Posts Tagged ‘textbooks’
What Day Is It? Links
* Jaimee’s book was reviewed in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last week. We spent the weekend in DC for her book launch and reading at the Folger, which was amazing. She just absolutely killed it. Buy her book! And come to her reading in Milwaukee next week…
* Part of the issue is an image problem around the impact of humanities research on the wider world. The public should know about Priscilla Wald, an English professor at Duke University, whose explanation of the “outbreak narrative” of contagion is changing the way scientists think about the spread of infectious diseases. Yeah they should! Humanities research is groundbreaking, life-changing… and ignored.
* “The Time Traveller,” a story in tweets by Alberto Chimal.
* “Nuclear War” Turns 50: A Fun Game about Human Extinction.
* Professorial anger, then and now. A bit more here.
* Every NYT Higher-Ed Thinkpiece Ever Written. How to write an essay about teaching that will not be published in the NYT, Chronicle, IHE, or anywhere else.
* The semipublic intellectual.
* What happens when you fiddle with just one knob on the infernal machine: rich people get richer.
* Billionaires and superstorms.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Are Public Universities Going to Disappear?
* The care work of the (mostly female) academic: “I estimate that someone cries in my office at least once every three weeks.”
* An incredibly rare Tolkien-annotated map of Middle-Earth was just discovered in a used bookstore.
* Highly irregular: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be considered the eighth book in the Harry Potter series.
* In a final speech to the synod, Pope Francis endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for President of the United States, while taking some clear swipes at conservatives who hold up church doctrine above all else, and use it to cast judgment on others.
* What Happens if a Former CEO Actually Goes to Prison?
* Cop Attacks High School Student In Her Classroom.
* The Hoverboard Scene In Back To The Future 2 Nearly Killed A Stuntwoman. Amazing story.
* Look, I’m not made of stone.
* A Google Tour Through The Underground: How to Read a Russian Novel Set in the Moscow Metro.
* NLRB Returns to Grad Student Unions.
* Bring on the climate trials: ICN has demonstrated that as early as the late 1970s, Exxon scientists were briefing top executives that climate change was real, dangerous, and caused by their product. By the early 1980s, their own climate models were predicting—with great accuracy—the track the global temperature has taken ever since. Meanwhile.
* David Mitchell on A Wizard of Earthsea.
* College sports: still the worst.
* Portugal has apparently smartly baked the potential for coups in its official constitutional order.
* Emolument took data from both the US and UK and found that while science grads get a bit of a headstart straight out of university in terms of pay, in later life it’s people with humanities degrees who tend to get bigger pay cheques.
* How to Make a Virtuoso Violinist: One mother’s devastating study of 100 musical prodigies.
* A DEA Agent Who Helped Take Down Silk Road Is Going to Prison for Unbelievable Corruption.
* The Ecological Uncanny: On the “Southern Reach” Trilogy.
* Boondoggle watch: The City of Milwaukee has been awarded a $14.2 million federal grant for construction of a spur connecting the streetcar with the lakefront.
* “Many Colleges’ New Emergency Plan: Try to Account for Every Possibility.” Well, that’ll work.
* Should a Cal State Fullerton math professor be forced to have his students use $180 textbook, written by his boss? Why is Cal State letting the math department chair require his own book?
* “They didn’t hire me, they hired me minus 35 pounds,” Fisher recently quipped.
* The arc of history is long, but Subway will finally pay for calling an eleven-inch sandwich a “footlong.” Next up: they shouldn’t be allowed to call that bread.
* Miracles and wonders: Landmark Huntington’s trial starts.
* Star Wars but with philosophers.
* “Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas.”
* Sesame Street will introduce an autistic muppet.
* I hate it when Yglesias is right, but sometimes he’s right: Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble. Down-ballot the Obama years have been a complete disaster in ways no one in the party seems ready or able to face.
* Wesleyan University’s student assembly is considering substantial cuts to the student newspaper’s budget, in a move that is surely *completely unrelated* to a truly stupid recent uproar when the paper published an unpopular op-ed. The paper is soliciting donations to stay alive.
* My brilliant colleague C.J. Hribal on his old house.
* The secret linguistic life of girls.
* Talkin’ Trash with Brian Thill and Pinar Yoldas.
* Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
* A literary history of whales.
* The Deadly Legacy of HIV Truthers.
* Things Men In Literature Have Died From.
* Exploring ‘Cartozia Tales,’ The Crowdfunded Fantasy Anthology for Readers of All Ages.
* Nabokov v. Kafka on drawing the monster.
* “Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here”: throwing shade the Le Guin way.
* Guys, we are definitely living inside a simulation. And possibly just a few years away from either crashing it or figuring out how to hack it.
* And teach the controversy: Luke Skywalker, Sith Lord. I really think this is just an effective viral marketing ploy, but I’ll concede I’m starting to have my doubts.
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.”
* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…
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.
Tabdump #4
* How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.
* George Costanza’s Frogger Record Shattered.
* ‘Scientists say dolphins should be treated as “non-human persons.”‘
* If you missed it, more on the Californication of America from Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Steve Benen.
* In defense of baby selling? You couldn’t write a better parody of free market ideology if you tried.
* Today’s lesson in irony is especially schadenfreudelicious.
* Behold, chess boxing. More here.
Gerry Canavan 