* Average Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty at 4-Year Colleges, 2013-14.
* How Endowment Hoarding Hurts Universities.
* On anxieties in the humanities.
* The bad old days in academia. University is No Place For Women, or, ‘What About the MEN?’
* Should I write for free? No. Maybe? No.
* ‘I got into sex work to afford to be a writer.’
* Against “doing something” or Love Your Sadness.
* What we talk about when we talk about low-wage workers. On (not) getting by in the gig economy.
* Her and twee fascism.
* Neobracketology at Slate. Walk off the court. The NCAA-Killing Lawsuit Might Finally Be Here. There simply never has been a compelling moral or ethical argument that the NCAA and the university had an inalienable right to every last nickel they could squeeze out of the work done by their student-athletes. Don’t tell me the odds.
* U. of Wisconsin Is Fined $35,000 in Settlement of Animal-Welfare Inquiry.
* The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.
* US foreign policy’s gender gap.
* …Silver will either have to keep his project modest in its topical scope, rendering it boring, or expand it into normative subject areas, rendering it incompetent. Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight is getting some high-profile bad reviews. By claiming the mantle of pure analysis, Silver is falling into a familiar journalistic trap. Nate Silver’s New Science Writer Ignores The Data On Climate Science.
* From way back in the archives: Gay Trek.
* JRR Tolkien translation of Beowulf to be published after 90-year wait.
* The West’s Coming Tragedy of the Commons. More at the New York Times.
* A Forgotten Scandal in Baltimore’s High Society.
* BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies is now soliciting submissions for its second issues.
* Wes Anderson symmetry supercut.
* Blame-the-victim gender-police watch: School Bans Boy From Wearing ‘My Little Pony’ Backpack, Claims It’s A ‘Trigger For Bullying.’
* Former Coach Is Awarded $360,000 in Bias Case Against U. of Minnesota.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine George R.R. Martin writing Game of Thrones tie-in films, forever. Is Game of Thrones unfinishable? Followup.
Martin surely was writing a conventional fantasy novel about an ancient evil and an exiled princess but somehow got distracted by what probably was summed up in some original one page outline in about one sentence (“Westeros monarchy weakened by infighting and succession problems”). Having fallen in love with what was supposed to be a bit of window dressing, he has continually expanded its role within the series even though it threatens to completely drown out what the series was supposed to be about in the first place. Is it any wonder that he has suffered from the contemporary genre’s most famous case of writer’s block? I’m sure that long ago he planned what would happen to Daenerys and the Night’s Watch, but now he feels obligated to give equal time to characters like Brienne who are likable yet serve little purpose to the central narrative and are instead dragged through increasingly arbitrary make-work scenes to keep them available for some later bit of relevance.
* Pixar sequels forever.
* Guys: Twitter says you’re using Twitter wrong.
* Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the On The Origin of Species Manuscript.
* CNN teaches the controversy.
* Why do we let 80,000 Americans suffer a ‘slow-motion torture of burying alive’?
* BREAKING: The last decade was a historically awful time to enter the job market.
* BREAKING: The United States Needs to Guarantee Paid Maternity Leave.
* No one could have predicted: Google Under Fire for Data-Mining Student Email Messages.
* 2ºC Warming Is Enough To Seriously Hurt Crop Yields.
* Florida Has Never Executed A White Person For Killing A Black Person.
* Mother Jones tries to argue marijuana is ecologically unsound for some reason.
* The Third Narrative Advisory Council says it wants to counter the notion — in an era when the idea of academic boycotts of Israel has gained some momentum — “that one has to be either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.” The truth is probably somewhere win the middle, I always say. LARoB roundtable on academic activism and BDS.
* The coming Democratic majority: Democrats don’t manage to run anyone for Nevada governor.
* Gamification in The Baffler.
* Maps of the day: how Hollywood destroys America. No, literally, how it does it. No, you’re not understanding.
* Science we can use: Why Dark Chocolate Is So Damn Good For You.
* You had me at 600-Pound “Chicken From Hell.”
* And the Very Best Tumblr of All Time: Skeletor Is Love.
* CFP: Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions: Reframing Identity, Culture, and History.
Gerry Canavan 