All the Wednesday Links

* Ada‘s special issue on Feminist Science Fiction is out, including a smart article on somatic capitalism and reproductive futurity from Rebekah Sheldon. 

* Should celebrities teach online classes? This was a reductio ad absurdum just a few months ago; I guess things really do move fast in the future.

* We cannot have a realistic discussion of the state of the humanities in the United States without talking about the disinvestment in public education that is taking place at all levels of America’s educational system. But the New York Times says we can solve it all with one quick fix so transparent and obvious it can’t even find a single skeptic to quote!

* Federal Bureaucrats Declare ‘Hunger Games’ More Complex Than ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ As an SF studies guy, I’m quite conflicted about this; luckily the rest of the article makes clear how broken the whole system is so I don’t have to worry.

* Which Companies Dominate Your State’s Politics? More links below the image!

* N=1: A Social Scientific Inquiry into Happiness and Academic Labor.

* Cops Subject Man To Rectal Searches, Enemas And A Colonoscopy In Futile Effort To Find Drugs They Swear He Was Hiding. Wow.

* The Top 6 Reasons This Infographic Is Just Wrong Enough to Be Convincing.

* China Miéville in Guernica on the new law of the West Bank.

* Western black rhino declared extinct. Still have north, south, east, and a bunch of other colors though. Nothing to sweat about.

* What happens if all the ice melts? Even more links below the image!

* Dolphins and humans: friends or frenemies? Aeon reports.

* Class polarization in American neighborhoods.

* Surely some threshold has been crossed: Under Armour Outfits Northwestern In Blood-Splattered American Flag Football Uniforms.

* Enemies’ lists in Wisconsin.

* And a classic good news/bad news situation: Ms. Marvel returns as New Jersey Muslim teen. New Jersey destroyed by Galactus. Not a hoax! Not a dumb Chris Christie fat joke! Not an imaginary story!

Friday Night Links

* This American Life retracts their Apple documentary. More here.

* Greetings from Milwaukee: Selections from the Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert Postcard Collection.

* Rortybomb with three ways of looking at the student debt crisis.

* China Miéville previews his new comic series Dial H for Hero.

* Inhofe on climate change: “‘I Thought It Must Be True Until I Found Out What It Cost.” Sure, that’s how facts work.

* Wisconsin GOP loses state Senate majority after surprise resignation.

* The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos. Via MeFi.

* Rick Perlstein argues the problem isn’t that conservatives are crazier than they were fifty years ago; the problem is they’re exactly as crazy as they were fifty years ago. Via LGM.

* After less than three full days of deliberations, the five men and seven women of the jury found Dharun Ravi, 20 years old, guilty of invading the privacy of his 18-year-old roommate, Tyler Clementi, and his dorm-room date. 

* So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

* I miss Linsanity. Those were simpler times.

* Americans used public transformation twice as much in 1940. That’s per capita. That’s nuts.

* Louis C.K. Withdraws as Host of Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. Who invited him in the first place? What a terrible choice for the gig.

* Obama comes out against Amendment One. Hey, me too!

* Al Gore endorses filibuster reform. Hey, me too!

* And today in Settlers of Catan news: A Dutch public broadcasting network last month offered its viewers a board game featuring Israeli settlers who use “Jewish stinginess” and “the Anne Frank card” to colonize the West Bank. Hours of fun for the entire family!