Posts Tagged ‘the fifty states’
Break v. Spring: Dawn of Thursday Links
* Coming up in two weeks! “After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction” will be the topic at the 2016 Robert W. Hamblin Lecture April 6 at Southeast Missouri State University.
* CFP: “Queers Read This!”: LGBTQ Literature Now, a Special Issue of GLQ. And a stray thought not-really-apropos of that:
* UWM introduces plan to cut $41.25 million from budget. That includes the end of the Center for Urban Initiatives and Research. But there’s always money in the job security stand:
“We have a fundamental tension between job security and the ability for this university to continue to be viable,” Mone said. “Those are inherent tensions. The reality is, when I talk about numbers, when I talk about budgeting, what we’re really talking about is people. And we’re talking about the ability to continue to operate as effectively and as efficiently as possible given the environmental changes that we have.”
* California Regents Reject Broad Condemnation of Anti-Zionism as Discrimination.
* Twitter creates ‘new academic hierarchies’, suggests study.
* Shock of shocks: The NFL has been lying about concussions.
* Batman vs. Superman is apparently in that delicious category of film so terrible that the critics compete to deal it the cruelest blow. FilmFreak. GQ. BMD. AV Club. Deadpan. The Guardian. Village Voice. And the rest! But I give the round to A.O. Scott:
For fun there are shots of the heroes shirtless and of Lois Lane in the bath. But the point of “Batman v Superman” isn’t fun, and it isn’t thinking, either. It’s obedience. The theology is invoked not to elicit meditations on mercy, justice or sacrifice, but to buttress a spectacle of power. And in that way the film serves as a metaphor for its own aspirations. The corporations that produce movies like this one, and the ambitious hacks who sign up to make them, have no evident motive beyond their own aggrandizement. Entertainment is less the goal than the byproduct, and as the commercial reach of superpower franchises grows, their creative exhaustion becomes ever more apparent.
* But it sounds like Justice League will somehow be even worse.
* Garner (not really) v. Affleck. This is actually a really interesting longread on the crafting of celebrity persona, despite your assumptions to the contrary.
* As a child I was unsatisfied with the world, already looking for ways out. I read some online pamphlet about Advaita Vedanta and decided I believed in it; I made myself a little diagram of the cosmos, within and without Māyā, dotted lines connecting Brahman to Atman to my own confined and unhappy self far across the limits of observable reality; I was weird. I liked things that weren’t really real; not pure fantasy but all those lenses that made the world bearable in its new capacity to be somehow otherwise, that gave me a kind of conceptual power to change things that I didn’t have in daily life. Conspiracy theory, pseudohistory, socialism, faith. I think it wasn’t long after my grandfather died that I found a collection of alternate histories, little stories told by pop-historians about what might have happened if one battle or another had gone the other way, a prism of worlds that never were. I don’t remember the title; it was actually a fairly stupid book (one account described the result of Lenin’s assassination on the way to St Petersburg: the Bolsheviks are effortlessly sidelined and we get a happy, prosperous, liberal-democratic twentieth century). The cover was utterly inevitable: a black and empty sky, and a swastika flag on the Moon. But that really did happen. The space programme that sent the first people to the Moon was the Nazi space programme, all those scientists snatched up in Operation Paperclip, effortlessly swapping Hitler for Washington. Watch the dialectic at work, preserving what it negates, proceeding as always by its bad side. It’s not that the Nazis are another example of Benjamin’s defeated of history; how could they be, when putting a swastika on the cover is still the best way to sell a book? But the litter that chokes our planet remains, all the bones remain, and one day we are promised the resurrection. This is why utopia is always melancholic, the refusal to simply mourn, the tight grip of the living to the dead.
* Obama legacy watch: How can a man who has weaponized the planet at a historic rate be championed as a purveyor of peace?
* A Conversation on Title IX, in the Yale Law Journal. First up: Nancy Gertner’s “Complicated Process.”
* Miracles and wonders: Controlling diabetes with a skin patch.
* Lead ink from scrolls may unlock library destroyed by Vesuvius.
* Should Parents of Children With Severe Disabilities Be Allowed to Stop Their Growth?
* North Carolina in ruins, again. Abolish the states.
* STEMJ: Researchers have long noticed that an oddly large number of jihadists have engineering backgrounds. Recently two social scientists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, scrutinized the numbers and concluded that, yes, the proportion of terrorists who are engineers far outpaces expectations.
* Elsewhere on the terrorism and statistics beat: American Mormon, 19, left with burns and shrapnel injuries in Brussels attack also survived Boston and Paris bombings.
* On the Origin of “African Proverbs.”
* On the Politics of Marvel’s Black Panther.
* The politics of failure have failed! We must make them work again!
* I guess the Singularity really is near: Microsoft’s ‘teen girl’ AI turns into a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours.
* The latest in the letting-the-superintelligent-AI-out-of-the-box subgenere: ANA.
* And, from the archives, some change we can all believe in: Abolish Caillou.
Weekend Links!
* I liked this brief addendum to my academic job market as “game” piece from the other day.
One thing I might add is that the game metaphor also helps us see the job market as something that could be improved. If we view the market as a system of pure luck, then there’s nothing we can do to fix it. And if we think of it as a meritocracy, then we don’t have any reason to. But if the job market is a game, structured, as Canavan says, by “a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair,” then those in positions of power in the academy (including people on hiring committees) could work to change the rules. In large and small ways they could work to make it a more rational and fair game.
I agree the game framing suggests change is possible in a way that neither merit nor lottery does. I’d hoped I made that point at the end (“make alliances, change the rules, overturn the table”) but perhaps I could have put more emphasis on it.
* I’ve always been really skeptical of Rolling Jubilee, so I’m a sucker for any time Naked Capitalism dumps on it.
So while it is impressive to hear of the large amounts of debt being forgiven, the fact is that the people who are finding their debts erased more than likely won’t care much because they are either no longer under any legal obligation to pay the note and have long since forgotten about it, or never intended to pay the note in the first place, and never would! So these borrowers won’t likely be gushing with praise and thanks, and frankly won’t be helped much if at all by the repurchase of the debt. I suspect that people learning of their debt being purchased and erased were, instead of relieved and grateful, were more perplexed as to why anyone would go to the trouble of clearing up debt that they themselves had forgotten about long ago! By far, the happiest participant in these transactions, are the banks/collection companies who are thrilled to get anything for the loans!
* But the elusive nomads who wander that desert say California was once a paradise.
* Courts do not give justice, because they do not try. They follow a formal procedure, at best.
* Run the university like a business, you know, have such radically lax oversight that one person can steal $700,000.
* When I was talking the other day about the similarities between my childhood plan to become a priest for the free housing and lifetime tenure and my current profession as a secular monk performing textual exegesis at a Catholic school, 1, 2, 3, 4, I guess I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.
* The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.
* Cutinella is the third high school football player to die in less than a week.
* On the life of PhDs working outside the US and Europe.
* Capitalism in 2014: “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”
* At least they got to waste all that money first: MOOC fever has broken.
* A gender-neutral pronoun is taking over Sweden.
* Elsewhere in the-Scandinavian-kids-are-all-right: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play.
* Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien. No Milwaukee, but he did do Cleveland, Boston, and DC. Many more links below the image; you’re not getting off that easy.
* I can’t figure out if Ascension is let’s-do-BSG-with-a-competent-showrunner or let’s-do-BSG-on-the-cheap. Mad Men in Space, though, so fine.
* Museum of Science Fiction Selects Design for Preview Museum.
* We Still Don’t Know If This Tribe Discovered In The ’70s Was Real.
* An Apple Store employee has written the follow-up to I Am Legend.
* Ideology watch: “Let. Her. Go.” movie supercut.
* America was founded as a white supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Here’s a lawsuit that seems deliberately calibrated to freak everybody out: Black sperm incorrectly delivered to white lesbian couple.
* Talking White: Black people’s disdain for “proper English” and academic achievement is a myth.
* D.C. Attorney May Use FBI Headquarters As Leverage In Statehood Lawsuit.
* People are saying Homeland might be good again, but don’t you believe it. That’s exactly what they want us to think.
* Elsewhere in ideology at its very very purest. Mad Men: Lady Cops.
* BREAKING: Startup Funding Is Given Almost Entirely To Men.
* Just imagine what England might accomplish if it ever gets a second actor.
* Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Controversial, really? Can’t imagine why.
* Freedom’s just another word for a $1200 machine that lets anyone manufacture a gun.
* Human civilization was founded as a human supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Earth crosses the walrus threshold.
* Paid leave watch: Florida cop placed on leave after using taser on 62-year-old woman.
* Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
* Please be advised: Jacobin 15/16 looks especially great.
* Even baseball knows baseball is dull.
* And a UF study suggests peanut allergies could soon be a thing of the past. That’d be pretty great news for a whole lot of people I know.
And Some Links
* The theme for MLA 2014 is “Vulnerable Times.”
A decade has passed since the National Collegiate Athletic Association rolled out its academic reform package. In that time, there is strong evidence that the reforms designed to open access to higher education to more athletes and punishing coaches and institutions failing at academics came at the expense of the integrity of the academy. The landscape of the NCAA’s program is scorched with scandals surrounding admissions, academic fraud, major clustering and clever gaming of the system for the wealthiest institutions to avoid penalties. We conclude that it has significantly damaged higher education.
* Kennesaw State to add football. I’m shocked any Board of Trustees would volunteer to take on this kind of liability, knowing what we know…
* Tesla catches the New York Times deliberately tanking its review of its Model S electric car, while at the same time revealing the truly staggering amount of data they can log while you’re driving.
* Apocalypse now: “Think of carbon as a global pollutant that affects the ocean everywhere it touches the sky,” explains Stanford University marine science professor and Hopkins Marine Station director Steve Palumbi. What does ocean acidification mean for sea life?
* Sad coda to the Oscar Pistorius story: Olympic Hero Oscar Pistorius Charged With Murder in Shooting Death of Girlfriend.
* Abolish the states watch: Scott Walker edition.
Yesterday Scott Walker finally announced his much-awaited decision about how to deal with the Medicaid expansion provided for in the Affordable Care Act. And he managed to come up with a “solution” that simultaneously lets him express solidarity with his nullification-minded soul-mates in the Deep South while increasing federal involvement in health insurance in his state and also costing Wisconsin taxpayers some serious money! Quite the triple-gainer, eh?
* Woman Says She’s Had the Same Song Stuck in Her Head for Three Years.
* New Atlanta Braves Logo Features Gruesome Depiction Of Trail Of Tears.
Thursday Afternoon
* Reminder: Don’t eat beef in the United States. The Kansas City Star reports. Via MetaFilter.
* Maps of Earth Showing Where Severe Weather is Most Likely to Kill You.
* A map of the United States as 50 states of equal population.
* Deep poverty: Americans living on two dollars a day.
* Life without Parole: Four Inmates’ Stories. The School-to-Prison Pipeline Gets Its First-Ever Airing in the Senate.
* Actual headline, or log-line for the next Stephen King novel? “USF researchers find 19 more graves at Dozier School for Boys.”
* The state agency in Wisconsin that oversees for-profit colleges is considering a proposal that would require those institutions to meet certain performance standards—much like a controversial federal rule—in order to be allowed to operate in the state.
* The average American in the year 1900 had an I.Q. that by today’s standards would measure about 67. Since the traditional definition of mental retardation was an I.Q. of less than 70, that leads to the remarkable conclusion that a majority of Americans a century ago would count today as intellectually disabled. Given that IQ tests are definitely objective and reliable and are definitely a meaningful indicator of intelligence, this is indeed the only possible conclusion!
* As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
* Kevin Drum notes they’ve chosen the worst possible filibuster reform. No one could have predicted!
*Something something “A good start”: Law school applications are collapsing.
* Did the Zipingpu Dam Trigger China’s 2008 Earthquake?
* Big Catholic? Marquette, DePaul, Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova leave the Big East.
* Honest internship ad. A non-defense.
* And today in “hilariously missing the point:” The CW is Planning a Hunger Games-Based Reality Show.
Friday!
* In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the ‘vengeful librarians’ also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
* It was linked in the Adam Kotsko post from earlier, but it’s worth promoting on its own merits: Nobody Cares about Property Damage.
In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.
* Occupy Oakland contrarian watch: WSWS.
* The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own.
* From Facebook: the fifty states of paranormal horror.
* And the chart of the day: American oligarchy.
50 Channels and Nothing On
Following up on the 50 movies for the 50 states map, here’s the 50 states of television. I’m not in love with Baywatch for California, though I see the logic—and I have to agree with kittens for breakfast that Breaking Bad is really the only possible choice for New Mexico.
It’s also interesting that how much more region- and city-specific the television map seems—or rather how much more obvious this map makes intrastate divisions. Seinfeld‘s a great choice for New York City, but not at all for Albany or Buffalo—and there other places in Maryland besides Baltimore/The Wire…
1,200 Lies Per Second
Strange Maps considers the definitive film for each of the 50 states. Wayne’s World for Delaware is an inspired choice.
Redrawing the Map
What the U.S. would look like with 50 states of roughly equal population, via James Fallows and Matt Yglesias. (The first link adds that Alaska and Hawaii are part of Washlaska and Coronado, respectively.) Not being a lawyer, constitutional or otherwise, and recognizing of course that nothing like this could ever actually happen in practice, I’d like to know whether something like this could hypothetically stand as an answer to the Article V problem that blocks Senate apportionment reform. Do individual states have a Constitutional right to permanent existence? Has this question ever even come up before?
Gerry Canavan 