Posts Tagged ‘Tea Party’
Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic!
* Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose. Having done so, it now can leave. Whether it will, and how much it will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen. Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll.
* Virginia GOP Delegate Files Suit To Get Out Of Voting For Trump At Convention.
* All agree that we have entered an era in which “peace” coexists uncomfortably with interminable global violence (for those non-state actors that risk committing it or those state actors powerful enough to do so and avoid condemnation). All agree that executives have pushed the boundaries of national and international legality and redefined the scope and timeline of legal violence with little apparent constraint — except, theoretically, a wayward public, which has not done much to push back yet.
* “Protestors on both sides of the fray were stabbed.”
* I wouldn’t say this is great news, given the franchise’s recent experiments in that direction: The New Star Trek Series Can Feature All the Sex, Blood, and Profanity It Wants.
* Scremain, or Scoveto? I’m sticking with my gut: Brexit May Well Never Happen. “Bracksies.” All told, quite an achievement.
* How to Prep for Your PhD If You’re Poor.
* Study Links 6.5 Million Deaths Each Year to Air Pollution.
* This amount of rain in such a short time is likely a “one-in-a-thousand-year event,” the weather service said. A zunguzungu flashback.
* Texas Gun Rights Advocates Fatally Shoots Her Two Daughters.
* They call it the seagullypse.
* A New League Of ‘Barefoot Lawyers’ Will Transform Justice In The Next 15 Years.
* Strange days: The Icelandic translator of Stephen King will likely be the country’s next president.
* This tweet seems sweet but is actually ice cold. Truly chilling.
* And it Looks Like Pluto Has a Liquid Water Ocean. Last one in is a rotten egg…
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine’s Day
* Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in: Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
* Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted. Oh, okay.
* The UW: Update from the Struggle.
* How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
* The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here’s a link to the full article, which has a definition of “merit” (as/against “prestige”) I can’t make heads or tails of.
* The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft’s work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft’s fiction was “finicky,” “childish,” and “antagonistic to reality.” But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being “shocked” is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren’t reading Jason Shiga’s Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it’s great.
* The social network’s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees — the same level that Facebook strives for. “We’re well below that now,” he said. I’m sure if you keep up what you’re doing you’ll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat: The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he’s a communist.
* Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
* An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC ’16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant. I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice, but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
* To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. “Restore.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
* I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
* When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
* Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him. I’ve come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I’m not a scientist.
* Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where “you didn’t know you were poor.” But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin’.
* The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony’s Secret Spider-Man Deal.
* The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
* By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I’ve resolved to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
* Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
* South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
“If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks,” the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
* NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
* Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn’t ‘Appreciate Her Tone.’
* The arc of history is long, but: Putin Banned From ‘Mighty Taco’ Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc., Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc. Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up: Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week’s The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
* The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals. Wash that “good Vox” taste out of your mouth with this “bad Vox” chaser: The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white prisoners.
* Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer. Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Somber news this Valentine’s Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
Good Morning, It’s Sunday Morning Links
* A rare correction: actually your pets will burn in hell. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com regrets the error.
* Watch out, modern-day slaves, the Pope might un-denounce your exploitation next!
* Sad update: Cheryl Abbate has been run out of Marquette.
* Adding that to the explicitly military and overseas contingency funding, the real dimensions of the US military-intelligence-police-prison complex begin to come into view: a staggering $830 billion, more than 80 cents out of every dollar in the funding bill, is devoted to killing, spying on, imprisoning or otherwise oppressing the people of the world, including the American people.
* The federal government is using data gimmicks to mask the true scope of homelessness.
* To end police violence, we must end policing as we know it.
* Timelapse video reveals massive size of New York City protests.
* Ferguson to Increase Police Ticketing to Close City’s Budget Gap.
* Point/counterpoint: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture is totally legit. Ex-NFL punter Chris Kluwe says maybe not.
* But what we do know is that the histories of slavery and of capitalism look very different if we understand them in relation to each other. The next time we walk the streets of Lower Manhattan or the grounds of Harvard University, we should think at least in passing of the millions of enslaved workers who helped make some of that grandeur possible, and to the ways that slavery’s legacy persists today.
* U.S. Schools Saying Goodbye to Foreign Languages. Horrible.
* Cruel optimism we can believe in: What if Democrats had their own Tea Party–esque rebellion? Why the Democratic Party could seriously change — for real, this time.
* Ever Say Never Again: On the History and Future of James Bond.
* Scientists think the Big Bang could’ve created a mirror universe where time flows backward.
* What are the bastards ruining now? Buffy.
* Is Studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer More Important Than Studying Shakespeare? I say teach the controversy.
* I think I would say Freddie is probably the worst possible spokesperson for the conversation the feminist left should be having in the wake of the Rolling Stone UVA scandal. But no one else seems to want to talk about it at all.
* Meanwhile, Matt Fraction walks away from Twitter.
* As recruitment dips, TFA leader says New York training site to close.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say “racism.”
* The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon.
* A Tolkien true believer vs. the nerds.
* Hear Philip K. Dick Talk About SF And The Mainstream In 1976.
* Playboy ranks every Star Trek episodes. “Mirror, Mirror” at #3 is a deeply weird choice. And “Arena” at #6 is just insane.
* They did a TV movie where the McCallisters get divorced? Pretty dark, Home Alone!
* Portuguese Street Artist Creates Stunning 3D Graffiti That Seems To Float In The Air.
* The Hobbit: A Middle-Earth Workplace.
* Now it’s the Kindle version of Green Planets that has inexplicably gone on deep discount for the weekend, if you’re in the market. And don’t forget to pre-order The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, out in January!
* And they say our society is no longer capable of achieving great things: This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint.
Tuesday Links!
* One last bit of self-promotion for my Octavia Butler series at LARoB, reviewing the forthcoming eBook Unexpected Stories and the never-to-be-a-book Parable of the Trickster.
* Meanwhile, my new best friend Levar Burton says Octavia Butler is the writer he most wishes he’d met.
* John Oliver for/against the World Cup. Five Thirty Eight’s World Cup Predictions. How to Nerd Out about Soccer. The World Cup and the Corporatization of Soccer.
* An itinerary is by no means the only thing required for setting out on a trip. And the itinerary will change along the way. But for a deliberate departure from capitalism, rather than a blind flight, a preliminary itinerary will be necessary. Whatever we think of the term communism, the crossroads Marx and Engels glimpsed in the Manifesto is coming more clearly into view: either a left alternative to capitalism or “the common ruin of the contending classes”.
* The Church of Science Fiction.
* As horrific as recent mass killings have been, the idea of a slide into ongoing domestic terrorism is just nightmarish.
* Meanwhile: War Gear Flows to Police Departments.
* Dads Want To Spend Time With Their New Children, If Only We’d Give Them Paid Leave.
* Leaving Homeless Person On The Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051.
* The Prison-Industrial Complex and Orange Is the New Black.
* Temple University is investigating an ethics complaint that two of its professors did not properly disclose funding from the private prison industry for their research on the cost of incarceration.
* Grad Students Could Win Big as Obama Slashes Debt Payments. Understanding the CBO’s bullshitting about how the government doesn’t make money on student loans. Lawsuits and the end of the NCAA. College’s inequality disgrace: Millionaire university presidents and indebted students. In the Near Future, Only Very Wealthy Colleges Will Have English Departments. Yes, the Humanities Are Struggling, but They Will Endure. And Now We Know I’ll Never Be MLA President.
* Emily Bazelon covers the Title IX crisis in American colleges. Taekwondo Is Great but Not the Solution to Campus Rape. U. of Oregon Student Who Alleged Rape by Athletes Writes Open Letter. And then there’s George.
* Jezebel covers Wikipedia’s internal fighting over #YesAllWomen.
* How to drive through all 48 of the contiguous United States in 113 hours.
* The unbearable sadness of Milwaukee tourism videos.
* I thought this was genuinely stunning even by Fox’s already low standards: Fox News Guest Launches Race-Based Attack On Neil deGrasse Tyson.
* Waffle House Forces Waitress To Return $1,000 Tip.
* “The way US immigration laws operate is absurd.”
* The media warns readers about violent pimps stealing girls from malls, but most victims’ stories are very different. I know this because I was a teen trafficking victim, and my experience reflects much of the research that’s been done with trafficking victims.
* The rise of the noncompete clause.
* A Brief History of the Gendered Pronoun in English. In defense of the singular “they.”
* Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks.
* If We’re Lucky, There’s Going to Be a Clone High Movie–IN MY PANTS.
* Review getting picked up: five stars.
* And 4°C only sounds like no big deal.
Weekend Links!
* Food Stamp Cut Reverberates Across Country. North Carolina Mother of 4: Food stamps cut from $500 to $16 per month. SNAP benefit cuts to affect 1 in 7 Wisconsinites.
* From the archives: Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality. Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman.
* Stranger in a Strange Land: Ender’s Game, its controversial author, and a very personal history.
* Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.
* JM Coetzee: Universities head for extinction.
* What crisis in the humanities? Interactive Historical Data on College Majors.
* Trends in Faculty Employment Status, 1975‐2011.
* Reduce working week to 30 hours, say economists.
* College Security Guard Leaves Trail Of Racism And Hate.
* No One is Born Gay (or Straight): Here Are 5 Reasons Why.
* Germany now allows ‘indeterminate’ gender at birth.
* Why there’s no future: Just 25% of Tea Party Republicans say there is solid evidence of global warming, compared with 61%of non-Tea Party Republicans.
* Sick: Lawyers to earn higher legal aid fees for early guilty pleas.
* The Pills of Last Resort: How Dying Patients Get Access to Experimental Drugs.
* Thomas Jefferson and the Qur’an.
* “They asked me to do a couple of episodes of The Walking Dead but I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Romero told The Big Issue. “Basically it’s just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally. I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism and I find that missing in what’s happening now.”
Friday Night Links!
* New Study Predicts Year Your City’s Climate Will Change.
* Hacking, War and the University. Hackers, War and Venture Capital.
* The sequester is a government shutdown which never ends.
* An accidentally published, unredacted document from a lawsuit against the TSA reveals that the Taking Shoes Away people believe that “terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports.” Of course that’s not to say they’re not doing very important work.
* New Jersey to allow gay marriage.
* The state-local-federal divide means even when progressive laws get passed they don’t count.
* What your country is best at.
* Six Decades of the Most Popular Names for Girls, State-by-State.
* High-speed trading algorithms poised to eat the bond market.
* Elliott Sailors was a blond bombshell with the prestigious Ford modeling agency and had curves that graced Bacardi billboards around the world. But when jobs dried up in an industry that considers 25 middle-aged, Sailors, 31, chopped off her blond locks and reinvented herself — as a male model.
* One Tea Party leader has the plan to finally fix everything: just file a class-action lawsuit against homosexuality.
Even More Friday!
* Another Buzzfeed list pings Marquette today: Are These The 32 Best College Campus Foods In America? Real Chili at #6.
* The first Jesuit pope? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. George Weigel at NRO doesn’t care for the Jesuit order:
Bergoglio is an old-school Jesuit, formed by classic Ignatian spirituality and deeply committed to an intelligent, sophisticated appropriation and proclamation of the full symphony of Catholic truth — qualities not notable for their prevalence among members of the Society of Jesus in the early 21st century. I suspect there were not all that many champagne corks flying last night in those Jesuit residences throughout the world where the Catholic Revolution That Never Was is still regarded as the ecclesiastical holy grail. For the shrewder of the new pope’s Jesuit brothers know full well that that dream was just dealt another severe blow. And they perhaps fear that this pope, knowing the Society of Jesus and its contemporary confusions and corruptions as he does, just might take in hand the reform of the Jesuits that was one of the signal failures of the pontificate of John Paul II.
* A CPAC session sponsored by Tea Party Patriots and billed as a primer on teaching activists how to court black voters devolved into a shouting match as some attendees demanded justice for white voters and others shouted down a black woman who reacted in horror. More links below the dumb gif.
* In Record-Setting ‘Match Day,’ 1,100 Medical Students Don’t Find Residencies. More from USA Today.
* Mathowie: Thoughts on Google Reader’s Demise. With reviews of possible alternatives.
* Profiles in courage: coming out in favor of marriage equality 2 years after your son comes out and 6 months after you know you won’t be VP. The truth of this, I suspect, is that he never really cared one way or the other, but now has no more reason to lie about it. What Rob Portman Learned.
People like Portman stridently work against other people’s interests until a crucial moment, both shaming and enlightening, when it becomes their interest too. It’s good that they ultimately come around on whatever the issue is — “Programs helping the poor are good because I lost all my money.” “My teenage daughter is pregnant and in no way prepared to have a baby.” — but does it erase the fact of their larger lack of compassion? I’m not sure it does.
See also Yglesias: Rob Portman and the Politics of Narcissism. Hero Sen. Rob Portman Courageously Endorses Equal Rights For His Family Members.
* Steubenville, Ohio, rape and India gang rape show India isn’t so ‘backward.’
Indian reaction to the New Delhi gang rape is in many ways more promising than American reactions to US rapes. Take the Steubenville, Ohio, case, which hasn’t generated the same public outrage as the case in India. Indian protesters’ calls for justice are a heartening sign of progress.
* North Dakota Poised To Enact Six-Week Abortion Ban, The Most Stringent Restriction In The Nation. Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by six weeks. This is the sort of transparently unconstitutional law Republicans love to pass to raise money and nuture a sense of embattled outrage in their constituency. It’s written to be overturned.
* It never ends: Top 10 Senate races of 2014.
* Imagine there’s no deficit crisis.
* And Appeals Court Rejects CIA Secrecy on Drones.
“It is implausible that the CIA does not possess a single document on the subject of drone strikes.”
Thursday Night Links
* Merit and the academy. Challenging, thoughtful post from Timothy Burke.
* My beloved alma mater found out about MOOCs. Meanwhile, the New York Times kind of buries the lede: “So far, most MOOCs have had dropout rates exceeding 90 percent.”
* The Atlantic argues the student loan crisis ain’t no thang. I suspect they’re quite literally cribbing from Adam.
* What could possibly go wrong? Utah considering bill to allow the carrying of concealed weapons without a permit.
* According to the Times, the ACLU compiled a 5,000 page report on the SAO, a group of former Minutemen and other right-wingers and violent home-grown fascists, for the benefit of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “alleging the Federal Bureau of Intelligence recruited a band of right-wing terrorists and supplied them with money and weapons to attack young antiwar demonstrators.”
* Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set.
Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey results suggested that people who rejected climate science were more likely than other respondents to reject other scientific or official findings and buy into assorted fringe theories: that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Central Intelligence Agency killed Martin Luther King Jr., that the AIDS virus was unleashed by the government, and so forth.
This piece of research appeared in a specialized journal in psychological science, but it did not take long to find its way onto climate skeptics’ blogs, setting off howls of derision.
A theory quickly emerged: that believers in climate science had been the main people taking Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey, but instead of answering honestly, had decided en masse to impersonate climate contrarians, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like whack jobs.
* Forget it, Jake, it’s Pretoria: The South African police replaced the lead investigator in the Oscar Pistorius homicide case on Thursday after embarrassing revelations that he was facing seven charges of attempted murder himself.
* Why Gender Equality Stalled. This country hates rational health care distribution, too. America!
* Prison and the Poverty Trap.
* Doctors are the next career to be deskilled and deprofessionalized. Ah, progress!
* A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.
* A sea change for mass culture: Nielsen Ratings Will Add Streaming Data For Fall 2013.
* Tumblr of the day: Shit Rough Drafts.
* The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.
* Slavoj Žižek vs. capitalism, round 200. This is almost literally a full rerun.
* Florida, after two years of Tea Party Rule. But even he isn’t a real conservative…
* Ezra Klein: Obamacare is winning.
* World’s greatest Venn diagram: Chemical Elements vs. US States.
* The NCAA, an organization with such open-decision making practices and clear accountability as to provide lessons to the mafia, is forcing a University of Minnesota wrestler to give up his music career or be declared ineligible for profiting off his own image.
* From the too-good-t0-check files: Young Japanese Women Rent Out Their Bare Legs as Advertising Space.
* The New York State Thruway Project, Social Issue Signage Disguised as Historical Markers.
* And we’re going to burn every drop of oil and destroy the future. Gleefully. Enjoy your weekend!
Thursday Night Links
* The New York Times has a pretty devastating retort to Tesla’s critique of their reporting.
* Low-Income Students Should Be Able to Graduate Debt-Free, Report Says.
* Why Employers Won’t Fire People If We Raise The Minimum Wage To $9. But the picture isn’t all rosy:
1. Improving efficiency. An increase in the minimum wage may lead employers to encourage employees to work harder, since they’re now being paid more. Such an adjustment may be preferable to “cutting employment (or hours) because employer actions that reduce employment can ‘hurt morale and engender retaliation.’” A review of 81 fast-food restaurants in Georgia and Alabama found that “90 percent of managers indicated that they planned to respond to the minimum-wage increase with increased performance standards such as ‘requiring a better attendance and on-time record, faster and more proficient performance of job duties, taking on additional tasks, and faster termination of poor performers.’”
Only the brutal immiseration of low-wage workers can save us now!
* Netanyahu said Iran was 3-5 years away from nuclear capability– back in ’95!
* Facebook Paid No Corporate Income Tax Last Year, After Making More Than $1 Billion In Profits. I know, I know: Facebook makes money?
* FreedomWorks outdoes itself. Wow.
* And via @zunguzungu: The future of higher education. It simply couldn’t be clearer.
Monday Reading™
* Well, that’s one way to do it: Tennessee Tea Party ‘Demands’ That References To Slavery Be Removed From History Textbooks.
* Russian scientist claims to have evidence of life on Venus.
by the 1960s, the American Mariner probes and their Soviet Venera counterparts had revealed Venus was just about the most inhospitable place imaginable, an acidic world with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures nearly 92 times that of Earth.
That’s why the new paper by Russian astronomer Leonid Ksanfomaliti, due to appear in the Russian publication Solar System Research, seems to sit slightly outside the scientific consensus. He says that photos taken in 1982 – presumably either by Venera 13 or Venera 14, both of which visited Venus in March of that year – depict a “disk”, a “black flap”, and, perhaps most boldly, “a scorpion.”
Well, it checks out.
* Why a white knight won’t save the GOP from the Mitt-Newt trainwreck.
* Speaking of which: Gingrichmentum!
* Brown and Warren agree to ban third-party ads in Massachusetts. What’s the force of this, if the ads are genuinely third-party?
* Gay rights victories in New Jersey and Washington State.
* Evidence of cooperative play between dolphins and whales.
* …it is now possible to recognize that there are four discrete corridors of cisnormative resistance toward trans people’s readiness to transition.
First corridor, pre-adolescence: “You don’t know any better. You’re too young to understand”;
Second corridor, during adolescence: “It’s a confusing time. Wait until after puberty’s done”;
Third corridor, late development: “You should wait until you’re totally sure. You’ll never pass”; and
Final corridor, maturation: “You’re having a mid-life crisis. What about your kids, spouse, and career?”
* Someone on Facebook just told me Object Lessons from Duke’s Own™ Robyn Wiegman is now out.
* How fluctuations in the academic job market affect time-to-degree.
* And some recent notes on mental health and the Ph.D., via here, via Twitter.
Gerry Canavan 