All the Weekend Links!

* A lengthy update from IHE on the outrageous attacks on Marquette University graduate student Cheryl Abbate.

* Ursula Le Guin gave a great speech at the National Book Awards this week.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

* It’s quite a bit better than the other thing that happened that night, though Handler is trying to making amends.

* Kirkus Reviews on the radical Joanna Russ.

* A Sokal hoax we can all believe in.

* Dialectics of Serial.

* Roofs are caving in in Buffalo after a week of truly insane November storms. The temperature is projected to be 60 degrees on Monday, which means this could all melt in one day and cause a whole new set of problems.

* CFP: Hostile Intelligences and The General Antagonism.

The purpose of this conference is to organize and proliferate the material heresies that are the basis for what Matteo Pasquinelli has called “hostile intelligences” and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as “the general antagonism.” Pasquinelli writes, in “The Labour of Abstraction,” “Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to find eventually its epistemic twin.” For him, forms of knowledge and subjectivity play a prominent role in his theory of anti-capitalist revolution. Hostile intelligence is one imaginary in which the recently formed Accelerationists conceive such an epistemic twin. Moten and Harney’s category, “the general antagonism,” is no doubt the epistemic twin of “the general intellect”, and powerfully indicates a generalized disidentification with white-supremacist, capitalist culture that is an extant part of the fugitive practices of what they eloquently call “The Undercommons.”

* Program of the 2015 MLA Subconference.

* While the Regents claim to negotiate on behalf of those who use the university–students, staff and faculty–their new gambit instead shows the difference between the Regents and higher Administration, on one hand, and “those who use” the university on the other. UCOP’s Failed Funding Model.

* A Communiqué from the UCSC Occupation of Humanities 2.

* What the students were doing in 2010, and what they’re doing today, is defending art, science and philosophy against a regime that believes none of these things are of any value except as a means to wealth and power. They are quite literally defending the values of civilisation from those who have abandoned them.

* Jacobin: Higher education should be free. But we can’t just copy the flawed European model.

* In Response to Pending Grad Strike at U. Oregon, Administration Urges Faculty to Make Exams Multiple Choice or Allow Students Not to Take Them.

* Do you want to be responsible for something that’s gonna paint UVA in a bad light? Horrifying report in Rolling Stone about a young woman’s experience being attacked at a UVA fraternity and then reporting it. Please note that the description of what happened to her is quite graphic and very disturbing.

* Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women.

* Inside Yucca Mountain, incomprehensibly long time scales clash with human ones—pairing the monumental and the mundane.

The repository would need some kind of physical marker that, foremost, could last 10,000 years, so the task force’s report considers the relative merits of different materials like metal, concrete, and plastic. Yet the marker would also need to repel rather than attract humans—setting it apart from Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, or any other monument that has remained standing for thousands of years. To do that, the marker would need warnings. But how do you warn future humans whose cultures and languages will have evolved in unknown ways?

* Public officials once operated for profit. Now that system has returned with a vengeance. Mike Konczal reviews The Teacher Wars and Rise of the Warrior Cop.

* Academics sometimes seek to make the world a better place, and the Chronicle is ON IT.

* Seven years in, Twitter finally puts in what you’d think would be one of its most basic features.

* Bangkok cinema chain cancels Hunger Games screenings over salute protest.

* 400 Things Cops Know Is the New Bible for Crime Writers. By MU English Alum Plantinga!

* The Singularity Is Here: 5-foot-tall ‘Robocops’ start patrolling Silicon Valley.

* NYPD Officer ‘Accidentally’ Shoots and Kills Unarmed Man in Brooklyn. Why would police officers have their guns drawn as a matter of course? How can that be protocol?

* What To Do About Uber?

* Late capitalism and the viral imagination.

* Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment.

* Exhibit A? U. of Colorado Will Pay Philosophy Professor $185,000 to Resign.

* Mass hysteria at the Department of Education.

* Now we see the violence etc: In a blow to schoolchildren statewide, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 7 the State of Michigan has no legal obligation to provide a quality public education to students in the struggling Highland Park School District. The law, in its majestic equality…

* First Grader Was Told ‘Guess What, You Can’t Have Lunch’ Because His Family Was In Debt.

* Being bullied physically changes kids’ brains.

* The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More.

* When My Mom Was an Astronaut.

* Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. Passwords are the new poetry.

* Accrediting commission says UNC ‘not diligent’ in exposing academic scandal. Let the stern finger-wagging commence!

* Lunatic: Keystone Pipeline Will Teach Men “What it Is to Be a Man.” Literally toxic masculinity.

* It’s one reason we’re poorer than our parents. And Obama could fix it—without Congress. Whatever Happened to Overtime? I’m sure he’ll get right on it.

* ‘Text neck’ is becoming an ‘epidemic’ and could wreck your spine.

* A new analysis by PunditFact found that of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were flat-out false. What’s more, only a measly 8% could be considered completely “true.”

* In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat.

* No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally.

* Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities.

* The enduring legacy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers’ room.

* The Ghostbusters 3 we’ll never see.

* The Empire Strikes Back we’ll never see.

* This One-Page Comic Explains Why Batman Never Seems To Die.

* From this vantage, the efficient society that terrorizes and comforts Codemus, and enfolds him in the straitjacket of a diffused, technologized fascism, resembles the experience of many workers today. Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones.

* Flatland, at last, is truly two-dimensional.

* And this Deceptively Cute Animation Illustrates The Horrors Of My Addiction to Coca-Cola.Won’t you give what you can, please, today? The case for treating sugar like a drug.

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!