Friday Links!

* Terrible news from UWM: The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) is facing an unprecedented attack on its very existence.

* CFP for SLSA 2016: “Creativity.”

* The shift from a subordinate learner as a grad student to a would-be peer on the job market is one of the most predictable traumas in an academic’s life, inducing professional and emotional distress in almost everyone who encounters it. I think this is true, but I wish we would encourage graduate students not to think of themselves so much as students in the first place.

* Ursula K. Le Guin on the Game of Fibble. Played on a Scrabble board.

* Raucous confrontation at SF State over ethnic studies cuts.

* Melissa Click has been fired by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.

* Washington State Prof Charged With $8M Research Fraud.

* MFA vs CIA.

* Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico (R-Grayson) said that books such as “Beloved” plant the seeds of evil in the minds of young people. This country’s gone completely mad.

* A 150-Year Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis.

* Nuclear waste dumped illegally in Ky. Poverty across Wisconsin reaches highest level in 30 years. Lead Warnings Issued for Pregnant Women, Kids in Jackson, Mississippi. Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns. America’s airlines are introducing a class below economy. America is pulling apart.

* A woman who was arrested at a hospital over the summer for failing to pay court fines died the next day because she was deprived of water at the Charleston County jail, her family’s attorneys said Wednesday.

* We’ve all thought about it: High School Honors Student Was Actually a Creepy Adult Pretending to Be a Kid.

* Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data.

* This goes with another point: drones are a signal departure from the impersonal destruction that typifies modern technologically advanced warfare, in which the attacker rarely perceives his individual victims. The drone pilot, in contrast, even though he is thousands of miles away, spends many hours closely observing his victim and those near him, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The stories are about both the killers and the killed.

* A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. Counterpoint: A presidential run by Michael Bloomberg could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

* The Mirror Universe: A Historical Analysis.

* How To Tell If You’re In a Flannery O’Connor Story.

* “Unintelligible yelling.”

* “Asteroid Will Pass Agonizingly Close To Earth.”

* In this article Huntington’s disease becomes the core of the case for editing genes, against even blindness on the other side. I wrote about it!

* Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.

* “I felt nothing,” she told me, smiling. “He was a dog thief, after all.”

* Finally we find that 38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. 10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.

Why does everyone keep joking about Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer?

I mean he definitely is but like, people died

— Griffin McElroy (@griffinmcelroy) February 26, 2016

All Your Tuesday Morning Links

* If You Leave Open A Million Tabs, ‘The Great Suspender’ Chrome Extension Is For You. Gamechanger.

* When Birds Squak, Other Species Seem to Listen.

* Two-Thirds of Risk Managers Say Frats Are Major Liability. The other third are on vacation, check back next week.

* This sort of thing is a problem in academia too. If a male prof refuses to mentor female students, that’s also bad.

* “Neoliberalism is the real affront to higher education — not Kanye West’s honorary doctorate.”

* The idea of using “drive-up advising” to reach these students started as a joke, Murray said, but it quickly turned into a reality.

* Low cost college isn’t enough. I’ve tried to argue that plans like #FreeCommunityCollege will actually be a strong accelerant to some of the other problems David is talking about, but it hasn’t exactly set the world on fire.

* The humane and the anti-humane.

What matters more is the loose agglomeration of practices, institutions and perspectives that view human experience and human subjectivity as a managerial problem, a cost burden and an intellectual disruption. I would not call such views inhumane: more anti-humane: they do not believe that a humane approach to the problems of a technologically advanced global society is effective or fair, that we need rules and instrumments and systems of knowing that overrule intersubjective, experiential perspectives and slippery rhetorical and cultural ways of communicating what we know about the world.

* Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy.

* Vote No on Every Fee.

* Public universities are using non-need-based aid to recruit out-of-state students, at the expense of low-income and in-state students.

* Three New Jersey colleges are appearing to be more competitive than they are in admissions by counting incomplete applications, NorthJersey.com reported.

* Race and Duke redux.

* academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com. beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com.

* Hamburger U: As more firms have set up their own “corporate universities”, they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school.

* The best historical model for the transition from the WWIII-devastated Earth to the post-First Contact regime may be the rise of the Soviet Union.

* Strange result, what could explain it? Students Who Attend Class Outperform Those Online, Study Says.

* Like Dylan plugging in, Simon Pegg Worries The Love Of Science Fiction Is Making Us “Childish.”

* “Keep Foreskin and State Separate”: Battle Over Florida Boy’s Circumcision Heads To Federal Court.

* N.C. Senate bill would criminalize, fire teachers for having political views.

* Why Did NY Ban Fracking? The Official Report Is Now Public.

* Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF.

* Canada Approves Nuclear Waste Site on Great Lakes Shore.

* Texas Elementary School Accused of Locking Boy up in a “Focus Room.” Why did we turn all our schools into torture chambers?

* Homework is a Social Justice Issue.

* Obama to Limit Military-Style Equipment for Police Forces.

* Washington State Is In A Drought ‘Unlike Any We’ve Ever Experienced.’

* Sure it looks as if things are getting more peaceful. But, looking at the mathematics, that’s exactly what we should expect to see, even if we’re most likely due for a much more violent future.

* Spies, they’re just like us.

* In fan fiction, even the Dursleys can potentially be redeemed.

* Counterpoint: Republicans Are Not on the Edge of Extinction.

* The White House Is Archiving Every Tweet Begging @POTUS for Sex.

* The truth about poo: we’re doing it wrong.

* Scientists examine why men even exist.

* Like Uber, but for stopping this from happening all the time.

* Great moments in spin: “New Jersey voters say they don’t think I would be a good president because they want me to stay.” It might just be because they’re jealous.

* “That’s an extraordinarily high number of medications in a state with less than 2 million people.”

* Generation gibberish. I think a version of this sort of thinking organized around the penetration of consumer technology is probably viable, but a lot harder to wrangle than assigning arbitrary birth years.

* Mad Men and the Coke Jingle Theory. Mad Men and the Movement.

* And from the archives: As good as it gets: Mad Men and neoliberalism. And today’s followup: The commodity is the better Jesus: On the Mad Men finale.

In any case, I regard the genre of television as completed now. The most critically acclaimed, culturally prestigious, artistically ambitious television show of all time — and judging by current trends, I include the future here too — has culminated in a tacky commercial. By doing so, it made us experience its moving utopian qualities and its sinister cult-like qualities. There’s nowhere else to go at this point. That’s “the real thing.” That’s “it.”

Special! Bonus! Weekend! Links!

* io9 buries the lede: Batgirl is going to grad school.

* “We use the atmosphere as an open sewer, and don’t charge anyone for dumping stuff into it.” Free-market fundamentalism and climate change. Meanwhile, Miami drowns.

* On innocent civilians. On collective punishment. On the Gaza Border.

* Wall Street as cause and beneficiary of skyrocketing university tuition.

* A “nationwide gentrification effect” is segregating us by education. Just say “class!” It’s not that hard!

* God Loves Cleveland. What Cleveland Would Look Like With LeBron James And Kevin Love.

* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice: Man Who Said He Was Fired Over Buying Pot Gets His Job Back.

* Big Data hopes to liberate us from the work of self-construction—and justify mass surveillance in the process. Also at TNI: Plantation Neoliberalism.

* Adam Kotsko for inflation and against prequelism.

* Duke’s Own Ainehi Edoro interviews Angela Davis.

* Lance Armstrong in Purgatory.

* Separation of powers! The system works! Meanwhile!

* Timothy Zahn Says We Shouldn’t Assume That All Star Wars Expanded Universe Books Are Non-Canon.

* Ted Cruz Launches Senate Fight To Auction Off America’s Public Lands. The Grand Canyon Faces Gravest Threat in the Park’s 95-Year History.

* Gasp.

* Director/cinematographer Ernest Dickerson is shopping an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark.

* That “Side Scroller” web comic I posted earlier in the week that everyone loved.

* Northern New Mexico College shorts its adjuncts.

* A Government Computer Glitch Reminded 121-Year-Olds to Register for the Draft. Lousy moochers! Don’t they know freedom isn’t free!

* The true story of the Seinfeld episode the cast refused to shoot.

* Probably the worst news I’ve ever received: Fraction’s award-winning Hawkeye comic apparently coming to an end.

* Mesmerizing Photos of People Lying in a Week’s Worth of Their Trash.

* And your twelve-year-old self just hacked Time Magazine: Scientists Say Smelling Farts Might Prevent Cancer.