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 Uses of Orphans.

* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.

* Reading Lolita at 12.

* 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.

* The return on the tontine.

* 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.

* The end of Moore’s Law?

* The end of UNC?

* 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…

* Generation Debt.

* 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.

* Marquette v. Cosby.

* 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.

* Research shows that in Pennsylvania’s public schools skin color, not economics, determines how much money districts get.

* 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.”

* As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us.

* 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.”

* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…

Wednesday Night Links

* Obama Makes It Clear He Isn’t Willing To Fight for Action on Climate Change. Boy, I’m really looking forward to liberals holding Obama’s feet to the fire on climate now that he won the election! Poll results show “the dramatic impact 2012′s extreme weather has had across party lines, with half of Republicans, 73 percent of independents and 82 percent of Democrats saying they’re worried about the growing cost and risks of extreme weather disasters fueled by climate change.” How Would We Implement A Carbon Tax? (Almost) Everything You Need To Know. Doing The Climate Math: Action Obama Can Take Now. Germany Has Built Clean Energy Economy U.S. Rejected in 80s.

* Horrible: A miscarrying woman has died in Ireland after being denied a medically necessary abortion.

* Normally differential tuition proposals are based on the different costs of running different programs (if your major is more expensive to run you should pay more etc) or, when there is some sort of relationship to future earnings that those entering more lucrative fields can afford more (part of the rationale for higher professional school fees). But the Florida Task Force operates on the opposite assumption: that costs of programs should not matter and that those who allegedly have worse job options should pay more for their programs than those who will move into fields that make them immediately employable. Or to put it more bluntly, that philosophy students should pay more for their education than STEM students because there are more jobs available in STEM fields than jobs as philosophers. Of course, as Elizabeth Propp Berman recently pointed out this job driven logic doesn’t even make economic sense: economic opportunities for most STEM fields are not higher than for many humanities or liberal arts fields, and the sorts of skills provided in the humanities and social sciences are in great demand in the economy.

* Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform privatization.

* But the kids are all right. A majority of Americans support sanity on immigration policy, too.

* Doug Henwood is unimpressed with Rolling Jubilee.

* Wisconsin GOPers back bill to arrest officials who implement Obamacare. It was your party’s own idea, you lunatics.

* The VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students. Teach the controversy!

* The no-stars New York Observer restaurant review everyone’s talking about.

* Gerrymandering was probably less of a factor in the election than systematic underrepresentation of urban populations more generally. But it’s still ridiculous.

* Someone just lit $10,000 on fire for no reason.

* Even the absolutely minimal filing requirements for PACs was too much for Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal nails it, as always.

* And this time for real: Local News Crew Confirms Denver Man’s UFO Claims While Attempting to Debunk Them.

Thursday Night Links

* Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”

* Romney Adviser: Not a Single Person on the Campaign Thought He Would Lose.

* What You Can Get for $228,646,000. I could have lost them basically everything for half that.

* Nate Silver explains that malapportionment in the Electoral College may actually be flowing the Democrats’ way in the near-term:

The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College.

By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them.

* I really don’t understand why Rolling Jubilee is worth doing. Why would we give the banks free money for bad debt they’ve already written off?

* The pros and cons of a Casablanca sequel. Spoiler alert: there is no possible pro.

Thursday!

* An inspiring New York Times op-ed argues we should just let go ahead and let the banks own students outright.

* Grantland overthinks the Alien franchise.

* Let’s admit it: The US is at war in Yemen, too.

* Western cultural imperialism Bingo.

* “I have some grudging admiration for them,” said Akhil Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale and author of a book on the Constitution. “All the more so because it’s such a bad argument. They have been politically brilliant. They needed a simplistic metaphor, and in broccoli they got it.”

* A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun.

…

Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.

* Interview with a john. What’s most striking, I think, is the extent to which specific knowledge of these women’s sometimes brutal exploitation has no apparent effect upon his behavior  at all.

* Is there any limit to SuperPAC spending?

* The Believer interviews WTF’s Marc Maron.

* #OccupyGaddis starts tomorrow.

* We are all MacGyver now.

* Thirteen ways of looking at a Catwoman cover.

* And today’s quiz: Which of these drugs are medications you can find in the real world, and which are just comic book drugs?

Friday!

* Euro 2012 starts today! Here’s your calendar and your tournament map.

* Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types. So now I have to spend the whole afternoon trying to figure out if I’m a Bert or an Ernie.

* Damon Lindelof is being brought in to rewrite World War Z after it’s already been shot. I’ll be brutally honest: That’s not a great sign…

* A brief history of the university.

* Lauren Berlant explains her new book, Cruel Optimism.

I’ll focus here on three matters.  The first is the concept of cruel optimism (what’s optimism, what’s cruel about it).  The second is on a particular scene—the end of the postwar good life fantasy and the rise of neoliberalism in the U.S. and Europe—in which the consequences of cruel optimism are lived collectively.  The third is about the need for a realism that embeds trauma and suffering in the ordinary rather than in a space of exception, given that the crises of exhaustion and knowing how to live are problems saturating ordinary life.

* So what does American politics cost, anyway?

* Pixar’s rules on how to write a story.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

* The crooks are ruining my lake! Power Plant Mercury Emissions Poisoning the Great Lakes.

* Federal data released Thursday show the United States has had its warmest spring, its warmest year to date, and warmest 12-month stretch on record.

* Salon covers the class action lawsuit against student loan agency Sallie Mae.

* Expressing both public and private frustration with Pakistan, the Obama administration has unleashed the CIA to resume an aggressive campaign of drone strikes in Pakistani territory over the last few weeks, approving strikes that might have been vetoed in the past for fear of angering Islamabad.

Now, said a senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive issues, the administration’s attitude is, “What do we have to lose?” What indeed! See also: Media, drones and rank propaganda. And also: International law and drone strikes. And also.

* Conservatives never liked left-wing, government-run solutions to problems like unaffordable health care and climate change. These days they don’t seem to like right-wing, market solutions, either.

* Why Johnny Q. Public can’t learn: What’s surprising about these results is that even after we internalize a scientific concept—the vast majority of adults now acknowledge the Copernican truth that the earth is not the center of the universe—that primal belief lingers in the mind. We never fully unlearn our mistaken intuitions about the world. We just learn to ignore them.

* And Mr. Rogers Remixed. Because there’s still a good and decent kid inside you somewhere, dammit.

Primary Analysis of the Night

Josh Marshall: It’s not unusual for also-rans to opportunistically pick up a caucus here and there, even when there’s a more or less anointed frontrunner. And it’s true Romney didn’t campaign or spend aggressively in those states. But the frontrunner, already prepping for the incumbent, shouldn’t need to go full court press just to stave off resounding defeats at the hands of a palpably second or third tier opponent. It looks more like Mitt Romney — at least in this cycle — is a sort of electoral Bubble Boy, unable to exist in the natural political environment without a protective layer of massive SuperPAC spending.

‘Stephen Colbert Super PAC Ad Labels Mitt Romney A Serial Killer’

Like I said: up to eleven.

Being Business Partners Does Not Count as Coordination, Legally

Last night Stephen Colbert took his SuperPAC gag all the way up to eleven. Here’s the video, in two parts.

Midweek Midday

* There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying – to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out.

* Aaron Bady: The case for making a storm in the ports. I feel certain 90% of the impetus for this piece was the desire to use that pun.

* Oh, UVM. You know better.

* Judge: Obama Administration May Have Politicized Morning After Pill Approval Process. May have?

* Plutocracy watch: More than 80 percent of giving to Super PACs so far has come from just 58 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the latest data, which covers the first half of 2011. The Republican groups have raised $17.6 million and the Democratic groups $7.6 million. Those numbers will balloon, with American Crossroads, the main Republican Super PAC, aiming to raise $240 million.)

The exceptions are two public employee labor unions, whose massive donations match those of some of the largest moguls. The rest are individuals with vast fortunes at their disposal.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Andy Serkis: Official plot synopsis for The Hobbit. Rise of the Planet of the Apes director shares his sequel plans.

* Government shutdown, again? Really? Well, I guess it’s been a few weeks…

Tuesday Night Links

* Watching an hour of television takes 22 minutes off your life. Exercising only fifteen minutes a day adds three years to your life. Someday science will reverse those trends. Someday.

* Glenn Greenwald’s long piece on neverending horserace-style election coverage has the definitive cartoon on the logic of Obama’s reelection campaign.

*  Here’s a suggestion that would put an end to the scandals: abolish Division I football and basketball altogether, because they are hopelessly and irreparably corrupted by billion dollar television contracts and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals.

* Related.

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.

* This is admittedly 90% guilt-by-association, but I’m much less confident about the wisdom of Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC gag now that I know it was being run by Rick Perry’s new treasurer.

* More Rick Perry follies. And here’s the secret of the so-called “Texas miracle”: Texas didn’t have to slash state funding like every other state.