Posts Tagged ‘Tim Morton’
Tuesday!
* C21’s book on Debt is finally almost out. My essay draws on the bits of the Polygraph introduction I wrote and is about ecological debt.
* Syllabus minute: I have W.H. Auden envy.
* MOOC Completion Rates: The Data.
* How neoliberal universities build their football stadiums.
Some projections showed Athletics might not be able to make payments starting in the 2030s when the debt service balloons. The debt is structured so that for the next 20 years, Cal only needs to make interest payments on the debt. The principal kicks in in the early 2030s, resulting in payments between $24 million and $37 million per year.
Look, if it’s good enough for an idea man who settled out of court on securities fraud, it’s good enough for me.
* Kent State fires adjunct who built their journalism master’s.
* Ian Morris, psychohistorian.
* What If? on The Twitter Archive of Babel. The Twitter Archive of Babel contains the true story of your life, as well as all the stories of all the lives you didn’t lead….
* Proud Species Commits Suicide Rather Than Be Driven To Extinction By Humans.
* A People’s History of “Twist and Shout.”
* PPP: Russ Feingold Poised For Comeback, Could Top Scott Walker Next Year.
* Michael Chabon: Dreams are useless bodily effluvia. Nicholson Baker: Dreams are all we have.
* You and I are gonna live forever: 72 is the new 30.
* Settling nerd fights of the 1990s today: Is This the Smoking Gun Proving Deep Space Nine Ripped Off Babylon 5?
* The Star Wars Heresies: Star Wars and William Blake. Tim Morton’s essay in Green Planets has a similar impulse with respect to Avatar.
* And in even more insane mashup news: WWE Keeps Pressure On Glenn Beck.
Monday Misc.
* Three Mile Island may still be leaking. More at Infrastructurist, which gives the story a strong pro-nuclear slant not really supported by the facts.
* When it rains too much, sewage gets in your drinking water. The stimulus package could have been devoted entirely to infrastructure and green economy programs and that still would have been just a start on the sort of spending that is necessary.
* John Marshall says the public option is now so tiny it is no longer worth fighting for. I like Josh, and I see his point, but I really think this takes too short-term a view; the point is to get any public option in, so that it can subsequently be improved and expanded using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. And even in the short-term, the progressive left is sufficiently invested in the public option that its loss would be widely understood as (another) demoralizing defeat—which is something we just don’t need right now.
* HASTAC is part of a big Obama administration science and math initiative today.
* The terrifying story of a man trapped in a twenty-three-year coma.
* And via Tim Morton, the Danish journal ReThink has a new section on climate change, with pieces from Morton and Latour among others. Check it out.
Ecotheoryblogging
Via Tim Morton’s Ecology without Nature blog: a link to new ecological theory blog Violent Signs, which comes at the question of ecology from what it describes as a a Deleuzoguattarian perspective. The post on Žižek and Eco-Critique is worth reading as well.
Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
* Swine flu in NC! PANIC!
* Another article on Homeland Security’s use of science fiction writers for brainstorming.
* Test your knowledge of literature with the Amazon Statistically Improbable Phrase Quiz. Via MeFi.
* New Yankee Stadium homerun theories.
* Two from Steve Benen: on the improbable discovery of Democrats at Liberty University and a roundup of recent misogynistic attacks on Nancy Pelosi.
* And our friend Tim Morton has a new video on YouTube: The Mesh.
Clips from the Roundtable
Okay, I think YouTube and I have reached an accord, and all of the clips from the Morton/Rudy roundtable are now up and viewable. The whole playlist is in order here.
Rudy Introduction
Morton Introduction
On Discursive Intervention in Ecology
On Ontology and “Ground”
On WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
On Dark Ecology and “Bambification”
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism
Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy Roundtable on YouTube
Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph “Ecology, Ideology, Politics” Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You’ll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.
The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.
Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and “ground”) (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and “Bambification”
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
I’m Making a Note Here, Huge Success
Big thanks to everyone who was able to come out to our Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph Roundtable last night. Preliminary results indicate a huge success…