Posts Tagged ‘Wales’
Weekend Links! Piping Hot!
* Don’t forget! The deadline for the SFFTV special issue on the Mad Max franchise is February 1.
* The local beat! The day Milwaukee almost killed the NFL.
* Expert says Michigan officials changed a Flint lead report to avoid federal action. Bernie calls on Snyder to resign. This is how toxic Flint’s water really is.
* A Bonus Keyword for the Age of Austerity this week: Meritocracy.
* The end of Al Jazeera America.
* NYPD Demands a Mere $36,000 “Copying Fee” for Access to Cops’ Body Cam Footage.
* I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their jobs, but this seems sacrilegious to me.
What a time to be alive.
* Rickman, Bowie, and class mobility.
* Teach the controversy: thebeatlesneverexisted.com
* The latest from KSR: What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
* The game’s afoot! Something Is Killing Off America’s Orange Supply.
* The incredible tale of irresponsible chocolate milk research at the University of Maryland.
* Girl Suspended for 30 Days Because She Lent Her Inhaler to a Gasping Classmate.
* Throw a save against narcissistic self-regard: “Role-playing Gamers Have More Empathy Than Non-Gamers.”
* Retired Art Teacher Leaves $1.7 Million to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
* 2016 pessimism watch: Democrats are in more trouble than they think. And changing demographics won’t save them.
* My people? 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world, new poll reveals.
* And “Late stage capitalism” is the new “Christ, what an asshole.”
End of the Semester Fire Sale: Every Link Must Go
* Another galaxy is possible: Toshiro Mifune turned down Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader roles.
* CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2016.
* The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
* Huntington’s disease and engineered humanity.
* A little on-the-nose, don’t you think? USS Milwaukee breaks down at sea.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: Millennials: They’re Just Like Us!
* College Football Coaches Are Making Millions Off A Useless Metric.
* AAUP calls UI search a ‘crude exercise in naked power.’
* Report Highlights Faculty Conditions at Jesuit Colleges.
* The Marquette Tribune did a short followup on my magic and literature class, returning this spring.
* 95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue. How Will the Professors Act When Fascism Comes to America? I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here’s what they said. Understanding Trumpism the Scott Adams Way. And here’s where things get wild: GOP preparing for contested convention. Trumpism would be the perfect ideology for a third party.
* When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity.
* On English studies and ennui. Gee, I wonder why a cohort of people who have discovered too late that they have committed themselves to an imploding profession might feel a little bit depressed.
* On the plus side: More Useless Liberal Arts Majors Could Destroy ISIS.
* The College of Saint Rose has laid off a number of tenured faculty, among them Scott Lemieux.
* Another mass shooting was over. The country had moved on. But inside one house in Oregon, a family was discovering the unending extent of a wound.
* Every year, roughly 40,000 people die in Minnesota. For some, it’s weeks or months before anyone finds them. Meet the crew who comes in to clean up the mess.
* Amazing Graphics Show How Much Fruits Have Changed Since Humans Started Growing Them.
* At least five police officers present during a shooting that was captured on a video that has created a firestorm of protest in this city supported a discredited version of events told by the officer who fired the fatal shots, newly released records show. Laquan McDonald and police perjury: a way forward. The U.S. Department of Justice unit that investigates civil rights violations by police departments has only about 18 employees who work on such investigations full-time. According to a former head of the unit, a forthcoming probe into the Chicago PD could overwhelm its “ridiculously small” staff. Good luck to them! Meanwhile, Rahm tries to hold on to power despite a clear need to resign.
* Here’s how Las Vegas police halted a trend in excessive force.
* How the Democrats flubbed San Bernardino. The worst part is most them seem not to have noticed.
* Nice work if you can get it: Top 20 billionaires worth as much as half of America.
* An Isochronic Map of the World from London, c. 1914. More links after the map!
* The geography of student debt.
* UBI in Finland — though it looks a bit like stealth social safety net cuts to me.
* Does America Deserve Malala?
* Obama scandal watch: This one does seem pretty corrupt, actually.
* Abandoned America: the Hershey Chocolate Factory.
* God save Title IX from its champions: ‘Hunting Ground’ Filmmakers to Harvard Law Profs: Criticizing Our Film Could Create a ‘Hostile Climate.’ When the core belief is that accusers never lie, if any one accuser has lied, it brings into question the stability of the entire thought system, rendering uncertain all allegations of sexual assault. But this is neither sensible nor necessary: that a few claims turn out to be false does not mean that all, most, or even many claims are wrongful. The imperative to act as though every accusation must be true—when we all know some number will not be—harms the over-all credibility of sexual assault claims. Relatedly, Newsweek has an article covering “the other side” of campus rape investigations.
* Telltale will make a Batman game.
* Two strikes against the next Wes Anderson movie: “…it’s a Japanese story and I’m playing a dog.”
* Servicemen Contradict Military’s Account Of Attack On MSF Hospital In Afghanistan.
* The arc of history is long, but Red Mars is finally going to series.
* Last year carbon emissions dropped while the economy grew for the first time in history.
* Public history at UNC: tracing the history of building names.
* Reading Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Islamophobia.
* ACA collapse watch: The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016.
* The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop. Don’t Let Kids Play Football. It’s Time To Take The Warriors’ Chances Of Going 73-9 Seriously. Golden State Warriors: best team in NBA history? The last team to start 20-0 like the Warriors was so good that its league folded.
* Being A Girl: A Brief Personal History of Violence.
* All The Items Of Clothing Women Have Been Told Not To Wear In 2015.
* These People Took DDT Pills In the 1970s to Prove it Was Safe.
* Being a good looking man could hinder your career, study finds. Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds. Stonehenge may have been first erected in Wales, evidence suggests.
* Why didn’t anyone stop Doctor Hardy?
* Latinx.
* Vice got the Rachel Dolezal profile.
* Fractal Problems in Comparative Domestic Policy.
* How D.C. spent $200 million over a decade on a streetcar you still can’t ride.
* Serial‘s back y’all. UPDATE: And it’s already super irritating!
* UFO truthers want to make Roswell an issue for 2016. Meet their lobbyist.
* Ron Howard says Arrested Development season 5 is in the writing stage.
* Teach the controversy: Building the Death Star Was an Economic Catastrophe.
* Pretty grim America: Gun Rights Groups to Hold Fake Mass Shooting at UT This Weekend.
* Just another here’s-what-happens-when-you-adopt-a-chimp story.
* FDA Approves Device That Can Plug Gunshot Wounds in 15 Seconds.
* The Definitive Guide to Sci-Fi Drugs Was Produced by the Government in the 1970s.
* Why are so many toddlers being put on heavy psychiatric drugs?
* All right, I’m in: Margaret Atwood Is Writing A Part-Cat, Part-Owl, Part-Human Superhero Comic.
* xkcd explains the Three Laws of Robotics.
* And in an age without heroes, there was Matt Haughey.
Weekend Links!
* If I weren’t going to DC on June 4th, I’d be going to this in Madison: Undercommoning the University: A Workshop.
* How writers of endangered languages are embracing sci-fi.
* With the recession over, are states investing in higher ed? Oh, honey.
* This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities.
* A local-interest explainer: Assata Shakur was convicted of murder. Is she a terrorist?
* New York University’s labor record epitomizes everything wrong with the neoliberal university.
* Report Blasts ‘Fantasy World’ of Presidential Benefits.
* FBI admits no major cases cracked with Patriot Act snooping powers.
* TIE Fighter and American Exceptionalism.
* The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
* While 45 percent of the roughly 1,000 respondents said they feel “somewhat prepared” to begin a career after college, slightly more than half said they did not learn how to write a résumé. And 56 percent did learn how to conduct themselves in a job interview.
* The Myth of the Garbage Patch.
* Up to 90 per cent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly US $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year, according to a report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
* 7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children.
* North Carolina receives NCAA notice of allegations in academic fraud case.
* New Study on Suicide Among College Athletes.
* BREAKING: Being competent is bad for you.
* io9 says the Supergirl pilot isn’t as bad as you’re expecting.
* This 85-Year-Old Nun Just Spent Two Years In Prison For Protesting Nuclear Weapons.
* Does Mike Huckabee Know Where the Ark of the Covenant Is Buried?
* A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two-Thirds Of Europeans.
* Home, the latest animated kid flick, is actually about colonialism. No, really.
* Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade?
* Modernism is back, baby! A Plea for Culinary Modernism.
* Friends from grad school still tease me about the day I basically went off on this rant in a seminar day discussing Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.
* #abolishmen: Men get into fatal car crashes twice as often as women.
* And another round of gender-swapped Disney characters.
The Union Jack: Now with 100% More Dragon
The Welsh want to put a dragon on the Union Jack. God bless those crazy kids. Via MeFi.
Gerry Canavan 