Posts Tagged ‘the digital’
Please Enjoy Weekend Links!
* Get your abstracts in! CFP: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. And a CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction.”
* The schedule of classes for Marquette English is up at Spring 2017. I’ll be on research leave, if you’re wondering why I’m not listed…
* Best Tumblr in forever: Sad Chairs of Academia.
* How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe.
* How Skin-Deep Judgments of Professors Might Influence Student Success.
* The extent to which Trump is floating absolute gibberish cannot be undersold. Even Costanza is superseded in his time. Once more with feeling: On Bullshit.
* What did Trump lie about at the debate, mondo-hugeo chart edition. Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. Prince Georging, Meflection, and Gobbing: A brief guide to Trump’s rhetorical tricks. A Trump Glossary. You’ll get ’em next time, buddy. What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump. This May Be The Most Horrible Thing That Donald Trump Believes. When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped. How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media. How to bait Donald Trump. Gray’s. Sports. Almanac. How to evade your taxes the Trump way. More. Even more! Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money. Cuba! I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. Donald Trump and the truth about race and real estate in America. America is already great. There’s still heroes in the world. And then there’s what happened just this morning.
* The most American-democracy thing that’s ever happened: But Republicans said the White House didn’t make a forceful case, putting themselves in the awkward position of blaming the president for a bill they enacted into law over Obama’s veto.
* Beyond Clinton or Trump: Nuclear Weapons and Democracy.
* Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November. What a shocking and unexpected consequence of these well-intentioned, commonsense laws.
* Note: The original headline for this piece was “George W. Bush is Not Your Cuddly Grandpa. George W. Bush can rot in hell.”
* Five questions we need to answer before colonizing Mars. Elon Musk’s spectacular plan to colonise Mars lacks substance. Fun and exciting, not boring and cramped! Is Elon Musk’s Crazy Mars Plan Even Legal?
* What could possibly go wrong? UVM Medical College to Eliminate Lectures.
* No Punishment for ‘Run Them Down’ Tweet.
* Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby.
* Why New Jersey’s Trains Aren’t Safer.
* Nicholson Baker goes to school. Reader, I bought it.
* Another review of Alice Kaplan’s book on The Stranger.
* “Liberalism is working”: Teen accused of stealing 65-cent carton of milk at middle school to face trial.
* Measles are gone from the Americas.
* On Premier League Fantasy Football.
* How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School.’
* The 25 Best Superpowers in the Superpowers Wiki.
*Wonder Woman Writer Greg Rucka Says Diana Has ‘Obviously’ Had Relationships With Women. She was on an island of only women for millennia! So yeah.
* The world passes 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. Permanently.
* And yet, looking back at The Jetsons intro sequence today, I wonder where the icecaps are in that little illustration of earth. Is some land missing from Central America? Has the North gained land mass? Such questions become more troubling in the context of current concerns about global warming and, once asked, open the floodgates for similar observations. In the intro sequence, flying cars convey the Jetsons and other families from their floating bungalow to other floating buildings like The Little Dipper School, Orbit High School, Shopping Centre, and Spacely Space Rockets Inc. What was once a cute innovation—why not live in floating cities?—becomes troubled by its energy costs and its purpose. Why do the Jetsons and other families live in orbit? What has happened below to force them into the skies?
* Today in on-the-nose metaphors: NASA Is Sinking Into the Ocean.
* Every society gets the post-apocalypse it deserves.
* There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Yes, I suppose they would be.
* Codex Silenda, A Handcrafted Puzzle Book With Pages That Must Be Solved to Unlock the Next One.
* Cheating in school as communism.
* Today in neoliberal consumerism: Want to Make Ethical Purchases? Stop Buying Illegal Drugs.
* The Dark, Gritty Tick goes to series. Spoon! But like a dirty, chipped spoon, a spoon that really reflects the darkness of our society and our souls.
* Emulator lets you turn NES games 3D.
* U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel.
* Striking Prisoners Say Their Guards Have Joined In.
* The Longreads Reading List on Utopias.
* Die a hero, or… Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?
* It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave. I wonder how many are actually caring for or financially supporting un-, under-, and unable-to-be-employed parents and siblings.
* Let’s Stop Talking About Stranger Things Season Two Before We Ruin It. Friends, I have some terrible news.
* There’s bad luck, and then there’s: Man Bitten On Penis By Spider For The Second Time This Year.
* Today in terrible ideas I could not denounce more strongly: Is it time for Star Trek: The Next Generation to go Kelvin?
Thursday Links!
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Thursday Night Links
* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.
* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.
* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’
* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.
* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).
* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.
* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.
* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.
* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.
* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.
A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links
* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.
* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.
* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6
* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.
* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.
* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.
* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.
* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?
* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:
“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”
* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!
* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter.
* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…
* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.
* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.
* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.
* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.
* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.
* Surveying self-confessed rapists.
* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.
* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.
* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.
* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.
* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.
Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:
“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”
This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…
Gerry Canavan 