Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Washington DC’

Just 300 or So of the Most Important Links for This Friday Morning

with 2 comments

* SFFTV 11.2 is out, a special issue on Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and women and sf, guest-edited by up-and-comers Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint! Check it out.

* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.

* Spencer Ackerman explains Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men.

* Inside the (ultimately successful) campaign to recall the judge of the Brock Turner trial.

* Another report from the looting of Toys R Us.

* Norman, the world’s first psychopath AI.

* Water missing opportunity not to be wet.

* Mapping the Movement to Dismantle Public Education.

* My research suggests that those concerns are real, and millennials really are building wealth more slowly than the other working generations. But they are not insurmountable—as long as millennials are willing and able to work longer than their parents and grandparents did. Great can’t wait.

* A Professor Brought His Guns to Protect Protesters at White-Supremacist Rallies. Then His Troubles Started.

* Solo: A Star Wars Story & The Problem With Prequels. We need to talk about the woke droid. I Have No Mouth and I Must Solo. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves. What Solo could have learned from My Friend Dahmer. Disney manages to learn $50M on a Star Wars movie. Kelly Marie Tran has deleted all the posts off her Instagram due to months of harassment she has received for her character Rose in The Last Jedi. Racism, Misogyny & Death Threats: How Star Wars Fans Turned to the Dark Side. What if Star Wars never happened?

[whispering to date while watching Solo when Solo first appears on the screen] "movies exist to generate wealth for corporate shareholders."

— your friend john (@johnsemley3000) June 3, 2018

* Colonial Hottie: Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman and Brand Israel.

* Trump keeps making it harder for people to seek asylum legally. The Awful Spectacle of 200 Immigration Officers Raiding a Couple of Garden Stores. Former DACA recipient murdered in Mexico after deportation. The Heartache of a Migrant Boy Taken From His Father. Mom and 4 children forced to separate after seeking asylum in US. Cops are called when a senator tries to see kids taken from their immigrant parents. Yet another nightmare child separation story from the Chris Hayes podcast. ICE Agent Decides He Wants Kids After Seeing Incredible Love And Devotion Of Parents Begging Him Not To Take Their Child. Feds Deport Uncle of Six Orphans Whose Parents Died Fleeing ICE. UN office calls on US to stop separating families at border. U.S. sending 1,600 immigration detainees to federal prisons. Pizza Delivery Man Arrested By ICE Is Scheduled to Be Deported This Monday. A GoFundMe for Pablo and His Family.

In this case DOJ successfully argues a woman from El Salvador, who would otherwise be granted asylum, can be forcibly deported from the US for providing material support to terrorists.

Even though said material support came AFTER GUERILLAS KIDNAPPED AND FUNCTIONALLY ENSLAVED HER https://t.co/cmV00wqZuA

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 6, 2018

Seeking asylum is not illegal; it is a right guaranteed under international law. It’s the Trump administration that is acting illegally — by their own admission — by enacting punishments against asylum seekers. Everyone who is a party to this action is a criminal.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018

No American will ever have the right to pretend they didn’t know what ICE was doing.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018

The US government chaotically shuffling thousands of children it has kidnapped from their parents through a series of inadequate temporary shelters has a small number of very predictable outcomes, all of them extremely terrible.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018

@SenJeffMerkley was finally provided a tour of the kid jail.

Those are children in those cages. Ripped from their parents.

Many qualify to stay in the US. There is *no* reason to separate them from their parents.

Unless cruelty has become policy.#ThisIsUs #ThisIsAmerica pic.twitter.com/uQIsHojIoF

— Hassan Ahmad (@HMAesq) June 8, 2018

* Jordan Peterson isn’t a good psychologist, either.

* University tutor died after ‘silently struggling’ with workload. Content warning: suicide.

* Taxi-Driver Suicides Are a Warning.

* How the media covers celebrity suicides can have life-or-death consequences.

Time for that sad reminder. After Robin Williams' suicide, sensational media coverage that violated the CDC guidelines resulted in a 10 PERCENT increase in suicides. Same effect applies to mass shootings. Newsrooms, please be considerate in your coverage. https://t.co/O5Gy81rSP0

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 14, 2018

* Death of a gig worker.

* What gets muddled in this telling of the gig economy is the idea of control. An Uber driver can pick her hours, yes. But is she really her own boss, or is the boss the company’s algorithm? The algorithm, after all, determines where the driver will head next, who she’ll pick up, and how much she’ll be paid for that trip. In other words, many important features of the job are outside the driver’s control.

* Trump administration tells court it won’t defend key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration believes Obamacare’s preexisting conditions protections are now unconstitutional.

* Down With the Copay.

* Justice Department Secretly Accessed New York Times Reporter’s Email and Phone Records to Find Government Leaker.

* Literally just letting coal barons write the laws.

* Huge, if true: America Is a Spiraling Corporate Contract Dystopia.

* Trump’s Right-Hand Troll.

* Gaming it out: Would a Former President Get Secret Service Protection in Prison? Just kidding, Democrats are on the case. Meanwhile.

Republicans who claim the president can commit literally any crime without consequence either during (no indictments) or after (self-pardon) office are saying they do not consider this country a democracy + do not accept any limit other than their own will to power. Believe them!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 5, 2018

* David Hogg SWATted.

* Questions on Michigan’s Investment Tactics.

Recent scrutiny of investment practices by the University of Michigan is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and ethical lapses at colleges and universities seeking to increase their endowments.

Questions about Michigan’s investment practices were prompted by an investigation by the Detroit Free Press, which found that a large portion of the university’s nearly $11 billion endowment is invested in private equity, hedge and venture capital funds, and real estate investment firms run by top university donors and alumni investment advisers.

* Dystopian Bodies: Barbara Ehrenreich Attacks the Epidemic of Wellness.

* Scott Pruitt, GOAT.

* Poor road conditions cost Wisconsin drivers $637 each year.

* The Post has mapped more than 52,000 homicides in major American cities over the past decade and found that across the country, there are areas where murder is common but arrests are rare.

* ‘Clear-sky’ flooding worsens across U.S. as sea levels rise, report says.

* Below are the two main written versions of Sojourner’s speech, the original, on the left, was delivered at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851. The full text of each speech follows the synopsis below so you can see the differences line by line. I have highlighted overt similarities between the two versions. While Frances Gage changed most of the wording and added the southern slave dialect to her 1863 version, it is clear the origin of Gage’s speech comes from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech.

* Hard pass: Howard Schultz steps down at Starbucks, may consider run for president.

* Without Interpreters, California’s Deaf Prisoners Are Getting Stuck Behind Bars.

* A major physics experiment just detected a particle that shouldn’t exist.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.

* The Enlightenment’s Dark Side.

* Rebuilding the Antinuclear Movement. How a little “working group” stopped Oakland from becoming a mini-fusion center for the Department of Homeland Security. Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon.

* The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.

* Your schedule could be killing you.

* Nazis brauchen keinen Badespaß.

* Schopenhauer, come on. You promised to keep it together.

* Time’s Up, Bill.

* Volkswagen Vows to End Experiments on Animals.

* Marvel’s Women Problem: Not A Single MCU Film Has Female Characters on Screen for More Than 40 Percent of Runtime.

* Drones taught to spot violent behavior in crowds using AI. “The work has questionable accuracy rates, but it shows how AI is being used to automate surveillance.”

* Ways brands can celebrate Pride Month.

* Hacked: 92 Million Account Details for DNA Testing Service MyHeritage.

* It’s Ulysses! No, it’s Finnegans Wake! Who Can Tell?!

* Books Just for Grownups.

* The Art and Activism of the Anthropocene, Part II: A Conversation with Jeff VanderMeer, Zaria Forman, and Gleb Raygorodetsky.

* Lovely Twitter thread on Dr. Apgar, who probably saved my daughter’s life, and maybe yours too.

* Body Positivity Is a Scam. “How a movement intended to lift up women really just limits their acceptable emotions. Again.”

* It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right; I hope you had the time of your life.

* And these recently declassified NSA posters make our authoritarian dystopia seem fun.

Written by gerrycanavan

June 8, 2018 at 10:58 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", #MeToo, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, administrative blight, Affordable Care Act, algorithms, America, amnesty, animal experimentation, artificial intelligence, asylum, authoritarianism, Barack Obama, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Clinton, body positivity, books, brands, Brock Turner, California, capitalism, CFPs, children, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, coal, corpocracy, David Hogg, deafness, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, Department of Justice, deportation, Disney, DNA, Donald Trump, Dr. Apgar, drones, Duke, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, endowments, EPA, ESP, fandom, fascism, Finnegans Wake, flooding, Frankenstein, Gal Gadot, gay rights, general election 2020, Germany, gig economy, Google, graft, gratuitous cruelty, guns, hacking, health, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, ice, immigration, impeachment, Israel, James Joyce, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, Jeff Vandermeer, Jordan Peterson, kids today, labor, looters, lower the voting age, Mark Bould, Marvel, Mary Shelley, mass shootings, MCU, military-industrial complex, millennials, misogyny, Monica Lewinsky, Nazis, NSA, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, Palestine, parenting, particles, pets, philosophy, physics, police, politics, potholes, prequels, protest, psychology, psychopathy, racism, rape culture, Reddit, Schopenhauer, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Scott Pruitt, sexism, Sherryl Vint, Sojourner Truth, Solo, Star Wars, Starbucks, Stephen Miller, suicide, surveillance society, SWAT teams, taxis, the Anthropocene, the Enlightenment, The Last Jedi, totalitarianism, toxic fandoms, toxic masculinity, Toys R Us, true crime, Uber, Ulysses, UNC, University of Michigan, Volkswagen, voting, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education charter schools, Washington DC, wellness, white supremacy, Wisconsin, women, Wonder Woman, work, X-Men

Blogging from the Mid-Atlantic, But the Other Way

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* An awakening anatomy of the average life’s two years of boredom, 6 months of watching commercials, 67 days of heartbreak, and 14 minutes of pure joy. 14 minutes of joy seems low even for a single day. What are you people doing with yourselves?

* The Voyager records, as art.

* I’m With™ Clinton’s ‘Innovation Agenda’ for Higher Ed.

murder shouldn’t be *legal* for entrepreneurs but it shouldn’t exactly be illegal either

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 30, 2016

entrepreneurs should get to run three red lights every six months, no questions asked

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2016

* Republicans seem pretty obviously right about this one. I don’t see how there’s any case for its propriety, but here’s a try.

* The Humiliating Practice of Sex-Testing Female Athletes.

* Estimate of U.S. Transgender Population Doubles to 1.4 Million Adults.

* For 20 years, the center has blocked off female-only hours to accommodate the area’s large Hasidic population. The pool has no male-only hours, and some Hasidic men swim during the hours that are open to all genders. An anonymous complaint was lodged recently with the city’s Human Rights Commission, which sent a notice to the parks department this spring saying that the policy might violate a city law barring gender discrimination in public accommodations.

* Using the budget usually reserved for the committee, they created a program called Dudes Understanding Diversity and Ending Stereotypes, or DUDES.

* He said he’s glad colleges have found the research useful, but he is cautious about the institutions that are taking it as an absolute. Mr. Sue said his goal had always been to educate people, not punish or shame them, if they engage in microaggressions.

* Boris Johnson and the Cuckoo Nest Plot. Now even Gove says he won’t Brexit before the end of the year. Sanders and Corbyn: The Survivors. Brexit Might Never Happen. Brexit: a disaster decades in the making. So you want to con a country. Based on a close reading of Frank Bruni’s Brexit commentary, “A Bachelor Named Britain, Looking for Love” (reproduced below the question), please describe the bearing of the New York Times op-ed staff on the collapse of serious political argument in American establishment institutions in the early 21st century.

* How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front. Bonus Tolkien! How To Tell If You Are In A J.R.R. Tolkien Book.

A wizard has roped you into a quest because one of your ancestors invented golf.

* Westeros Is Poorly Designed. A Followup: It’s Okay That Westeros Is Poorly Designed. Some more nerdery on the subject.

When asked how fast the ships in Babylon 5 travel, creator J. Michael Straczynski replied that they travel “at the speed of plot.”

How big is Westeros? “Plot-sized.” How many people live there? “Plot thousand.” How do they make their living? “Tilling the plot.”

* Game of Thrones season 6 was good TV that shows why the series will never be great.

* Why did the Stars Wars and Star Trek worlds turn out so differently? Please Stop Marrying Fictional Characters to People They Met as Children, It’s Creepy. I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run.

* How to Get Tenure. Counterpoint: You Probably Won’t Get Tenure.

* How to Give a Conference Paper.

* Elsewhere on the academic beat: Study Finds First-Year Students Who Take 15 Credits Succeed. Why Can’t My New Employees Write? The New McCarthyism. Right-Wing Elites Love Your Abigail Fisher Hot Take.

* Rationalia has already garnered some powerful enemies.

Sadly, there is no solution to the #Rexit crisis save the formation of a new country, South Rationalia, which I must reluctantly lead.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 30, 2016

* Amazing, awful: Author Gay Talese disavows his latest book amid credibility questions.

* Unprecedented’: Scientists declare ‘global climate emergency’ after jet stream crosses equator. The Window for Avoiding a Dangerous Climate Change Has Closed. The Day After Tomorrow Happened 30,000 Years Ago. Geoengineering at the CIA.

* Physicists just confirmed a pear-shaped nucleus, and it could ruin time travel forever. Not if I undiscover it yesterday!

* America is lying about its involvement in Africa: AFRICOM’s reports simply don’t add up.

* Secret History of the AOL Disc Campaign.

* More from the twilight of the law schools.

* “This is the single greatest panel ever published in a Transformers comic.”

* Trumpocalypse watch! Another boondoggle. And another. And another. And another. This one is probably the best yet. 4 Ways Cleveland’s Colleges Are Bracing for the Republican Convention. Who will win the presidency? Why not play along at home! And if you want a vision of the future: imagine Trump’s vice-presidential candidates stomping on a human face, forever.

ReverendMagnett_2016-Jun-30

Written by gerrycanavan

July 1, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, affirmative action, Africa, America, AOL, Battle of the Somme, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, books, boondoggles, boredom, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Britain, bullying, Captain America, Chris Christie, CIA, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, college, comics, conferences, debt, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, ecology, economics, education, emails, England, entrepreneurs, fantasy, first-year students, Friendship Is Magic, Game of Thrones, Gay Talese, gender, general election 2016, geoengineering, geography, George R. R. Martin, Harry Potter, HBO, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, if you want a vision of the future, imperialism, innovation, Jeremy Corbyn, journamalism, joy, kids today, law schools, Lord of the Rings, Loretta Lynch, love, maps, marriage, masculinity studies, McCarthyism, Michael Gove, microaggressions, misogyny, Mordor, My Little Pony, NASA, Neil deGrasse, neocolonialism, New Journalism, New York Times, Newt Gingrich, outer space, plot, politics, polls, race, racism, Rationalia, Republican National Convention, running, scams, science, science fiction, sexism, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, swimming, television, tenure, the 1990s, The Day After Tomorrow, The Hobbit, the law, the speed of plot, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time travel, Tolkien, Tories, Transformers, transgender issues, Tyler Cowen, United Kingdom, veepstakes, Voyager spacecraft, Washington DC, Westeros, World War I, worldbuilding, writing

Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!

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* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.

* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!

* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.

* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.

* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).

* Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.

* Star Trek 2017 Rumor Watch!

* Local news.

* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?

“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”

* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.

* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.

* 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?

* How to Build a Major in a Young Field: The University of Toledo’s new disability-studies program attracts undergradute interest.

* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.

* Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.

* UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.

* President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.

* Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’

* The Minecraft Generation.

* Behind the Scenes at the Met.

* The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.

* Wild Chernobyl.

* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.

* A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.

* Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.

* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.

* A(other) New Map for America.

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* This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!

* How Not to Audit the Pentagon.

* You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.

* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!

* New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.

* Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.

* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!

* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.

* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.

* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.

* I was a men’s rights activist.

* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.

* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.

* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.

* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.

Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan. The chimp was eventually caught after being shot with a tranquilizer gun and falling from the power lines, Kyodo news reported. REUTERS/Kyodo

* It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.

* Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.

* Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.

* A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.

* Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.

* Being Kumail Nanjiani.

* Being Cherie Berry.

* Being Monica Lewinsky.

* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.

* Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.

* Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.

* Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.

* New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.

* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.

* At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.

* Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?

* And they said culture was dead!

* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.

* Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.

* Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.

* Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.

* Can SeaWorld Redeem Itself?

* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?

* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?

* Behold, the US alt-right.

* If you want a vision of the future.

this is craaaazy. I mean, PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE much? no one wants your avatar, cameron! pic.twitter.com/zFHsohnibD

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) April 15, 2016

* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 18, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with 1099s, 2030, Aborigines, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Afro-pessimism, Al Qaeda, aliens, Alpha Centauri, alt-right, America, Andrew Jackson, animal intelligence, animal personhood, animals, apes, apocalypse, art, Australia, Avatar, Avatar 5, Barack Obama, basketball, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Beirut, Ben Affleck, Ben and Jerry, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, blackness, books, capitalism, CEOs, CFPs, Cherie Berry, Chernobyl, child care, Childrens Hospital, circumcision, class struggle, Cleverman, climate change, coffee, college, contract employees, coral reefs, Cornell, creeps, Death Star, Democratic primary 2016, disability, disability studies, Disney, Donald Trump, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, elevators, emoji, emoji movie, feminism, film, Florida, FOIA, food, Foon, Game of Thrones, games, Georgetown, gig economy, Golden State Warriors, Great Barrier Reef, Greenland, Haiti, Hamilton, Hello from the Magic Tavern, How the University Works, huge if true, ice sheet collapse, independent studies, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, intelligence, James Cameron, Jesuits, John McAdams, journamalism, just peace, just war, Keurig, kids today, Kimmy Schmidt, Kumail Nanjiani, LEGO, librarians, libraries, literary theory, local news, Los Angeles Review of Books, maps, Marquette, men's rights activism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, minimum wage, misogyny, Mississippi, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, modernity, monarchism, Monica Lewinsky, monkey news, monkeys, moral panic, Mount St. Mary's, music, musical theater, musicals, my scholarly empire, neoliberals, Netflix, North Carolina, obituary, Octavia Butler, Offices and Bosses, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, pepper spray, Peru, philosophers, podcasts, Poland, politics, prison-industrial complex, public relations, rape, rape culture, reactionaries, recycling, Republican primary 2016, Rogue One, Scalia, science film, SeaWorld, Shakespeare, slavery, songs, Srinivas Aravamudan, Star Trek, Star Trek 2017, Star Wars, statehood, Stephen Curry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Salaita, student debt, Supreme Court, Tampa Bay, teaching, television, tenure, the $10 bill, the $20 bill, the courts, the humanities, the law, the Pentagon, tigers, Timbuktu, Title IX, Twitter, UC Davis, United Nations, University of Toledo, Vatican-City-style communofascism, Washington DC, what it is I think I'm doing, word processing, working moms, Wow! signal, you don't exist, zoos, Žižek

Tuesday Links! Too Many of Them! Send Help!

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* Don’t forget! Just two weeks until the “Global Weirding” deadline!

* And tomorrow night in Missouri! Marquette Professor to Present ‘After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction.’

* CFP: Radical Future and Accelerationism.

* Evergreen headlines: The Shrinking Ph.D. Job Market.

* Last year’s Pioneer Award winner: “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.”

* The Anthropological Unconscious, or How Not to Talk About African Fiction.

* AfroSF Now: A Snapshot, Seven Novels and a Film.

* Africa Has Always Been Sci-Fi.

* Cost Control Is a Progressive Value.

* Grade Inflation, Forever and Ever Amen.

* Dueling letters: President Lovell. Professor McAdams.

* Cheating Incidents Blemish NCAA’s Marquee Event.

* Honors Colleges Promise Prestige, But They Don’t All Deliver.

* The Humanities in the Anthropocene.

* Extinction: A Radical History.

* Art in the Age of Economic Inequality.

* Manifesto of a Future University.

* 30 Cities Where America’s Poor Are Concentrated. You know where this is going.

* It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention. And a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Jeffrey Dahmer’s House Is Up for Rent During the Republican National Convention.

* More politics watch! The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election. Sanders +2.6! Trump -4.1! Go vote Wisconsin!

* It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates.

* My analysis of the latest federal data shows that, on average, these families’ income — including tax credits and all sources of welfare — is about $9,000 below the poverty line. That means ensuring no children grow up in poor households would cost $57 billion a year. (To put that in perspective, that’s how much money we’d get if Apple brought back the $200 billion it has stashed overseas, and paid just 29 percent tax on it – it’s a big problem, but it’s small compared to the wealth of our society.)

* Students begin sit-in at Allen Building, demand resignation of Executive Vice President Tallman Trask.

* Unionizing Pays Big Dividend for Professors at Regional Public Universities. What Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges Made in 2015-16.

* The villain gap: Why Soviet movies rarely had American bad guys. Risk time in the gulag by reading about Soviet-era underground media. Cold War board games explore the conflict’s history, spycraft, and humor. Soviet sci-fi: The future that never came.

* This Genius Twitter Feed Is Turning Classic Kids’ Books Into Nightmares.

* Superman And The Damage Done: A requiem for an American icon. An oral history of Superman. A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Death to All Superheroes. Yes, chum, there’s more links below the picture.

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* The Antonin Scalia School of Law, or…

Koch donation leads George Mason to rename its law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law. That's right: ASS Law. https://t.co/7vtmEusF5s

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) March 31, 2016

* Retirees Are Handing Wall Street Billions For No Good Reason.

* All politics is local: I grew up being compared to my overachieving cousin. Now he’s a Supreme Court nominee.

* Laughter doesn’t scale.

* Imagine living in a cell that’s smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate.

* Up to half of people killed by US police are disabled.

* “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

* The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore.

* Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. But I say that’s not thinking big enough! 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.

* This Is How We Could Hide Our Planet From Bloodthirsty Aliens.

* Dibs on the screenplay: Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Just Reappeared and Nobody Knows What Happened to It. 

* Researchers Just Discovered a New State of Matter.

* Hot take watch: Aaron Burr, Not So Bad? I wish I knew the Hamilton soundtrack well enough to make a proper joke here.

* Statistical Analysis Has Revealed Game of Thrones‘ True ‘Main’ Character.

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* Data suggests a mere 94% of Tor data is malicious.

* It is now 100 years since the war on drugs began in the United States and was then gradually imposed on the rest of the world.

* Indigenous video games you should download.

* Scientists bemoan SeaWorld decision to stop breeding orcas.

* Researchers who have recently ventured into this region say the once-vibrant ecosystem is now a ghastly tableau, filled with pale-white corals that are at risk of dying off.

* Dark, gritty ad absurdum: The Tick in 2016.

* Durham and gentrification.

* Trumpism in everything, Wal-Mart edition.

* NFL Sends Threatening Letter To New York Times, Demands Retraction Of Concussion Investigation.

* The Ultimate List of Weapons Astronauts Have Carried Into Orbit.

* Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly. The end of Florida. These Maps Show What Washington Will Look Like When Antarctica Melts.

* Ambiguous utopias: In Pod-Based Community Living, Rent Is Cheap, But Sex Is Banned.

* Can an outsider become Amish?

* The strange case of Jennifer Null.

* Whatever happened to utopian architecture?

* Miracles and wonders: Treating Huntington’s With Gene Knockout Might Be Safe For Adults.

* Terry Gilliam tempts fate, again.

* The best Star Wars character you’ve never heard of.

* And the arc of history is long, but the MLA has changed its style guide again.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 5, 2016 at 8:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with a vague mish-mash of identitarian buzzwords, Aaron Butt, academia, academia freedom, accelerations, Africa, Afrofuturism, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, ambiguous utopias, America, anonymity, anthropology, apocalypse, Apple, April Fool's, architecture, art, astronauts, austerity, Batman, Batman v. Superman, Bernie Sanders, board games, CFPs, cheating, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, citation, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, Clone Wars, coastal cities, Cold War, college basketball, college sports, comics, concussions, coral reefs, cost control, databases, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, digitality, disability, distant reading, Don Quixote, Donald Trump, Duke, economics, energy, eugenics, extinction, fascism, Florida, football, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, genetics, genomics, George Mason, George R. R. Martin, global weirding, Google, grade inflation, graphs, Hamilton, Hillary Clinton, honors colleges, How the University Works, Huntington's disease, ice sheet collapse, income inequality, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Dahmer, John McAdams, laughter, law schools, manifestos, maps, March Madness, Mark Bould, Marquette, mass extinction, matter, Merrick Garland, Michael Lovell, Milwaukee, miracles and wonders, MLA, my media empire, my scholarly empire, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, NFL, Occupy Duke, ocean acidification, orcas, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Panama Papers, paperbacks, Paradoxa, pensions, PhDs, Pioneer Award, pod-based community living, police, police state, politics, polls, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, reboots, Republican primary 2016, Republicans, retirees, Robin, satellites, Scalia, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Sea World, sex, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, solar system, Soviet Union, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels, superdelegates, superheroes, Superman, Supreme Court, tax havens, taxes, tenure, Terry Gilliam, the Amish, the Anthropocene, The Dark Forest, the dark side of the digital, the dark web, the humanities, the Internet, the Tick, the university in ruins, Tor, trees, Trumpism, trutherism, underground media, unions, USSR, Utopia, villains, Wal-Mart, Wall Street, war on drugs, Washington DC, wealth, weapons, whales, Wisconsin, writing

Spriiiiiiiing Breaaaaaaaaak! Links

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I have a plan to shorten the coming Dark Ages from 10,000 years to only 1,000. PM me for details.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2016

* Don’t miss the CFP for my upcoming Paradoxa special issue on “Global Weirding”!

* Of course you haven’t read Canavan until you’ve read him in the original French.

* Black Study, Black Struggle.

* Today in the end of our lives’ work. Delaware State cuts more than a quarter of its majors. But don’t worry, we’ve finally got the solution.

* Chairing a humanities department at the end of the world.

* Trying to put a number on adjunct justice.

* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied.

* Course evaluation forms ‘not read properly by students’: Undergraduates endorsed patently false statements in US experiment.

* Can a Marxist Read Tolkien?

* Cli-Fi Comes to YA.

* I think you’ll find every possible jaundiced, post-academic riff on this story has already been made: French woman aged 91 gets PhD after 30 years.

* Cuomo bares fangs at CUNY.

* A new United Nations report on racism as a human rights issue speaks to challenges people are facing right here in Milwaukee.

* All about the SF sensation of SXSW, Dead Slow Ahead. And more!

* Great moments in unenforceable contracts.

* Ten Years after the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A prison interview with the accuser.

* A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave.

* Reminder: NCAA Amateurism Is a Corrupt Sham, We Are All Complicit. March Madness means money – it’s time to talk about who’s getting paid. And here’s how to gamble on it.

* The trouble with people who lived in the past.

* Inside the Protest That Stopped the Trump Rally.

* How to steal a nomination from Donald Trump. The Pre-Convention. There is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party. I can’t be contrarian about Donald Trump anymore: he’s terrifying.

* Inside a Trump rally.

* Meet the Academics Who Want Donald Trump to Be President.

* I do agree that presidential term limits make little sense, though my solution would be to abolish the office entirely.

ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you now to the most joyless general election season of all time

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 16, 2016

* The oldest man in the world survived Auschwitz.

* What if Daylight Saving Time never ended?

* Twilight of the Metro.

* Twilight of Sea World.

* Teach the controversy: Richard Simmons May or May Not Be Currently Held Hostage by His Maid.

* As temperatures soar, new doubts arise about holding warming to 2 degrees C.

* The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go. Game Two. Game Three. Game Five. But we got one!

* How The TV Show of Octavia Butler’s Dawn Will Stay True to Her Incredible Vision.

* Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism.

* Take your Baby-Sitters’ Club cosplay / fanfic blog to the next level.

Screen Shot 2016-03-16 at 8.55.03 PM* Photoshopping men out of political photos.

* Scenes from Iconic Films Hastily Rewritten So They Pass the Bechdel Test.

* Another ultimate TedX talk.

* Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.

* Paul Nungesser has lost his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia.

* The Really Last Crusade.

* Chris Claremont visits Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men.

* Despair fatigue.

* Paging Lt. Barclay: Science proves the transporter is a suicide box.

* The Untold Tragedy of Camden, NJ.

* At least he denied it!

* J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish.

* Scientists discover ‘genderfluid’ lioness who looks, acts and roars like a male.

* Always a good sign: Star Trek Beyond Is Reshooting and Adding an Entirely New Cast Member. Meanwhile: Paramount lawyers call Star Trek fan film’s bluff in nerdiest lawsuit ever.

* Jacobin reviews Michael’s Moore Where to Invade Next. Jacob Brogan reviews Daniel Clowes’s Patience.

* From our family to yours, happy St. Patrick’s Day.

* Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along.

* And because you demanded it: What if James Bond Was a Chimpanzee?

zero likes, zero retweets, but history will know it as the best tweet of all time https://t.co/Qzp3EVayBe

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 16, 2016

Written by gerrycanavan

March 17, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Andrew Cuomo, animal liberation, animal personhood, animals, artificial intelligence, Auschwitz, austerity, Baby-Sitters Club, Barack Obama, Bechdel test, bonobos, bracketology, Camden, chimpanzees, class struggle, climate change, college basketball, college sports, Columbia, comics, contracts, copyright, cosplay, course evaluations, CUNY, Daniel Clowes, David Graeber, Dawn, Daylight Savings Time, Dead Slow Ahead, Delaware State, despair, documentary, domestic society, Donald Trump, Duke, Duke Lacrosse, ecology, Episode 7, Expanded Universe, expanded universes, fan fiction, fascism, film, Foundation, French, games, genderfluidity, general election 2016, global weirding, Go, Hari Seldon, Harry Potter, history, hostage situations, How the University Works, human rights, Indiana Jones, infrastructure, J.K. Rowling, James Bond, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, lions, longevity, Lord of the Rings, magic, March Madness, Marxism, mattresses, Michael Moore, Milwaukee, misogyny, my media empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New York, NSA, Octavia Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paradoxa, philology, philosophy, photography, politics, prime numbers, protest, quantum mechanics, race, racism, rape, Republican National Convention, Republicans, reshoots, Richard Simmons, science fiction, Sea World, sexism, Silicon Valley, St. Patrick's Day, Star Trek, Star Trek Axanar, Star Wars, student movements, surveillance society, teach the controversy, TED talks, term limits, that'll solve it, the courts, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the law, the Metro, the past is another country, the past isn't over it isn't even past, the presidency, time travel, Title IX, Tolkien, transporters, true crime, twins, Washington DC, whales, Where to Invade Next, X-Men, Xenogenesis, young adult literature, zunguzungu

Mondayish Reading

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* In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests. The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.

* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.

* TV archive discovers couple who beat Kirk and Uhura to first interracial kiss.

* Marquette is hiring a sustainability coordinator.

* “Why I’m Teaching a Netflix Class.”

* What Do You Have to Make in a Year to be in the Top 1% of Your State?

* Videogames without Players.

* The Death and Life of Simulated Cities.

* You could call it Rahm’s revenge—the whole point of passing a more ambitious, more politically risky version of Obamacare was to get enough healthy people to buy coverage, and that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening.

* Anti-proliferation advocates have accused U.S. officials of disguising the fact that they have built a new weapon, breaking President Obama’s promise not to construct new nuclear bombs.

* Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. How to Decimate a City.

* On science fiction and post-scarcity economics.

20130126* I suppose I’ve always been ahead of the curve.

* Junot Díaz talk discusses social activism in academia.

* To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’

* Penn State Cancels Recreational Class Trips To NYC & DC Due To “Safety Concerns.”

* Star Wars, before the EU. Alan Moore’s Star Wars. Hang the Jedi.

* A brief history of judicial dissent.

* On Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s racism wasn’t the matter of a few unfortunate remarks here or there. It was a core part of his political identity, as indicated both by his anti-black policies as president and by his writings before taking office. It is completely accurate to describe him as a racist and white supremacist and condemn him accordingly.

* The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

* Meet the outsider who accidentally solved chronic homelessness.

* What was it like to be a Nintendo game play counselor?

* Antonin Scalia, fraud, part 87.

* The rich are better.

* The struggle is real.

* They live, weesa sleep.

* The rise of “white student unions.” They’re probably fake.

So UC Berkeley (a so-called bastion of liberalism and diversity) now has a white student union. pic.twitter.com/zfekufgvLu

— Zoé S. (@ztsamudzi) November 22, 2015

* Use of High-Tech Brooms Divides Low-Tech Sport of Curling.

* When administrations co-opt student movements, Duke edition. Also at Duke: debate over continuation fees.

* CNN, still the worst, forever and ever amen.

* Trump has aggressively weaponized the ability of right-wing politicians to lie with impunity. Though you always wonder if there’s still some limit after all.

* The further I get into my thirties, the more depressed I become.

* Women in Hollywood.

* Music stops, everybody switch positions on free speech.

* Colbert Drops to 3rd Place Behind Kimmel as New Poll Shows CBS Host Alienating Audiences. I’ve never understood CBS’s plan here.

* English is not normal.

* The McDonaldization of Medicine.

* The Unholy Alchemy behind Cheetos.

* Come along, Susan.

* Super-excited to trust my kids to the wisdom of the public school system.

* In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future.

* ‘Hunger Games’ Box Office: Why $101M Weekend For ‘Mockingjay 2’ May Be Cause For Despair.

* A “lost” James Bond movie written by Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, would have seen Daniel Craig’s 007 forced to kill Judi Dench’s spymaster M in a shock finale, according to a new book.

* Required classes, y’all.

* The tech economy, still a bad joke.

* All U.S. Lab Chimps Are Finally Going To Paradise: A Retirement Home in the South Somewhere.

* Enjoy it while it lasts: Coffee’s good for you again.

* Elsewhere in science facts that are definitely going to hold up forever and ever: Scientists Say Psychopathic People Really Like Bitter Food.

* SyFy wants a Black Mirror too. Syfy is Releasing a Film, De-Rebranding, and Becoming Super Interesting.

* What crime is the founding of a bank, compared to the founding of a police department?

* But just in case you had any ideas that this wasn’t going to be a super-depressing list: Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of ‘post-antibiotic era.’

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Written by gerrycanavan

November 23, 2015 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, activism, administration, air travel, Alan Moore, apocalypse, Barack Obama, bitter people, Black Mirror, Bond, bullying, Channel Zero, Cheetos, chimps, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, CNN, coffee, Colbert, college basketball, college football, college sports, comics, continuation fees, curling, demographics, deprofessionalization, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, Duke, economic bubbles, English, Episode 7, Expanded Universe, Facebook, fake facts, film, free speech, futurity, games, gender, graduate student movements, health care, Hollywood, homelessness, How the University Works, Hunger Games, income inequality, industrial agriculture, ISIS, Islamophobia, judicial dissent, Junot Díaz, kids today, language, LEGOs, lies and lying liars, Marquette, McDonald's, misogyny, Mockingjay, names, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York, Nintendo, panic, pedagogy, Penn State, police state, politics, post-antibiotic bacteria, post-scarcity, race, racism, Republicans, required classes, research, safety, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, sexism, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, sustainability, SyFy, Syracuse, teaching, tech economy, television, tenure, the courts, the curve, The Force Awakens, the Jedi, the law, the rich are better, the rich are different, the social safety net is for closers, They Live!, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trolls, Washington DC, white people, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, Woodrow Wilson

Rise and Shine, It’s 2015! Links

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* 2014 Kinda Sucked: A Look at Our Slow Descent Into Dystopia. I didn’t think it was all that slow.

* That annual tradition: What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?

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* B^F: “Ryan North reviews George Gipe’s insane novelization of Back to the Future, published before the book was released.”

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 14.5: “Errors in Judgment.”

* This City Eliminated Poverty, And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It.

* How to be politically optimistic in Wisconsin.

* In an alternate universe, the New York Police might have just solved the national community-policing controversy. Routine harassment of citizens is down as much as 94%!

* I say teach the controversy: No matter what vernacular is employed, the time has come for other alternatives to the handcuffs, leg irons and waist chains routinely used on incarcerated youth in the District.

* Carcetti for President: Maryland Governor Will Commute All Remaining Death Sentences To Life Without Parole.

* “DA Who Failed to Indict Killer Cop Now GOP Front Runner for Congress.” 2015 starting out great!

* “Girls from a variety of backgrounds were featured within the campaign, reflecting that anyone can embody the spirit and character of Annie.” Oh, Target.

* What was Ello?

* Look, I get that the football players are angry. I even get that all the boosters who hadn’t stepped up before are now swearing that they would have donated millions of dollars to keep the program alive if only Watts had asked them. But the Faculty Senate? At a bare minimum, shouldn’t they have had the back of a president who wanted to stop draining money from academics into football, even if no one else did? Yeesh.

* “This book review by 13-year-old Eve Kosofsky (later Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, known for her brilliant work on queer theory) appeared in the January 1964 issue of Seventeen. You’re welcome.”

* Researcher: Sony Hack Was Likely an Inside Job by a Woman Named “Lena.”

* U.S. Solar Is 59 Percent Cheaper Than We Thought It Would Be Back In 2010.

* Salon’s charter school scam roundup for January 1.

* White Flint isn’t completely dead, but the outlook is not good. The only stores still in operation are a Lord & Taylor and a P.F. Chang’s. On Jan. 4, the P.F. Chang’s will close. Why I’m Mourning The Death Of A Mall.

* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal rings in the New Year right with the Uncomfortable Truthasaurus.

20101130

 

Written by gerrycanavan

January 1, 2015 at 9:08 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with 2014, 2015, academia, America, Annie, austerity, Back to the Future, books, charter schools, class struggle, college football, college sports, copyright, death penalty, dystopia, Eric Garner, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, film, hacking, headbrick, How the University Works, juvenile detention, juvenilia, malls, Manitoba, Martin O'Malley, Maryland, Mincome, mistakes were made, North Korea, novelizations, NYPD, optimism, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, poverty, prison, public domain, queer theory, Quvenzhané Wallis, race, racism, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scam, Seventeen, solar power, Sony, Target, the courts, the law, the more you know, The Wire, Tommy Carcetti, Uncomfortable Truthasaurus, universal basic income, war on education, Washington DC, Wisconsin, words

Sunday Links!

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* Letter of Support for Abbate from Marquette Dept Chairs. Pres. Lovell Letter to the Campus Community — November 22, 2014.

* Cold and Hungry: Discourses of Anorexic Femininity in Frozen (2013).

* We Need To Talk About Tyrion: How HBO Failed George R. R. Martin’s Iconic Character.

* Another good one from Charlie Stross: Let’s put the future behind us.

Anyway, this is the future, folks. It’s built from the bones of the past, it’s unevenly distributed, and it’s already here. And while it’s an interesting place to visit, I’m not sure I’d want to stay.

* Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns. Well, there’s an Ebola crisis to co– oh? really? Well, there’s Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration to cover!

* How to Shave $1 Trillion Out of Health Care.

* Under pressure, Wisconsin universities boost response to campus sex assaults.

Across town at Marquette University, three fraternities last spring received official warnings after reports of sexual misconduct. Complaints against fraternity members were handled through student misconduct channels, and the university ordered the fraternitiesto undergo training.

* UVA Suspends Fraternities Following Rolling Stone Campus Rape Investigation. As is usual with these sorts of things, what’s stunning is how clear it is they’re only doing this because they got caught. They knew everything Rolling Stone reported before RS reported it; the only difference is now everyone knows those things.

* The University of Virginia’s selection of an independent counsel to investigate rape allegations turned out to have been a member of the fraternity that is the subject of the accusations.

* Universitybot Responds: Gang Rape as “Sexual Misconduct.”

* The Historical Moment at UC Davis – Strategies for Davis Activists. Some UC Occupiers on Ferguson and the State of Emergency.

* I tell you, the ethical shambles that is today’s Young Person. Watching live college football — college football paid for by your tuition dollars, whether you like it or not — is not a right! It’s not even a privilege! It’s an obligation.

* Marion Barry has died. I’ve been learning a lot today from people talking about who he was before and besides a walking punchline.

* Transgender woman dies suddenly, presented at funeral in open casket as a man.

* And Where the Academic Jobs Aren’t: Philosophy Edition.

Right offhand, a number of notable trends pop out. First, this looks like a terrible job season so far. Over at the Smoker, Zombie has tallied only 110 tenure-track jobs [note: now, going back all the way to June, it doesn’t look quite so bad–though most AOS are still in the single digits).  Second, the most in-demand AOS this year are ethics (37 listings), applied ethics (35) jobs, open (37), and social-political (20). So, value theory’s looking comparatively good. Third, it’s surprising (to me, at any rate) how few jobs are in the “core”, though Mind isn’t doing too bad (15 listings).

From what I can gather of the contemporary philosophy discipline a lion’s share of those ethics jobs (themselves now the supermajority of the field!) are in interdisciplinary attempts to make ethics “relevant” to science, medicine, business, etc. If you want a vision of the future of the humanities…

Written by gerrycanavan

November 23, 2014 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic job market, actually existing media bias, anorexia, applied ethics, Barack Obama, Benghazi, Charlie Stross, civil rights movement, class struggle, college football, college sports, Ebola, Elysium, ethics, femininity, feminism, Ferguson, fraternities, Frozen, funerals, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, grad student nightmares, health care, How the University Works, if you want a vision of the future, immigration, kids today, Marion Barry, Marquette, Missouri, Occupy Cal, orbital suburbs, outer space, philosophy, politics, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, retrofuture, science fiction, St. Louis, student movements, student occupations, the humanities, Title IX, transgender issues, University of California, University of Wisconsin, UVA, UWM, Washington DC, Wisconsin

Sunday Night Links!

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* Kenya sci-fi series imagines European immigrants fleeing to Africa. A very different premise, but it reminds me a bit of some of what happens in Abdourahman A. Waberi’s excellent short novel The United States of Africa.

* Map of the week: 57% of languages do not have gendered pronouns.

* How comics portray psychological illness.

* New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators. With searchable database so you can see how your school has changed since the 80s.

* UCLA spends 2% of its budget on sports, while UO spends 13%. 13%!

* The Council of UC Faculty Associations did the math, and showed to get tuition back down to 2000-01 levels $5300 in today’s dollars), and state funding back up to spend 20001 amounts per student, would cost to the median individual California taxpayer, each year, a total of $50.  Restoring full quality and affordability for the state’s 1.6 million public college and university students would cost the state median taxpayer about the same as a holiday bottle of single malt scotch.  That would get us halfway back to a Free UC

* Grad school’s mental health problem. When education brings depression.

* “Teachers can’t strike, so we’ll strike for them.”

* Functioning democracy watch: The rise of the blank-slate candidate.

* Lawrence Lessig: Only the super-rich can save us now.

* But when it comes to the narcissism of war, as the example of Christopher Hitchens reminds us, no one has quite the self-deluding capacity of the intellectual.

* Friends, it gets worse: California aquifers contaminated with billions of gallons of fracking wastewater.

* U.S. Emergency Rooms Are Bracing For An Ebola Panic. The nightmare Ebola scenario that keeps scientists up at night. ‘Breach of Protocol’ Led to 2nd Ebola Infection. Cuba leads fight against Ebola in Africa as west frets about border security. But don’t worry, we’re tweaking all our incentives: US government offers $1m for best hazmat suit design as demand surges.

* Prison to Table: The Other Side of the Whole Foods Experience. Pennsylvania’s addiction to prison-building a moral, economic disaster.

* BREAKING: White people are radically misinformed about just about every salient question in American politics.

* Yes, they are killing young black males. Documents Show NYPD Has Paid $428 Million in Settlements Since 2009. Asset seizures fuel police spending.

* Why is the recovery so weak? It’s the austerity, stupid.

* They did, however, find the case significant enough to notify their sergeant — “due to the fact that it was an F.S.U. football player,” the report said. The sergeant, a Florida State University sports fan, signed off on it and the complaint was filed away as “unfounded.” It was hardly the first time that the towering presence of Florida State football had cast a shadow over justice in Tallahassee.

* Cultural preservation watch: There Is A Nine-Foot Tall Statue Of Edward Snowden In New York City.

“When the story broke about Edward Snowden, I was thinking a lot about surveillance and monumentality and how we remember things,” Dessicino told BuzzFeed News on Friday. “How public space is used and how people in history are remembered.

“And I got the idea that maybe people who are major actants upon history aren’t always represented properly, and those people could be written out of history by not having something more permanent made of them.”

* Elsewhere in Snowdenmania: news that he has apparently inspired a second leaker, still at the agency, as well as a nice button on the love story that dominated so much of the early coverage.

* I’ve been a Moffat-skeptic and didn’t like Twelve’s introduction or first few episodes at all, but I have to admit the new Doctor Who is probably as good as it’s ever been. Each of the last few episodes has been better than the last. Sid & Nancy on the TARDIS.

* Nielsen: still the absolute worst.

* The oldest struggle: Hawk v. drone.

* Yet, there is something incomprehensible and inconsistent about this brand of “evil.” Mordor presents these characters in incredibly high fidelity—and I mean that both aesthetically and narratively. Some of the Orcs wear visible jewelry. One dev pointed out during a video preview that “some of them are poets.” But we’re told again and again that these Orcs want to destroy beautiful things. It just doesn’t hold up, and this tension extends to every element of their narrative and systemic characterizations. These Orcs have fears, interests, values, rivalry and friendships. Some Orcs are lovingly protective of their bosses or underlings. But they are “savage creatures” that “hate beauty,” so go ahead and enslave them.

* Matt Yglesias is making sense: The real problem with Nate Silver’s model is the hazy metaphysics of probability.

* The LEGO Batman Movie is the moment reboot culture begins to learn at an algorithmic rate. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

* “He soon resigned.” A chess column had run in the New York Times since 1855, until today.

* Here come the self-driving cars.

* Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired.

* This Is How Judges Humiliate Pregnant Teens Who Want Abortions.

* Marissa Alexander will have a new trial.

* Unpopular opinion watch: This is not a perfect article, but the proposition that universities are not equipped to be courts and shouldn’t try to be seems basically right to me. I can’t imagine how people are looking at the last few decades of Title IX implementation and saying the answer is to give schools a larger role in this.

* Dystopian road signs.

* Understanding Homestuck.

* Understanding the Great Zucchini, DC’s most in-demand clown.

* Well, that explains it. Hitler was ‘a regular user of crystal meth’, American Military Intelligence dossier reveals.

* The age of miracles: cure for type-one diabetes imminent.

* And I’m so old I can remember when “full of bees” seemed like the worst possible thing.

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Written by gerrycanavan

October 12, 2014 at 6:13 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with Abdourahman A. Waberi, abortions, academia, addiction, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, agriculture, America, an age of miracles, animals, austerity, California, cars, chess, civil forfeiture, clowns, college football, college sports, comics, crystal meth, Cuba, cultural preservation, democracy, depression, diabetes, Doctor Who, don't panic, drones, drought, dystopia, Ebola, Edward Snowden, FSU, full of bees, full of spiders, futurity, games, gender, grad student life, Great Recession, hawks, Hitler, Homestuck, How the University Works, hydrofracking, imperialism, ISIS, just raise taxes, Kenya, language, Lawrence Lessig, LEGO, Lord of the Rings, Marissa Alexander, medicine, memory, mental health, mental illness, metaphysics, MS Paint Adventures, Nate Silver, neoliberalism, Nielsens, NSA, NYPD, only the super-rich can save us now, orcs, pandemic, pedagogy, Peter Capaldi, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, prison-industrial complex, probability, pronouns, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reboots, road signs, science fiction, science is magic, self-driving cars, Silicon Valley, spiders, Steven Moffat, strikes, surveillance society, teaching, television, the courts, the economy, The Great Zucchini, the Holocaust, the law, The LEGO Movie, this time it'll be different, Title IX, Tolkien, tuition, UCLA, United States of Africa, University of Oregon, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, warning signs, Washington DC, water, web comics, white people, Whole Foods, words

Thursday Links! Guaranteed* Not to Bum You Out!

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* Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook.

* I would have thought this was still a few years off: “Faculty object to plan to replace humanities requirement with self-help course.”

* The Marquette Tribune has an article on adjuncts at our university today.

* Unraveling the response to this incident, and where it seemed to go wrong and why, offers a glimpse into the complexity of responding to cases of sexual assault in study abroad, the competing legal frameworks that study abroad programs exist within, and the tensions that can result when the best interests of the institution and the student are arguably not one and the same.

* The flipped classroom as MOOC waste product.

* “You go to an Ivy League school. Then you either become an investment banker or a management consultant. After two-three years, you apply to law school or b-school. And if you fall off the path for even one year, you can’t get back on.”

* Major League Baseball owners, despite earning more than $8 billion in revenue in 2013, voted in January to allow individual teams to slash or eliminate pension-plan offerings to their non-uniformed personnel.

* The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the Secret Corruption Inside PBS’s News Division.

* The NSA and Climate Change Spying: What We Know So Far.

* All in all, the NEADA estimates that sequestration caused about 300,000 families to lose home energy assistance.

* Simply saying we should improve the quality and reduce the duration of work doesn’t allow us to ask whether that work needs to exist at all.

* BDS gaining steam within Israel itself.

* Even a Stationery Logo Pits Palestinians Against Israel.

* The Book of Revelation speaks of a great two-headed beast, paradoxically describing each head as providing worse cable service than the other.

* Oliver Sacks and the Mystery of Hallucinations.

* Another woman speaks out over Bill Cosby sexual abuse allegations.

* There Have Been At Least 44 School Shootings Since Newtown.

* Barbie to Be a Featured “Model” in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Ugh.

* The Millennium Falcon Owner’s Workshop Manual.

* Is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actually a show about interracial family? You may have seen me going back and forth with Scott a bit this morning about how to include the romance elements of the show here; if this is supposed to be about family, it seems like we have to deal with the fact that all the siblings are in love and Big Bro is sleeping with Mom.

* Anthology alert!  Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse.

* And here’s what a Martian space elevator might actually look like. Sold.

Written by gerrycanavan

February 13, 2014 at 11:49 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, activism, actually existing media bias, adjuncts, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., apocalypse, austerity, Barbie, baseball, BDS, Bill Cosby, Book of Revelation, cable companies, Chicago, class struggle, climate change, Comcast, comics, dignity of work, domestic surveillance, ecology, family, guns, How the University Works, incest, Israel, Ivy League, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Marquette, Mars, Mars trilogy, Marvel, massacres, Millennium Falcon, modeling, MOOCs, neoliberalism, neuroscience hallucinations, Newton, NSA, Oliver Sacks, our brains work in interesting ways, Palestine, PBS, pedagogy, pensions, politics, rape, rape culture, science fiction, self-help, socialism, space elevators, Sports Illustrated, Star Wars, surveillance society, teaching, the humanities, the sequester, the worst, Time Warner, Title IX, war of education, Washington DC, work

However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That

with 3 comments

9710380815_b64e98462e_b* First, they cast Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and I said nothing.

* de Boer v. Schuman re: Hopkins. It’s not the supply, it’s the demand.

* The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.

* Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes.

* If I worked at Kansas University, this post might get me fired.

* Rortybomb v. the social safety net.

* Charlie Stross v. Bitcoin.

* X-tend the Allegory: What if the X-Men actually were black? Essay version. Via.

* “Men’s Rights” Trolls Spammed Us With 400 Fake Rape Reports.

* The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency.’ It’s already here. 96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change. The year in fossil fuel disasters.

* “Unfathomable”: Why Is One Commission Trying to Close California’s Largest Public College? ACCJC Gone Wild.

* San Jose State University has all but ended its experiment to offer low-cost, high-quality online education in partnership with the massive open online course provider Udacity after a year of disappointing results and growing dismay among faculty members.

* Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses.

* CSU-Pueblo revising budget downward; up to 50 jobs at risk, loss of $3.3M.

* For-Profit College Oakbridge Academy Of Arts Suddenly Shuts Down.

* “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” the billionaire told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”

* In Defense of ‘Entitlements.’

* The way we die now.

* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.

IncomeGuide_2013_Jan17_RGB_page-11_11

* “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

* World’s first full-size Lego car can hit 20 mph, powered by insane, 256-cylinder compresed air engine.

* Scott Walker signals he will sign school mascot bill.

* Thieves steal risqué calendars, leave protest signs.

* DC Passes Great Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Days Bills. What’s in Them?

* France institutes a carbon tax.

* Community Season 5 Feels Like An Old Friend Has Finally Come Home.

* 62 Percent of Restaurant Workers Don’t Wash Their Hands After Handling Raw Beef.

* Mars by night.

* Shock in Ohio: No evidence of plot to register non-citizen voters. That only proves how successful the conspiracy has been!

* Wow: Tampa Toddler Thriving After Rare 5-Organ Transplant.

* The Decline of the US Death Penalty. Still illegal to murder people in Detroit (maybe). 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 20123. Data Broker Removes Rape-Victims List After Journal Inquiry.

* The true story of the original “welfare queen.”

* Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.

* The 16 Colleges and Universities Where It’s Hardest to Get an A.

* Michael Pollan on plant intelligence.

* Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter.

* Marriage equality reaches New Mexico.

* A vigil planned as a peaceful remembrance of a teen killed in police custody ended with tear gas and arrests Thursday night in downtown Durham.

* An oral history of the Cones of Dunshire.

* On scarcity and the Federation.

* “Characters” trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

* And ion has your science fiction postage stamps.

ku-xlarge

Written by gerrycanavan

December 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, Afrofuturism, allegory, Ant-Man, apocalypse, Bitcoin, calling in, carbon tax, catastrophe, Charlie Stross, charts, City College of San Francisco, class struggle, climate change, college, comics, community, CSU Pueblo, Dan Harmon, deafness, death, death penalty, Detroit, Durham, ecology, entitlements, film, for-profit schools, fossil fuels, France, gay rights, God works in mysterious ways, grade inflation, graduate student life, How the University Works, hygiene, illness, income inequality, insanity, Johns Hopkins, Kansas State University, labor, LEGO, manifestoes, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, mascots, Mayor Bloomberg, meat, medicine, men's rights activism, Michael Pollan, minimum wage, misogyny, MOOCs, mundane SF, Native American issues, New Mexico, no future, Ohio, over-educated literary theory PhDs, paid sick days, Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd, photographs, plants, police brutality, politics, post-scarcity, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, rape, rape culture, restaurants, rich people, San Jose State, scarcity, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, silence, social media, stamps, Star Trek, television, tenure, The Cones of Dunshire, the future is now, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the way we die now, true crime, voter fraud, voter suppression, Washington DC, welfare queens, Wes Anderson, words, X-Men, Žižek

All the Midweek Links

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* CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education. CFP: Anthropocene Feminism at the Center for 21st Century Studies.

* By now my students were getting a bit restless. The confidence with which they had gone into this testing situation was beginning to dispel. Just a bit. There were still 102 questions left to answer.

* Exclusive Gyms For Members Of Congress Deemed ‘Essential,’ Remain Open During Shutdown. Amtrak Is in Trouble, But Congress Won’t Care. Government shutdown ends North Carolina WIC benefits. Social Security Warns Benefits Could Get Cut. DC Can’t Spend. Here’s how it’ll mess up higher ed (including freezing student loans). Secession by other means. Back Door Secession. Avenging the surrender of the South.

nbt.2706-F1

* The horror: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.

* Former Graduate Student Collects Placement Data He Wishes He’d Had.

* (Another) Intern Couldn’t Sue For Sexual Harassment In New York Because She Wasn’t Paid.

* A recent report shows that graduate students generate nearly a third of all education debt.

* Pay It Forward is a bad idea that doesn’t seem to make sense even in its own terms.

* “Exploitation should not be a rite of passage.”

* Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty–student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty–student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.

* How to Kill a Zombie: Strategizing the End of Neoliberalism.

* How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds.

High fees and black boxes are just part of the story. Some funds also allow their managers to make undisclosed side bets by trading ahead of or opposite to the fund’s trades.

Chicago-based Grant Park Futures Fund LP, which is marketed by Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), says on page 90 of a 180-page, April 2013 prospectus that David Kavanagh, president of the $660.9 million fund’s general partner, may place such personal trades. “Mr. Kavanagh may even be the other party to a trade entered into by Grant Park,” it says.

* Adam Kotsko’s Contribution to the Critique of White Dudes.

* Rebecca Solnit, The Age of Inhuman Scale.

* Cropped Out: Environmental History Through a Car Window.

* Joseph Stalin, Editor.

* Vulture has an excerpt from Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection.

* Sports Illustrated has an excerpt from League of Denial, on the NFL’s concussion denialism. You can also watch the Frontline documentary here.

* Soviet board-games, 1920-1938.

* In the days of the Soviet Union, the country boasted that all its citizens shared the wealth equally, but a new report has found that a mere 20 years after the end of Communism, wealth disparity has soared with 35% of the country’s entire wealth now in the hands of just 110 people.

* The rise of the portmanbro.

* Within 35 years, even a cold year will be warmer than the hottest year on record, according to research published in Nature on Wednesday. The L.A. Times will no longer publish letters from climate cranks.

* But the kids are all right: Arin Andrews and Katie Hill, Transgender Teenage Couple, Transition Together.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 9, 2013 at 2:40 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing journalism, adjuncts, Amtrak, bros, capitalism, cars, CFPs, charts, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, climate change, concussions, Confederacy, conferences, contingency, denialism, ecology, editors, environmentalism, feminism, film, football, government shutdowns, grad student nightmares, graduate student life, hedge funds, How the University Works, hyperobjects, income inequality, interns, kids today, labor, male privilege, neoliberalism, NFL, North Carolina, Oregon, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pay It Forward, pedagogy, politics, Russias, scale, scams, secession, sexual harassment, Society Security, Soviet Union, Stalin, standardized testing, student debt, superexploitation, teaching, the Anthropocene, the kids are all right, transgender issues, tuition, unions, war on education, Washington DC, Wes Anderson, white privilege, WIC, words, zombies

Monday Links, Part 2!

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* …comparing salary sharing as a portion of revenue in professional sports to scholarship funding as a portion of revenue in athletic departments, a new working paper published by Cornell University’s Higher Education Research Institute takes a different angle to make the same point: college athletes are being robbed.

* On October 11th, a group of right-wing truckers is planning to drive to DC to shut down the major commuter highway that circles the city. They’ll continue to block traffic, they say, until they see the arrest of elected officials who have “violated their oath of office.”

* Nielsen releases a new Twitter-penetration metric.

* How Someone Ends Up Working In Disability Studies.

* Thanks To The Government Shutdown, College Sexual Assault Investigations Have Been Put On Hold.

* Adjunct Stereotypes Exist for Administrators’ Ease.

* The headline reads, “U.S. Women Are Dying Younger Than Their Mothers, and No One Knows Why.”

In particular, growing health disadvantages have disproportionately impacted women over the past three decades, especially those without a high-school diploma or who live in the South or West.

Well, gee, I bet I can guess!

* Reductions in the amount of public money allocated to universities are fuelling corruption within higher education systems across the world, it was claimed this week.

* Netflix as the new canon. I’ve seen this in my own classes.

* And the New Inquiry #21 is on witches. Enjoy!

Written by gerrycanavan

October 7, 2013 at 2:47 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with academia, adjuncts, canons, capitalism, cartels, class struggle, college basketball, college football, college sports, corruption, disability studies, feminism, government shutdowns, health care, how it is I came to be doing what it is I think I'm doing, How the University Works, misogyny, NCAA, Netflix, Nielsens, politics, poverty, protest, rape culture, ratings, sexism, television, The New Inquiry, truckers, Twitter, Washington DC, witches

Thursday Night Links: Neoliberalism, The University in Ruins, Is the Pope Catholic?, and More

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* CFP: Ecology and the Environmental Humanities symposium at Rice University.

* Rather than enlarge the moral imagination and critical capacities of students, too many universities are now wedded to producing would-be hedge fund managers, depoliticized students, and creating modes of education that promote a “technically trained docility.” Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of corporate culture, many universities are now driven principally by vocational, military and economic considerations while increasingly removing academic knowledge production from democratic values and projects. The ideal of the university as a place to think, to engage in thoughtful consideration, promote dialogue and learn how to hold power accountable is viewed as a threat to neoliberal modes of governance. At the same time, higher education is viewed by the apostles of market fundamentalism as a space for producing profits, educating a docile labor force, and a powerful institution for indoctrinating students into accepting the obedience demanded by the corporate order. Neoliberalism and the Politics of Higher Education: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux.

* “We believe the current (higher education) leadership is pursuing a bad model that will decrease affordability for students and parents, eliminate good jobs, increase inequality and reintroduce a class-based system where the rich will receive a good, four-year liberal arts education, and everyone else will get trained for jobs that will last 10 years and then disappear.” The SEIU considers higher education.

* The Commercialization of Academia: A Case Study.

This has been the one constant in my experience.  Each of the ten academic years I’ve been at my current institution has been subjected to some fundamental reorganization, to the point where my colleagues have a joke about it: it’s a Mao-esque permanent revolution. In this time, my department has been based in two faculties under four (soon to be five) deans, housed in three (soon to be four) “schools”, with four different heads of school, and my department has had five chairs. The university writ large has seen a massive building program, the consolidation of branch campuses on the main campus, the reduction in faculties from eight, to five, and then a year later four. Physically, my department has moved offices twice in two years, and for some three times. We’re facing yet another physical move in the summer of 2014, as our extant offices are redeveloped into on-campus housing for students. My own major has been reduced to a minor twice; once in 2005, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious but corresponded with the sacking of two colleagues. Following the byzantine process of validation, which I’ve now achieved a certain proficiency at, it relaunched three years later, only to have it suddenly pulled on that Saturday morning, three years ago.

* Disinvestment watch: State Budgeters’ View of Higher Ed.

nasbo2

* 72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit, even if they did well in the class. More importantly, these are the professors who voluntarily took time to teach online courses, which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher.

* Walmart “is in the early planning stages of a service that would see in-store customers rent space in their vehicles and their time to the mega-retailer to deliver products it sells online. The move would combat same-day delivery ideas from Amazon and reportedly what’s in the works with Google, which might have already signed on Target for such a service.”

* Idaho teacher investigated for saying ‘vagina’ during biology lesson. What should she have said?

* The group of 12 young people who had their feet washed and kissed by the pope included two young women – the first time a pope included females in the rite. The ceremony has traditionally been limited to men, since all of Jesus’ apostles were men. Via TPM, that “has traditionally been limited” thing appears to have some real force.

* With natural gas production on the rise—it has jumped 26 percent since 2007, chiefly because fracking now makes it economically viable to pursue gas trapped in shale deposits—and unconventional practices such as dewatering ramping up domestic oil development, the wastewater deluge is expected to get worse. Operators are injecting more water than ever into drilling wells, while boring new wells to accommodate the overflow. Yet nobody really knows how all this water will impact faults, or just how big an earthquake it could spawn. In the West, small quakes don’t often cause much damage because of stricter seismic regulations but also because the underground formations—buckled, with younger rock—absorb all but the biggest events. Induced quakes, however, are happening primarily in flatter states, amid more rigid rock, making them more destructive—a stone makes a bigger splash when it’s hurled into a glassy pond than a river of raging whitewater. Fracking’s Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms.

* Things you didn’t even know you needed to worry about: Are Exploding Manhole Covers In Washington DC Caused By Shocking Levels Of Leaking Natural Gas?

* Screen Daily teases The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé.

The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

* Charlie Stross predicts 2043.

* Contagion was right: How The Meat Industry Is Fueling The Rise Of Drug-Resistant Diseases.

* We’re screwed: Forecasts of global temperature rises over the past 15 years have proved remarkably accurate, new analysis of scientists’ modelling of climate change shows.

* And Billy Corgan is the only rock star from the 1990s brave enough to take a stand against the lizard people.

Written by gerrycanavan

March 28, 2013 at 5:29 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with 2043, academia, Alex Jones, apocalypse, austerity, Barack Obama, Billy Corgan, biology, CFPs, Charlie Stross, charts, climate change, contagion, disease, earthquakes, ecology, film, health care, hoo-has, How the University Works, hydrofracking, labor, lizard people, meat, methane, misogyny, MOOCs, neoliberalism, no one could have predicted, pedagogy, Rice, science fiction, SEIU, sexism, Smashing Pumpkins, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the humanities, the Pope, the truth is out there, unions, Walmart, Washington DC, We're screwed, Wes Anderson, Won't somebody think of the children?

Tuesday Night Links

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Kotsko* Local news! Marquette has named Dr. Richard Holz its new dean of the Klinger College of Arts and Sciences.

* More local news! Students at The Marquette Tribune strike back against proposed budget cuts.

* Now, the United States has reached “mass incarceration”—“a level of imprisonment so vast that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group,” Western writes. He has found that 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts in the United States will go to prison before age 35. The deterrent effect of incarceration is lessened if it becomes so common that it no longer carries any stigma. “The American prison boom is as much a story about race and class,” he writes, “as it is about crime control.”

* Adam Kotsko explains neoliberalism. Exactly so.

* Scott Walker vs. the unions, round two.

* Harry Potter pulls one over on the paparazzi.

* Missouri Bill Makes It A Felony For Lawmakers To Propose Gun Safety Legislation. I mean really.

* What’s remarkable about this rejected 1998 proposal to revamp Superman from Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer is how many of the ideas wound up being used in other superhero comics like All-Star Superman and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

* Florida Atlantic University names its football stadium after a for-profit prison company.

* Climate change to bring alligators to DC.

* And 40% Of Americans Now Make Less Than 1968’s Minimum Wage. Freddie deBoer: Absolutely nothing can be done to address this country’s problems until people are willing to admit that our economy has become a machine for siphoning more and more resources to those at the top. 

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Written by gerrycanavan

February 19, 2013 at 8:29 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with alligators, America, charts, class struggle, climate change, college football, comics, ecology, Florida Atlantic University, Grant Morrison, guns, Harry Potter, income inequality, Mark Millar, Mark Waid, Marquette, mass incarceration, minimum wage, Missouri, NCAA, neoliberalism, paparazzi, post-Fordism, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, Scott Walker, Superman, the law, unions, Washington DC

RSS NEW PODCAST! “Grad School Vonnegut”

  • 8. "The Voter" November 12, 2021
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  • 0. The Many Saints of Newark October 3, 2021
  • 5. "Chike's School Days," "The Sacrificial Egg," and "Akueke" August 23, 2021



The Cambridge History of Science Fiction



Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler Archives – Resources


Extrapolation 58.2-3: Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre



Paradoxa 28: Global Weirding


Metamorphoses of Science Fiction


The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction


Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction


American Literature 83.2: Speculative Fictions


Polygraph 22: Ecology and Ideology

Editor at Science Fiction Film and Television

Editor at Extrapolation

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