The Coldest Monday Links

* Study: You Can’t Tell If Someone Is a Good Hire from Their Facebook Profile, But It Does Help You Be More Racist.

* The definition of insanity is continued development of the American southwest.

* No one could have predicted! Water pollution from fracking confirmed in multiple states.

* Against Speed Cosmopolitanism: Towards the Slow University. We are scientists. We don’t blog. We don’t twitter. We take our time.

* A new survey finds that male economics Ph.D.’s who get married early in their careers see their salaries grow 25%, while females who do the same thing see their salaries shrink by 23%.

* Here come the brain drugs.

* Baby, listen, it really is cold outside.

* Scalia’s golden chance to kill unions.

* FBI Drops Law Enforcement as ‘Primary’ Mission. 99 Percent Of Police Brutality Reports In Central New Jersey Never See The Light Of Day. Half Of Black Males, 40 Percent Of White Males Are Arrested By Age 23.

* “They are not allowed to fail.” North Carolina’s assault on teachers is working.

* What’s Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada’s Science Libraries? More Details on the Franklin Co., NC Records Destruction. This last one is National Treasure III-level weird.

* Politics shadows process for UW System president finalists.

* Who’s burning money on ed-tech venture capital? Everyone, that’s who!

* Rich people and just-world bias.

* Detroit Retirees Will Lose Health Insurance In 2 Months If City Manager Gets His Way.

* “Police For America” Seeks To Use Elite Graduates To Patrol Underserved Communities.

* “The difference between people who believe in the 2nd coming of Jesus and those who believe in global warming is that Jesus will return”: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming. How global warming can make cold snaps even worse.

* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Jenna Jameson weaponizing internet forums–forever. (NSFW.)

* So there’s complexity at play here: internet pornography presents an ambiguous vision of freedom that is subtended by a business apparatus that depends upon the very opposite of freedom. Porn and democracy.

* Lexical Distance Among the Languages of Europe.

* Trouble in Iraq. Why is the Nation framing this in should-we-invade terms? Because the definition of insanity is…

* Nancy Kerrigan was attacked twenty years ago. You. are. old.

* Fun’s over in Utah.

* And my daughter’s a libertarian, too.

Friday Everything

* Ralph Nader has found an awesome new way to troll the nation: he will campaign to kill athletic scholarships.

* Fox has renewed Fringe. This is great news—but I still haven’t forgive them for Firefly.

* Vermont’s not green, it’s red: Vermot House passes single-payer health care bill. It’s also expected to pass the state senate, too, which means things are about to get very interesting.

* I haven’t put up anything about Fukushima in a while, but suffice it to say things still sound very bad. (UPDATE: More here.) Nuclear power advocates—who I seem to recall assuring me that nothing bad could possibly happen at Fukushima because of updated, failsafe reactor designs—have now begun assuring me that what happened at Fukushima could never happen again because of updated, failsafe reactor designs. Okay, that ship turned out to be sinkable. But this one…

* Great moments in abuse of power: A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters. Josh Marshall catches the most interesting angle: “the fact that he lists his 18 years of experience working in GOP politics as his experience for doing this sort of stuff.”

* Cheating scandal in the game of kings.

* Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language. It drives me crazy when people don’t speak it.

* And from Inside Higher Ed: Who’s in your fantasy research institute this season?

Change We Can Believe In

I heartily endorse the political project Toothpaste for Dinner outlines here.

I Don’t Talk About My Process

Toothpaste for Dinner, get out of my brain.

Links for the Post-Thanksgiving Blues

* Near them on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

* Rest in peace, Leslie Nielsen and Irvin Kershner. Stay safe, everyone else.

* “Ph.D. students are extremely bright people who have been successful their whole lives,” says David D. Perlmutter. He is director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa and author of a new book called Promotion and Tenure Confidential (Harvard University Press). “They are like the hundreds of thousands of inner-city kids who believe they are going to be playing in the NBA,” says Mr. Perlmutter, who also writes a column for The Chronicle’s Careers section. Despite gloomy job news and the hundreds of applicants for any opening, “they still think they’ll be the exception.”

* Breaking news: Either Democrats are impossibly bad at bargaining or (heaven forfend) they’re getting exactly the results they want.

* And of course you had me at “build an Olympic stadium on the Moon.”

Cl@ss @sshole

Toothpaste for Dinner steals my joke about graduate school cohorts and applies it to all communities.

Return of the Son of Random Links

* Good news from downtown: The Carolina Theater is doing a Kurosawa retrospective for the rest of May.

* The New York Times presents its guide to Facebook’s 170 privacy options.

* Although Major League Baseball is reluctant to move the All-Star Game, Mexico’s top soccer teams have canceled an exhibition match in Arizona in protest of the state’s now-infamous documentation laws.

* How the EPA will fight climate change. More here.

* The Deepwater Horizon spill is now estimated to generate the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every four days.

* Does the road to single payer go through Vermont?

* That’s awesome! What’s your novel gonna be about?

How to Win Any Election

So much about contemporary politics comes down to the comparative size of these two groups.

Thursday, Thursday

* UNCG (Go Spartans) has opened an important digital archive on American slavery.

* Butterfly attempts to fly in microgravity.

* My MFA Workshop Responds to My Twitter Status Updates.

* A visibly distraught Senator Alesi casts his “no” vote on marriage equality yesterday in Albany.

* Detroit, Dubai, Dresden, more: cities before and after radical changes.

* Comcast, a company about which I have never heard a single good thing, will buy NBC. Only 30 Rock fans will benefit.

* NPR has a Logicomix preview. I enjoyed the entire novel; check it out.

* Barbara Boxer: Climategate is a criminal matter. Communist!

* Other senators I like: Bernie Sanders and Al Franken, whom the GOP underestimates at its peril.

* The rest of the senators I can mostly do without.

* And Toothpaste for Dinner zeroes in on my particular pathology.

Saturday Night Fever

Saturday night, and I can’t stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it’s pretty astounding.

* Krugman: “There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980.”

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

Go to Grad School?

Go to grad school?

No Longer Super Sweet

Ladies and gentlemen, Toothpaste for Dinner.

Lit Links

Lit links.

* Emily Dickinson: sexpot.

* On James Baldwin and Barack Obama. Until now I’d thought that Bill Ayers had secretly ghostwritten Obama’s memoir, but I see now that it was probably James Baldwin.

* TV show as megamovie. Via Kottke.

* Reinterpreting Red Dawn.

Red Dawn is not an exact parallel to our situation, of course. The Iraq we invaded was no functioning democracy; our Army does not execute civilians; many Iraqis favor the American occupation. But Red Dawn certainly didn’t stir the mad, patriotic fervor I felt when I heard Howell shout, “Wolverines” 24 years ago. MGM is so far tight-lipped about the plot of its Red Dawn remake, but I wonder: Will the new Wolverines be us—or fighting us?

* And Toothpaste for Dinner has obviously never taken one of my classes.

Quick S.F. Links

Quick links:

* Toothpaste for Dinner beholds the Singularity. (Thanks, kate w!)

* They’re (finally) turning Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series into a movie.

* Once again people are discovering Orson Scott Card’s reprehensible politics. It happens about once every six months.

* 29 Literary Science Fiction Novels You Should Read. More than half of these are already on my exam lists; the rest probably will be by the time I take my exams in March…