Sunday Morning Links!

* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!

* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.

* This is relatable content.

* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.

The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.

* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?

* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.

* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”

* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.

* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.

* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.

* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.

* It’s never going to end.

* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.

* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.

* Seems about right.

* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.

* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?

And it’d be fun to see Gandalf arriving as a young wizard and getting into scrapes, maybe a story or two set in other campaigns during the War of the Ring. But we saw the main story already, there isn’t a ton of narrative space for another epic.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 17, 2018

* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.

I guess I've lived long enough to see sexist stereotypes of women go from "desperate to trap commitment-phobic men into marriage" to "shallow sluts who need enforced monogamy."

— Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar) May 19, 2018

* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.

* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.

* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.

* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”

Cmon put him in the game pic.twitter.com/ggrPZgRQKM

— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) May 20, 2018

* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.

why don't young people trust the institutions and processes that have exclusively brutalized them every waking moment of their lived reality? opinions differ

— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) May 19, 2018

TFW the country with more guns and people in prison than any other nation in the planet, and that's been at war on "terror" for two decades, builds schools that look like prisons and still is terrorized by kids on rampages with infantry rifles

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 18, 2018

* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.

* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.

* Being Frank R. Paul.

* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

* A mere 400 months in a row.

* And on the pedestal these words appear.

Saturday Morning Links, Just Like When We Were Kids

* The Department of English invites applications for an entry-level, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in medieval literature, language, and culture, primarily British, before 1500. Marquette English is hiring!

* Maybe my new favorite page on the Internet: r/DaystromInstitute’s list of long-running Star Trek what-ifs and what-abouts.

* I think I’ve linked this thread before, at least a different version of it: “I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.”

* Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture.

* Creative Destruction: Tech and the evolution of the desk, 1985-2014.

* Bousquet breathes some fire: This change in appointment types is not accidental or caused by outside forces. The adjunctification of faculty appointment has been an intentional shock treatment by campus administrations. Of course, there may be some claims regarding saving money; however, most critical observers note that “saving” on $70,000 faculty salaries generates a vast, expensive need for $80,000- to $120,000-per-year accountants, IT staff members, and HR specialists, plus a few $270,000 associate provosts. Not to mention the $500,000 bonus awarded to the president for meeting the board’s permatemping target and successfully hiding the consequences from students, parents, and the public. It should be obvious to most of us that any money left over from bloating the administration is generally directed to consultants, construction, and business partnerships.

* The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducted a recent survey that questioned the correlation between internships and full employment upon graduation.The findings were astonishing. Hiring rates for those who had chosen to complete an unpaid internship (37%) were almost the same for those who had not completed any internship at all (35%). Students who had any history of a paid internship, on the other hand, were far more likely (63%) to secure employment.

* “It’s a horrible irony that at the very moment the world has become more complex, we’re encouraging our young people to be highly specialized in one task.”

* What’s wrong with college? Plenty. What’s wrong with journalism about college? Everything.

* Casinos are the autoimmune disease of city planning. They destroy everything else in the area, then die when the host is dead.

* From nuclear bombs to killer robots: how amoral technologies become immoral weapons.

* Preliminary Studies Show Potential Health Risk For Babies Born Near Fracking Sites.

* …white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

* AAUP writes Chancellor Phyllis Wise over the Salaita firing.

* BREAKING: Elizabeth Warren won’t save us.

* Will Zephyr Teachout save us?

* Unskew the polls! Democratic Senate edition.

* Today in climate change neologisms: “Megadroughts.”

* California, before and after drought.

* The arc of history is long, but: “Doctor Who ‘lesbian-lizard’ kiss will not face investigation.”

* A unique experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending questions about our universe—including whether we live in a hologram.

* Asst. Principal Fined for Changing His Son’s Failing Grades 11 Times. This story has everything:

According to the New York Daily News, Ali has been reassigned away from Bread and Roses, but has not been placed at a new school. He remains on the Department of Education’s payroll with a $104,437 annual salary.

…

The school, the Daily News reports, is expected to close by 2016 for poor performance.

* Study suggests autism rates have plateaued since 1990.

* ALS Foundation floats trademarking the concept of an “ice bucket challenge,” but immediately gets talked out of it.

* Thoughtcrime watch: Dorchester County discovers one of its teachers is a novelist, completely flips its wig.

* Fox developing a drama about a world without sleep.

* The inexorable march of progress: This Cheap Exoskeleton Lets You Sit Wherever You Want Without a Chair.

* The way we die now.

* Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: What’s the point of studying history?

* The Politics Of Every Major U.S. Religion, In One Chart. Way to claim the vital center, Catholics!

* It sounds like you just selected easily measured metrics and increased them, rather than trying to make the experience good.

* ​The 12 Most Obnoxious Dungeons & Dragons Monsters.

* Suddenly I’m up on top of the world: They’re rebooting Greatest American Hero.

* An Annotated Reading Of Multiversity #1.

* How the growing generation gap is changing the face of fandom.

* A eulogy for Twitter. Twitter as misery factory.

* Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.

* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.

* Why Aren’t Women Advancing At Work? Ask a Transgender Person.

* And just this once, everybody lives: Family Cleans House, Finds Pet Tortoise Missing Since 1982.

Thursday Morning Links!

* In Landmark Decision, U.S. Patent Office Cancels Trademark For Redskins Football Team. So the Redskins will be forced by lost revenue and unrestrained anti-Redskins bootlegs to change their name — at which time bitter Redskins dead-enders will be able to sell each other Redskins-branded merchandise in protest…

* In praise of Diplomacy.

* We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work.

* That plan goes something like this: maximize constrained educational choices that are a function of labor market changes; commodify inequality by organizing for the highest need students; extract guaranteed funds from public coffers; call it access; wash and repeat.

* Guernica‘s special issue on class, including a report on adjuncts.

* BREAKING: The U.S. Has the Most Expensive, Least Effective Health Care System. BREAKING: Guns kill children. BREAKING: The American prison system is a nightmare. BREAKING: Capitalism is insanely corrupt. BREAKING: Uber is a scam.

* Schools and/as prisons.

* Self-plagiarism is a really weird concept to pin down.

* When innocent people are exonerated after wrongfully spending time in prison, some states pay money to the accused for their trouble. As data from NPR and the Innocence Project show, those payouts are often despicably low. 

* This Is How Much More States Spend On Prisoners Than On Students.

* Does the alternatives-to-incarceration industry profit from injustice?

* The economics of nuclear war.

* When Presidents Get Bored.

* Things instructional staff aren’t paid enough to do.

* The logic on display here shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for.

* And they say America’s best years are behind it.

* How the West was stolen.

* How ISIS Games Twitter.

* Münchausen syndrome by proxy, mommy blog edition.

* The horror of postpartum psychosis.

* Against the GRE.

* Against the simplicity of “born this way.”

* It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.

* Louie. Louie. Lou-eeeee. Louie. Louie. Lou-iiiiiii.

* You can kill anyone with your car, as long as you don’t really mean it.

* Walker said it was important to have a smooth-running highway system to avoid gridlock “that would choke off the ability of businesses to come in and out of Milwaukee.” “I think the last thing you want to do is have employers look to go bypass the city of Milwaukee when they’re talking about jobs and commerce here,” he said. “So you’ve got to make sure there’s a good transportation system.” And just wait until he finds out human beings use roads too!

* My brilliant wife has a poem in TAB.

* How to Catch a Chess Cheater.

* Elon Musk “Hopeful” First People Can Be Taken To Mars in 10-12 Years.

* And even Colbert Report writers have to form tech startups now.

Thursday Links!

* Marquette makes Slate’s vaunted “ridiculous phrases universities have trademarked” list. Meanwhile, Danny Pudi’s Marquette-flavored entry in the 30 for 30 series is up at Grantland. Jesuit author featured on ‘The Colbert Report’ to speak at Marquette University commencement.

* The academic outrage of the year is Nazareth College rescinding an offer following a request for more salary, research accommodation, and “official” maternity leave. I’ve been ranting about this on Twitter (1, 2, etc) (and now MetaFilter) all day but I can’t see how people can see this as anything but naked gender discrimination. I hope she sues.

* I know there’s a whole secondary argument on Twitter about the propriety of Buzzfeed’s appropriation here, but I found @steenfox‘s thread incredibly powerful last night. What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?

* This is one of my favorite endlessly recurring Internet images: “Do colleges have to hire RED professors?” asks The American Legion Magazine in Nov. 1951.

* The Humanities Crisis Industry.

* Workers Sue McDonald’s For Wage Theft Violations In Three States.

* Chicago Police Cannot Keep Complaints Of Brutality Secret Anymore, Court Rules. Why could they ever?

* Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner walks free after 30 years.

* My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.

* Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired.

* “Is it time to rethink the 40 hour week?” Yes, it’s time to think about bringing it back.

* University of California Credit Is Downgraded by Moody’s.

* I’ll give it to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this regard. I had, up until last night, found Ward to be one of the blandest characters on the show. But now he has my sympathies. Because that character is stuck in a world where terrible things happen and, when they happen to him, no one cares.

* Free markets! Disruption! Innovation!

* Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men. How To Make A Pundit. And I can’t wait to see how they voxplain this.

* I want to return to a thread I introduced in that earlier piece with much greater force: That those who write for free or very little simply because they can afford to are scabs. I don’t endorse this piece, honestly, because I think it significantly misunderstands the terms under which TT academics are employed — but I found it an interesting provocation nonetheless.

* WI school officials seize control over student paper after ‘rape culture’ article appears.

* Paul Ryan: Just The Worst.

* I have never seen anything as utterly nihilistic as the position Andrew Napolitano proudly puts his name on here. It’s unreal.

* The Sheep Look Up: Radioactive ‘Oil Socks’ Found Illegally Stockpiled In Abandoned North Dakota Gas Station. North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links From Website. Panasonic First Multinational Company To Pay Air Pollution Hardship For Overseas Workers In China. NASA Study: Climate Sensitivity Is High So ‘Long-Term Warming Likely To Be Significant.’

* The economics of prostitution.

* Seinfeld After People.

* The best TV show you may not be watching: Review from Andy Daly. Also starring another Comedy Bang Bang stalwart, Jessica “Marissa Wompler” St. Clair.

* Hands Off My Kid’s iPad.

* Abolish letter grades.

* Reuters auctioning off unpaid internships. My god.

* The only thing Americans care about less than climate change is race relations.

* “They cry because they are not allowed to be children at all.”

* Scott Aukerman explains BetweenTwoFernsGhazi.

* Teju Cole: @apieceofthewall.

* And the future is terrible.

More Monday Links!

* Martin Luther King’s Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Restoring King. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” “Beyond Vietnam.”

* Jebediah Purdy: No One’s Job: West Virginia’s Forbidden Waters.

* Well, here’s something interesting from the entrance survey to the “It’s Not a MOOC, It’s a Movement” “History and Future of Higher Education” Coursera course: You are invited to take part in a research study conducted by your instructor, Professor Cathy N. Davidson, and a graduate student from North Carolina State University, Barry W. Peddycord III. The purpose of this study is to assess a tool developed to automatically assess the quality of peer reviews on writing. The tool, called “Automated Metareviewing,” reads the essay and a review of it, and then measures how relevant, helpful, and specific the review was.

* Adam Kotsko has a provocative post today on higher ed and masculinity, reframing the crisis of rape culture on campuses as a byproduct of the hypermasculine spaces of fraternity and athletics colleges nurture for development purposes. In the comments I felt the need to try to extend this observation a little bit to the toxic masculinity that sometimes dominates academic departments themselves.

* State Higher-Education Spending Continues Slow Recovery.

* The future, folks: Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It. Microsoft’s ‘smart elevator’ knows where you’re going.

* It turns out you can get fired as a cop.

* Science has figured out why cold air smells different.

* On Thursday, Seay received a $10 off coupon from OfficeMax that was address to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash, Or Current Business.”

* The Air Force has roughly 500 officers in charge of protecting and maybe someday launching America’s arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles. Nearly all of them cheat on every exam they take, at every chance they get, according to three veterans of the force.

* Candy Crush Saga studio claims to own the word “candy” the same way it owns your every waking moment.

* And Tom Tomorrow has your typical day in the governor’s office.

Tuesday Night Links

* Welcome to My Massive Open Online Cult!

Welcome to my MOOC—Massive Open Online Cult—a 10-week course based on the revolutionary educational models of Coursera and edX. Due to the “massive” nature of this course, I am unable to interact with prospective cult members individually. Though I am acutely aware that the most fulfilling cult leader/acolyte relationship arises from months of sustained and deeply personal psychological manipulation, this is simply not an option with the MOOC format. However, I will do my best to break down your resistance mechanisms throughout the taped lectures.

* Alex Kudera considers adjunct misery. Treating graduate students as people, not just scholars in training, will make them better professionals. Our Dirty Little Secret.

Now that three-quarters of college teachers are contingent faculty members like Duffleman, the depiction of professors as tweedy, pipe-smoking dons or turtlenecked, bearded radicals with actual authority is inherently reactionary. It paints all faculty members as a pampered elite, disconnected from the “real world,” ignoring the reality that most of them have more in common with Wal-Mart employees than they do with the one-percenters who preside over Kudera’s urban academic hellscape of poverty, terrorism, outsourcing, deskilling, externalization of costs, and privatization of profits.

* Hollis surveyed administrators in higher education, with the somewhat startling result that “close to 62% of respondents . . . confirmed that they had been bullied or witnessed bullying in their higher education positions in the last 18 months” (36). And while “African Americans, women, and members of the LGBT community experience proportionally higher levels of bullying,” Hollis found that men in higher education still reported rates of bullying higher than the national rate (41, 42). Hollis argues that these differential rates demonstrate that there is considerable intersection between bullying and harassment, which may expose colleges and universities to legal jeopardy.

* University of California – Diploma Mill.

(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

* As the debate about the drone and the war on terror in America emerges, these are the voices that are not heard—those of the victims and the targeted communities.

* Salesmen in the Surgical Suite.

* SCOTUSblog menu of today’s coverage of the Proposition 8 argument. Emblazoned in red, same-sex marriage dominates social media.

At this blog, Lyle Denniston observes that, with the Justices so clearly split along ideological lines, focusing on Justice Kennedy to predict an outcome was an “even more reliable approach this time” than usual, and Justice Kennedy appeared strongly tempted to conclude that the case was improvidently granted. Thus, as Amy Howe observes in her review of the arguments “in Plain English,” “the real question before the Court is not whether it would strike down Proposition 8, or what the broader effect of such a decision might be, but whether it is going to reach the merits of the case at all.” Tom Goldsteinexplains that if these indications hold true, the Court’s ruling will take one of two forms: Either the Court could conclude that the proponents of Proposition 8 lacked standing to bring the claim, in which case it would “vacate the Ninth Circuit opinion but leave in place the distinct court decision invalidating Proposition 8,” or “the Court may dismiss the case because of an inability to reach a majority. . . . The upshot of either scenario is a modest step forward for gay rights advocates, but not a dramatic one.”

* Atheism as the next civil right issue? We shall overcome…

* Robots Have Taken All the Good Jobs, Report Economists.

* Aaron Bady vs. magical realism. Aaron vs. the Great American Novel.

* Google Objects To Existence Of New Swedish Word.

* Planetary gets an omnibus.

* John Brunner accurately predicted 2013.

* Rand Paul continues his hard pitch at the readers of this blog: Sen. Paul: Obama, Bush ‘lucky’ they weren’t arrested for smoking pot as kids.

“Look, the last two presidents could conceivably have been put in jail for their drug use,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Look what would have happened. It would have ruined their lives. They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don’t get lucky. They don’t have good attorneys. They go to jail for these things. And I think it’s a big mistake.”

* And another great what if: With today’s technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I?

Big Monday Links

(some links stolen from the great zunguzungu)

* It’s bad enough that I’ll never be asked to reboot Back to the Future—but it’d be utterly intolerable if the gig goes to two guys I went to high school with. Jon says it’s all a big misunderstanding but you know he’s just trying to throw me off the scent.

* There is no fresh start: The Return of Mad Men and the End of TV’s Golden Age. A metafictional reading of the series. And for fun: The Foreign Language of Mad Men: Do the characters really talk like people from the ’60s?

* Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.

* Arundhati Roy: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

* In his novel “2066: Red Star Over America,” Han, China’s premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike. The seas around New York rise, the Twin Towers crumble and the U.S. is plunged into pandemonium. You had me at “Go.” Via io9.

* Do professors get paid too much for too little work? Obviously. More here.

* Related: “College Professors Demand Right to Be Mean.”

* Facebook asserts trademark on word “Book.” Can’t see that being controversial.

* It must be an election year, because suddenly the Obama administration is talking about the environment.

* Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday. “Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming,” Reuters reports. “It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. Why didn’t anybody warn us!

* Government spending is good in a recession? Why didn’t anyone tell us!

* Why is horseracing even allowed? Via MeFi.

* Rules: This is a very specific contest. Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.

* If They Directed It: The Hunger Games. I don’t think anything I’ve written on Twitter has gotten as many retweets as my brief reading of series as a utopia.

* Imagining The Wire Season Six.

* On not calling Rich Santorum “crazy.”

* Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes up his visit to the wonderful conference I was at last weekend, ICFA 2012.

A highlight of ICFA was China Miéville’s talk “On Monsters.” I am a fan of Miéville’s work; The City and the City is one of my favorite books. His narratives are always beautifully written as well as philosophically challenging. Besides possessing an astonishing vocabulary (he sends me to the dictionary, and makes me wonder how they ever gave me a PhD), he is a writer widely read in theory — though his books never turn into allegories for lit crit. They always trace problems, and stay away from anything easy. Miéville brought up Quentin Meillassoux and speculative realism, for example, during his paper (dismissively: he is not a fan of SR or object oriented philosophy, which surprised me). China’s presentation started off as straightforward account of how the uncanny might be broken into various subcategories: the ab-canny, the sur-canny, the sub-canny, the post-canny, the para-canny, and onwards. His account began seriously but spiralled into a proliferative joke. His point was that classification is not analysis, and that such a “taxonomic frenzy” (as he called it) mortifies: “the drive to translate useful constructs into foundations for analysis is deadly,” because it violently takes away the potency and possibility of the terms it organizes. What was interesting to me, though, is that China’s talk performed something, um, para-canny (right beside itself, there but unseen) that I’ve also learned from studying medieval encyclopedists: taxonomic frenzy might produce a desiccated system of emplacement in which everything gets filed into a cabinet and drained of its vitality. Or it might actually be so creative in its proliferative energy and so limned by the necessity of its own failure that it undermines its own rigidity in the very process of articulation, becoming an envitalizing and innovative act — an act of writing — rather than a system of deadening inscription. China’s multiplication of canniness had a power that he walked away from, I think: why abandon your monster like that?

* Honoring the 20th anniversary of Apollo 18 the only possible way: interactive fiction.

* This American Life: What kind of ideology?

* “He Was a Crook”: Longform.org remembers Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.

* Haiti: Where did the money go?

* Support for Afghan War falls. Support for NC anti-gay amendment rises.

A recent Elon University poll found that 58 percent of North Carolinians oppose the amendment, with 38 in favor of it. That poll surveys adults statewide, while the WRAL News poll includes the results only of likely voters.

Despite the broad amendment support in the WRAL News poll, only 37 percent of voters said same-sex couples deserve no legal recognition in North Carolina, according to the poll.

So you have no idea what you’re voting for and won’t bother to find out. Got it.

* Because the 2012 campaign hasn’t been tedious enough: 2016.

* Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching. The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin’s Killer Go Free. On Trayvon Martin as innocent victim.

* Why Obama’s Healthcare Law Is Constitutional. Absolutely everything you need to know about health reform’s Supreme Court debut. What the Supreme Court Could Do About Obamacare, Explained. Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare.’

* If I didn’t know better I’d say this little video has some sort of message.

* MLA Job Information List data back to 1965.

* Infographic of the night: Doomsday Predictions Debunked.

* The headline reads, “UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters.” Huh! I really thought they’d give themselves hell.

Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: “A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes.”

You’re a university, for Christ’s sake. My god.

* What could possibly go wrong? Has Obama put us on a permanent war footing, even in peacetime?

* And what could possibly go wrong? Tacocopter could be the unmanned future of food delivery. Some should have read more Jenny Rhee.

Gerry-Built Monday Links

* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.

* Plaintiffs Challenging Affordable Care Act In The Supreme Court Admit That The Law Is Constitutional.

* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.

* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.

* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.

* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.

* The Muppets vs. Fox News.

* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”

* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.

* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.

* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.

Three for Wednesday

* Mega Brands, owner of the hated Mega Bloks, has won a trademark battle against the good people of LEGO.

* Karl Rove, RINO.

* And every freshman composition essay ever: Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation.

Superman and the Courts

io9 has a nice look at the history of comic-book intellectual-property law through the lens of Superman-related lawsuits. The most interesting, for me, remains the legal tussling over Superboy:

Superman creator Jerry Siegel submitted a proposal to DC Comics for a series of adventures about Clark Kent’s youth. DC rejected the proposal, but later printed Superboy while Siegel was serving in the US Army. When Siegel’s heirs attempted to terminate Superboy’s copyright, DC and Time Warner claimed that Superboy was merely Superman as a young man, and not a distinct character (and thus not copyrightable as distinct from Superman), giving DC the legal right to publish books featuring Superboy with or without Siegel’s permission.

Superboy’s Story: The original Superboy follows the adventures of the young Superman growing up in Smallville. He wears glasses as his alter ego Clark Kent and the iconic suit as Superman. Like his grownup self, he has superpowers and battles Lex Luthor, and he eventually travels to the 30th century to join the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Outcome: In 1948, a referee in a dispute between Siegel and DC found that Superboy was a distinct entity from Superman, and that DC had published the comic illegally. The findings were vacated in a settlement between DC and Siegel, but in 2006, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the referee, granting termination rights to Siegel’s heirs. However, the court later vacated that ruling, granting Warner and DC’s motion for reconsideration. Although Siegel’s family has recaptured some rights to Superman, the Superboy question remains undecided.

It must be the narrativist in me who just can’t understand how Superboy can be a distinct entity from Superman: the whole premise for Superboy is that he’s Superman as a boy.