Posts Tagged ‘The Wonder Years’
Saturday Night Links!
* I’ve had a nice bit of professional good news: I’ve been asked to join Extrapolation as an editor beginning with their Spring 2015 issue.
* “Crutzen, who is not a geologist, but one of the modern great scientists, essentially launched a small hand grenade into the world of geological time scales,” Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the ICS’s anthropocene working group, told the Guardian. “The word began to be used widely, well before geologists ever got involved.”
* That old-time religion: Now that science fiction is respectable, it’s lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest.
* From AfricaIsACountry: Ebola and neo-imperialism. And from Jacobin: The Political Economy of Ebola.
* The arsenal of, well, let’s say democracy: The U.S. sold $66.3 billion in weapons last year –- more than three-fourths of the entire global arms market.
* Richest 1% of people own nearly half of global wealth, says report.
* Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay.
* Of Collaborators and Careerists.
* Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting.
* Meritocracy watch: Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong.
* The 21st century university: women’s only colleges and trans identity.
* Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers.
* The Milwaukee police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park is believed to be the first officer in the city fired as a result of a fatal on-duty shooting in at least 45 years.
* More back-and-forth on carceral feminism from Amber A’Lee Frost and Freddie deBoer.
* Pieces like this are enough to make you nostalgic for the quietly understated narcissism of “job creators.”
* An oral history of The Wonder Years.
* New Scrabble Dictionary Disrepects The Game.
* Stop worrying about mastermind hackers. Start worrying about the IT guy.
* And just for fun: How to die in the 18th century. Watch for for evil, and for the purples…
Friday: Steven Salaita Link Roundup and More
* Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair. Return of the blacklist? Cowardice and censorship at the University of Illinois. Academic Freedom, Except When I Disagree. Bérubé on Salaita. The national AAUP’s statement. Cary Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of bestowing academic freedom. Cary Nelson’s Case. John K. Wilson. The definition of academic freedom, for many, does not accommodate dissent. The University of Illinois Is Not an Island. A Love Letter to Twitter. A New Birth of Academic Freedom.
* One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against. So it’s probably natural for college students to be a little ironic, a little unsettled. It’s time, meanwhile, to admit that the college years aren’t for figuring out some improvised “sense of purpose.” They’re more like a period of acclimatization—a time when realizations can dawn. If you’re feeling uneasy about life, then you’re doing the reading.
* Matthew Cheney has a call to read Survivor over Octavia Butler’s objections, inspired in part by my recent series at LARoB.
* Princeton Considers End to Limit on Number of As.
* The University of Colorado is moving to fire a tenured faculty member after the Boulder campus paid $825,000 this week to settle a graduate student’s allegations that the philosophy professor retaliated against her for reporting she was sexually assault by a fellow student.
* Watch NJ cop go rogue: Since Obama ‘doesn’t follow Constitution, we don’t have to.’
* Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health.
* Is Student Debt Harmful to Your Health? Student debt correlated with nagging sense that life is pointless.
* Oh, there’s your problem, your culture produces monsters: Telling white people the criminal justice system is racist makes them like it more.
* On not being cynical enough: LeBron James just leapt from one carefully constructed superteam to another. Of course I’m talking about you; I was always cynical about this. #cynicprivilege
* The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.
* An interview on death and mourning with Thomas Laqueur, from the great TNI issue on mourning I was hyping the other day.
* When stock photography modeling goes wrong.
* Endless Adjunct: The Game! From @readywriting.
* “Ole Miss Struggles to Be a New Miss.” On trying to rebrand.
* The Wonder Years: An Oral History.
* I guess in Obama’s America it’s not always legal to randomly murder people for no reason.
* Run Cruel optimism, Liz, run cruel optimism!
* “Punk archaeologists” explain why they dug out the Atari landfill. I should have been a punk archaeologist.
* Christina Hendrick’s time-travel-centered Mad Men spinoff looks pretty promising. The Mary Poppins one is good too.
* Lost in Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam trying to make Don Quixote again, which is now about trying to make Don Quixote.
* There’s only one thing Disney/Marvel loves more than money, and that’s not making inclusive superhero movies.
* Perhaps most importantly to everyone outside of Broadway, this production basically puts the kibosh on any new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—at least until it’s over. David said he “hadn’t ruled out” doing more Curb, but that he’s “not going to mentally do that to myself right now.” Also, if he did do another season, “this play would push that schedule back.” So we’d say that if he did do a ninth season, it could be about how Larry David starring in a Broadway show ends up irritating everyone else. But of course, he already did that.
* Everything old is new again: Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016. NBC has great idea for family show starring Bill Cosby.
* Slot-machine science: How casinos get you to spend more money. A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos.
* The arc of history is long, but bends towards justice: Cops no longer desire photo of teenager’s erection.
* Over the cliff: Almost 20 percent of people near retirement age have no retirement savings.
* The headline reads, “Experts Split If Robots Will Usurp Human Workers By 2025.”
* Google Saved by the Bell Truth. Wake up sheeple.
* My god. The bureaucracy works.
* And SMBC presents: The Darwinist!
Thursday Afternoon
* The day would come when many West Virginians recalled the story of Jack’s Powerball Christmas with a shudder at the magnitude of ruination: families asunder, precious lambs six feet under, folks undone by the lure of all that easy money.
* Austerity everywhere: they’re going to start charging for the bus between Duke and UNC.
* Jokes I’ve stolen from elsewhere on the Internet: Let’s do a sequel to that beloved show starring a grown-up version of that Savage brother. #youfools #yousaidtheincantationwrong #monkeyspaw
* When scams collide! Grand Canyon University, a for-profit Christian college located in Phoenix, Ariz., now has a Division I athletics program. Inside Higher Ed reports that GCU will become a member of the Western Athletic Conference, as the first for-profit college to join a Division I NCAA conference.
* Apocalypse as wish-fulfillment.
* And an actual scandal alert! Susan Rice, Top Candidate For Secretary Of State, Has Millions Tied To Canadian Tar Sands.
The Wonder Years without Narration
Chris at Cynical-C finds a YouTube gem: a clip from The Wonder Years with the narration removed.
Gerry Canavan 