Posts Tagged ‘urban renewal’
Thursday Night Links!
* Rest in peace, Toni Morrison. A New Yorker flashback. The obligatory MetaFilter thread.
* Just in time for my fall class: [r/FanTheories] Hagrid is a Death Eater.
* Toward a Theory of the New Weird.
* In Praise of Samuel R. Delany. Samuel Delany on capitalism, racism, and science fiction.
* More Than 100 Immigrants Were Pepper-Sprayed At An ICE Facility. ICE Raids Miss. Plant After $3.75 Million Sexual Harassment Settlement. Families “Are Scared To Death” After A Massive ICE Operation Swept Up Hundreds Of People. Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter. America’s “Poster Child” Syndrome. ICE agents try to raid Brooklyn homeless shelter without warrants, sources say. Death by deportation.
* Police Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder. Boston Police crush wheelchairs belonging to homeless folks. After HuffPost Investigation, 4 White Nationalists Out Of U.S. Military — But Others Allowed To Remain. Chelsea Manning Can Remain in Jail for Another Year, Judge Rules.
* Trump administration authorizes ‘cyanide bombs’ to kill wild animals.
* Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. Surviving Amazon.
* Tired: Trade war. Wired: Real war.
* Police “neutralized” the Dayton shooter in 30 seconds. He still shot 14 people. White House rebuffed attempts by DHS to make combating domestic terrorism a higher priority. Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing Are Chapters in the Same Manifesto. Understanding The Statements Of Mass Shooters. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto contains a dangerous message about climate change. How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism. A future that currently doesn’t exist. America decided the death of children was bearable before America became America.
* Joke’s on you, libs! McDonald’s new paper straws aren’t recyclable — but its axed plastic ones were.
* How Gender Stereotypes Affect Pro-Environment Behavior. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper changes the game.
* How Peanuts Created a Space for Thinking.
* What is the secret to living to be well over 100 years old?
* now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list
* A thread involving me where the other people are saying more interesting things: The NYT published a review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s “cosmic justice” that basically convinced me the film *is* fascist.
* How often do women talk in Quentin Tarantino films? Updated now for Death Proof, if you saw it earlier.
* Where are they now? Manson family edition.
* Diabetic groom-to-be dies after taking cheaper insulin to pay for wedding. In the richest country in human history.
* The Highway Was Supposed to Save This City. Can Tearing It Down Fix the Sins of the Past?
* There’s a ‘Toxic Fallout’ From the Notre-Dame Disaster: Lead Contamination.
* Greta Thunberg Joined A Walkout At The First Major Summit Of The Movement She Inspired.
* Jeffrey Epstein Is the Face of the Billionaire Class.
* Dreams are lost memories: a fatalism vs stoicism film roundup.
* The legacy of colonialism on public lands created the Mauna Kea conflict.
* Robin Vos is a truly odious person.
* Seems fine: Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials.
* Twilight of Pacific Standard.
* The man just upped my rent last night / and tardigrades on the moon
* The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On.
* And copyrightopia is already here, it just doesn’t apply to anything you’d actually want to read: Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain.
Wednesday, Wednesday
* NOAA just released its summer outlook, predicting which areas are going to see unusually hotter temperatures this year. Unsurprisingly for those who have been watching the string of heat records that have been falling like dominoes, almost every area of the United States is included. Things Have Gotten Much Worse Since An Inconvenient Truth.
* Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
* How highways wrecked American cities.
* Is Donald Trump’s Hair a $60,000 Weave? A Gawker Investigation.
* The Democratic primary has entered its Gnostic phase.
* The Marijuana Industry’s War on the Poor.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Oberlin. A reasonably good ethnographic study of a subject which seems to have become utterly impossible to talk about dispassionately.
* And speaking of “impossible to talk about dispassionately”: The canon of English literature is sexist. It is racist. It is colonialist, ableist, transphobic, and totally gross. You must read it anyway.
* Diversity as a Tenure Requirement?
* The Baylor board of regents fired school president Ken Starr on Tuesday amid the sexual assault scandal involving the Bears football team, according to HornsDigest.com. Baylor not commenting on reports of President Kenneth Starr’s firing.
* Enrollments Slide, Particularly for Older Students.
* The terms “World Science Fiction” or “Global Science Fiction” are becoming legitimate fields of interest at a time where human life is indistinguishable from technological interference and scientific thought. We are technology. We are post-human. And we understand both the “global” and “world” adjectives only through the eyes and screens technology has afforded us. If we loosely understand science fiction as the imaginative exercise with which we deal with science and technology, then it becomes a major tool in understanding a reality that increasingly grows less believable and more fragile, in which crisis has become our quotidian condition. We are desperately looking for others because, in a globalized culture and economy, they might not exist anymore. We might have exterminated them, and we fear our genocidal complicity.
* Soviet Brutalist Architecture, Photographed By Frederic Chaubin.
* Some truly crazy news about Peter Thiel and Gawker today.
But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil of secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the super rich, few publications will have the resources or the death wish to scrutinize them closely.
* Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery hasgone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space oracquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!
* Freddie Gray verdict: US police officers who kill rarely get punished, but they might get rich.
* The Do Not Call list was supposed to defeat telemarketers. Now scammy robocalls are out of control. What happened?
* Would the U.S. Drop the Bomb Again?
* John Scalzi has a new space opera.
* Which Rock Star Will Historians of the Future Remember?, or, “Johnny B. Goode in the Anthropocene.”
But it did guarantee that one rock song will exist even if the earth is spontaneously swallowed by the sun: “Johnny B. Goode,” by Chuck Berry. The song was championed by Ann Druyan (who later become Sagan’s wife) and Timothy Ferris, a science writer and friend of Sagan’s who contributed to Rolling Stone magazine. According to Ferris, who was the album’s de facto producer, the folklorist Alan Lomax was against the selection of Berry, based on the argument that rock music was too childish to represent the highest achievements of the planet. (I’m assuming Lomax wasn’t too heavily engaged with the debate over the Sex Pistols and “Saturday Night Fever” either.) “Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock song on the Voyager disc, although a few other tunes were considered. “Here Comes the Sun” was a candidate, and all four Beatles wanted it to be included, but none of them owned the song’s copyright, so it was killed for legal reasons.
* The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs.
* How One in Ten Humans Could Be Wiped Out Within the Next Five Years.
* The Business of Too Much TV.
* On the Trail of Nabokov in the American West.
* And presenting Reverse CAPTCHA.
NYE Links!
* Finally, my moment has arrived: Smuggling LEGO is the new smuggling diamonds.
* The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.
* On Optimism: Looking Ahead to 2015.
* From climate denialism to climate cashing-in with nothing in between. Are We Approaching the End of Human History?
* Thanks to energy drilling operations, northern New Mexico is now covered by “a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud.”
* Serial, episode thirteen: 1, 2, 3 coming today or tomorrow I think. A sort-of out-there blog post on what it could all mean: The Serial Podcast: The Possible Legal Implications of Jay’s Interview for Jay & Adnan.
* UI Chancellor Responds To Salaita Report. This is actually a fairly significant walk-back of Wise’s position — I think she’s actually more progressive on academic freedom than Cary Nelson now — though since she’s still pretending Salaita wasn’t actually hired it doesn’t do much good for him.
* Professors are teaching less while administrators proliferate. Let’s find out how all that tuition is being spent. Colleges Need a Business Productivity Audit. Of course the actual text of the article zeroes in on instruction first, which is not the source of the problem…
* It’s the original sin of college football, and you’ll never guess what it is. In Harbaugh hire, excessive pay would send wrong message. How one former coach perpetuated a cheating scheme that benefited hundreds of college athletes. Shut down middling college football programs and shift the money back to instruction.
* The arc of history is long, but: New Michigan Law Bars College Athletes From Unionizing.
* Another angle on the growing Title IX mess: Mothers of accused college rapists fight back.
* Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play At Hard Work.
* Brent Bellamy reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization.
* 538 profiles the best damn board game on the planet, Twilight Struggle.
* Really interesting idea from Bleeding Cool about what might be happening with Marvel’s sliding timescale. I could honestly see them doing this, or something like it, at least until they start getting some rights back.
* Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America.
* Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.
* Is Wisconsin destined to be a Rust Belt backwater?
* Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond.
* Seriously, though, sometimes you can’t just switch the skin tones and have the story turn out the same.
* Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence.
.* BREAKING: Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.
* Counterpoint: Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri.
* To Discipline and Punish: Milwaukee Police Make Late Night Visits.
* I say teach the controversy: Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination.
* High School Basketball Team Banned From Tournament Over ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirts.
* This Deadspin piece has really made me regret softening my anti-Vox stance in recent months.
* Sounds like the Afghanistan war has ended again. This is #3 or #4 at least, right?
* How to destroy a city: just build a highway.
* The CDC is saying we’re all going to get the flu.
* And as if the IMF wasn’t bad enough.
* “Why should the legality of a sale of secrecy depend entirely upon who initiates the transaction? Why is bribery legal but blackmail not?”
* Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.
* No Charges for Police Chief Who Used Badge to Try and Intimidate Teen into Posing Nude.
* …but believe it or not it is possible for a cop to get fired over a fatal shooting.
* LAPD Launches Investigation Into ‘Dead, Dead Michael Brown’ Song Sung at Retired Cop’s Party.
* The labor movement should rally against police violence, whether police unions like it or not. I think we should let this whole work stoppage thing play out personally.
* Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine de Blasio. The headline actually undersells the severity of a story where they talk about planting drugs on his daughter.
* Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.
* Elsewhere in the richest city in the richest nation ever in the history of the world.
* Military Turns To Prison Labor For $100 Million In Uniforms — At $2-Per-Hour Wages.
* What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition.
* North Dakota to eliminate taxes because fracking fracking fracking forever fracking. What could go wrong?
* Real life Alien vs. Predator: Cuomo vs. the New York State Legislature.
But Cuomo has insisted he would agree to a pay hike only if the Legislature addressed a long series of criminal and ethical charges against many of its members by passing several reforms, such as a limit on outside incomes earned by lawmakers and a system of publicly financed campaigns.
The legislative leaders, however, responded that Cuomo was making demands he knew were unacceptable in a politically motivated effort to appear as a reformer because he’s under federal investigation for dismantling his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel.
* “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing.”
* Streetcars, maybe not so great?
* Heartbreaking story of a trans teen’s suicide, based on a suicide note that went viral. Now go hug your kid.
* Exciting new pioneers in research:
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors
ALLEN C. GOODMAN (Wayne State University)
JOSHUA GOODMAN (Harvard University)
LUCAS GOODMAN (University of Maryland)
SARENA GOODMAN (Federal Reserve Board)We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.
* Bat-Kierkegaard: The Dark Knight of Faith.
* Want to feel old? This Is What the Cast of Doug Looks Like Now.
* For its first Star Wars spinoff Disney has selected the impossible task of recasting Harrison Ford. They chose… poorly.
* Austerity in everything: Science proves once-in-a-lifetime moments will just make you more depressed.
* And there’s more! You’re more likely to die on your birthday.
* Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide.
* “Deputies said the shooting appears accidental”: Idaho toddler shoots and kills his mother inside Walmart.
* Wake up, sheeple! Back to the Future predicted 9/11.
* From io9: Physics students at the University of Leicester claim to have calculated the amount of energy required to transform water into wine.
* Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses.
* And I guess I always knew I’d die on a roller coaster.
‘Made in Durham’
The specters of mass incarceration, segregation and deindustrialization linger here. Locked up and locked out of mainstream employment, young men employ violence to enforce an economy of self-medication in these historically African American neighborhoods. Imprisonment and homicide continue to annihilate the nuclear family much like slavery did, dooming children for an insatiable cycle. Will this Durham actually be revitalized in an integrated way, or will it be bulldozed and gentrified or further marginalized?
Durham photographer Justin Cook profiled at Slate.
The Suburbs
The question is not, as Ryan Avent asks while guest-blogging for Ezra Klein, whether high-energy prices will destroy the suburbs. It seems clear that they will, at least to some extent, and more importantly it seems clear that these energy realities exist in a context with other, perhaps more immediate trends that point in the same general direction: America’s cities are on the mend, and it’s the suburbs that now face decline.
The important question, then, is not whether all this will happen but how suburban America will react to the fact of re-urbanification, which will have dire financial consequences for those who have concentrated the bulk of their wealth in the prices of their suburban homes. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, increasingly choose to live in cities, prices will rise there and fall in the suburbs, which over time will essentially wipe out those people whose suburban residence is also their primary or sole investment.
These people will have every financial incentive to fight to keep the suburban lifestyle intact, no matter what the cost in money, energy, or sprawl. And they’ll vote, demanding pro-suburban incentives and policy counter to every consideration of sustainability or good sense.
This will be not only a geographic fight but a class and intergenerational one as well, and if you’ll allow me to make a Big Prediction for a moment I fully expect this to be one of the more highly contested divides in American politics as we face the end of cheap energy and the accordant, dramatic weakening of our automobile-centric culture.
UPDATE: There’s more of this sort of speculation at Freakonomics, Political Animal, and Matt Yglesias.
Gerry Canavan 