Posts Tagged ‘the presidency’
Friday Train Ride Links!
* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.
* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.
* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.
* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?
* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”
* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.
* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.
* Got to have some mixed feelings.
* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.
* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).
* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!
* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.
* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.
* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.
* Fossils of the 21st century.
* Union solutions / management solutions.
* And it was 20 years ago (yesterday).
Tuesday Morning Links!
* CFP: Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes: PCA/ACA 2018.
* When Universities Swallow Cities.
* UC Davis’ Katehi will teach one course per quarter, conduct research in $318,000 position. Ah, so the standard rate.
* The Last Days of New Paris is China Miéville’s novella about a surrealist Paris magically overlapping with our realist Paris. At the back of the book, Miéville offers endnote citations of the surrealist art that inspired his writing. I corralled all the art in this post.
* Liking What You See will be an AMC series. Interesting!
* This Is the Way the College ‘Bubble’ Ends.
* I don’t like this: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for Hundreds of Applicants. If Admissions guesses wrong it seems to me the college should have to bear the burden of solving the problem.
* Border Agency Set to Jumpstart Trump’s Wall in a Texas Wildlife Refuge.
* The Fifty Year Ache: The Milwaukee Housing Marches.
* We seem to be entering a terrifying new moment of Trumpism. This October, Trump Will Try to Start a War with Iran. A Few Reasons to Impeach the President, Just From Today. How the Trump Administration Broke the State Department. You think? The Presidency in Exile. Kleptocracy. Here comes the pivot.
* RNC PR BS — no more! Inside the end of the Priebus era.
* This guy is on-brand. Aaaaaaand he’s gone. It’s gone to be a record.
* A good day for bad guys getting what’s coming to them.
* Has Jeff Flake really, truly had enough? I bet it’s bluster, and perhaps defensive, but we’ll see…
* All these “ha ha loser POTUS” pre-mortems forget that Trump hasn’t faced a crisis not of his own making yet.
* I thought this Russia subplot was over.
* No exit.
* Immigrant mother of three with no criminal record to be deported.
* Trump’s travel ban keeps orphan kids from US foster families.
* Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.
* The Academic “Success Sequence” – Get Lucky at Birth, Mostly.
* Left with Rage: What Happens When Trump Is Gone.
* Democrats Will Do Anything To Win…Except Change. Democrats Can Abandon the Center — Because the Center Doesn’t Exist. Guys, they’ve got this.
* Dogs probably domesticated us, not the other way around.
* And I say 137 years is too good for ’em!
* Oh, so that’s what happened.
* Why millennials cheat less than their parents.
* Of course you had me at pop culture detritus illustrated as abandoned, overgrown ruins.
* Close roads so children can play in the street like their parents did, say public health experts.
* The Ultimate Playlist Of Banned Wedding Songs.
* A brief history of speedrunning.
* All these worlds are yours, except…
* And I have just one piece of advice for you.
#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!
* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.
* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.
* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.
* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).
* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.
* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.
* Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.
* GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.
* Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.
* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.
* The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.
* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.
* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.
* On desistance and detransition.
* Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.
* US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.
* SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.
* Just what is happening at Disney?
* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.
* And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.
Really Almost Christmas Now Links
* 46 shots that were cut from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There Was Almost a Jedi in Rogue One. What Rogue One Teaches Us About the Rebel Alliance’s Military Chops.
* How a Pen and Paper RPG Brought ‘Star Wars’ Back From the Dead.
The Xenofeminist Manifesto, published by the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks lays out a new framework for technology’s role in social progress. “Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends?” the authors ask. “The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized… the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labor.” This reframing of technology requires a politics that does not shy away from scale and complexity.
* The Strange History of Talossa, a Bedroom That Was Also a Country. Milwaukee’s own!
* Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.
* “Even if we darken the sky with hundreds or thousands of satellites and interceptors, there’s no way to ensure against a dedicated attack,” Montague said in an interview. “So it’s an opportunity to waste a prodigious amount of money.” This is fine. The Slim Pickins Trump Doctrine. In 1987, he set out to solve the world’s biggest problem. How World War III became possible.
* Today’s purge: feminists in the State Department. Yesterday’s, of course, was professors teaching courses on whiteness at UW.
* [fingers crossed] please don’t be an academic, please don’t be an academic — aw damnit
* Must-read article from 1983: Tuition Hikes in Store at Some State Universities.
* Supercharging the school-to-prison pipeline in Missouri.
* Huge, if true: The CIA Is Not Your Friend.
* In a time without heroes, they were: The Rockettes (2021).
* The law, in its majestic equality… Appeals court vacates ‘unconscionable’ life sentence for New Orleans man over theft of $15 from ‘bait vehicle.’
* The financial system as hostile AI. What can I say? Great minds think alike!
* And friends, I’m here to tell you, it only gets worse from here.
Monday Morning Links!
* A personal announcement: I’ll be the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association for the next three years. Thanks for the vote of confidence!
* CFP: “Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince.”
* Huge, if true: Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers. And meanwhile: What’s Wrong With Literary Studies? Some scholars think the field has become cynical and paranoid. Only some?
* Use Data to Make a Strong Case for the Humanities.
* They did it: Army Corps of Engineers Statement Regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline. More from Vox.
* Is there any branch of literature so insecure, so uncertain of its own status, as science fiction?
* Inside the world of Chinese science fiction, with “Three Body Problem” translator Ken Liu.
* Marquette in the ne– oh come on.
* Dan Harmon’s story circle at YouTube.
* Trouble in the Heartland: Listening to Springsteen in Wisconsin in 1979.
* Well, that seems fine: GOP rep: Trump has ‘extra-constitutional’ view of presidency. Donald Trump risks China rift with Taiwan call. BREAKING: US President-elect Trump told Rodrigo Duterte that Philippines was conducting its drug war “the right way.” That’s bad. Trump’s education pick says reform can ‘advance God’s Kingdom.’ What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next. A People’s History of the Third Reich: How Great Man theory allows us to abdicate collective responsibility. Facts are stupid things: Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News. Trump and the coming failed state. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About. Another visit from the goon squad. Trump and the Bush Legacy.
* New SPLC reports reveal alarming pattern of hate incidents and bullying across country since election. Note the category just labeled “Trump — general.”
* Identity politics and the alt-right.
* Premised on the possibilities of political struggle, here was the Douglass Option: “a party in the Southern States among the poor.”
* Seems like this guy is Trump’s very worst pick, clearing a very tough field:
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
Flynn also helped promulgate the “Pizzagate” hoax that nearly led to a mass shooting today.
* Google, democracy and the truth about internet search.
* Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is winning me over.
* It’s true that racism is a powerful and durable force in our politics. But it is also true that Donald Trump is an incompetent clown who ran an amateurish campaign rife with mistakes. The Democrats should have won this election in a landslide. They did not, and there is no nobility or reassurance for them in a narrow loss in the electoral college or a win in the popular vote. And continuing to insist that a Donald Trump win was either some kind of strange fluke or completely inevitable is a recipe for repeated defeat.
* When the Democrats didn’t like monopolies. On not going high when they go low.
* Can the good parts of Obamacare survive Trump?
* Friedman just got finished telling us that a black elephant is half black swan, and half elephant in the room that will inevitably become a black swan. But now that half-swan, half swan-within-an-elephant is being contrasted with a black swan: in the near future, things that are really black elephants will be misidentified as black swans.
* Understanding survivorship bias.
* Podcast idea of the week: Like Random Trek, but for Rod Serling.
* Which Famous Actor Hustled Chess Games in New York City?
* What does elephant taste like?
* Here’s Why You Should Be Watching Netflix’s Brazilian Sci-Fi Series 3%. And on the SF kick: Aaron Bady explains Westworld.
* …there is no reason to assume Uber’s obliteration of local competition across the planet will create a sustainable business in the long term. Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly. As long as people have cheaper alternatives (public transport, legs), they will defect if the break-even price is higher than their inconvenience tolerance threshold.
* Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change. But really, show’s over, folks.
* The trans brain and gender dysphoria.
* This is brilliant and I’m shocked it took the good guys this long to figure it out.
* Kazuo Ishiguro on the coming race of super clones. Never Let Me Go 2: The Revenge.
* Every villain is the hero of their own story.
* And this is pretty much my actual teaching philosophy.
Monday Morning Links!
* Permanent addition to the sidebar: Resources for planning a trip to the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington. Send me anything I’ve missed!
* CFPs I have going: Women and Science Fiction Media (SFFTV Special Issue). Buffy at 20 (April conference at Marquette).
* My friend and colleague Dan Hassler-Forest has been composing a Trump Film Studies Syllabus: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus.
* So you think you elected an autocrat.
* Dr. Strange and the Trump Presidency.
* Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office. Not even the same scandal: Donald Trump Pauses Transition Work to Meet with Indian Business Partners.
* Electoral College fan fiction getting good now.
* This seems fine. Disabled People Will Die Under Trump. Trumpwatch. Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular. @EveryTrumpDonor. Trump vs. neoliberalism, #whoeverwinswelose. Racism with No Racists. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Man in the High Castle. After Trump. Being Mike Pence.
* It can’t happen here. It probably can’t happen here. It probably won’t happen here. Okay but that was a long time ago. George Takei.
* Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” So propaganda is bullshit — in the philosophical sense.
* Don’t normalize this. Don’t ever, ever normalize this.
* We’ll be talking about this question for a long time, whether we like it or not: The End of Identity Liberalism. Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. And yet: Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.
* Close Reading Hamilton: “What’d I Miss?” I only did two days on Hamilton in my class this time around and wound up focusing a lot on these two songs myself.
* Abolish Chuck Schumer. Abolish the Presidency.
* More than 100 campus leaders urge Trump to take more forceful stand against “harassment, hate and acts of violence.” Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election. Wesleyan declared sanctuary campus.
* It doesn’t matter how effective a deterrent it is — it’s cruel and unusual and we need to act.
* Only the superrich can save us… oh forget it.
* Meet the Professor Who’s Trying to Help You Steer Clear of Clickbait.
* Michigan fights court order to give Flint residents bottled water.
* Keep an eye on North Carolina.
* A Brief History of Fascism in the Pacific Northwest.
* When a Sibling Goes to Prison.
* The Limits of Gossip: Informal system of warning colleagues about senior scholars who engage in inappropriate behavior doesn’t really protect anyone, study finds.
* The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing.
* A Mere 12,000 US Schools Are Within a Mile of a Hazardous Chemical Facility.
* Science proves the rich really are different.
* We might be done with climate change, but climate change is not done with us.
* It’s official: NASA’s peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Though sports culture continues to be a domain of intense patriarchal production and violence — rape jokes are just locker room talk, after all — these days jocks in the news are just as likely to be taking a knee against American racism in the image of Colin Kaepernick. The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.
* And because you demanded it…
Monday Morning Links!
* My superhero identity has finally been scooped.
* Lots of people are sharing this one, on hyperexploited labor in the academy: Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech. As with most of this sort of adjunct activist some of its conclusions strike me as emotionally rather than factually correct — specifically, it needs to find a way to make tenured and tenure-track faculty the villains of the story, in order to make the death of the university a moral narrative about betrayal rather than a political narrative about the management class’s construction of austerity — but it’s undoubtedly a powerful read.
* I did this one already, but what the hell: Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
* Bring on the 403(b) lawsuits.
* On being married to an academic.
* It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe: Nobel academy member calls Bob Dylan’s silence ‘arrogant.’
* Eugenics and the academy. Racism and standardized testing. Whiteness and international relations.
* Language Log reads the bookshelf in the linguist’s office set in Arrival (out next month!).
* After years of neglect, public higher education is at a tipping point.
* Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th.
* Springsteen and Catholicism.
* White masculinity as cloning.
* Parenting is weird. If God worked at a pet store, He’d be fired. Part Two. It’s a mystery!!! Wooooooooooh! The Fox and the Hedgehog. Science and technology have reached their limit. Self-destructive beverage selection: a guide. Motivational comics. Has the media gotten worse, or has society? Understanding the presidency. The oldest recorded joke is from Sumeria, circa 1900 B.C. There’s a monster under my bed.
* Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty.
* Trump’s Milwaukee Problem. Let’s Talk About the Senate. From Pot To Guns To School Funding: Here’s What’s On The Ballot In Your State. Todd Akin and the “shy” voter. The banality of Trump. The latest polls indicate the possibility of a genuine electoral disaster for the GOP. A short history of white people rigging elections. Having not yet won it back yet, Dems are already getting ready to lose the Senate (again) in 2018. The Democrats are likely to win a majority of House votes, but not a majority of House seats. Again. Today in uncannily accurate metaphors. This all seems perfectly appropriate. Even Dunkin Donuts is suffering. But at least there’s a bright side. On the other hand.
Slavery: Colorado
Yes, you read that right. There is a vote on slavery in 2016. The Colorado state constitution currently bans slavery and “involuntary servitude” … except if it’s used as punishment for a crime. This amendment would get rid of that exception and say that slavery is not okay, ever.
* And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.
* Speaking of endless refrain: Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi is now pierced by bullet holes.
* District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
* On Anime Feminist. (via MeFi)
* Today in the Year of Kate McKinnon: ten minutes of her Ghostbusters outtakes.
* Jessica Jones’s Second Season Will Only Feature Female Directors.
* I don’t really think they should do Luke Cage season two — or Jessica Jones for that matter, as Daredevil proved already — but just like I’d love to see a Hellcat series with Jessica Jones as a supporting player I’d love to see Misty Knight guest starring Luke Cage.
* The Case against Black Mirror. I haven’t been able to tune in to the new season yet but the backlash surprises me. This was one of the best shows on TV before! What happened?
* Famous authors and their rejection slips.
* How much for a hotel on AT&TTW? AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion.
* “This is still the greatest NYT correction of all time imo.”
* This is [chokes] great. It’s great if they do this.
* This, on the other hand, is unbelievably awful: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war. Everyone involved in trying to claw back this money should be ashamed of themselves.
* Gee, you don’t say: U.S. Parents Are Sweating And Hustling To Pay For Child Care.
* I’ve discovered the secret to immortality.
* And there’s a new Grow game out for that mid-2000s nostalgia factor we all crave. Solution here when you’re done messing around…
Spriiiiiiiing Breaaaaaaaaak! Links
* Don’t miss the CFP for my upcoming Paradoxa special issue on “Global Weirding”!
* Of course you haven’t read Canavan until you’ve read him in the original French.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Today in the end of our lives’ work. Delaware State cuts more than a quarter of its majors. But don’t worry, we’ve finally got the solution.
* Chairing a humanities department at the end of the world.
* Trying to put a number on adjunct justice.
* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied.
* I think you’ll find every possible jaundiced, post-academic riff on this story has already been made: French woman aged 91 gets PhD after 30 years.
* All about the SF sensation of SXSW, Dead Slow Ahead. And more!
* Great moments in unenforceable contracts.
* Ten Years after the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A prison interview with the accuser.
* Reminder: NCAA Amateurism Is a Corrupt Sham, We Are All Complicit. March Madness means money – it’s time to talk about who’s getting paid. And here’s how to gamble on it.
* The trouble with people who lived in the past.
* Inside the Protest That Stopped the Trump Rally.
* How to steal a nomination from Donald Trump. The Pre-Convention. There is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party. I can’t be contrarian about Donald Trump anymore: he’s terrifying.
* Meet the Academics Who Want Donald Trump to Be President.
* I do agree that presidential term limits make little sense, though my solution would be to abolish the office entirely.
* The oldest man in the world survived Auschwitz.
* What if Daylight Saving Time never ended?
* Teach the controversy: Richard Simmons May or May Not Be Currently Held Hostage by His Maid.
* As temperatures soar, new doubts arise about holding warming to 2 degrees C.
* The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go. Game Two. Game Three. Game Five. But we got one!
* How The TV Show of Octavia Butler’s Dawn Will Stay True to Her Incredible Vision.
* Take your Baby-Sitters’ Club cosplay / fanfic blog to the next level.
* Photoshopping men out of political photos.
* Scenes from Iconic Films Hastily Rewritten So They Pass the Bechdel Test.
* Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.
* Paul Nungesser has lost his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia.
* Chris Claremont visits Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men.
* Paging Lt. Barclay: Science proves the transporter is a suicide box.
* The Untold Tragedy of Camden, NJ.
* J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish.
* Scientists discover ‘genderfluid’ lioness who looks, acts and roars like a male.
* Always a good sign: Star Trek Beyond Is Reshooting and Adding an Entirely New Cast Member. Meanwhile: Paramount lawyers call Star Trek fan film’s bluff in nerdiest lawsuit ever.
* Jacobin reviews Michael’s Moore Where to Invade Next. Jacob Brogan reviews Daniel Clowes’s Patience.
* From our family to yours, happy St. Patrick’s Day.
* Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along.
* And because you demanded it: What if James Bond Was a Chimpanzee?
Tuesday Links
* Local police involved in 400 killings per year.
* Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him. But cops agree: cops haven’t used excessive force in Ferguson. 40 FBI agents are in Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown, and they already know who did it. ‘Let’s Be Cops,’ cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. Reparations for Ferguson. John Oliver: Let’s take their fucking toys back. A movement grows in Ferguson. Ferguson and white unflight. Michael Brown’s autopsy suggests he had his hands up. An upside flag indicates distress. More links from Crooked Timber.
* Man Dies After Bloody, 10-Minute Beating From LAPD Officers. Texas Incarcerates Mentally Disabled Man for 34 Years without Trial.
* Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem. The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson. For blacks, the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here. Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear. A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public. Even the liberal Kevin Drum agrees: We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake. “By mistake.” So close.
* Meanwhile: Detroit police chief James Craig – nicknamed “Hollywood” for his years spent in the LAPD and his seeming love of being in front of the camera – has repeatedly called on “good” and “law-abiding” Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.
* Law professor Robert A. Ferguson’s critique of the U.S. prison system misses the point that its purpose is not rehabilitation but civic death.
* Poor, Non-Working Black and Latino Men Are Nearly Non-Existent.
* A quarter century later, the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500. The racial wealth gap among working-age families, in other words, is a stunning $236,500, and there is every reason to believe that figure has widened in the five years since
* A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by leeching free content from real schools. Sounds legit!
* Change we can believe in? CBS, Produce a new Star Trek Series Featuring Wil Wheaton as the Lead role/Captain of a federation Vessel. Any true fan would know that Wesley quit Starfleet to pursue his destiny with the Traveler, but perhaps I’ve said too much.
* Coming soon to the Smithsonian Galleries: Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.
* Yahoo really wants you to think Donald Glover is in the next season of Community. That “I am serious. I am Yahoo Serious.” tag is pretty gold, though.
* And while I’m on the subject: I know it’s not for everyone, but if you ask me this may have been the most quintessential Harmontown of all time: melancholy, silly, ranty, with some great improv D&D. Give it a listen if you like Dan Harmon.
* The twenty-first century gold rush: debt collection.
* No Child Left Behind achieves its destiny: virtually every school in the state of Washington is a “failing school.”
* All students at MPS now eligible for free meals.
* New Media: Time, Inc rates writers on how friendly they are to advertisers.
* Technocratic tweaks that will definitely solve everything: what if presidents only had one term? The icing on the cake is that if anything this would probably have the opposite effect.
* The problem with self-driving cars: they’re still cars.
* Paul Campos with the latest on the law school scam.
* This November, the organizing committee of the MLA Subconference comes to Milwaukee.
* The Post-Welfare State University.
* Students who graduated in 2008 earned more credits in the humanities than in STEM, the study found. Humanities credits accounted for 17 percent of total credits earned by the typical graduate. In contrast, STEM credits accounted for 13 percent.
* Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way) more likely than women to earn tenure.
* The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List.
* Top Legal Scholars Decry “Chilling” Effect of Salaita Dehiring.
* Huge asteroid set to wipe out life on Earth – in 2880. 865 years, that’s all we’ve got…
* Mining Spill Near U.S. Border Closes 88 Schools, Leaves Thousands Of Mexicans Without Water. Meet The First Pacific Island Town To Relocate Thanks To Climate Change. The Longest River In The U.S. Is Being Altered By Climate Change.
* The venture capitalist are now weaponizing kids. Of course, when you find out how much raising a kid costs, child labor starts to make a lot of sense. Plainly parenting is a market ripe for disruption.
* What is your greatest strength as an employee? Bonus SMBC: on internship as neologism.
* How air conditioning remade modern America.
* How to Hide a Nuclear Missile.
* The winners of the 2014 Hugos.
* The rumor is that Doctor Strange will be part of a new Marvel paradigm that rejects origin stories.
* Twitter’s management is very, very eager to ruin Twitter. Can Facebook catch up in time?
* Primary 2016 watch: Only Al Gore can save us now.
* And they’ve finally gone too far: Edible LEGO. Some lines man was just never meant to cross.
Gerry Canavan 