Wednesday Links!

* Great moments in CFPs: The Journal of Dracula Studies.

* There is nothing wrong with thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever.

* CNN’s Van Jones says Keystone pipeline only creates 35 permanent jobs.

* How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.

* Tracking PhD outcomes at Penn State.

* IRS Suggests ‘Reasonable’ Ways of Calculating Adjuncts’ Hours.

* Marvel Body Mass Index Study Reveals Nearly 1/3 of Female Characters Are Underweight.

* College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.

* 80,000 March in North Carolina.

* NBC single-handedly pays for a fifth of all Olympic Games.

* When the CIA came to Iowa City.

* 3,863,484: The LEGO sublime.

* You don’t understand hipster post-irony, dad! But it’s true: I don’t understand what Fred Armisen is doing.

* Contact with the market can be hazardous to usability; nationalize Twitter.

* Adam Kotsko vs. the difference principle.

* Boromir death simulator.

* NASA now accepting applications to mine the moon.

* Globalization, man.

* “Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983,” proclaims the most depressing lede of all time.

* The sheep look up: The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. The Sixth Mass Extinction Event. 105 Winter Olympians Call for Climate Action. Another water disaster in West Virginia. The Fossil Fuel Industry Just Had a Really, Really Bad Day.

* Change we can believe in: Why Dragonlance should be the next fantasy film franchise.

* Duke’s Own™ Mitch Fraas in the New York Times, tracking libraries looted by Nazis.

* And rest in peace, Shirley Temple and Stuart Hall.

Monday Night Links

* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.

* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.

“I get this call from San Jose State: ‘Uh, we have a problem,'” recalled Mark Ryan, superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute, a public school set up on a military model.

It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach.

To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.

* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.

* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.

* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.

* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.

* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?

* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.

* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).

* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?

* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.

Perhaps the most intriguing news: “Sony said they’re very interested in recording me watching it as a commentary track” for the Season 4 DVD set, he said. His co-host for the evening, Rob Schrab, asked if the DVD commentary could also include a visual in the corner of the screen of Harmon’s facial expressions as he watches the season he was aced out of.

* Assange v. Google.

* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.

* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.

* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?