Thursday Links!

* Call for papers: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult

* On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of ‘The Floor is Lava.’

* Antifascism and the left.

* There were like 15 separate Trump bribery scandals just yesterday. This one could be the biggest.

* Happy anniversary, Robert Mueller.

* None dare call it fascism: Trump administration preparing to hold immigrant children on military bases. “These aren’t people. These are animals.”  ICE arrested a dreamer, revoked his DACA status, placed him in detention, and attempted to deport him, claiming he was a gang member. A federal judge just ruled that ICE was lying—brazenly, intentionally, repeatedly, and illegally. Abolish the ICE Prison Complex.

“These aren’t people. They’re animals.” — Donald Trumphttps://t.co/Ycln6f5PTQ pic.twitter.com/gycKkv7PB5

— Jeffrey Vagle (@jvagle) May 16, 2018

Inflammatory liberal rhetoric isn't why there isn't a conservative-liberal alliance against authoritarianism. The refusal of conservatives to enter into an alliance with liberals against authoritarianism is the reason contemporary liberal rhetoric is inflammatory.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 17, 2018

America's near-future hard-border weapons-saturated climate-catastrophe is going to call for some really impressive perversions of empathy and the concept of humanity – and let me just say, my friends, we're on track to Bring It

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 15, 2018

* If men gave birth, the question of whether or not to have children would have been the central question of philosophy from the beginning of time.

* The Left Hand of Darkness in Light of #MeToo.

* The worst -preneurs.

* The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.

* The Solo reviews are rolling in. Disney has already moved on.

SOLO Is Bad, But Editorial Policy and Our Fear of Online Creeps Prevents Us from Saying So Outright

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 16, 2018

* Revisiting Springsteen’s worst decade.

* Michigan State University Reaches $500 Million Settlement With Larry Nassar’s Victims. Report: USC Ignored Gynecologist’s Alleged Misconduct.

* Is Chicago Experiencing a Historic Preservation Crisis?

* Can Artificial Intelligence Help Find Alien Intelligence?

* The story you don’t care about, in the format you don’t want, in the series you’ll forget about while it’s still airing: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Will Focus On Young Aragorn.

* Same thing but Young Alfred.

* The Wrath of Khan Director Reveals He Was Making a Star Trek Trilogy for CBS, But It’s Been Delayed.

* How can you make Arrested Development season five even less promising? Netflix’s top scientists are hard at work.

* Elsewhere in entertainment news: Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die.

* Scenes from the Anthropocene: Scientists Match Pollution in Greenland’s Ice Sheet to Events from Ancient Greece and Rome.

* Someone, somewhere, is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect.

* We can now see how humans have altered Earth’s water resources.

* The secret, unaccountable location-tracking tool favored by dirty cops has been hacked (and it wasn’t hard).

* Researchers uncovered 2 pages of ‘dirty jokes’ in Anne Frank’s diary.

* Inside the largest comic book collection in the world.

* In a time without heroes…

* Traumatic License: An Oral History of Action Park.

* Poverty and the brain.

* Rage and the incels.

* It is sometimes said that a generous basic income could empower workers to better resist their capitalist bosses. This familiar claim regarding the emancipatory potential of basic income has things almost exactly backwards. A universal basic income high enough to be genuinely liberating would require enormous expropriation of businesses and wealthy people. Consequently, there is no chance of its passage until there is an organized working class already powerful enough to extract it. This fact should inform the Left’s political strategy.

* The arc of history is long, but Uber and Lyft agree to stop forcing driver sexual assault victims into arbitration, confidentiality agreements.

* Batman and Eve.

* Kid, you got the job.

* And I always knew: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.

This cosplay at Salt Lake Comic Con pic.twitter.com/hF91aQM6BN

— Eric Alper (@ThatEricAlper) May 12, 2018

Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!

* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.

* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.

* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.

* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.

* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.

* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.

* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.

* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.

* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.

* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?

But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?

It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.

* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.

* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.

* Heinlein shrugged.

* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.

* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.

* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.

It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.

And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.

* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.

* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.

* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration.  Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.

* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.

* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.

* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.

* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.

A disability version of the “Bechdel Test,” maybe?

1) There’s a disabled character visible

2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,

3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.

* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.

* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.

* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.

* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”

* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.

* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.

* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.

* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.

* Labeling the market natural and the state unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo.

* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.

* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.

* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.

* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.

* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.

* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.

* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.

* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”

* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.

* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.

* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.

* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.

* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.

* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.

* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.

* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.

* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.

* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?

* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.

* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.

* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.

* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.

* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.

* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.

Midweek Links!

* Another scene from the death of the university.

* A postscript for Fun Home.

* Someone Calculated How Many Adjunct Professors Are on Public Assistance, and the Number Is Startling.

* Transforming White People Is Not the Job of Minority Students.

* Poor and at Harvard.

* By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Voxis attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all.

* For the Humanities, Some Good News Is Mixed With the Bad.

* Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Paves Way for Progressives to Abandon Principles Very Early in 2016 Election. Hillary Clinton isn’t a champion of women’s rights. She’s the embodiment of corporate feminism. How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World. The typeface.

* Why did it take the federal government so long to prosecute the Blackwater contractors who shot up a Baghdad square in 2007, killing and maiming scores of Iraqis? Because investigators were trying to wait out the Bush administration, which wanted to go easy on the killers, recently unearthed documents show.

* Gasp! New Research Shows Free Online Courses Didn’t Grow As Expected. Once-celebrated online courses still haven’t lived up to the hype.

* ‘Fuck Your Breath’ — Video Shows Cop Mocking Unarmed Man As He Dies From Police Bullet. This story is even more bizarre than you’d think. Black Men Being Killed Is The New Girls Gone Wild. Police have been setting up suspects with false testimony for decades. Is anyone going to believe them now when they tell the truth? Thousands dead, few prosecuted.

* A brief history of Marvel’s teen heroines.

* Victims of Chicago gun violence memorialized in lifelike statues.

* City to Acknowledge it Operated a Slave Market for More Than 50 Years.

* The New Somali Studies.

* Huge if true: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand.’

* How Game of Thrones is diverging more and more from the books. More on that.

* The “zone of sacrifice” that is Oxnard, California, where low-income workers are paying the price for pesticide use and chemical dumping.

* California and the literature of water.

* Turkish mayor sued over giant robot statue.

* 17 Years After a Spill Into the Ocean, LEGO Pieces Still Wash Ashore.

* Hate to judge it from a trailer, but Ant-Man sure seems pretty specifically not great.

* As Sinclair Lewis said, when fascism comes to America it will be wearing a Fitbit and offering you a discount on insurance.

* St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene.

* Maryland ‘Free Range’ Kids Taken Into Custody Again.

* BREAKING: Your Brain Is Primed To Reach False Conclusions.

* Saga Was One Of The Most Challenged Books In US Libraries Last Year. #2? Persepolis.

* Weird children’s books from the 1970s, by way of Jonathan Lethem.

* Tech bubble about to burst again.

* And The Left Hand of Darkness has been adapted for BBC Radio.

Lots of Monday Links But In My Defense They Are All Fascinating

* Margaret Thatcher dies. Glenn Greenwald on speaking ill of the dead. We’re still living in Thatcher’s world. We Are All Thatcherites Now. “If I reported to you what Mrs. Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations.” Thatcher on the climate. Obama on Thatcher.

* Will Democrats destroy the planet? And pretty gleefully, too, it looks like.

* I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that not a single one of our major institutions, within government or without, is capable of confronting this problem. And if we can’t, that’s rather the ballgame, isn’t it?

* The Methane Beneath Our Feet.

* ExxonMobil, FAA, Arkansas cops establish flight restriction zone, threaten reporters who try to document Mayflower, AR spill.

* It’s Art Pope’s nightmare, North Carolinians just live in it.

* Imagine for a moment if a loved one found themselves in legal jeopardy in some foreign country that had a 99% conviction rate.  You might ask what kind of illegitimate system are they up against.  You would likely conclude that any system where conviction is nearly-assured is stacked against the accused.  Yet this is exactly what the situation is in federal courts in the United States, the alleged bastion of liberty that does not hesitate to hold itself out as a beacon of freedom and poses as the benchmark of fairness that other nations are encouraged to follow.

* Pornokitsch considers one of my childhood favorites, Dragonlance Chronicles.

* Searching for Bill Watterson.

* How to make $1,000,000 at Rutgers. Rutgers Practices Were Not a Hostile Work Environment.

* Average Faculty Salaries, 2012–13. The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2012-13. Colleges Begin to Reward Professors for Doing Work That Actually Matters to Them.

* And with stretched budgets and public pressure to keep costs down, many colleges and universities are cutting back on tenure and tenure-track jobs. According to the report, such positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.

* The dark side of open access.

* Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.

* ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ Bring New Ideas, New Conflicts to Colleges.

* Coursera Takes a Nuanced View of MOOC Dropout Rates.

* Steinberg’s bill will undermine public education by entrenching private capital; Block’s overestimates the educational effectiveness of online for its target population and therefore helps foreclose more imaginative uses of the digital and the allocation of necessary resources to the CCC and the CSU.

* How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy.

* So imagine my surprise — and envy — upon learning that these networkers moonlight in a profitable little business using Shakespeare to teach leadership, strategy and management to businesses and organizations. For $28,000 a day!

* The relentless drive for efficiency at U.S. companies has created a new harshness in the workplace. In their zeal to make sure that not a minute of time is wasted, companies are imposing rigorous performance quotas, forcing many people to put in extra hours, paid or not. Video cameras and software keep tabs on worker performance, tracking their computer keystrokes and the time spent on each customer service call.

* The Problem with Nonprofits.

* A brief history of public goods.

* New York Is Shelving Prison Law Libraries.

* An editor rejects The Left Hand of Darkness.

* Game of Thrones as subway map.

* Dear Television premieres at TNR with a review of the Mad Men premiere.

* Bill Cosby will speak at the 2013 Marquette commencement.

* And your single-serving-site of the day: How far away is Mars?