* ICYMI: An edited and expanded meritocracy, lottery, game blog post got republished at Inside Higher Ed yesterday. Here’s a reply suggesting a better metaphor than games might be the casting process.
* Cool stuff happening at Marquette: Conflicting Audience Reception of Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. A student-curated exhibit at the Taggerty. And of course there’s my pop culture group geeking out over The Hunger Games.
* A college can’t fire an adjunct professor for criticizing it, so long as the issues raised are matters of public concern and the adjunct has reasonable expectation of continued employment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Thursday in a decision regarding Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois.
* Walter Benjamin’s Radio Plays. You Know, for Kids.
* A Manifesto for the Freelance Academic.
* Colorado Community College Faculty Bill of Rights.
* Is academic science still sexist? No! Yes!
* Colleges have no business being vehicles for mass entertainment any more than they have business selling widgets or maintaining a fishing fleet. It is no proper part of a university’s mission to provide quality television programming and year-round gambling opportunities for the rest of the country. That this has become the norm in America’s system of higher education is a monstrous accident of history and of academic neglect, but there it is, and it is not going anywhere, and the only way to do it is simply to make an honest business out of it.
* Gasp! …the average student in a MOOC is not a Turkish villager with no other access to higher education but a young white American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job.
* Cura personalis: The maturation of the student—not information transfer—is the real purpose of colleges and universities. Of course, information transfer occurs during this process. One cannot become a master of one’s own learning without learning something. But information transfer is a corollary of the maturation process, not its primary purpose. This is why assessment procedures that depend too much on quantitative measures of information transfer miss the mark. It is entirely possible for an institution to focus successfully on scoring high in rankings for information transfer while simultaneously failing to promote the maturation process that leads to independent learning.
* The end of the Red Cross.
* The latest from Aaron Bady’s ongoing interview series at Post45: “Not in a million years did I expect some people to be upset about the portrayal of the conquistadors.”
* My Grandma the Poisoner.
* Happy election day! The empty election. The Democrats are doomed. Ginsburg Was Right: Texas’ Extreme Voter ID Law Is Stopping People From Voting. New Voting Restrictions Could Swing the 2014 Election. Black people, white government. Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here’s How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012.
* Lawyers, judges, and even journalists tend to have trouble finding people like Eric Kennie—the people who are the most completely disenfranchised by a law like SB14—precisely because such people are, in many areas of life, completely disenfranchised. If they had the kind of economic and social wherewithal to make their voices heard in political or legal spheres—if they knew lawyers or journalists or legislators or people who knew such people—then they most likely would also have the kind of economic and social wherewithal to obtain the documents SB14 demands. Their very lack of money, lack of a car, lack of knowledge of how the system works, and lack of options also tend to make them invisible to the more elite actors who, in distant courtrooms and legislative hearing rooms and newsrooms, fight out the disputes that affect whether they can vote. From the point of view of those more elite actors, looking for Eric Kennie is indeed, as Pilkington puts it, like looking for a vacuum. It like an anti-social-networking puzzle in our networked age: please find me the people who are the most distant from, the least connected to, me or anyone I know.
* And as if the whole stupid thing weren’t irrational enough: Sense of disgust is ’95 percent accurate’ predictor of whether you’re liberal or conservative.
* Tom Steyer spent $57 million to get voters to care about climate change. It didn’t work. Oh, if only he’d spent $58 million!
* Cancel the midterms! There’s still time!
* Viewpoint Magazine, Issue 4: “The State.”
* 2016 and imperial feminism.
*The dependence of the poor on payday loans is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the result of neoliberal policies. The New Loan Sharks. Payday Loans, You Know, for Kids.
* They’re Still Redlining.
* BREAKING: The stock market is an irrational casino and we have no idea how it works.
* Huge congrats to Obama for triumphing here over a really tough field.
* Bullshit Jobs, the Caring Classes, and the Future of Labor: An Interview with David Graeber.
* Historical Futurology. Check the footnotes for some nice citation of Green Planets!
* The sharing economy has a race problem. The Sharing Economy: 21st Century Technology, 19th Century Worker Protections. The Sharing Economy’s ‘First Strike’: Uber Drivers Turn Off the App.
* Nudes and female corporal ownership.
* Hollaback and Why Everyone Needs Better Research Methods.
* How Racism Stole Black Childhood.
* Fracking Wells Abandoned in Boom/Bust Cycle. Who Will Pay to Cap Them?
* Americans Are Working So Hard It’s Actually Killing People.
* The justice system is a monster: Why Innocent People Plead Guilty.
* Finally, someone has put transubstantiation to a rigorous scientific test.
* On Saturday, Brittany Maynard used Oregon’s Death With Dignity law to end her life.
* Erwin Chemerinsky read a 500-page biography of Antonin Scalia so you don’t have to. Spoiler alert: he’s the worst.
* In praise of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Really bad third act problems, though.
* People can feel lots of different things about Lena Dunham and her body of work. What I’m not comfortable with, and certainly not under the mantle of supporting victims and building a culture of consent, is for people to create a narrative of victimization and abuse for Grace Dunham that she has never claimed for herself.
* Losing My Career to Illness: Academia and Parkinson’s Disease.
* Bruce Springsteen by the book.
* Cheat-Sheet for a Non (or Less) Colonialist Speculative Design.
* FBI Files on African American Authors and Literary Institutions Obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
* Mr. Rogers Talks To The Wicked Witch About Being Misunderstood.
* “The court finds that Secular Humanism is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes,” the ruling read.
* In 2014, countries are still paying off debt from World War One.
* UK cultural institutions leave their WWI cases empty to protest insane copyright.
* Dachau’s notorious ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate stolen.
* Secret Fantasies of Adults.
* The legendary comics author Alan Moore has written a million-word novel, tribute to every eternal speck in his universe.
* A Melancholy List of Edgar Allan Poe’s Debts, From His Bankruptcy Petition of 1842.
* How to stop global warming, in seven steps. Oh, if only it’d been six steps!
* Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* And kiss your free time goodbye: you can now play 900 pre-1996 arcade games online for free.
Gerry Canavan 