Wednesday Links

* Marquette English’s medievalist search closes today! Get your applications in!

* Advice for academics: how to write a research statement.

* The digital humanities and the MLA JIL.

* Junot Diaz on academic freedom and Palestine.

* The Plot Against Public Education.

* Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance.

* Yet another roundup on the death of the faculty.

* Holy picket lines, Batman! Marxism and superheroes, part two: the struggle.

* Same-sex marriage crossed the 50% threshold yesterday, as it became legal as many as 30 states due to SCOTUS inaction.

* The right to die: Terminally Ill 29-Year-Old Woman: Why I’m Choosing to Die on My Own Terms.

* Is Rick & Morty the best cartoon since The Simpsons season four? Probably! You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty. Seriously.

* Google Glass and facial recognition.

* American Empire, by the numbers.

* An open access book: Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.

* Understanding reparations.

4. The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

5. But because the claimants are dead, it is said that nothing can be done. Society shrugs, moves on, because, uhm, black on black crime.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014

* War is a racket, Prophet Samuel edition.

* Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion.

* The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past. Yet at least since the 1970s, most professional historians – that is, most historians holding doctorates in the field and teaching in universities or colleges – conducted most of their research on timescales of between five and 50 years.

* We’re probably teaching math wrong.

* Daria Morgendorffer’s Reading List.

* Hey, you, get your damn hands off her.

* Venus Green, who was 87 when she was handcuffed, roughed up and injured by police, will receive $95,000 as part of a settlement with Baltimore City. The quote doesn’t even reflect the most bananas part: Woman, 90, locked officer in basement, settles with police.

* Ga. Cops Who Blew Off Toddler’s Face With Grenade Won’t Be Charged.

* Did I do this one already? Infinite Jest, as it was meant to be read.

* Stay informed: Nicolet National Forest is Milwaukee’s “zombie safe zone.”

* National Adjunct Walkout Day Planned.

* The gum you like is going to come back in style.

* And that gum you like is going to come back in style.

* Startups Did Not Get Last Month’s Memo To Stop Burning All Their Money.

* MIT researchers are developing a “second skin” space suit lined with tiny coils that contract when switched on, tightening the garment around the body. The coils (image below) in the “BioSuit” are made from shape-memory alloy that “remembers” its shape when bent and returns to its original form if heated.

* Marvel will finally try to make some money off the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

* Boston Review on vulture capitalism.

* MetaFilter mega-post on sex work and consent.

* The United States and alcoholism. Some anti-big-data-journalism pushback.

* And now at last we see the violence inherent in the system.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/8LS8TRMkAo

— congress-edits (@congressedits) October 7, 2014

Tuesday Links!

* Ian Bogost on moralism and academic politics: The Opposite of Good Fortune is Bad Fortune.

* This week on Studio 360: Will Sci-Fi Save Us?

* The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program.

* They say there are no heroes anymore, but I’ve decided not to promote any of the truly horrible things people have been saying about Gaza. You’re welcome.

* Lazer-guided metaphors about America in 2014: FEMA Wants to House Migrant Children in Empty Big Box Stores.

* Or this one: Luxury Condo’s “Poor Door” Is Now City-Approved.

* The Globe and Mail has a powerful piece about Huntington’s disease and the right to die.

* Here’s how shock-doctrine CFOs plan to ruin education at your university n the name of permanent crisis.

* UC Regents approve pay increase for university executives. Top UC coaches earn twice as much money as top UC brain surgeons. Why Are Campus Administrators Making So Much Money?

* In recent years, a handful of community colleges in that state have outsourced the recruitment and hiring of adjunct instructors – who make up the overwhelming majority of the community college teaching force – to an educational staffing company. Just last week, the faculty union at a sixth institution, Jackson College, signed a collective bargaining agreement allowing EDUStaff to take over adjunct hiring and payroll duties.

* Segregation and Milwaukee, at PBS.

* A recent random spot check of hundreds of arraignments by the Police Reform Organizing Project showed that in many courts around the boroughs, 100% of those appearing for minor legal violations — things like taking two seats on a train or smoking in a train station — are people of color.

* The nation’s top gun-enforcement agency overwhelmingly targeted racial and ethnic minorities as it expanded its use of controversial drug sting operations, a USA TODAY investigation shows.

* Sun Ra Teaches at UC Berkeley, 1971.

* D-List X-Men.

* There’s a place in Cornwall where LEGO washes in with the tide.

* Historical Slang Terms For Having Sex, From 1351 Through Today.

* Five Former Players Sue NFL Players Union Over Concussions.

* In praise of UNC’s anti-grade-inflation scheme.

* Holy NDA, Batman! One of the nation’s largest government contractors requires employees seeking to report fraud to sign internal confidentiality statements barring them from speaking to anyone about their allegations, including government investigators and prosecutors, according to a complaint filed Wednesday and corporate documents obtained by The Washington Post.

* First a LEGO episode, now a Futurama crossover: The Simpsons really wants me back. It’s been fifteen years, dudes, just let me go…

* How does squatters’ rights fit into Airbnb’s business plan?

* This Woman Has Been Confronting Her Catcallers — And Secretly Filming Their Reactions.

* Art Pope vs. North Carolina.

* Red Klotz, who led basketball’s biggest losers, the Washington Generals, dies at 93. A Statistical Appreciation of the Washington Generals And Harlem Globetrotters.

* “So, what have you learned in your many years of toddler torture?” “They hate it.”

* Dan Harmon on Paul F. Tompkins’s Speakeasy, with beloved Milwaukee institutions like the Safe House and the Marquette University English Department warranting mentions. Now, for PFT to finally appear on Harmontown….

* Now, please hold all my calls: the next episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead comes out today…

Saturday

* Should LeBron play for the league minimum? Sports Illustrated makes a strong case. (via Eric Barker)

* Naomi Klein on climate debt.

* How to power your galactic empire.

* And two from this week’s New Yorker: a piece on Caster Semenya, the intersex South African runner, and “My Parents, Enid and Sal, Used to Be Porn Stars.” The piece on death hysteria in American politics, centered around Morris County, New Jersey’s Karen Ann Quinlan, is also quite good—but it’s not online.