* So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.
Posts Tagged ‘transphobia’
My My My My Corona
* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.
* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.
* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?
* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.
* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.
* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.
* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.
* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.
* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.
* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.
* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.
* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.
* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.
* Probably the single biggest problem I have.
Let’s see what else is in the news.
* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.
* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.
* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.
* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.
* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.
* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.
* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.
* The circle of academic life.
* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.
* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.
* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.
* Tough week for Alex Jones.
* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.
Thursday Night Links!
* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.
* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.
* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?
* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.
* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.
* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.
* Here come the esports majors.
* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.
* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.
* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.
* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.
* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.
* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!
* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.
* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.
* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.
* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.
* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.
* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”
* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.
* How they teach slavery, then and now.
* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.
* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.
* I suppose this is canon (again).
* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.
* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.
* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.
* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?
* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.
* Absolutely psychotic nation.
* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.
* get you a man who can do all three
* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.
* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.
* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!
* This one is a real america.jpg too.
* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.
* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.
* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.
Happy Trumpsgiving
* From our family to yours, now more than ever: a Thanksgiving prayer.
* Turkeys Are a Nightmare from Which We Are Struggling to Awake.
* How Donald Trump Ruined Thanksgiving.
* The CFP for the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is up: Asymmetry.
* More scenes from the end of the university.
* Science fiction triggers ‘poorer reading’, study finds.
* ICE Says It Separated Immigrant Father From Infant Son Because He Couldn’t Prove Relationship. New York couple set to be deported to different countries, tearing apart family before Thanksgiving. DACA Twins Are Spending Thanksgiving Fighting Their Parents’ Deportation. ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity.
* As metaphors go, this is a little on the nose.
* “By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states.” That means 30% of the country will have more than a supermajority in the Senate.
* The Dam of Congressional Sexual-Harassment Claims Cracks Open. Two more Franken accusers emerge. Democrats are facing an important test with Al Franken. They’ve failed it before. ‘You’ll never work again’: women tell how sexual harassment broke their careers. How Our Broken Justice System Led to a Sexual Harassment Crisis. How rape culture makes women poorer. I find the cognitive dissonance required to process what was done to that U.S. gymnastics team in the moment of their assent to global fame almost too much to bear.
* Understand false rape accusations.
* Women surgeons are punished more than men for the exact same mistakes, study finds.
* This company truly has everything: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People. Oh, Uber. Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race. And with tech companies this good, why not end Net Neutrality?
* Management openly looting their institution? Gasp!
* A transgender professor just won a major court case. Seriously, it’s a big deal.
* Alex Azar, Trump’s HHS Pick, Has Already Been a Disaster for People With Diabetes.
In fact, price gouging from Eli Lilly and other insulin manufacturers has already had deadly consequences. Shane Patrick Boyle, a founder of Zine Fest Houston, died on March 18 after his GoFundMe campaign to pay for insulin came up $50 short. Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26, was found dead in his apartment on June 27. He was rationing his insulin after he aged out of his parent’s insurance coverage. The sad fact is more people would be alive today if insulin was affordable for all Americans.
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* By the end of all this they’re going to rename trump cards in bridge.
* The Jobs You’re Most Likely To Inherit from Your Parents. I had no idea “college professor” was a congenital condition. March for the cure today.
* Teen Mom 2 Asks an Important Question: Is It OK to Shoot Down Drones?
* Disney just does not understand Star Wars fans.
* The story of Star Trek: The Animated Series.
* You’re messing up your kids years before you think you are.
* No one has yet given a full accounting of how deranged this essay is.
* And, at last, Rick And Morty reveals Mr. Poopybutthole’s backstory. I still think he’s a parasite.
Thursday Links!
* Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.
* Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio.
* Indeed, this kind of repression is perhaps more sinister because it ropes you into participating in your own silencing. You become the policeman in your own head. When considering whether to attend a demonstration, the powerful internal suggestion is that, even if you do everything “right”—even if you are being peaceful but just happen to be in the same vicinity as someone who isn’t—you could get caught up in a costly legal battle and face serious fines, even jail time. Your entire life could be turned upside down. You might be left alone. But it’s impossible to know—and the only way to be sure is to stay home. You still have the “freedom” to choose, but fully exercising that freedom amounts to playing Russian roulette with an entity all too eager to take that freedom away if you get caught standing near a smashed window. So, really, how much freedom do you have?
* The government is spying on journalists to find leakers.
* Not exactly happily, I found this AAUP unpacking of procedural issues in the recent John McAdams decision pretty persuasive.
* An oral history of “The Inner Light.” The second-best discussion of “The Inner Light” you’ll see this year!
* Monopoly vs. the Nazis: How British intelligence used board games to thwart the Germans.
* How Jalada Is a “Revolution Uniting African Literature.”
* Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting. Here’s why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner. More. Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation. They’re also looking into Trump’s personal attorney.
* Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules.
* “He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,” says someone who speaks with the President. “I see him emotionally withdrawing. He’s gained weight. He doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts.” This is the most relatable Trump has ever been.
* Rise and shine, campers, ’cause it’s coooooold out there today.
* Don’t put ground wasp nest on your vagina to tighten muscles, warns gynecologist.
* California Single Payer Is a No-Brainer.
* If you want a vision of every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.
* SMBC roundup! We discovered a new form of ethical animal consumption. The older you are, the more people you have to deal with, so the number of lies to tends to go up quadratically. The anti-status-quo society. But a strange thing happened. Quantum hypocrisy. Marine biology. Ontology and the barbecue. Neoliberal magic. No funeral. You too.
* Confidence. Never corner a teacher. Flirting and coquettery. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should. Or, Twitter.
* The visit is intended to focus attention on the estimated more than 230 military veterans deported from the U.S. and on the need for a more rigorous process to ensure legal residents recruited with promises of citizenship are naturalized.
* Man Faces Deportation After Failing to Pay Fare on Minneapolis Light Rail.
* “Fearless Girl” is rapidly becoming an entire syllabus in the theory of art.
* More Than One-Third of Teen Girls Have Experienced Depression, Study Finds. When you have numbers like this you have to conclude that the problem isn’t the girls.
* In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives comics’ dead women their voices back. Buy it here!
* Suffering Sappho! The Tortured History of Female Superheroes.
* If only there were an appropriate Marx quote for this.
* On taking candy from a baby.
* A vaccine for denialism? I’m skeptical.
* Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* 1 in every 4 children robbed of their childhoods.
* “Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.”
* The patent and copyright systems are clear examples of how the distribution of income is determined by the rules put in place as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the “free market.” There is nothing about the laws of the economy that says the government has to grant these monopolies, and it certainly was not a natural process through which their length and scope came to be extended in the last four decades.
* So you were buddies with a Nazi.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* And a smart think piece from the archives: Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context. More relevant now than ever…
Monday Mega-Links
* Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Be President. Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken. Clinton Releases a Brutal Anti-Trump Ad. 5 not-totally-crazy electoral maps that show Donald Trump winning. Could Trump Put Georgia in Play for Democrats? Only a Democrat can stop Trump now. Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism. The six days of Carly Fiorina’s vice presidential campaign, ranked.
* Report: FBI Preparing to Interview Hillary Clinton About Email Thing.
* Wave of no-confidence votes sweeps Wisconsin campuses.
* Why graduate students should be allowed to see the letters we write on their behalf. I was in strong disagreement with the headline but was won over by the text.
* Recommendation for a quick, great read: Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti, an Afrofuturist space-age riff on Harry Potter with more than a little bit of Octavia Butler in there…
* Another thing I’ve been enjoying, which you might too: “Hardcore Game of Thrones” on howl.fm. (First three episodes available for free here.) It’s completely sold me on the viability of a prequel spinoff, and I may actually like it more than the actual series.
* Two Great Tastes: On Civil War and Hamilton. Meanwhile, a great review from Abigail Nussbaum asks whether Civil War (which I liked a lot) has ruined the MCU.
* The Norton Writer’s Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay written by an undergraduate. Literacy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.
* “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
* Unable to analyze meaning, narrative, or argument, computer scoring instead relies on length, grammar, and arcane vocabulary to do assess prose. Should you trust a computer to grade your child’s writing on Common Core tests?
* A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism.
* Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.
* Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?
* Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight. This situation is absolutely untenable and I cannot believe the airlines are willingly participating.
* Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills.
* Maps of the end of the world. The post keeps going after the image!
* Why Refrigerators Were So Slow to Catch On in China.
* U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.
* Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.’
One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.
* Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet.
* Happy Mother’s Day: Kids’ Screen Time Is A Feminist Issue. Keep scrolling!
* Nonhuman Rights Project Chimpanzee Clients Hercules and Leo to Be Sent to Sanctuary.
* Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff.
* The modern banking system and zero-factor security.
* University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien. There’s still more after the image!
* Here’s the Table Of Contents For Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Amazing Big Book of Science Fiction.
* The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies.
* Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
* Fullest House, A Never-Ending Stream of Daily ‘Full House’ Scripts Generated by a Neural Network.
* Before Hamilton, there was… An Oral History of Rent.
* Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship.
* Grimdark realism isn’t realistic: where is kindness on Game of Thrones?
* Twilight of The Antioch Review.
* Why we sued the American Studies Association.
* When Robinson Met Bacigalupi.
* Daredevils Jump Out of Plane, Play Quick Game of Quidditch Before Landing. Keep going.
* The Flight of the Navigator sequel/reboot just wrote itself.
* New J.M. Coetzee novel announced.
* Daredevil and the Problem of the Not Bad.
Ultimately, there’s not much you can say about Daredevil because its not-goodness derives from the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. This makes it hard to say anything about the way it’s not saying anything. Based on the first season, I would have argued that the show uses the superhero genre tode-familiarize gentrification and the way crime plays into struggles over urban land use. Similarly, I would contend that Jessica Jones uses the superhero-detective genre to de-familiarize trauma and addiction. Coming out — dare I say, being flushed out — of Daredevil season two, I would say that it uses the Batman-genre to re-familiarize the Ninja-genre. And for all the violence it does to its characters and setting, the real problem is this reinvestment in the fetish of ninja violence. The show uses the spectacle ofliteral violence to render unnecessary the organic narrative flow of people just being people in the world. Instead of the hidden injuries and traumas of class, as they play themselves out across our lives, we get a story of a ninja fighting ninjas because, well, ninjas.
* CEI et al. argue that TSA’s final rule fails to consider one important factor related to the deployment body scanners: a potential increase in highway injuries and deaths. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. Past research suggests that post-9/11 airport security policies were so invasive that a number of would-be air travelers decided to drive instead. Given the fact that auto travel is far more dangerous than air travel,three Cornell University economists found that TSA’s invasive, time-consuming airport screening policies resulted in about 500 additional highway fatalities annually in the years following 9/11—more than a fully loaded 747 per year.
* Google is working on a computer that is literally injected into your eye. Hard pass.
* Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War.
* What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage.
* On women’s bodies in academia.
* Educated people are usually critical of absolute truths, no matter if they come from statistics or religious revelation. Facts need to be understood within a larger cultural context in order to be deemed plausible or implausible. Today, however, we see an increasing tendency to describe the world not in terms of cultural values, but in terms of fundamental truths. In the cases of fundamentalism and neoliberal education of excellence, as I’ve shown here, this “deculturation” takes the form of a dangerous combination of religion and pseudoscientific thought peddled as excellence.
* There’s a Sci-Fi Novel Secretly Unfolding in Reddit’s Comments.
* 78% of Reddit Threads With 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis.
* Sure, let’s clone Leonardo da Vinci. Things could hardly get worse.
* I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Historical memory is not about the past — it is about the future.
* And some scenes from the Anthropocene: Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There. Fort McMurray Wildfire: 80,000 Evacuated Over Out-of-Control Blaze. Fleeing Fire in Oil Country. Alberta Wildfires Expected to Double In Size and Burn for Months. The First Coral Reefs Are Starting to Permanently Dissolve. Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard. Have a great week, everybody!
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
Monday Morning Links
* An Illustrated Account of the Great Maple Syrup Heist.
* The 85 richest people on the planet are as wealthy as poorest half of the world.
* Slate has a memo from MLK following the desegregation of Montgomery’s bus lines.
* The problem, Berger concluded, was that “the Cubists imagined the world transformed but not the process of transformation.” It is that larger question – the process of actually getting to another world — that takes us beyond the artist and challenges the Left as a whole to cope with what can be done in this current moment of widespread disillusionment. Art in the Age of Fatalism.
* If we don’t greatly reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, or completely eliminate them, a major city is going to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon. It’s remarkable—it’s incredible!—that a major city hasn’t been destroyed since Nagasaki. We can confront this problem or we can accept that hundreds of thousands or more will be killed.
* 14 Things We Learned from Bill Murray’s Reddit AMA. Bill Murray says he tried mightily to save Garfield.
* About 100 demonstrators rallied Friday outside the Safety Building to denounce Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm for his decision not to issue charges in the death of Corey Stingley.
* Dropouts with heavy debt litter for-profit college landscape in Wisconsin, new report says.
* “The world does not understand the settlements,” Livni said in a Channel 2 TV news interview. “The peace negotiations are the wall stopping the wave [of international boycott pressure]. If there is a crisis [in the talks, that wave] will crash through.”
* Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100.
* The Myth of the Deserving Rich.
* Responses to Grantland’s Trans Outing.
* Famous movie quotes recreated as pictograms.
* Book reimagines ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from a cat’s point of view.
* Debating executive salaries at MLA.
* Melville and the Language of Denial.
* The president is quoted today saying some things I never excepted a president to say.
* Even cough medicine is a lie.
* What if saving could be like a lottery?
* Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007. If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation. The National Review visits Appalachia, and somehow manages to blame welfare.
* Meanwhile: Heroin gains a deadly foothold in Vermont.
* The headline reads, “Thief drops urn containing Sigmund Freud’s ashes during break-in attempt.”
* Ultimate Slate Pitch? I Would Rather Lick a Toilet Seat Than a Cellphone.
* What’s Inside This Mystery House In North Carolina?
* Isn’t it pretty to think so? As Presently Constructed, GOP Cannot Win White House. More here. They say the Democrats can’t lose. I say give them a chance.
* The Average Human Wastes 22 Years Of Their Life… Sleeping.
* Why Expanded Universes Matter.
* I saw this movie: Starting next week, all Indianapolis-area hospitals will ban visitors with flu-like symptoms.
* Adjuncts exist, and the New York Times is ON IT.
* During World War Two, conscientious objectors in the US and the UK were asked to volunteer for medical research. In one project in the US, young men were starved for six months to help experts decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.
* Judge Dredd now enforcing jaywalking laws in New York, apparently.
* And someone left a laptop on a park bench.
All the Friday Night Links!
* We are ruled by fools: The amount of airtime granted to climate change on both the Sunday shows and the nightly news was up, too — to a total of 27 minutes, and an hour and 42 minutes, respectively, for the entire year.
* So long and thanks for all the fish: Freedom Industries has declared bankruptcy.
* “Why Is The Rest Of The Country Fixated On A New Jersey Traffic Jam And We Have No Clean Water?”
* Fracking Chemicals In North Carolina Will Remain Secret, Industry-Funded Commission Rules.
* Judge Rules Detroit Is Trying To Give Banks ‘Too Much Money.’
* Remember that most of the “steps” any insurance company or pharmacy makes you go through are pretty much nothing but hoops, in the purest sense of the word. These are obstacles being placed in your path in hopes that you will become discouraged and give up—and they won’t have to pay for your medication or treatment. Show them that you are not going away.
* The headline reads, “Six Years After Chemical Ban, Fewer Female Snails Are Growing Penises.”
* Every Scary, Weird Thing We Know the NSA Can Do.
* The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History.
* Total Disaster as Springsteen Tries to Sell Recordings of Live Shows.
* The rule of law still has a few bugs in it.
* Star Wars retcons we can get behind.
* Someone stop J.J. Abrams before he kills again.
* BREAKING MUST CREDIT CANAVAN’S RAZOR: The point of the STEM push is to lower STEM wages, not help people get jobs that don’t exist.
* BREAKING: Comedians are psychopaths psychotics. See comments.
* Johnson’s No More Formaldehyde Baby Shampoo.
* Even half of Utah supports marriage equality.
* The Myth Of The Absent Black Father.
* UNC Stops Professor Mary Willingham From Researching Athletes’ Low Reading Levels.
* Rob Nixon is giving a talk at UWM’s Century for 21st Century Studies next Friday.
* Wisconsin may eliminate ban on 7-day work weeks. Workers will be allowed to “volunteer” for extra work.
* This medieval manuscript curses the cat who peed on it.
* This transphobic publication hounded a woman to suicide. You’ll never guess what happened next.
* Pope Benedict Defrocked 400 Priests For Molesting Kids.
* We Would Have Eliminated Poverty Entirely by Now if Inequality Hadn’t Skyrocketed.
Gerry Canavan 