Posts Tagged ‘winter’
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
Here is my most humorless opinion: The concept of ghosts is an example of how we stigmatize victims of violence as much as perpetrators, and perceive them as a threat to our peaceful lives. The desired outcome is to make them go away, shut up, and let us forget about them again.
— Sandra Newman is objectively frightening (@sannewman) October 31, 2019
Xennials are called Calvinistas now https://t.co/8vhCm4X8vU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
I am sure you will be surprised to hear that in less than 48 hours a gigantic corporation has superseded Twitter’s PR-grabbing “no political ads” rule because Twitter really likes money https://t.co/rTyNE6xC3X
— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) November 5, 2019
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
The narrative about totalitarian political correctness on college campuses HAS to be true, because otherwise the greatest political dangers would be coming almost exclusively from the right, and every smart pundit knows that's impossible.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) November 6, 2019
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
A lot of people on my timeline like this proposal but my reaction is just pure dread on every level, from the thought of kids trapped at school literally all day to the inevitable revenue-neutral strategies to somehow wring an extra three hours of care out of the existing budgets https://t.co/2Q89HE4iTb
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
the liberatory potential of fandom lies in dispensing with any loyalty to the 'original' and the structure of media conglomerates that exploit it for profit. the most visible kind of fandom now is the opposite, astroturfed by disney
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 5, 2019
pitch: THE GOODFELLAS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
NTSB docs: Uber's radar detected Elaine Herzberg nearly 6 seconds before she was fatally struck, but “the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians” so it didn't react as if she were a person. https://t.co/M2B38i2Bq2 via @mikelaris
— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) November 6, 2019
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 8, 2019 at 10:23 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", a whole host of promising academic careers strangled in the cradle, academia, Adorno, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, Alexa, algorithmic culture, ALS, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, Bernie Sanders, Big Apocalypse, billionaires, birds, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Bloody Sunday, books, boycotts, brands, Brazil, Brutalism, burnout, California, Calvin and Hobbes, child abuse, children, class struggle, climate change, comics, computers, concussions, cults, dark side of the digital, Deadpan, deforestation, delicious ice cream, disability, Disney, DNA, Donald Trump, Durham, e resistance, ecology, economists, Exxon, fandom, fascism, film, forbidden knowledge, fossils, free marks, free speech, Frozen, futurity, games, general election 2020, Generation X, George Washington, ghosts, Goodfellas, Grand Theft Auto, Green New Deal, Halloween, Hamilton, hate crimes, health care, health insurance, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, homelessness, How the University Works, immigration, insects, Into the Spiderverse, Into the Spiderverse 2, iPads, John W. Campbell, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lean In, Let It Go, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, McDonald's, MCU, Medicare, Medicare for All, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, money, monopolies, Mr. Rogers, my media empire, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, OK Boomer, Oregon Trail, pasta, police, police state, politics, printers, quantum mechanics, race, racism, Satan, school, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, scooters, Scorsese, screen time, Should I go to grad school?, Siri, social media, SpaghettiOs, speculation, sports, Stanford, Stanford University Press, Star Trek, struggle, superheroes, Superman, surveillance society, survival, teachers, television, texts, The Affair, the Amazon, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Uber, unions, Utopia, victims, Watchmen, white supremacy, whiteness, wildfires, Williams College, winter, Wisconsin, Wonder Years, work, Yugoslavia
February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…
* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.
* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.
* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.
* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* Presenting the Nebula finalists.
* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.
* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.
* Comics studies comes of age.
* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.
* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
REPUBLICANS: Hi, we’re ethnic cleansers!
DEMOCRATS: And *we’re* the loyal opposition!
BOTH: And together we’re [INHUMAN SCREECHING]
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2017
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.
* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.
Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.
The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.
* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.
* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!
* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.
* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.
* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.
* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.
* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.
* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!
* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.
* Why facts don’t change our minds.
* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.
* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.
* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.
* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.
* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.
* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!
* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.
* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.
* Radical feminism finds a way.
* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.
* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.
Republicans seek however many votes they need to relegalize slavery.
Democrats seek one vote less than they would need to ever do anything.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2017
* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.
* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!
* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.
* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 28, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 4chan, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academia freedom, ACLU, actually existing media bias, advertising, Alex Jones, algorithms, America, Americorps, Andrew Cuomo, animal intelligence, animal liberation, animals, apocalypse, Arizona, arts, authoritarianism, authorship, autocracy, basketball, bees, Benjamin Kunkel, biopunk, Black Mirror, Borges, cancer, capitalism, Captain Planet, cartoons, catastrophe, CFPs, charter schools, Chicago, children's literature, China, class struggle, climate change, collapse, college basketball, comics, conspiracy theories, continents, crisis, cultural preservation, death penalty, Death Star, deep state, democracy, Democrats, deportation, disability, domesticity, Don Bluth, Donald Trump, dystopia, Earthseed, ecology, entrapment, equality, Expanded Universe, extrasolar planets, facts, fascism, FBI, feminism, Forrest Fenn, free speech, Gamergate, gay rights, general election 2020, gerrymandering, glitter, Hero's Journey, history, How the University Works, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, Japanese, juking the stats, Kim Stanley Robinson, legitimacy, lies and lying liars, life finds a way, March Madness, marriage equality, Mars, medicine, melancholy, midterm election 2018, millennials, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, Moral Mondays, museums, music, NASA, NCAA, NEA, Nebula Awards, NEH, neoliberalism, never tell me the odds, New Jersey, New Zealand, Nina Riggs, North Carolina, nuclear war, obituary, Octavia Butler, oil spills, open mikes, our brains don't work, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, outer space, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Tricksters, parenting, Peter Singer, philosophy, podcasts, police state, political parties, politics, polls, prosthetics, protest, race, racism, reality-based community, refugees, religion, Republicans, resistance, Rust Belt, Sally Hemings, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, segregation, Shakespeare, sharks, sitting, slavery, snow, socialism, Sophie's Choice, space law, SpaceX, Springsteen, Standing Rock, standup comedy, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg, success, suicide, superheroes, syphilis, teaching, Terminator: Genisys, the Anthropocene, the archives, The Butter Battle Book, the Capitalocene, the courts, the law, The Lorax, The Martian, the Moon, the Rockies, the suburbs, Thomas Jefferson, Trappist-1, treasure, trolls, Tumblr, Uber, Upper Midwest, UVM, video games, voter ID, voter suppression, Wall-E, Walt Whitman, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, we're all gonna die, winter, zombies
Friday Links!
The death of the academic job market really makes the MLA a kind of Children of Men situation.
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) January 5, 2017
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
Every event feels like potential Reichstag fire. The OSU attack, this Chicago kidnapping, the situation in Whitefish, MT. On the precipice.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 5, 2017
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
in the future, every superpower will be ruled by an unhinged narcissist for fifteen minutes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 6, 2017
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 6, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2016?, 2017, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, animal intelligence, animals, Arnold Schwarzenegger, austerity, bankruptcy, BBC, Canada, Carrie Fischer, celebrity culture, Chicago, chickens, Children of Men, CIA, college football, college majors, computers, David Foster Wallace, decadence, democracy, Donald Trump, drugs, energy, Episode 9, faculty senates, film, Five Thirty Eight, Four Futures, Freddie deBoer, futurity, games, general election 2016, George Lucas, Go, hate crimes, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, Infinite Jest, James Joyce, Jesuits, Lake Huron, Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lord of the Rings, masculinity, math, math gremlins, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, MLA, Monty Hall problem, moral panic, mortgage interest deduction, museums, Nate Silver, national security, Nazis, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, oil, originality, pastiche, pedagogy, Peter Frase, pollution, power-pairing, Princess Leia, probability, race, racism, reality television, Rebekah Sheldon, Reichstag fire, reproductive futurity, rhetoric and composition, Rogue One, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Schumer, science fiction, Seinfeld, Sherlock, social capture, Soviet Union, sports, Star Wars, subprime mortgages, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, The Apprentice, the audacity of narcissism, the Left, Tolkien, tournaments, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, UVM, voting, white guilt, white privilege, white supremacists, white supremacy, whiteness, winter, Wisconsin, women, writing, zeitgeist
No Bad News Today Links
* The polar vortex is coming. Here’s what that means — and how cold it could get.
* Where Black History and Floods Intertwine.
* I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords.
* CFP: The David Foster Wallace Conference has extended its deadline to January 15.
* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.
* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.
* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.
* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.
* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.
* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.
* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.
* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.
* The birthering of the Democrats.
* Japanese American Historical Plaza.
* The smoke break and solidarity.
* Robots and literary criticism.
* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.
* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.
* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.
* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.
That Democrats are saying "we're the ones who care about FACTS" as they fall into a full-on psychotic break is like out of a Greek tragedy.
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) December 12, 2016
* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.
* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.
* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.
* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.
* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.
* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.
* This is some Black Mirror shit.
* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.
* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.
* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’
Behold, the next four years of our lives: https://t.co/fxANTMHByO pic.twitter.com/oDbqsZLMOX
— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) December 12, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
December 12, 2016 at 9:50 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1836, actually existing media bias, Alexander Hamilton, America, apocalypse, art, bitherism, black history, Black Mirror, CFPs, Chicago, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CIA, class struggle, climate change, cognitive bias, compulsory voting, computers, concussions, conferences, cooling the mark out, David Foster Wallace, Democrats, Donald Trump, elections, Electoral College, emoluments, English departments, espionage, fake news, flooding, football, games, general election 2016, Great Lakes, Great Lakes Confederation, hacking, Hamilton, Hegel, Hillary Clinton, impeachment, Infinite Jest, internment, John Milton, journamalism, kids today, labor, libertarians, literary criticism, malware, Mark Bauerlein, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Napoleon Hill, Nazis, NFL, North Carolina, our brains don't work, person of the year, phishing, polar vortex, politics, Prince, Putin, reality TV, robots, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, self-help, slavery, smoking, solidarity, Stanislaw Lem, Star Wars, state violence, surface reading, telephone, time, trolling, trolls, Utopia, Vichy France, Vietnam, voting, weather, Westworld, winter, work, Žižek
Quittin’ Time Links
* Canamania 2016: Just another reminder that Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (out now!) and Octavia E. Butler (out this November!) appear this year.
* And speaking of Octavia: a previously lost interview from 1995 has resurfaced.
* Call for Papers: Disability and Superheroes.
* A landmark special issue of Extrapolation (if I do say so myself) on Indigenous Futurisms, ed. by Grace Dillon, Michael Levy, and John Rieder.
* The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment.
* How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic.
* “Culturally and geographically, EMU football will simply never succeed from an attendance and financial standpoint,” faculty member Howard Bunsis, who helped prepare the report, said in a presentation to the Board of Regents on Friday. “It is a losing proposition – always has been, and always will be. We hardly raise any money for football, and our attendance is the lowest in the country. Some of you believe that we are close to succeeding, if we just throw more money at the situation. This proposition is insane.“
* Eleven Theses for the Bernie Sanders Generation.
* Wrongthink watch: The Tools of Campus Activists Are Being Turned Against Them. When Slogans Replace Arguments.
* “Literature about medicine may be all that can save us.”
* …but marketplace feminism has simply embraced a mediagenic vision of leadership, most notoriously in the new women’s conference industry, where, Zeisler writes, attendees can “access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.” These conferences come with a hefty price tag to hear inspiring celebrities and CEOs’ tales about bootstrapping their way to the top and kicking sexism in the rear in stiletto heels. It’s a vision that, she notes, “erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially…” Feminism, Inc. is big business.
* Global warming has made the weather better for most in U.S. — but don’t get used to it, study says. But it’s not all bad news: Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA .
* Living Near A Highway Is Terrible For Your Health. 1 In 10 Americans Do It.
* Too good to check: Tabloid says it has proof: Ted Cruz’s father is mystery man in Lee Harvey Oswald photo.
* Suicide Rates Are Up, But the Most Obvious Explanations Are Probably All Wrong.
* The Arctic Suicides: It’s Not The Dark That Kills You. Milwaukee suicide rates lower than rest of US.
* Study of exceptionally healthy old people fails to trace their well-being to specific genes.
* The Rise of Pirate Libraries.
* A Scientific Guide to the Fantastical Predators in Game of Thrones.
* Abolish Neil deGrasse Tyson. But he’s got the right idea here.
* Is there God after Prince? The rejected Simpsons script Conan O’Brien wrote for Prince. Musician’s secret vault reportedly contains ‘thousands’ of unreleased songs. Prince and Springsteen duet, one night only. Springsteen covers “Purple Rain.”
Love this! "They should put Prince on the $20 bill and call it $19.99. It's "The bill formerly known as a twenty." pic.twitter.com/BdCFjg3ozR
— Ty Francis (@tyfrancis) April 24, 2016
* Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. No! It can’t be! That’s impossible!
* EVE Online Could Become a Television Show. I’d watch at least a few!
* How does a porn parody get made? And elsewhere on the porn beat: Child Porn Is Being Hidden in Legal Porn Sites and It Could Land You in Trouble.
* The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and I’m already annoyed because [felled by assassin’s bullet]
* You Should All Be Reading These Criminally Underrated Comics Right Now.
* Twilight of the New York Times.
* Clean, safe, and too cheap to meter.
* Chernobyl as an Event: Thirty Years After.
* I never should have agreed to appear on the cover of American Legion Magazine.
* Will America’s Worst Wildfire Disaster Happen in New Jersey?
* Kurt Vonnegut, Our Reluctant, Agnostic, Hippy Guru. I taught Galápagos for the first time in years this month and fell in love with it all over again — and I’m presenting on it at a meeting of the Vonnegut Society at ALA in May.
* I’ve been saying it for years: Oxford Scientist Confirms Starting Work, School before 10 AM is Torture.
* Kids Play in Backyard While Mom Does Dishes. An Investigation Ensues.
* Marijuana is kosher for Passover, leading rabbi rules.
* Snitchr.
* Definitely evidence of galactic civilization watch: A Dozen Black Holes Are Mysteriously Spewing Energy In the Same Direction.
* But maybe everything dies someday comes back: Ecto Cooler returns.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 25, 2016 at 5:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academia freedom, activism, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, ALA, animals, apocalypse, Bernie Sanders, black holes, books, capitalism, cars, CEOs, Chernobyl, Chicago, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, comics, communism, cryptozoology, disability, Division I, Doctor Who, dolphins, ecology, Ecto Cooler, EVE Online, Extrapolation, feminism, football, galactic empires, Galápagos, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Google Reader, Harriet Tubman, HBO, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Janelle Monae, JFK, Judaism, kids today, kosher, language, Lee Harvey Oswald, libraries, literature, longevity, managerialism, marijuana, maybe everything that dies someday comes back, medical humanities, Melissa Click, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, millennials, Milwaukee, moral panics, music, my media empire, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New York Times, nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, old people, parenting, pedagogy, pirate libraries, police, police state, politics, porn, porn parodies, Prince, public health, reality, reality is a hoax, science, science fiction, Simpsons, sleep, Springsteen, stop snitchin', student movements, suicide, superheroes, Superman, survivalism, teaching, Ted Cruz, television, tenure, the Arctic, the courts, the kids are all right, the law, The Lives of Animals, torture, Uber, Vonnegut, what it is I think I'm doing, wildfires, winter, Won't somebody think of the children?, wrongthink, you don't exist
Tuesday Links!
* Jack Hamilton on “Under Pressure.” When Bowie Met Springsteen. David Bowie’s Radicalism. The International Marxist Group, “In Defense of Bowie.” A Good Looking Mugshot. David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books. David Bowie’s Dark Past. Last Words. The Longreads. Almost Elrond. “Will Brooker is studying David Bowie by trying to live like him for a year.” We Won’t See His Like Again.
* MLA is dead; long live MLA.
* Between 2009 and 2013, public universities reported increasing their annual expenditures on football to more than $1.8 billion — a 21 percent jump in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to Knight Commissiondata reviewed by International Business Times. In that same time period, public universities’ reported debt on their athletic facilities has grown to $7.7 billion — up 44 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars in that time. In all, two thirds of Division I public universities increased their spending on football or athletic facilities in that time period — when average tuition and student fees at public universities have risen more than 40 percent in the last decade. The payoff for all that investment? Nearly three quarters of all Division I football programs now run deficits, which are eventually covered by the rising tuition and student fees.
* Daisy Ridley: The Carrie Fisher Interview.
* Robert Kilpatrick on The Feminine Future : Early Science Fiction by Women Writers.
* Why Wisconsin city’s bid to tap Great Lakes water is a big deal.
* Like Harry, though, I’ve never intended to let that happen. I have no interest in trying to tell other people what to do if they find themselves close to death, but my choice has always been clear: I don’t want to die in pain—or drugged into a stupor by pain meds—all while connected to tubes and respirators in a hospital room. When the end is near, I want to take my own life.
* Meanwhile: This Doctor Wants to Treat Your Crippling Fear of Death With Uncut Ecstasy. Okay, dammit, I’m in.
* Alternatively, maybe the fact that El Chapo—who we can probably assume has someone in his employ who does, in fact, speak English—didn’t exercise his veto is as damning an indictment of such an arrangement (or, more specifically, the product of such an arrangement) as if he had and the magazine acquiesced. The 14 weirdest moments from Sean Penn’s El Chapo interview. Reality truly is a hoax.
* I’ve played the Powerball simulator for 1,092 years and have lost 91% of my money.
* The forgotten way African Americans stayed safe in a racist America.
* Today, of course, anti-beardism is the last acceptable prejudice.
* Texas School Triples Recess Time And Sees Immediate Positive Results In Kids.
* Tax Cuts Don’t Lead to Economic Growth, a New 65-Year Study Finds.
* The Company Behind LA’s Methane Disaster Knew Its Well Was Leaking 24 Years Ago.
* You had me at Hello: Arrested Development Season 5 will echo Making a Murderer and Trump.
* What could possibly go wrong?
* What could possibly go wrong?
* Despite Frigid Winter Temperatures, Students Are Waking Up To Unheated Classrooms. Elsewhere in Baltimore: Women In Baltimore Public Housing Were Forced To Trade Sex For Basic Repairs.
* Whitesboro’s racist town logo up for vote. Good news everyone.
* Breastfeeding is overhyped, oversold, and overrated. The real story: Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise.
* Trinity Cube was created by melting these two forms of glass together into a cube, then installing the cube back into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone as part of the Don’t Follow the Wind project. The artwork will be viewable by the public when the Exclusion Zone opens again, anytime between 3 and 30,000 years from the present.
* Against Serial season two. I think there’s a lot more one could say about what’s seemed to go wrong this time around, but on the level of why the show seems so boring now this is a good start.
* And on the local beat: South Milwaukee man behind homemade fireworks launcher escapes citation.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 12, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2017, academia, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Afrofuturism, anti-beardism, Arrested Development, art, assisted suicide, Baltimore, beards, Bowe Begddahl, Bowie, breastfeeding, Bruce Springsteen, California, Carrie Fischer, CEOs, ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, class struggle, climate change, college sports, color, Constitutional conventions, Cops, Daisy Ridley, death, Donald Trump, drugs, ecstasy, El Chapo, English departments, English majors, fireworks, Fukushima, good news everyone, Great Lakes, guns, How the University Works, journamalism, kids today, lotteries, Making a Murderer, Marxism, methane, MLA, music, NCAA, nuclearity, obituary, parenting, play, police, politics, Powerball, prejudice, privatize everything, race, racism, rape culture, recess, school, science fiction, Sean Penn, Second Amendment, Serial, South Milwaukee, Star Wars, suicide, sundown towns, thanatophobia, the Constitution, The Force Awakens, The Fore, the law, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, under pressure, water, What could possibly go wrong?, Whitesboro, winter, Wisconsin
Christmas Hangover Links
* This was fun: My Tolkien/The Force Awakens mini-essay got picked up by Salon.
* Is Star Wars setting up Poe Dameron as its first queer protagonist? Rey is not a role model for little girls. The prior texts against which this film needs to be judged are not those long-ago movies, but rather the trailers for this new movie. And bah humbug! Double humbug! Double triple bah humbug!
* And for the devotee: How Did This Get Made? covered The Star Wars Holiday Special this week — with bonus oral history.
* A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection.
* New York University is known for bestowing lavish perks on its leaders. Its new president, Andrew Hamilton, will be no exception. NYU sort of hitting it out of the park this week generally. The latest extravagances in the college sports arms race? Laser tag and mini golf.
* Economists Say ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to Christmas Presents.
* Phylogeny of elves finds that santa’s workers are actually dwarves.
* The death of the Wisconsin idea: Under the proposed policies, faculty members could be laid off for financial reasons or if academic programs are discontinued for education reasons, including long-term strategic planning that includes “market demand and societal needs.”
* Let this be our Christmas story. Why? Well, that requires some explaining and perhaps even a stronger rationale than I’m yet able to muster. Because it has no cheer, redemption or family bonding. It’s about power, money, greed, recklessness and what can only be termed the sort of roughshod ridiculousness and surreal unintentional comedy that comes from being powerful enough or serving people with sufficient power that the ordinary sort of fear of getting caught and having to explain yourself simply doesn’t apply.
* Call for ideas: the Museum of Capitalism.
* From Bleeding Heart Libertarians: “Universities may indeed be exploiting adjuncts, but they cannot rectify this mistake without significant moral costs.”
* What really happened in the Christmas truce of 1914? The Real Story Behind the 1914 Christmas Truce in World War I.
* The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom.
* The strange case of Case Western Reserve University law school.
* El Niño, explained: A guide to the biggest weather story of 2015. Records smashed on East Coast’s warmest ever Christmas Eve.
* African-Inspired Space Opera Yohancé Is Going To Be Our Next Obsession.
* ‘Unprecedented’ gas leak in California is the climate disaster version of BP’s oil spill.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 26, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 1914, academia, actually existing media bias, Adam Roberts, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Afrofuturism, apocalypse, art, bah humbug, California, capitalism, CEOs, cheese, Christmas, Christmas truce, class struggle, climate change, CWRU, December, Doctor Who, drugs, ecology, economics, efficiency, El Niño, elves, Episode 7, Expanded Universe, film, girls, golf, graft, grandparents, How Did This Get Made?, How the University Works, laser tag, law schools, Lord of the Rings, Martin Shkreli, McKenzie Wark, methane, moms, movie trailers, museums, my media empire, NYU, Peter Capaldi, podcasts, politics, queer theory, queerness, rich people, Santa, science, science fiction, Sheldon Adelson, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, tenure, The Force Awakens, the Wisconsin Idea, theory, Tolkien, University of Wisconsin, waste, weather, winter, World War I, Yohancé, Zoey
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
February 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird
Wednesday Morning!
* Man tragically unable to remember saying Barack Obama would make a great president says Hillary Clinton will make a great president. Meanwhile, the rest of us are reduced to talking about Obama’s secret achievements.
* Solitary Confinement May Dramatically Alter Brain Shape In Just Days, Neuroscientist Says.
* Last Night on Jeopardy No One Wanted to Answer Qs About Black History.
* Noose Found Around The Neck Of Statue Honoring Civil Rights Icon At Ole Miss.
* What Does it Mean that Most Children’s Books Are Still About White Boys?
* The J.R.R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings in 2014.
* Here are the hoops a college football team has to jump through to be allowed to form a union.
* 84-Year Old Nun Sentenced To Prison For Weapons Plant Break-In.
* Academic freedom with violence.
* Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? The dream remains alive.
* Whistle-blower fired from Hanford nuclear site.
“We do not agree with her assertions that she suffered retaliation or was otherwise treated unfairly,” URS said, adding Busche was fired for reasons unrelated to the safety concerns. “Ms. Busche’s allegations will not withstand scrutiny.”
…
Busche is the second Hanford whistle-blower to be fired by URS in recent months. Walter Tamosaitis, who also raised safety concerns about the plant, was fired in October after 44 years of employment.
* A new China Miéville short story collection, scheduled for November 2014.
* A world of horrors: There is no such thing as a child prostitute.
* In the same way that certain styles of dance simulate sex, the Winter Olympics simulates scraping one’s February-chapped nostrils against the surface of a Kleenex whose aloe content is useless and reaching out for the warm escape of death. It’s an art of failed suicide attempts.
* A preliminary sketch of the data reveals, of course, that by 2050 films will be reviewing us.
* “First, why would we even think about letting it go through?”
* “This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers.”
* Grace Kerr sometimes jokes with her family that “Amanda was not that great. Zach is awesome.” What she means is that her son is finally happy, and is helping others.
* Diseased and unsound meat: Hot Pockets®!
* In Act Of Protest, Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed At Miami Museum.
* News You Can Use: Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo.
* A portrait of Steve Jobs made entirely out of e-waste.
* The Ice Caves of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
* Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment.
* How the north ended up on top of the map.
* Inside Kappa Beta Phi, the Wall Street Fraternity.
* And our long national nightmare is over: Obama apologizes for disparaging art historians.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 19, 2014 at 7:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, American Studies, animals, Apple, archives, art, art history, Barack Obama, BDS, big pictures, black history, books, Candy Crush, castration, Chicago, children, China Miéville, class struggle, college football, college sports, Comcast, cultural preservation, Daily Kos, death drive, destruction, eating meat, Facebook, Florida, flowcharts, general election 2016, Her, Hillary Clinton, hippos, history, horror, Hot Pockets, How the University Works, ice caves, integration, Israel, Jeopardy, Kappa Beta Phi, kids today, Krugman, labor, Lake Superior, male privilege, maps, Marquette, Miami, Mississippi, monopolies, NCAA, neuroscience, New Weird, Northern Lights, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, nuns, Olympics, paint, Palestine, pedagogy, politics, pollution, poverty, prison-industrial complex, prisons, prostitution, race, racism, radiation, Ray Kurzweil, rules are rules, scale, science fiction, short stories, solitary confinement, Steve Jobs, strikes, suicide, the courts, the Internet, the law, the rich are different from you and me, the Singularity, threats, Time Warner, Tolkien, transgender issues, trash, UIC, unions, violence, Wall Street, waste, weird fiction, what if, whistleblowing, white privilege, winter, Winter Olympics, xkcd
Saturday Night Links
* Austerity: not all bad? Meat Industry May Shut Down For Weeks Due To U.S. Spending Cuts.
* The Journal-Sentinel profiles Einstein Productions, a Milwaukee non-profit founded with the help of the Marquette University College of Communications providing job training assistance to people on the autism spectrum.
* The Myth of “Saudi America.”
* Natural gas and oil production is the second-biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gases, the government said, emboldening environmentalists who say tighter measures are needed to curb the emissions from hydraulic fracturing.
* Winter in an era of climate change: “We will see a shorter snow season, but more intense individual snowfall events.”
* Boston University student tasered for throwing a snowball at a cop. Seems proportional.
* According to the new survey, 54 percent of Americans approve of using drones to kill high-level terrorism suspects, while 18 percent disapprove and 28 percent are undecided. … But support for drone strikes in the new HuffPost/YouGov survey dropped to 43 percent if the terrorism suspects are U.S. citizens, with 27 percent disapproving and 31 percent saying they’re not sure. If innocent civilians may also be killed in the process of targeting terrorism suspects, only 29 percent approve of using them and 42 percent disapprove. I’m amazed the numbers are that low, to be honest. Perhaps there’s an opportunity here to leverage Republicans’ knee-jerk hatred of Obama for anti-imperialist ends.
* The surfeit of attention paid to the figure of the entrepreneur in the present moment reveals it to be an object of impossible longing, a fiction riven by ideological contradictions. He—it is usually a he as portrayed in media—is an abstraction but also manifest as a Mark Zuckerberg or a Peter Thiel. He is both an idea and a real person. The distance between the two—mirrored in the gulf between what he is meant to stand for and what we are supposed to do in emulating flesh-and-blood entrepreneurs—reveals some of the deep contradictions in how we live our lives and how we think.
* Ruth Fowler reads Christopher Dorner’s manifesto in light of his rampage.
“I am a man who has lost complete faith in the system, when the system betrayed, slandered and libeled me,” Dorner writes, who identifies throughout his manifesto as a patriot whose core beliefs have been shattered. He realizes that he has, as we might say, ‘lost the plot’. He’s happy to tell you why that is, and why he believes he has to divert his killing skills away from the people they were intended for, and against those who trained him. His manifesto or letter, titled simply, ‘Last Resort’. is addressed to America, in a final plea, perhaps, that they address the heart of darkness that lies at its core. The heart of darkness which turned Christopher Dorner from a man who believed that he could best serve his country by working as a navy reservist and LAPD officer, to a man who believed he could best serve his country by destroying the LAPD entirely using the skills he learned in the navy.
* And you’ve always wondered: how does AOL make money? The Atlantic reports.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 9, 2013 at 8:31 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academic freedom, America, AOL, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, BDS, carbon, cars, Christopher Dorner, climate change, drones, ecology, entrepreneurs, feminism, food, graffiti, guns, hydrofracking, ideology, Israel, job creators, LAPD, Lena Dunham, Marquette, meat, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, natural gas, nudity, oil, Palestine, police brutality, politics, snow, tasers, vegetarians, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, winter, Wisconsin