student unions, Gulf Stream, happy birthday, Harry Potter, high school, House of Representatives, How the University Works, I want to believe, Jesuits, John Boehner, journamalism, kids today, Kindle, kleptocracy, Lewis Carroll, lies and lying liars, medicine, millennials, Muppets, my media empire, Mysteries of the Unknown, neoliberalism, Netflix, outer space, pedagogy, podcasts, prison-industrial complex, queer theory, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, Republican primary 2016, resignations, resilience, Retraction Watch, rude hand gestures from around the world, Salvador Dali, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, Serial, Star Trek, State College of Florida, Steven Salaita, television, tenure, the Internet, the Spectre, the truth is out there, Tylenol, UIUC, unions, universal basic income, University of Chicago, Volkswagen, Wesleyan, what it is I think I'm doing
Weekend Links!
* The future of war, from the author of The Forever War. And a nice flashback from the archive: Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True.
* The dead zones of hypercapitalism.
* There’s some really weird, interesting stuff happening in X-Men fandom right now. It’s almost the inverse of the “Bad Fan” problem that tends to plague Quality TV shows like Breaking Bad: fans so devoted to “appropriate” affective investment in a story that the story itself can no longer be pleasurable to them…
* Insane: The EPA is accusing Volkswagen of illegally using software to cheat emissions standards, allowing the German automaker to sell half a million cars that produce nitrogen oxide, which creates smog, at up to 40 times the legal limit. Criminal charges?
* New details released Friday by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University reveal that 96 percent of NFL players the group has examined showed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease impacting the brain. It seems hard to believe this sport can have much future.
* A Brief History of Toilet-Based Animal Attacks.
* The first, last, and only alignment chart you’ll ever need.
* Counterpoint: no, Jesus Christ, save money in your twenties if you can.
* Counterpoint: no, PhD programs exist to produce future professors. They can’t be saved independently of that, and why would you try?
* Counterpoint: no, actually that popular antidepressant was totally unsafe for teens.
* #IStandWithAhmed and the Criminalization of the American Schoolyard.
* The University As Ed Tech Startup.
* Ursula Le Guin’s guide to the impossible craft of storytelling.
* Meet the Engineers Trying to Prevent the Destruction of Humanity.
* Sometimes, though, it’s the little things.
* And the word’s come down: The FBI Says Retweets Are Endorsements.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 19, 2015 at 8:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, alignment charts, animals, anti-depressents, apocalypse, austerity, Big Pharma, capitalism, Cary Nelson, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, comics, concussions, disruption, Dr. Strangelove, ecology, emissions, EPA, fandom, FBI, forever war, futurity, How the University Works, Inhumans, Joe Haldeman, kids today, Marvel, money, neoliberalism, NFL, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paxil, PhDs, politics, psychopharmacology, queer theory, Republican primary 2016, science, Scott Walker, smog, startups, Steven Salaita, toilets, Twitter, Ursula K. Le Guin, Volkswagen, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, X-Men, zero tolerance
Thursday Night Links!
* Did you know Jaimee Hills’s incredible How to Avoid Speaking has started to ship? Buy it today! Hear her on Lake Effect!
* Presenting the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.
* The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence. Will “decoherence” be the doom of American democracy?
* The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Race Is Always the Issue.
* The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us about freezing brains and reanimating human minds. A Dying Young Woman’s Hope.
* The Caine Prize after “emergence.”
* The Nine Dumbest Things in the Rutgers Report on Kyle Flood.
* The Internet after Ad Blocking. Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web.
* Inside the Brains of Happily Married Couples.
* Friends don’t let friends write clickbait confessionals.
* The feminist think piece industrial complex.
* Twilight of the Elites and the rise of a global left. Even Yglesias is on board!
* We enter into something of a contract as a faculty member: we trade income for autonomy and security. If we do not use the latter, we enter a fool’s bargain. This is why I stay, and why being ready to quit is an important part of staying.
* Inside the Battle for Cooper Union.
* Doing the Lord’s work at GOG.com.
* Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.
* 30 Questions to Ask Your Kid Instead of “How Was Your Day?”
* These 25 schools are responsible for the greatest advances in science. Go Spartans! #11.
* If you like Return Of The Jedi but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism.
* Tased at the Harris Teeter. After an often torturous tenure at the helm of the Durham Police Department—including, most recently, last week’s controversial Tasering of an unarmed black man at a Durham Harris Teeter—Chief Jose Lopez Sr. is out.
* Fraternities are pretty bad.
* “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
* The NFL and the military: a love affair as strange and cynical as ever.
* God save Title IX from its champions.
* Memo to Clinton-world: It might be time to start panicking.
* Ahmed Mohamed and the “Freedom to Tinker.”
* How to screw up the Muppets in one easy step.
A spoiler-free example: The Miss Piggy-Kermit relationship has always worked because of how unfathomable it is, both in terms of species and temperament. These people don’t belong together, but somehow they’ve formed a decadeslong pairing, one that always felt buoyed by Miss Piggy’s stronger affections and a submissive aspect to Kermit. But discovering that Kermit is dating another pig now, perhaps a slightly more docile pig, inverts the whole dynamic of the relationship. Now Kermit just has a fetish, so has he always been playing hard-to-get with Piggy as part of some role-playing that we haven’t previously established? Once you open the window a crack, you’re gonna have to throw open the doors eventually. And within the same dynamic, Miss Piggy’s affections for Kermit, even affections tempered by occasional abuse, have always been a key softening factor for Miss Piggy. We tolerate her awfulness because of her love for Kermit and the love we believe Kermit has for her. Without that core, the risk of Miss Piggy spiraling into an untenable sty of callus words and consistent mistreatment of subordinates is all too real.
* What’s it like to take Jim Henson’s place?
* Don’t Have Sex With Robots, Say Ethicists.
* Nemo iudex in causa sua, but, you know, the opposite.
* Utilitarianism, y’all. Also: the Singularity.
* What Happens When A Parent’s Grief Goes Viral?
* At WeWork, an Idealistic Start-Up Clashes With Its Cleaners.
* Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art.
* “The Long Emancipation” offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists.
* Students’ Requests for Trigger Warnings Grow More Varied. Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine. How Salaita Was Fired: One Year Later. Gaps in Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data. Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down. Colleges Flush With Cash Saddle Poorest Students With Debt. No Child Left Behind Goes to College. Is College Tuition Really Too High? The Uberification of the University. The Rise and Coming Demise of the Corporate University. Tacit knowledge and graduate education. Can’t afford to eat at a college sitting on over $9 billion? There’s an app for that. The Whistleblower Effect. The entire Japanese public university system attempts a massive queen sacrifice. There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts. Are College Lectures Unfair? Microaggressions and good manners. The coming human capital contract nightmare.
* In 1997, the ETS announced that the SAT could not properly be labeled a scholastic assessment test, either; the initials now stand for nothing.
* Maybe the best description of what it is I think I’m doing I’ve ever seen: He said that his best professors “took texts that seemed complicated, made them look simple, and then made them complex again.”
* “We couldn’t imagine Oregonians’ turning their backs on higher education, but they did.”
* Some have called Harvard a Hedge Fund with a school attached, because it has over $36 billion in its endowment, but the UC holds over $100 billion in its retirement funds, endowments, and working capital funds. This large amount of money can be used for good, or it can be used for darker purposes, but one thing for sure, it makes the university an important global finance player. Of course, we should all ask what it means when a public university enters global finance.
* Jerry Brown’s University of California Perma-Temp Problem.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 22: Collaboration (part 2 of 2).
* The rise of the woman comic book buyer.
* Studies in Cruel Optimism, Bernie Sanders campaign edition.
* Yes. Yes. Embrace your hate.
* This week, the site enabled hosts of events to determine who has actually seen the Facebook invites they’ve sent out but not replied, making the simple act of viewing of your notifications a horrifying social contract you can’t escape.
* Nice work if you can get it: How I Felt After 70 Days of Lying in Bed for Science.
* If We Burn All the World’s Fossil Fuels, We’ll Melt Antarctica & Flood the Earth. Right, that’s the plan. Climate Apocalypse and/or Democracy. PS: Almost Half of the World’s Ocean Life Has Died Off Since 1970.
* Markets in everything! Refugees bring in big business in Europe.
* The arc of history is long, but.
* And some news you can use: The IRS Will Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 17, 2015 at 6:47 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #quitlit, abolition, academia, academic fraud, adjunctification, adjuncts, ads, African literature, Ahmed Mohamed, America, apocalypse, Aramaic, art, Banksy, Bernie Sanders, books, brains, Caine Prize, canons, carbon, China, class struggle, clickbait, climate change, college sports, Columbia, confessions, Cooper Union, cruel optimism, cryonics, CWRU, D&D, decluttering, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, dislike button, ecology, endowments, espionage, Europe, Ewoks, Facebook, feminism, film, fossil fuels, Founding Fathers, free markets, free speech, freedom to tinker, fuck your shitty town, futurity, games, graduate student life, grief, Hillary Clinton, hoarding, How the University Works, How to Avoid Speaking, human capital contracts, IRS, Jaimee, Japan, Jim Henson, Jimmy Carter is smarter, Kermit, kids today, language, lectures, Lolita, marriage, mass incarceration, Matthew Yglesias, meritocracy, micro aggressions, military-industrial complex, Miss Piggy, Muppets, Museum of Science Fiction, Nabokov, NASA, NCAA, nemo iudex in causa sua, NFL, No Child Left Behind, NYPD, ocean acidification, oil, Oregon, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, personal essays, poetry, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, polls, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, privilege, race, rape culture, refugees, Return of the Jedi, robots, Rutgers, SATs, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, sea level rise, sex, slavery, sleep, social networking, startups, staypieces, Steven Salaita, student debt, student evaluations, student movements, tasers, taxes, teaching, temp workers, the 1970s, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the Internet, the law, the Left, the Singularity, thinkpiece-industrial complex, Title IX, trigger warnings, tuition, Twilight of the Elites, Uber, University of California, utilitarianism, what it is I think I'm doing
Another Very Busy Couple of Weeks, Another Absolutely Too Long Linkpost
* ACLA 2016: The 21st Century Novel at the Limit. Feminism and New Generations of Old Media. Aesthetic Distance in a Global Economy.
* And one for NEMLA: Women Authors from the Great War.
* Special Issue CFP: Queer Female Fandom.
* You broke peer review. Yes, I mean you.
* Graduate students are employees when that’s bad for them, and students when that’s bad for them.
* Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment. In contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes.
* Why financial aid might make college more expensive.
* Scenes from the schadenfreude at UIUC.
* First, Do No Harm? The Johns Hopkins System’s Toxic Legacy in Baltimore.
* SF short of the month: the found footage / time travel narrative “Timelike.” “Suicidium” is pretty good too. Both are very Black Mirror.
* Salon’s Michael Berry interviewed me and a bunch of other SF scholars recently on the greatness of Dune.
* No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy.
* Science fiction and class struggle, in Jacobin.
* Precrime comes to Pennsylvania.
* Seven habits of unsuccessful grad students. Job market secrets from the English department at U. Iowa. How to avoid awkward interactions during your tenure year.
* Clinton’s ed plan poised to continue the bad disruptivation of the Obama administration. Yay!
* Northwestern Football Players Cannot Form Union, NLRB Rules. Former Berkeley Football Player Sues Over Concussions. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports New Possible NCAA Violations.
* Coca-Cola and the denialists.
* Abandoned college campuses of Second Life.
* Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom.
* What If Stalin Had Computers?
* The NLRB might (finally) shut down the temp economy.
* Crowdfunding Is Driving A $196 Million Board Game Renaissance.
* Sesame Street and neoliberalism, but like for real this time.
* Why 35 screenwriters worked on The Flintstones movie.
* Yes, We Have “No Irish Need Apply.”
* Epigenetics: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes.
* Evergreen headline watch: “Michigan Fails to Keep Promise to Native Americans.”
* UC Davis workers: “We exposed students to asbestos.”
* Understanding Neal Stephenson.
* The Bucks as case study for the stadium scam. Bucks affiliate the Biloxi Shuckers and their endless tour.
* They had no inkling about what was really going on: Gubb was a serial fraudster who made a living by renting houses, claiming to be a tenant, then illegally subletting rooms to as many residents as he could cram in—almost always young women desperate for a piece of downtown living.
* How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year.
* US and Boeing developing a targeted EMP weapon. Looking forward to the surplus sale.
* Another car remotely hacked while driving. If a Cyberattack Causes a Car Crash, Who Is Liable?
* How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change?
* By 2100, Earth Will Have an Entirely Different Ocean. You probably can’t undo ocean acidification even if you find a way to pull carbon out of the air.
* The ice bucket challenge may have been a much bigger deal than you thought.
* An oral history of Six Feet Under.
* Death penalty abolition in Connecticut.
* The new Cold War is a Corn War.
* Donald Trump and fascism. This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.
* Writing the second half of the Harry Potter series replacing Cedric Diggory with a Slytherin.
* Interactive widget: How to fudge your science.
* Science proves parenthood is a serious bummer.
* How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth.
* Who mourns for the Washington Generals?
* Well, it makes more sense than the official story: ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim.
* Is Howl the Netflix of podcasts? Watch Earwolf’s user base revolt.
* The kids today and the end of funny. The unfunny business of college humor.
* Racial Bias Affects How Doctors Do Their Jobs. Here’s How To Fix It.
* NBC chairman threatens ALF reboot if Coach reboot is successful. Just give them what they want! Pay anything!
* Controlling the Narrative: Harper Lee and the Stakes of Scandal.
* Hell, with same-day delivery.
* Locked in Solitary at 14: Adult Jails Isolate Youths Despite Risk.
* I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.
* Mars One Is Still Completely Full of Shit.
* A Troll in the Lost City of the Dead.
In 2010, anonymous emails started popping up in the inboxes of Department of the Interior officials. The messages accuse museums across the country of failing to deal with their massive collections of Native American bones. Those remains are there illegally, the emails allege, and should be returned to the tribes to which they belong. They’re all signed “T.D. White.”
* Science proves the universe is slowly dying
* How DC has played Suicide Squad all wrong.
* The law, in its majestic equality, permits both rich and poor to sleep outside.
* Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras.
* Ancient whistle language uses whole brain for long-distance chat.
* “We’re Fighting Killer Robots the Wrong Way.”
* An early YA novel gets lost in the Freaky Friday canon.
* My dad was right! Social Security really is a Ponzi scheme.
* Don’t freak out, but scientists think octopuses ‘might be aliens’ after DNA study.
* Don’t bring your dogs to work.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal continues to overthink Superman in the best possible way.
* Architects are trying to raise $2.8 billion to build this city from Lord of the Rings.
* You Know Who Hates Drones? Bears. They love pools though.
* Don’t say it unless you mean it.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2015 at 10:13 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1984, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, ACLA, ALF, Amazon, apocalypse, art, asbetos, automated killer robots, bail, Baltimore, Banksy, Barack Obama, baseball, basketball, bears, Bill Watterson, Biloxi Shuckers, Black Mirror, bummers, California, Calvin and Hobbes, cars, CFPs, Charles Schulz, China, class struggle, climate change, Coca-Cola, Colbert, Cold War, college football, college sports, Columbia House, comedy, computers, conferences, Connecticut, corn, DC Comics, Deadwood, death penalty, debt, denialism, Disney, Disneyland, disruptive innovation, DNA, dogs, Donald Trump, drones, drought, Dune, dystopia now, Earwolf, ecology, EMPs, endowments, entropy, epigenetics, fandom, fascism, Fermi paradox, film, flamethrowers, Flintstones, Freaky Friday, genes, gentrification, geoengineering, Go Set a Watchman, Goonies, Goonies never say die, graduate students, Harlem Globetrotters, Harper Lee, Harry Potter, HBO, Hillary Clinton, history, homelessness, How the University Works, Howl, I grow old, J.K. Rowling, Johns Hopkins, kids today, landlords, language, life extension, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mars, Mars One, medicine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, MOOCs, museums, music, NAGPRA, Native American issues, NCAA, Neal Stephenson, neoliberalism, NLRB, no Irish need apply, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, ocean acidification, octopuses, Orwell, parenthood, Peanuts, peer review, Pennsylvania, plagiarism, planned economies, podcasts, politics, Ponzi schemes, precrime, prison, prison-industrial complex, privilege, queer theory, race, racism, reboots, repatriation, Republican primary 2016, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, Second Life, segregation, self-driving cars, Sesame Street, short film, Six Feet Under, sleep, Slytherin, Snoopy, Social Security, solitary confinement, Soviet Union, stadiums, Stalin, Star Wars, Starbucks, Steven Salaita, student loans, Suicide Squad, Superman, surveillance society, Ta-Nehisi Coates, technology, technosis externality clusterfuck, television, temp jobs, temp workers, tenure, the courts, the Holocaust, the law, time travel, torture, TurnItIn, Twilight Zone, UC Davis, UIUC, unions, war on education, Washington Generals, white supremacy, Wikipedia, work, Yale, young adult literature
Tuesday Links!
* The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism interviews my friend Ramzi Fawaz about his exciting new book on the X-Men in the 1970s: The New Mutants.
* David Foster Wallace’s blurbspeak.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo Will Be Published In October.
* Scientist studies Diplomacy game to reveal early signs of betrayal.
* US Education Reform and the Maintenance of White Supremacy through Structural Violence.
* Whatever happened to Gary Cooper: You’ve heard of women’s studies, right? Well, this is men’s studies: the academic pursuit of what it means to be male in today’s world. Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”
* The fire next time: The Pension Crisis at Public Universities.
* The Clinton plan for college. This summary leaves out all the awful disruptivation and neoliberalization stuff that will be part of any actual plan, so it sounds great.
* Widespread use of private email revealed a day after Wise resigns. The Revelations in Phyllis Wise’s Emails. Legal experts react. It’s so bad the board is going to vote on whether to pull her $400,000 golden parachute.
* More on Duquesne’s proposition that adjunct unions would interfere with its Catholic mission.
* SeaWorld sees profits plunge 84% as customers desert controversial park.
* The Making of the American Police State.
* The Socrates of the National Security Agency.
* Police Union In Missouri Declares ‘Darren Wilson Day’ On Shooting Anniversary. Yankees’ Minor League Affiliate Holds ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Event On Anniversary Of Michael Brown’s Death.
* One Holdout Juror Was Likely Why James Holmes Avoided Death Penalty.
* Comic book movies and the forgotten art of the ending. You heard it here first!
* The big Superman reveal (from the pre-52 DC Universe) that DC never got around to revealing.
* Always a Lighthouse: Video Games and Radical Politics.
* No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games.
* Netflix’s Dystopian Show 3% To Be Developed Entirely In Brazil.
3% takes place in a world where most of the population lives in “Hither”: a decadent, miserable, corrupt place. When people reach 20 years of age, they go through the “Process”, the only chance to get to “Thither” – the better place, with opportunities and promises of a dignified life. Only three percent of the applicants are approved by the Process that will take the applicants to their limit, putting them in terrifying, dangerous situations and testing their convictions through moral dilemmas.
* More incredibly bad behavior in SF fandom. A little more context here.
* Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct. Colleges Under Investigation for Sexual Assault Wonder What Getting It Right Looks Like.
* Here come the automated trucks. Kids today don’t even want to drive anymore (or their helicopter parents won’t let them)!
* The Amazonization of Everything.
* Point: Please don’t have sex with robots. Counterpoint: Humans should be able to marry robots.
* Point: They clearly should have let Max Landis write Fantastic Four. Counterpoint: The Fantastic Four Are Jerks.
* Two interesting essays on sex work and sugar daddies from TNI’s “Daddy” issue: “Letter to a Young Baby” and “You Deserve It, Sweetie.”
* Atlas Shrugs Google Rebrands.
"We named ourselves after a gurgle, clothed ourselves in primary colors and cartoons, and have now graduated to the alphabet."
— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015
Actually, there's probably something to be written about Google's mobilization of signifiers of infancy, hopefully by @tylerbickford.
— Natalia Cecire (@ncecire) August 10, 2015
Google: “Don’t be evil” Alphabet: “Evil is just one of our businesses”
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) August 10, 2015
Natalia’s tweet became a whole great blog post on modernism, childhood, and tech.
* Why do hotels have ice machines?
* Why do pro wrestlers die so young?
* Prison-industrial-wildfire complex: Nearly half the people fighting wildfires wreaking havoc across California are prison inmates.
* Sandernistas would do well to reflect on one thing. In a few months’ time, Sanders’s campaign will be gone. He will not win. … But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away. And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. A useful corrective, I think, though my intuition remains that this is one brand of underpantsgnomism competing with another for underpants-gnome supremacy.
* Diseases of the twenty-first century: Foot Orgasm Syndrome.
* This could actually be interesting: Harvard Professor Larry Lessig To Explore Democratic Presidential Run.
* Because you demanded it: Werner Herzog’s Ant-Man.
* Science has discovered a new pentagon.
* And while the lion still remains at large, Milwaukee remembers its polar bear.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 11, 2015 at 10:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 3%, academia, academic freedom, adjuncts, administrative blight, aesthetics, Africa, Afrofuturism, Age of Ultron, alphabet, always already, Amazon, anime, Ant-Man, anti-cinema, anti-narrative, Avengers 2, übermensch, baseball, Bernie Sanders, betrayal, blurbs, books, branding, Brazil, Buffy, California, cars, Catholicism, charter schools, childhood, cities, class struggle, comic books, comics, computers, corporate directives, Croatoan, David Foster Wallace, David Gerrold, DC Comics, death penalty, Democratic primary 2016, Diplomacy, disability, disease, Disney, disruptive innovation, Duquesne University, email, fandom, Fantastic Four, Ferguson, film, Foot Orgasm syndrome, games, general election 2016, gentrification, Google, Hillary Clinton, hotels, How the University Works, Hugos, ice machines, Japan, Joss Whedon, kids today, Lagoon, Lawrence Lessig, lesser Whedonia, literature, manga, marijuana, marriage, Marvel, masculinity, mass shootings, math, Max Landis, men's studies, MFAs, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Lion, Milwaukee polar bear, misogyny, modernism, narrative, Natalia Cecire, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nietzsche, Nnedi Okorafor, NSA, nuclearity, pensions, Peter Thiel, police state, police unions, police violence, politics, prequelism, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, pro wrestling, protest, public universities, race, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, rape, rape culture, religion, Roanoke, robot marriage, robots, science, science fiction, Sea World, self-driving cars, sequelism, sequels, sex, sex work, sexism, Shakespeare, Steven Salaita, sugar daddies, superheroes, Superman, surveillance society, tenure, The Avengers, The Avengers 2, the courts, the law, The New Inquiry, The New Mutants, The Story of Kullervo, the sublime, Title IX, Tolkien, tuition, UIUC, underpants gnomes, unions, University of Wisconsin, war on education, Werner Herzog, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, WWE, X-Men, zoos
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 8, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic freedom, Adam Kotsko, adjunctification, adjuncting, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Alabama, America, Andy Daly, animals, apocalypse, Apple, austerity, automation, bad science, baseball, Batman, Ben Affleck, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, black leftism, black power, books, boondoggles, Breaking Bad, bribery, Britney Spears, Brutalism, bullying, bureaucracy, campus police, Captain Picard, car alarms, carbon, card games, cars, celibacy, Chicago, children's literature, China Miéville, choice, Chomsky, class struggle, climate change, colonialism, comics, competitive bagpiping, creditonormativity, creeps, cussing, David Graeber, DC Comics, death penalty, decadence, deep time, delicious Coca-Cola, Democratic primary 2016, desegregation, drought, dystopia, ecology, education, ennui, EPA, erotic alphabets, even the losers get lucky sometimes, evil, exotic pets, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Facebook, fake cream, fandom, Fantastic Four, fanzines, fat, film, final exams, fire, free speech, free will, freemium, games, gaslighting, Gene Roddenberry, gig economy, girls, Google, Google Plus, GPS, graduate student life, guns, harbingers of failure, Harry Potter, health, Hiroshima, historically black colleges, Hogwarts, Hollywood, hope but not for us, Hostess cupcakes, House of Cards, How the University Works, India, infrastructure, interviews, Islamophobia, ITunes, IUC, Jack the Ripper, Jacobin, Jimmy Carter, Jon Stewart, Judy Greer, jury nullification, Katrina, KFC, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lake Mead, literature, Little Women, Magic: The Gathering, Margaret Atwood, Mark Bould, Marvel, mass shootings, math, megadrought, microaggression, millennials, Milverine, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, Milwaukee Lion, modernism, museums, my media empire, my particular demographics, my scholarly empire, nationalize the Internet, neoliberalism, Nevada, nuclear war, nuclearity, nutrition, offshoring, oligarchy, organized crime, our brains work in interesting ways, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, Paul F. Tompkins, pedagogy, Phyllis WIse, planned communities, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, polygraphs, prequels, presumption of innocence, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rebellion, reboots, rejection letters, renewable energy, Review, roads, robot umpires, run it like a sandwich, Samuel Delany, sandcastles, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, serial killers, sewage, shared governance, short stories, social justice, social media, solitaire, Soviet Union, stadiums, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, Subway, Super Mario, superheroes, surveillance society, survival, sustainability, swearing, taste, tax cuts, teaching, teaching philosophy, technology, television, tenure, the alphabet, the Anthropocene, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the archives, the courts, The Daily Show, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the law, the Left, The Matrix, the rent is too damn high, This American Life, Tijuana Bibles, Title IX, TNG, Tressie McMillan Cottom, trial by combat, trickle-down economics, Twinkies, Twitter, Uber, unions, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Iowa, University of Phoenix, Ursula K. Le Guin, USSR, Utopia, Vermont, Vince Gilligan, war on education, water, wealth, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Wolverine, women's history, Won't somebody think of the children?, woodcuts, Woody Allen, words
Another Loose Firehose of Weekend Links!
TGIF RT @iycrtylph: Capital's final victory is to have produced a humanity unworthy of liberation.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2015
* I’ve been so busy this little bit of clickbait isn’t even timely anymore: 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. And this one isn’t timely either!
* New China Miéville story, in Salvage.
* A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis.
* Campus cops are shadowy, militarized and more powerful than ever.
* How to Support a Scholar Who Has Come Under Attack.
* Guns, Prisons, Social Causes: New Fronts Emerge in Campus Fights Over Divestment.
* The final budget numbers that University of Wisconsin campuses have been dreading for months were released late Monday, prompting a mad scramble on campuses to figure out the winners and losers. Wisconsin’s Neoliberal Arts.
* In other words, states would be required to embrace and the federal government would be obligated to enforce a professor-centered vision of how to operate a university: tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand. Sanders for president!
* Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature.
* 11 Reasons To Ignore The Haters And Major In The Humanities. “Quality of life” almost barely sneaks in as a criterion at the end.
* On Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye.
* Deep cuts: Why Do TV Characters All Own the Same Weird Old Blanket?
* The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.
* The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms. In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%” The effects persist “even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”
* The Verdict on Charter Schools?
* “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Letter to My Son.
* What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?
* On June 8, CNN unveiled “Courageous,” a new production unit and an in-house studio that would be paid by advertisers to produce and broadcast news-like “branded content.”
* Social networking and the majority illusion.
* “Colleges’ Balance Sheets Are Looking Better.” Happy days are here again!
* My Severed Thumb and the Ambiguities of Technological Progress.
* So much for “most unpaid internships are illegal.”
* Now that the Supreme Court has once again saved Obamacare, can we have an honest talk about it?
* From the archives! Liberalism and Gentrification.
* From the archives! The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders’ descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.
* “Zach Anderson” is the latest outrageous story from the sex offender registry to go viral.
* Prisoner’s Dilemma as pedagogy.
* In its 2015-17 budget, the Legislature cut four-year college tuition costs by 15 to 20 percent by 2016 — making Washington the only state in the country to lower tuition for public universities and colleges next year.
* The end of “weaponized anthropology.”
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 20: Pivot.
* Tumblr of the week: Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].
* New Jersey congressman pitches the least substantive response to the student debt crisis — SO FAR.
* Neither special circumstances nor grades were determinative. Of the 841 students admitted under these criteria, 47 had worse grades than Fisher, and 42 of them were white. On the other end, UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s.
* Thousands Of Children Risked Their Lives In Tanzania’s Gold Mines For $2 A Day.
* Kotsko has been blogging about his latest turn through the harassment grinder. He’s taking on Big Santa, too. He just doesn’t care.
* Climate science and gloom. But at least air conditioning might not be that bad.
* Weird day for computers this week. Anyway we should put algorithms in charge of everything.
* Scenes from the Olympic scam, Boston edition.
* Sci-Fi Crime Drama with a Strong Black Lead.
* The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an attachment that requires you to print them at home. The original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life – has mutated into exotic versions of itself. The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.
* The initial, back-of-the-napkin notes for Back to the Future 2 and 3.
* Nice try, parents! You can’t win.
* What my parents did was buy us time – time for us to stare at clouds, time for us to contemplate the stars, to wonder at a goiter, to gape open-mouthed at shimmering curtains of charged particles hitting the ionosphere. What it cost them can be written about another time. What I am grateful for is that summer of awe.
* The “gag law also forbids citizens to insult the monarchy and if someone is found guilty in a defamation or libel case, he or she can face up to two years in prison or be forced to pay an undetermined fine,” local media outlet Eco Republicano reported as the public expressed its anger against the law introduced by the ruling Popular Party.
* Wisconsin Democrats sue to undo the incredible 2011 gerrymander that destroyed the state.
* Obama Plans Broader Use of Clemency to Free Nonviolent Drug Offenders. This is good, but still much too timid — he could free many times as many people as he’s freeing and still barely make a dent in the madness of the drug war.
* EPA’s New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print.
* The central ideological commitment of the new Star Wars movies seems to be “well of course you can’t really overthrow an Empire.” Seems right. (Minor spoilers if you’re an absolute purist.)
* Brian K. Vaughn will write an issue of The Walking Dead.
* Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world.
* So you want to announce for the WWE.
* This isn’t canon! Marisa Tomei is your Aunt May.
* I’m not happy about this either.
* A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving, or, Our Brains Don’t Work. I got it right, though I doubt I would have if it hadn’t been framed as a puzzle.
* Your time travel short of the weekend: “One-Minute Time Machine.”
* Or perhaps post-apocalyptic Sweden is more your flavor.
* Another round of the polygamy debate.
* Everything You Thought You Knew About Nic Cage’s Superman Film Is Wrong.
* Remnant of Boston’s Brutal Winter Threatens to Outlast Summer.
* And then there’s Whitesboro.
* The Lost Girls: One famous band. One huge secret. Many lives destroyed.
* Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer.
* 7,000 Fireworks Go Off at Once Due To Computer Malfunction.
* Sopranos season eight: How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp.
* I never noticed how sexist so many children’s books are until I started reading to my kids. Preach.
* Aurora is out! Buy it! You don’t have to take my word for it! Excerpt! More! More!
Written by gerrycanavan
July 10, 2015 at 8:02 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, adjuncts, affirmative action, air conditioning, algorithms, Alice Sheldon, America, American Revolution, anthropology, apocalypse, art, at least it's an ethos, Aunt May, Aurora, austerity, Back to the Future, Back to the Future II, bail, Barack Obama, Batman, Bernie Sanders, blankets, Boston, brain cancer, Brian K. Vaughn, bubble wrap, business, campus police, cancer, capital, cellphones, charter schools, child labor, childhood, children's literature, China Miéville, cities, class struggle, clemency, climate science, CNN, cognitive bias, college admissions, comics, computers, creative classes, crime, debt, disability, discipline, divestment, drugs, Dune, ecology, empire, endowments, English departments, EPA, Europe, European Union, film, fireworks, Fourth of July, free speech, Game of Thrones, games, gender, gentrification, gerrymandering, gold, Greece, guns, hacking, harassment, hate machine, Hawkeye, health care, health insurance, history, How the University Works, hydrofracking, internships, iPhones, James Tiptree Jr., Japan, journamalism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, LEGO, liberalism, literature, lotteries, maps, Marisa Tomei, Marvel, Matt Fraction, Milwaukee, misogyny, monarchy, music, Native American issues, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nicholas Cage, novels, Olympics, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, pardons, parenting, Parks and Recreation, Pawnee, pedagogy, police brutality, police procedurals, police state, police violence, politics, polygamy, prison-industrial complex, prisoner's dilemma, privatize everything, professional wrestling, propaganda, public sphere, quality of life, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Reddit, Risk, run it like a sandwich, Salvage, Santa, scams, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex offenders, sexism, shadow work, short film, social networking, Sopranos, Spain, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Steven Salaita, student debt, Superman, Sweden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, technology, television, tenure, Texas, the coming Super Ice Age, the courts, the Euro, the humanities, the Internet, the law, the past isn't over it isn't even past, The Walking Dead, time travel, transraciality, tuition, unions, University of Wisconsin, UWM, vegetarianism, wage labor, war on drugs, war on education, Washington, wealth, whiteness, Whitesboro, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, WWE
Weekend Links!
* New journal: Series: The International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
* The full syllabus for my upcoming summer science fiction course is finished, if you’re interested. I’ve also updated the “online articles” section of my website with a link to Marquette’s online repository of my articles, which has some stuff people have been asking for (like my Snowpiercer essay).
* So why is TPP the only thing Obama has ever bothered to fight for?
or a path to single payer, or a Green Recovery, or… RT @lucasoconnor: Requisite ‘if only Obama had worked this hard for card check’ tweet
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2015
* “The hardest things are the title and the name of the girl.” Oh, so it’s ridiculously easy.
* Judge finds probable cause for murder charge against officer who killed Tamir Rice.
* Judge orders University of Illinois to release Steven Salaita emails.
* The only thing anyone can talk about.
The take too hot to hold. https://t.co/wDf0Vc64GA
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2015
* Every Single Federal Employee’s Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report. Incredible. I almost wonder if this breach could actually be so large that the government has to shift responsibility for fraud away from individual consumers.
* At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects.
* On the heels of last week’s shocking news that the Transportation Security Administration has a whopping 95 percent failure rate at finding bombs and weapons, we are now learning that the TSA further failed to identify 73 airport workers with links to terrorism.
* ‘Debt-Free College’ Is Democrats’ New Rallying Cry.
* The Milwaukee Bucks bailout and Gov. Scott Walker’s questionable math.
* Why are so many companies spending record sums of money buying back their shares instead of reinvesting more of their profits in their business and their workers? What could possibly explain it?
* I thought homeschooling my kids would be simple. I was wrong.
* “If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.”
* Barbasol’s inclusion was mostly a fluke — the movie’s art director, John Bell, said he grabbed it off a prop shelf with little thought; in the book, smugglers used Gillette — but the shaving-cream maker now calls it one of its biggest victories: John Price, a marketing vice president for parent company Perio, called it “one of the most recognized brand integrations of all time.”
* Here’s how much it would cost to build Jurassic Park.
* One phenomenon that has so far flown under the radar in discussions of peer-to-peer production and the sharing economy but that demands recognition on its own is one for which I think an apt name would be crowdforcing. Crowdforcing in the sense I am using it refers to practices in which one or more persons decides for one or more others whether he or she will share his or her resources, without the other person’s consent or even, perhaps more worryingly, knowledge. While this process has analogs and has even itself occurred prior to the digital revolution and the widespread use of computational tools, it has positively exploded thanks to them, and thus in the digital age may well constitute a difference in kind as well as amount.
* I know Reason is the enemy and all, but their report on this mishandled sex assault case at Amherst is genuinely stunning.
* New, large study confirms that approximately 1 in 5 women suffer sexual assault at college.
* A program designed to help female college freshmen resist sexual assault is creating a lot of buzz among victims’ advocates and college educators. Most were encouraged to learn that incidents of rape had been cut in half among participants in a Canadian study of the program, which involved four three-hour sessions in which the women learned to recognize the danger of coercive situations and to fight back, verbally and physically.
* Scenes from the class struggle at god Reddit is awful.
* Counterpoint: Anne Frank’s Diary Should Have Been Burned.
* RT @SaintRPh: Guy lives next to airport. Painted this on roof to confuse passengers as they fly overhead. He lives in Milwaukee.
* Secrets of the Milwaukee Accent.
* Reality is weird: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron hated each other, but their stunt doubles got married.
* 22 Incredible Facts About The Life and Career Of Sir Christopher Lee.
* Thanks, global warming: Now polar bears are devouring dolphins.
* Nearly Half of Senior Tenured Professors Want to Delay Retirement. Yeah, you’ll never get rid of me.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Future really getting weird now.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 13, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 3D printing, academia, academic freedom, academic journals, administrative blight, airport security, America, Amherst, animals, Anne Frank, austerity, Barack Obama, Barbasol, books, capitalism, Cassandra complex, CEOs, Christopher Lee, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, college, crowdforcing, data, dialects, dolphins, due process, ecology, Fat People Hate, film, FOIA, fraud, free trade, Fury Road, futurity, hair, homeschooling, How the University Works, identity theft, James Bond, Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, kids today, language, Mad Max, Marquette, Michigan, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Bucks, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, Nazis, necrofuturism, neoliberalism, obituary, polar bears, police brutality, police state, politics, privacy, product placement, race, Rachel Dolezal, racism, rape, rape culture, Reddit, retirement, school in the summer, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, security, sharing economy, shitlords, Snowpiercer, stadiums, Steven Salaita, student debt, syllabi, Tamir Rice, television, tenure, the future is now, the Left, Title IX, Transpacific Partnership, true love, TSA, tuition, Twitter, UIUC, University of Wisconsin, UWM, Washington, Wisconsin, words, writing
Monday! Morning! Links!
* With respect to the Mad Men finale, kudos to Eileen Sutton and Todd VanDerWerff. And to this guy too.
That last shot really was “The Princess Bride” ending, btw. Beautifully, wonderfully cynical. https://t.co/JaA2EzF9Bl
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
What you call narrative catharsis was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
Okay, so let’s all meet back here in ten years for the premiere of SALLY DRAPER. #MadMen
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 18, 2015
* Davis stayed with the agency for 19 years as a music director, creative concept writer, composer and producer, rising to senior vice president. He would popularize and create new “song-form” advertising that won every award the industry offers. He wrote Coca-Cola songs which are some of the most popular advertisements in existence today, including, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” “It’s the Real Thing,” “Have a Coke and a Smile,” “Mean Joe Green,” “Coke Is It” and “Country Sunshine.” He also wrote songs for Miller Brewing Company (“If You’ve Got the Time”), Campbell’s Soup and Sony.
* Meanwhile last night’s Game of Thrones was prurient and horrible.
* Nnedi Okorafor on magical futurism.
* A Duke University professor has reportedly been placed on leave after posting racist comments online that included talk of “the blacks” and “the Asians.”
* Why Salaita Was “Un-Hired”: The Missing Facts in the AAUP and CAFT Reports.
* Marquette in the ne…. oh come on. (UPDATE: Actual Journal-Sentinel story here.)
* Early men and women were equal, say scientists. Stealing the illustration directly from the Guardian:
* “But Game Of Thrones goes to absurd lengths to present full-frontal female nudity.”
* “People would look at us and say, ‘Oh, so you’re gay Amish?’ ” Johannes said.
* Sweden is not a member of NATO and spends a relatively small amount on its military. How could it hope to deter the Russian navy on its own? The answer, according to one Swedish group, is simple: The Swedes must send out gay propaganda via Morse code.
* “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. “Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “kill list” validated, the drones do the rest.
* The Forgotten Female Shell-Shock Victims of World War I.
* Can there be a feminist world?
* Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class.
* Columbia Examines Its Long-Ago Links to Slavery.
* Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck.
* Reviving the female canon of philosophy.
* Special issue of Contexts on the sharing economy. Via (as always!) Sunday Reading.
* How Many Americans Are Married To Their Cousins?
* I can’t help it: I just love reading about EVE Online.
* And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 18, 2015 at 7:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academic freedom, apocalypse, assassination, Assata Shakur, Barack Obama, Barbara Ehrenreich, boondoggles, class struggle, Columbia, cousins, delicious Coca-Cola, demographics, drones, Duke, ecology, EVE Online, feminism, Flintstones, Game of Thrones, games, garbage, gay rights, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, gender, HBO, history, Mad Men, magical futurism, Marquette, marriage, Nnedi Okorafor, nudity, philosophy, planned communities, pollution trash, primitive communism, primitivism, professionalism, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Russia, science fiction, Seattle, sharing economy, slavery, stay at home moms, Steven Salaita, Sweden, television, tenure, the canon, the middle class, the past isn't over it isn't even past, UIUC, utopias, war on terror, World War I, Yuppies