Wednesday Links!

(…though Tuesday’s links are still perfectly good…)

* I’m really excited to see that the Jameson talk on the army as a figure for utopia I talked about at the end of my Battle: Los Angeles essay is becoming a book (with some collected responses).

* One of my favorite Ted Chiang stories, “Understand” has been adapted as a radio drama at the BBC. Go listen!

* If you’re local, don’t forget! Mad Max: Fury Road discussion on campus today at 5 PM!

* We Don’t Need to Reform America’s Criminal Justice System, We Need to Tear It Down.

* Superheroes in a Time of Terror: Rushdie’s 1001 Nights.

* Language and the Postapocalyptic World.

* Doctors Without Borders airstrike: US alters story for fourth time in four days.

* The FBI’s probe into the security of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail has expanded to include a second private technology company, which said Tuesday it plans to provide the law enforcement agency with data it preserved from Clinton’s account.

* Against Joe Biden.

* Two great tastes: For decades, researchers have debated whether a major asteroid strike or enormous volcanic eruptions led to the demise of dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago. According to a new study, the answer might be somewhere in between: The asteroid impact accelerated the eruptions of volcanoes, and together, these catastrophes led to the mass extinction.

* The Vancouver public-speaking and drama instructor sees his reasons for assigning Alcor US$80,000 of life insurance benefits to have his brain cryopreserved as strictly pragmatic.

* Kristof said that more preschoolers are shot dead each year than are on-duty police officers. For children aged 0-4, that is accurate for the past six years. For children aged 3-5, the statement is true in most years, but not in every year. We rate the claim Mostly True.

* Twenty-first century problems: Can Crowdfunding Save This Town from White Supremacy?

* Yale Just Released 170,000 Incredible Photos of Depression-Era America.

* Free college, pro and con.

* Stay classy, Milwaukee.

* Texas’s war on birthright babies.

* A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Board that looks at what role credit scores play in committed relationships suggests that daters might want to start using the metric as well. The researchers found that credit scores — or whatever personal qualities credit scores might represent — actually play a pretty big role in whether people form and stay in committed relationships. People with higher credit scores are more likely to form committed relationships and marriages and then stay in them. In addition, how well matched the couple’s credit scores are initially is a good predictor of whether they stay together in the long term.

* This might be even worse than the drill bits: Greenfield Police Using Pink Handcuffs, Wearing New Pins For Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

* Get a head start on next week: “It’s time to abolish Columbus Day.”

* And at this point I have no idea what sort of milk I should be drinking. Thanks, Obama.

All the Links of the Week in One Convenient Location

* Ending the World the Human Way: Why can no one talk about climate change?

* You’ve seen it linked everywhere, but not here! Woody Allen’s Good Name. Don’t Listen to Woody Allen’s Biggest Defender. ​The Internet Digs Up Woody Allen’s Creepy Child-Loving Past. Woody Allen, My Pen Pal.

* Basically nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle.

* Last days of a model.

* The Boston Globe: The Invisible Professor. Part-Time Professors Demand Higher Pay; Will Colleges Listen? 111 Colleges Are Accused of Violating Law by Requiring Student-Aid Forms.

* Another university makes the queen sacrifice.

* Privilege and the Ph.D. The Tenure Code. 1,600 letters of recommendation.

* Fifty-Five Bodies, and Zero Trials, at the Florida School for Boys.

* Even the liberal Kevin Drum thinks former senator, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments to run of president on, unlike (say) Obama when he ran for president, or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or….

* “The entire system is a joke. There is absolutely no living, breathing person with any kind of intellect who believes that a grand jury could consider and vote on 10 complex issues in the period of time that they use to deliberate on hundreds,” Joe Cheshire, a Raleigh attorney who handles criminal cases across North Carolina, told The Charlotte Observer.

* And all perfectly legal: Missouri Executes Man While His Appeal Was Still Pending Before Supreme Court.

* Cop Who Allegedly Said ‘We Don’t Have Time For This’ Before Shooting Schizophrenic Teen Dead Has Been Indicted.

* Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8?

* Broken clock watch: Antonin Scalia is… making sense?

* Wisconsin Teacher Fired for… Receiving Emails from His Sister.

* Cook, an Edinburg marksman, was target shooting toward the school from about a mile away when he struck the boys Dec. 12, 2011. The gunshots left Nicholas “Nicko” Tijerina, then 13, paralyzed and Edson Amaro, then 14, with serious internal organ damage.

* From the archives: In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series. Harry Potter novels renamed.

* I think I’ve done this one before, too, but what the hell: Lynda Barry’s Course Syllabus.

* If It Happened There: The Super Bowl.

* Unloved Films, Part III: “The Hudsucker Proxy.”

* Daily Life in the Slave Quarters.

* A Local Teen’s Documentary on Slavery Premieres Friday in Detroit.

* How the Myth of the ‘Negro Cocaine Fiend’ Helped Shape American Drug Policy.

* Faculty set strike date at UIC.

* Closing SodaStream’s West Bank Factories Would Hurt Palestinians, but That’s Not the Point.

* ACLU lawsuit challenges Wisconsin same-sex marriage ban. Lawsuit claims Apple infringing on University of Wisconsin patent. Water Levels of the Great Lakes Are Declining.

* CVS Will Stop Selling Tobacco Products by October. I can’t believe it’s taken this long; it’s shocked me that pharmacies sold cigarettes ever since I worked in one way back in high school.

* Rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

* Brooklyn chess star battles the pressure of expectations.

* A Mystery Illness Is Causing Starfish to Rip Themselves Into Pieces.

* What would happen if a cue ball struck a rack of 15 perfectly round, frictionless billiard balls, exactly head-on?

* Gasp! Marx Was Right!

* Gasp! Tar Sands Oil Development Is More Toxic Than Previously Thought, Study Finds.

* Gasp! Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom in Higher-Ed Work Force, Report Says.

* 12 Post-Potter Revelations J.K. Rowling Has Shared.

* On “Imported from Detroit.”

* The Fall of East Cleveland.

* California Considers Raising Its Minimum Wage To The Highest In The Country.

* CNN: The Worst.

* What They’re Saying About The Grand Budapest Hotel.

* Some great beach art.

* Now hanging on the wall of my office: The Life of Thought.

* It’s very important to McDonald’s that you know McNuggets are acceptably gross.

* Science Fiction as a Childhood Coping Mechanism.

* And the future truly is weird: Woman Gives Birth To Children, Discovers Her Twin Is Actually The Biological Mother, But She Is Technically Her Own Twin.

All the Tuesday Links

* A New Gallup Survey Will Measure the Value of a Degree, Beyond Salary. What possible value could exist “beyond salary”?

* Why you should read Ted Chiang.

* Folks: It’s not easy for a white guy to get arrested.

* The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev.

* The New Yorker profiles Pope Francis.

* Great moments in oversight: It Took The FDA Four Decades To Request Proof That Antibacterial Soap Is Safe.

* The Rich Are Paying a Smaller Share of Taxes Under Obama.

* Charity is a game the rich play with themselves: Study Shows the Top 1% Mostly Gives to the Other 1% and Calls it Charity.

* Amazon could get a union.

* Obamacare debacle-watch: Only the super-rich can save us now!

* How the Media Will Report the Apocalypse.

* The ACLU is accusing the lawyers defending Pennsylvania’s law banning same-sex marriage of stalling and making undue requests for information about the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. …according to the ACLU’s Witold Walczak, the lawyers Gov. Tom Corbett (R) hired at taxpayer expense want to know whether any of the plaintiffs previously had opposite-sex relationships or ever sought counseling.

*Federal Court Rules Bulk Collection Of Phone Records By NSA Likely Violates Constitution: Founding Fathers ‘Would Be Aghast.’

* On March 17, 2012 – the six month anniversary of the beginning of OWS – the police savagely cleared the park and arrested 75 people peacefully occupying Liberty Square. In the process of my arrest, a cop grabbed my thumb and snapped it in place, not once, but twice. I used to have a full scholarship to NYU to study classical piano. My life was shattered forever. I’ll never play Beethoven again.

* The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted? Perhaps it will always be a mystery.

* College presidents are different from you and me.

* Tenured Professor Pushed Out after Giving Lecture on Prostitution.

* Mary-Faith Cerasoli, adjunct.

* Millennials: Hold ‘Obamacare’ hostage.

Demand that the Department of Labor crack down on illegal internships and other forms of wage theft. Demand that the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act get a fair vote on the Senate floor. Demand that Congress cap tuition-increase rates at universities receiving Pell Grant money. Demand a jobs program, legal marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income. Hell, demand a trillion dollars; it worked out great for the banks. Don’t sign up for “Obamacare” until they meet these demands and then some.

The only way to get our way in American politics is threaten to burn the whole house down. And when older adults inevitably chide us for taking irresponsible and selfish risks with the country’s future, we can always remind them who taught us how.

* Expensive cities are killing creativity.

* You had me at everything but “directed by Michael Bay.”

* Say it ain’t so, Shia! It gets weirder.

* vakarangi.blogspot.co.uk is blogging Star Trek: The Animated Series.

* The worst human beings alive: Paul Dini explains why execs don’t want girls watching their superhero shows.

DINI: “That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’ — this is the network talking — ‘one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.’

I guess I just always thought the patriarchy operated with a little more subtlety. Where’s the craft, fellas?

* If Eccleston had come back.

* They can’t pay their workers, but…

* And the future is weird: Severed hand kept alive on man’s ankle.