Wednesday Links! No Fooling.

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 17: Brand/Branding/Rebrand.

* Jackson was paid $7.1 million in 2012, more than any other college president in the nation, and continues to be paid at that level. Just in case you don’t click through, the headline to that piece reads “Report: R.P.I. facing $1 billion in debts, liabilities.” So you know she’s worth every penny of that salary.

* But did you know the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets less than half the public money per student that Madison Area Technical College gets and less than a third of what goes to Milwaukee Area Technical College?

* And speaking of UWM: After Extinction, at UWM April 30-May 2.

* Meanwhile, at Duke: Response to President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth. The original incident is described here.

* Unsettling the University, at UCR April 2-3.

* But what also became clear was that she and I have radically different visions of what constitutes the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System and how it might be preserved and protected. Through the course of our conversation it became increasingly clear to me that in the current situation in Wisconsin we find ourselves in what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “a differend,” a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement.” Despite all parties–Regents, chancellors, faculty, staff, students, and alumni–being committed to the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System, it seems impossible to agree upon a rule of judgment or any set of criteria by which to adjudicate our different visions of what that well-being would look like.

* Dept. Names More Than 550 Colleges It Has Put Under Extra Financial Scrutiny.

* Salaita lawyers: ‘No doubt’ that UI, prof had agreement for employment.

* Over time, however, more and more departments failed to meet that standard; last year some 60 units were out of compliance, according to information gathered by the union. At Bridgewater State University, one of the worst offenders, for example, adjuncts taught more than 15 percent of courses in 16 large departments in 2014-15. Some 50 percent of classes in the English department were taught by part-time faculty, along with 40 percent in math and computer science. In philosophy, it was 63 percent of classes. Bridgewater officials did not respond to a request for comment.

* Google Maps turned your streets into Pac-Man yesterday, though I can’t imagine how anyone could have missed this news.

* The Entire History of ‘Doctor Who’ Illustrated as a Tapestry.

* 24 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.

* California Snowpack Hits All-Time Low, 8 Percent Of Average.

* Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.

* Chomsky: The Death of American Universities.

* There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

* The Trevor Noah train wreck.

* “Lutheran pastor resigns after being linked to threatening email.” That’s… something.

* Italian grandmother causes illness with cocoa expired in 1990.

* Why You Should Really Be Afraid of the Zombie Apocalypse.

* Gas Siphoning Coverup May Have Caused East Village Explosion. Jesus Christ.

* But there’s at least one unforeseen upside when all episodes are released at once: The writers don’t get the chance to self-correct in the middle of the season.

* The Long And Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl.

* The Americans renewed for season four. Hooray!

* Pokémon and philosophy.

* Study: Not Many Disco Songs About Daytime. But of course more work is required.

* I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life.

* Oh my God, Becky, look at this vigorous debate among scholars about the true origin of the straight male preference for a curvier backside.

* I can”t believe they’re bringing this thing back: The X-Files Could Have Ended With a West Wing Crossover.

* And Paul F. Tompkins picks his best episodes from a prolific podcasting career. My tragedy is I’ve heard all these. Perhaps you’ve heard he’s got a new one out today…

Can It Be? More Wednesday Links?

* …as long as critics and publishers frame African literature as always on the cusp, it will continue to be an emerging literature whose emergence is infinitely deferred. It will remain utopian, just out of reach.

* Also from Aaron Bady: ‘House of Cards’ Should Stop Trying to Be ‘The West Wing.’

* Never tell me the odds.

* How To Lower Univ. of Illinois Tuition (and it can work at other universities too).

* The Corinthian 15.

* Columbia Graduate Students Push for a Labor Union.

* The Loser Edit That Awaits Us All.

* How One University Unexpectedly Found Itself Ranked Among the ‘25 Most Dangerous Colleges.’ This is pretty horrifying, even before you get to my intuition that this is all prelude to an extortion scheme.

* Teaching evaluations: still bad! Don’t use them!

* Legendary, lost civilization discovered in Honduras rainforest 1,000 years later.

* Brian Williams has finally found the women responsible for his mistakes.

* Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon.

* My name is Ozymandias, Sim of Sims — look upon my work, ye Maxis, and despair.

* Remember the Maryland parents who let their two kids walk home from a park alone and then had to deal with police and child protective services? They heard from the state today. The couple was found responsible for “unsubstantiated” child neglect, a confusing charge that resolved nothing and left the couple possibly more nervous and paranoid than ever.

* Pharrell Made Only $2,700 In Songwriter Royalties From 43 Million Plays Of ‘Happy’ On Pandora. Disruptatational! Innovasmagoric!

* Daddy, what do you want me to be when I grow up?

* And from the too-good-to-check file: Profile of Hulk, a 175-pound pit bull.

Wednesday Links!

* Marquette English’s course offerings for summer and fall 2015, including my courses on Science Fiction as Genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, and American Literature after the American Century.

* Speaking of my courses, this is such an incredible answer to the last few weeks of my cultural preservation course I almost feel as though I somehow made it up.

* An amazing late comment on my Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis post, including some great commentary on the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

* My review isn’t coming for a few months, but I really loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. I can’t wait to talk to people about it. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now.

* If you want a vision of the future: Sweet Briar College, Citing ‘Financial Challenges,’ Will Close Its Doors in August. (More, more.) Clarkson U., Union Graduate College Explore Merger. It’s Final: UNC Board of Governors Votes To Close Academic Centers. Jindal cuts higher ed by 78%.

* Where has all the money gone? The decline in faculty salaries at American colleges and universities over the past 40 years.

* It’s always “the end of college.”

* “De-tenure.” Don’t worry, it’s just another regrettable drafting error!

* Why we occupy: Dutch universities at the crossroads.

* The academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has focused largely on how fake undergraduate classes helped athletes maintain their eligibility to compete. In an article in The News & Observer over the weekend, a former UNC official says athletics officials also sometimes asked the university’s graduate school to bend the rules to admit athletes in order to extend their eligibility.

* This is the best Dean of Eureka Moments post yet. Maybe literally the best possible.

associate vice provost of failure successes

— Dean O. Eureka (@deaneureka) February 28, 2015

* College admissions and former inmates.

* Nine out of ten startups fail, which is why every institution in society should be converted to the startup model immediately.

* The Search for a Useable Past: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Radical America.

* The politicization of even the idea of knowledge.

* Michigan Frat’s 48-Hour Rager Wrecks Resort, Causes $430,000 in Damages.

* Le Guin vs. Ishiguo: “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

* The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s.

* US sea level north of New York City ‘jumped by 128mm.’

* A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years.

* Vox considers the end of American democracy: 1, 2.

* Against the West Wing.

* Against “learning styles.”

* Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules. Hillary Clinton’s personal email account looks bad now. But it was even worse at the time.

* …whose frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things…

* Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

* When A Newspaper Gave Blade Runner‘s Replicant Test To Mayor Candidates.

* “An ode to Juiceboxxx, a 27-year-old rapper from Milwaukee no one’s ever heard of.”

* “When Your Father Is the BTK Serial Killer, Forgiveness Is Not Tidy.”

* Scott Walker Wants To Stop Funding Renewable Energy Research Center. Of course he does.

* Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company.

* The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism.

* Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.

* Justice department determines Ferguson is a terrible place.

* Wrong way Obama?

* The Americans and austerity.

* Two ways of looking at income inequality.

* How a French insurer wrote the worst contract in the world and sold it to thousands of clients.

* Teach students about consent in high school.

* Vermont Town May Allow 16- And 17-Year-Olds To Vote In Local Elections.

* Crunching the numbers: How Long Can A Spinoff Like ‘Better Call Saul’ Last?

* What Marvel Characters End Up Being Called In Other Languages.

* Panpsychism’s Labyrinth.

* Careers of the future: professional dumpster diver.

* It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son. After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.

* The globalist sublime.

* Mars One colonists better off eating frozen pizza than local veggies.

* Local Lab In Berkeley Accidentally Discovers Solution To Fix Color Blindness.

* Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.

* How the MFA Glut Is a Disservice to Students, Teachers, and Writers.

But there’s another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either—no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person’s money is as green as the next, after all. If you’ve received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you’re in.

* 10-Year-Old Math Genius Studying for University Degree.

* The Last Man on Earth really shouldn’t work. And yet…

* Officials at Arizona State University probably weren’t expecting the full Stormfront treatment when its English department advertised a spring semester class exploring the “problem of whiteness.”

* No shades of grey in teaching relationships.

* Pendulum keeps swinging: Now Americans Should Drink Much More Coffee.

* But not Keurig.

* It’s been so long so I posted one of these I haven’t even linked to anything about the dress yet.

* In 1971, William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.

* Why Americans Don’t Care About Prison Rape.

* Robear: the bear-shaped nursing robot who’ll look after you when you get old. What could possibly go wrong?

* The invention of blue.

* In the 1800s, Courts Tried to Enforce Partnerships With Dolphins.

* The 16 Strangest Dragons In Dungeons & Dragons.

* Mark your everythings: Community comes back March 17.

* First the gorilla who punched the photographer, now this.

* Wes Anderson’s X-Men.

* Abra kazam.

* LLAP.

* And the arc of history is long, but: North Carolina Legalizes Call Girls For Politicians.

Meanwhile, in heaven … #LeonardNimoy #LLAP pic.twitter.com/kn1a6RiDuA

— Kirsten Heffron (@KirstenHeffron) February 27, 2015

Thursday Night Links

* I saw this movie: Brains of rats connected allowing them to share information via internet.

* It bears repeating: The candidate’s adviser sent us a letter on which both “department of history” and “faculty of arts and sciences” were misspelled.

* Advice From Tenure-Track Faculty To Those Entering The Profession.

* Beyond the MOOC: While other universities move quickly to offer courses online for free, Carnegie Mellon University is instead starting for-profit efforts designed to capture segments of the education market. I’ll promote this a bit more as the date gets closer, but I’ll be speaking at a “What’s the Matter with MOOCs?” event at UWM in mid-March.

* Boots on Campus: Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia.

* Student Debt Nearly Tripled In 8 Years, New York Federal Reserve Reports.

* The Dan Harmon backlash, at the AV Club and TNR (of all things).

* Justice, American style: The city’s complaint in federal court claims that if Ms. Truong is entitled to damages for the nearly three years she spent in jail awaiting trial, then Mr. Ryan is as much to blame as the city because he took too long to get the coerced confession tossed out of court by the judge.

* What is happening with Bob Woodward? Seriously, WTF Is Up With Bob Woodward?

* Will a Republican friend-of-the-court brief tip the Supreme Court in favor of gay marriage? I’m pretty sure it’ll have more luck than Obama’s.

* These numbers are unprecedented: by 2014 President Obama will have deported over 2 million people – more in six years than all people deported before 1997. That “before 1997” actually means since 1892.

* AFL-CIO Executive Council Endorses Comprehensive Doomsday Policy for Working Families.

“We need union jobs today, not tomorrow,” said Rich Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO.  “The resolution balances our desire to protect the fragile ecosystem of the earth, while acknowledging the economic benefits of a high-road strategy to develop the doomsday technologies of the future.”

* Never forget: The entire staff of the West Wing died on Voyager.

* How Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the EmpireTurned Star Wars into Science Fiction.

* Women Work Harder Than Men, Study Says.

* The Turn against Nabokov.

* When the White House was completely gutted.

The social events of the 1948 holiday season had to be canceled. And with good reason: Experts called the third floor of the White House “an outstanding example of a firetrap.” The result of a federally commissioned report found the mansion’s plumbing “makeshift and unsanitary,” while “the structural deterioration [was] in ‘appalling degree,’ and threatening complete collapse.” The congressional commission on the matter was considering the option of abandoning the structure altogether in favor of a built-from-scratch mansion, but President Truman lobbied for the restoration.

* When Martin Luther King played pool.

* “Preserved” plushies in jars.

* Help wanted: must be infallible.

* They’re making a movie out of The Drowned World.

* Shale Gas Fracking Will Be Around For a Long, Long Time.

* And American history, Breitbart style: Journalists on the campaign trail saw Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. We all saw it!

What to a Blogger Is the 5th of July?

* By request, I made a Storify (my first!) of our conversation about Louie 3.1.

* Next up in the “definitive takedown” series that has made An und für sich so rightly famous and so terribly feared: the ontology of Aaron Sorkin.

One could criticize Sorkin’s ontology for lacking depth and nuance and view the family structure as artificial and forced, but that is not a flaw so much as the entire point. Every Aaron Sorkin show starts from the same radical subtraction and carries the same basic axioms to the same absolutely rigorous conclusion. Sorkin’s universe is one in which a repeated reassertion of a rudimentary structure is the sole alternative to absolute chaos. Given the absolute lack of inherent “character traits” or “motivations,” their stereotyped relationships are the only thing keeping the “characters” from descending into a total — albeit clever — glossolalia.

* Pennsylvania looks to disfranchise 10% of its population to prevent voting fraud it can’t prove has ever happened. Why not just have the military install Romney as king and get this over with? It’d be quicker and more honest.

* I’m an academic, I don’t do it for the money: In Defence of Unpaid Academic Positions. Note: not actually a defense!

* What this means is that in graduate school we get used to working for nothing, even as we’re expected to invest heavily in expensive professional development activities. By attending conferences, we pay for the opportunity to present our work to our (future) peers, who are the primary “gatekeepers” to academe. This system helps to perpetuate privilege because only “those who have afforded to work for free will get jobs. The vicious circle is maddening” (Ernesto Priego, July 2, 2011, Twitter).

* Of course, there are perks: Drunk professor forces students to sit through 23-hour-long science exam.

* Another study shows for-profit university students earn less, default more.

* San Diego accidentally sets off all its fireworks at the same time, creating a wormhole and/or the Eye of Sauron.

* This time our New Four Horsemen–who claim to be market-oriented Republican justices–struck at an approach supported by the market-oriented Republican presidents who appointed them, thought up by market-oriented Republican ideologues to be the market-oriented Republican approach to keeping the market-oriented health insurance system from collapse. Fred Rodell understood that supreme court justices are for the most part moral and political actors first and text- and precedent-oriented legal technicians second. 

Fred Rodell would have been astonished by judges who are for the most part neither precedent- and text-oriented legal technicians nor moral and political actors, but mere partisan weathervanes.

* Here come the new Obamacare challenges.

* Inconceivable! States Bucking ‘Obamacare’ Are Among Those With Highest Rates Of Uninsured.

* And on the actually-existing-media-bias beat: just don’t mention the science.

‘Sorkin’s Shows Are the Type That People Who Never Watch TV Are Always Claiming Are Better Than Anything Else on TV’

Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker on “The Artificial Intelligence of The Newsroom.“ I’m a bit curious how things will play out this time around; it’s been a long time since those early seasons of The West Wing, and there’s been a lot of great TV since then…

Tuesday!

* The headline reads, “Babies can understand what you’re saying at just 6 months old.”

* The headline reads, “Israeli scientists develop prototype of Geordi’s Star Trek VISOR.”

* Scandalous contrarianism: Josiah Bartlet Was A Mediocre President.

* Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn.

“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”

* And the FBI says paying cash for coffee is a sign of terrorist intent. Yeah, that checks out.

Wednesday Night Links

* Alas, Duke! Unceremoniously bounced from GQ‘s 10 Douchiest Colleges Ranking.

* In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series.

* How George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels explain our foreign policy.

* Former President Josiah Bartlett on the debt ceiling: “I think I shut down the government if I’m not mistaken. And I walked up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill and waited in the speaker’s office and if that’s required I’ll do that again as well.”

* And Matt Taibbi on the current president: Obama Doesn’t Want a Progressive Deficit Deal. It’s sad but true.

A Few Links People Following My Twitter Feed Have Mostly Already Seen

* Aaron Sorkin directs the White House national security team as they watch the mission unfold. Hat tip to Angus Johnson for reminding me just how Sorkiny the last week has been.

* Also, how LOLcatty.

* zunguzungu: Bin Laden’s Code Name Was ‘Geronimo.’

* Traxus: The death of Osama bin Laden is the one kill the official ‘narrative,’ or blood-soaked montage rather, can justify as unquestionably righteous, and is at the same time its proper conclusion. And thus America celebrates the end of a narrative that no one could ever really accept, a joke from the moment Dubya made the “dead or alive” crack, simply because it’s the only one we can address with the full force of the rich world’s media infrastructure — it’s the only celebration we will ever be allowed to have for this neverending war.

* Here come the deathers. I couldn’t resist arguing with a deather-curious commenter somewhere in the middle of this endless MeFi thread.

* And in lighter news: Philanthropist offers $300 million to any city that hires someone beside Gehry to design its art museum. Awesome.

We Have to Magic the Magic Before the Magic or the Magic will Magic

* I’m planning on using this week’s bizarre Lost/West Wing crossover as my litmus test for how seriously to take people’s opinions on science fiction. That was painful, and enshrines what is more or less total garbage at the center of the show’s mythology. (We have to magic the magic before the magic or the magic will magic…) Despite those really good time travel bits in season five, season six has presented a strong challenge to the wisdom of our decision to start watching this show again. The showrunners still don’t have any idea what they’re on about; they never have. I’m hoping the last few episodes can avoid Battlestar Galactica levels of total series failure; I’ll be glad if they can just bring this thing in for a landing…

* Oliver Stone previews Wall Street 2 and 3.

* Climate change watch: no more lizards.

* The Great Unwinding: Detroit to begin its demolishing of 10,000 homes.

* And Boing Boing has a helpful graphic about Virgin’s SpaceShip Two. Booking my ticket now.

Where Have All the Republicans Gone?

Mark Halprin, master of D.C. conventional wisdom, points out that only two GOP candidates are currently making serious efforts to run for president in 2012: Mitt Romney, a second-rate candidate whose chances have likely already been scuttled by Romneycare’s structural similarities to Obamacare, and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, a “virtual unknown.” The best bit:

And despite his years in the national spotlight, Romney remains unexpectedly unfamiliar to a large number of Americans. On a recent cross-country trip, as I read Romney’s new best seller, No Apology, which features a close-up photo of the author on the front cover, a passing flight attendant exclaimed, “No apology? Not even for his wife?” If Romney can so easily be confused with disgraced politician John Edwards, he’ll have to work harder to create a more distinct identity if he hopes to win the White House.

Via Ben Smith, who also notes another round of Obama/West Wing fanfic.

‘The West Wing on Steroids’

Barack Obama and the ‘West Wing on steroids.’

Pulling power close is something all recent presidents have done – and on the campaign trail, Obama spoke out against George W. Bush’s attempt to expand his executive authority.

But when it comes to building his own team, Obama is taking the notion of a powerful White House staff to new heights, leaving little doubt who will set policy and guide the politics of the his newborn administration.

The structure could pose an early test for Obama — whether he can referee turf battles and policy skirmishes between presidential advisers and his Cabinet, which contains some formidable figures as well. Obama comes to the job lacking the executive experience of his two predecessors, governors-turned-presidents.

But Obama appears willing to take that chance. Aides say he believes the Cabinet structure is outdated because it doesn’t recognize that problems like global warming sprawl across several agencies, often requiring a sort of uber-Cabinet member – a czar – to confront them.

The West Wing 2009

Having finally watched the first three seasons of The West Wing on DVD, and planning to go forward to season four soon, I can now appreciate “The West Wing: 2009.” (via)