Posts Tagged ‘Woody Allen’
Not CoronavirME — CoronavirUS
* The new SFFTV is out, a special issue on Blade Runner and its legacies. It’s a really good one — check it out! Elsewhere on the SFFTV beat: Congratulations to Joseph Jenner, whose ‘Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect’ (from #12.1) has just been shortlisted for the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies’ Award for best Doctoral Student Article/Chapter!
* This week’s must-read: The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.
* Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction.
* “Oh My God, It’s Milton Friedman for Kids”: A historian of capitalism exposes how Choose Your Own Adventure books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”
* UC Santa Cruz Fires 54 Graduate Student Workers. UCSC cancels classes, shutters services as demonstrators block roadways. I Believe in the Strike. UCSC, The Fate of Graduate Education, and the Future of the University. After Announcing Firing of Grad Assistants, UC-Santa Cruz Is in Turmoil. “So far UCSC has spent $5.1 million dollars on police rather than meet with striking graduate students; this is nearly 25% of the cost of an annual COLA for all graduate students.” MLA Statement. Donate to the strike fund.
* The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s. The New School of Labor Rights.
* Critical theory represents the power, not the corruption, of the humanities.
* Debtors of the World, Unite!
* First Covid-19 outbreak in a U.S. nursing home raises concerns. The ominous days leading up to the coronavirus outbreak at Life Care Center in Kirkland. ‘We’re gearing up for something extremely significant’: Top hospitals across the US told us how they’re preparing for the coronavirus outbreak. Cronyism and Conflicts of Interest in Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. ‘To hell and back’: my three weeks suffering from coronavirus. The new normal. To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China. Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life. WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought. Another senior politician has died of coronavirus in Iran, where 8% of the parliament is infected. State by state, we’ve still barely tested anyone. When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain Coronavirus? New CDC guidance says older adults should ‘stay at home as much as possible’ due to coronavirus. AIPAC. CPAC. Get ready for live-streamed funerals. Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus. Port of Los Angeles Sees Coronavirus Impact Sharply Reducing Imports. As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP. CoronaCoin: A coronavirus speculative deathwatch cryptocurrency. ‘If We Don’t Work, We Don’t Get Paid.’ How the Coronavirus Is Exposing Inequality Among America’s Workers. America Is About to Get a Godawful Lesson in Why Health Care Should Never Be a For-Profit Business. The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead. We’re in trouble.
* SXSW Cancelled, Unbelievably. The effect on Austin will be massive. Event Admits It Has No Insurance for Coronavirus Cancellation.
* First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow. UW, Seattle University classes moving online starting Monday. Stanford too. As Coronavirus Spreads, the Decision to Move Classes Online Is the First Step. What Comes Next? Coronavirus Looms Over March Madness.
* Graphic Novels Your Kid (Probably) Hasn’t Read Yet.
* What to Say to Your Daughter About Campus Sexual Assault.
To bring the spirit of these lessons into a child’s home, parents can focus on building a relationship with their daughter that teaches her that she is equal to men and has the right to set her own boundaries and see them respected. For dads, a simple thing to try is letting your daughter brush you off sometimes. Let her question your authority, talk back, and leave the room in the middle of an argument. These changes could be especially important if the greatest risk to your daughter comes from an authority figure, but they will apply to her peers too.
* Is Miscarriage Is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It? The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go.
* The race to save Polesia, Europe’s secret Amazon.
* We Re-Ordered The Entire Democratic Primary Calendar To Better Represent The Party’s Voters. Twilight of Chris Matthews. Daily Caller gets one I can’t help but pass along. Bring in the boss? ‘This Was a Grift’: Bloomberg Staffers Explain Campaign’s Demise. America’s black billionaires have no place in a Bernie Sanders world! The Liberal-Conservative-Socialist Case for Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren: A Populist for the Professional Class. Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race. ‘Bailey’ vs. ‘blood and teeth’: The inside story of Elizabeth Warren’s collapse. How Elizabeth Warren Lost. It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren. Capitalism Is Rallying Behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans What They Want. Democrats Rallying Around Joe Biden Could Alienate Generations of the Party’s Youth Support. Biden can finish Bernie off in Michigan. Who Said It: Trump or Biden? Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s 2020 Campaign Makes Me Sick with Fear for Our Future. I just remembered Joe Biden is fine. Electability in the time of coronavirus. What if there’s no hope? Sanders campaign hatches comeback plan.
* Lots of my political thoughts have been going viral on Twitter lately, from the proper level of identification with a candidate to the ego protection of despising Bernie Sanders to just straight up rants to a pretty solid sitcom pilot. But nothing approaches a random repost of a meme I saw on Facebook.
* This seems fine: Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups.
* The head of CIS was illegally appointed and it barely even registers.
* The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread gets to The Dispossessed. And from the archives: Sexual Violence in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Towards an Interpretation.
* I don’t want to shock you: Why algorithms can be racist and sexist.
* Larry Nassar victims want accountability. Olympic officials offered cash and veiled threats.
* Woody Allen Memoir Dropped by Hachette After Staff Walkout.
* Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?
* In a lot of office environments, “bad energy” might be code for “old” or “overweight” or “knows too much about labor law,” but one veteran WeWork employee said Rebekah’s firings were seemingly random and without obvious prejudice. “She was just a spoiled baby,” the employee said.
* Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds.
* Susana Polo writes for Polygon about her Twitter account, which, year-round, tweets out events in Lord of the Rings on the day that they happened. (via MeFi)
* Now I know you’re just making these up: “the snow firehose.”
* And Shell is now She’ll. Namaste.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* I see this kind of entrapment everywhere in the neoliberal order. In my own field of academia, I think of how we tell students that college is the only path to a liveable life, leading them to ‘freely choose’ to take on impossible debt loads that they can never escape. We recognize that an injustice has happened here, but a lot of people find it hard to resist saying, essentially, ‘Well, you should have thought of that before you took out the loans….’ They chose it, therefore they should bear the consequences.
And that is one of the least sinister cases – for instance, think about how blacks are entrapped into criminality and then punished disproportionately. Again, we recognize an injustice, but in the mainstream discourse the instinctive reaction is: ‘Well, they had a choice.’ Under neoliberalism, our free choice doesn’t exist to give us room for creativity and exploration – we can seemingly only ever choose wrongly. Free will is a means to generate blameworthiness, to tell us that we deserve what we get.
* The Future of Work, at Wired.
* Common Good, Not Common Despair.
* We don’t often talk of the formative nature of debt in the same way we do in regard to other educational experiences. But just as education is about more than funneling information into students’ brains, indebtedness is about more than the transfer of money. Universities rarely address the aspect of higher education that may most powerfully shape students’ futures: the debt they take on to finance it. A Debt to Education: Universities can shape their students for life – in more ways than one.
* But we can do better. As educators, we need to lead the way and design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging, and compassionate. And it requires that institutions find more creative ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching. This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.
* Universities watchdog threatens fines over grade inflation.
* Citizenship v. The Surveillance State.
* I now conceptualize the society I came from and the war to which I went as part of the same grotesque amusement park ride. If I have discovered anything since my homecoming, it is not that I never came home. It is not that my soul resides in Afghanistan. It is that my home has lost its peaceful veneer, stripped bare, like Twentynine Palms. An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.
* Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death.
* What I Learned from Reading 1,182 Emergency Room Bills.
* A Father’s Version Of A Guatemalan Girl’s Trip To The US Raises Questions About The Border Patrol’s Account. Guatemalan girl likely died of ‘sepsis shock’ after crossing border, hospital officials said. Medical Help Was Hours Away for Migrant Girl Who Died in U.S. Custody. “I just left the tent city at Tornillo. It is a child prison camp. They refused our request to speak with the children who are held there.”
* “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”
* Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation. Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit. How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise. Quick thread on the only recorded criminal arrest of a sitting U.S. president—made by a D.C. Police offering for speeding, a century and a half ago.
* The Future of Ultrahigh-End Space Travel.
* How Scandal and Severance Enrich Private-College Presidents.
* The New York Times Just Published an Unqualified Recommendation for an Insanely Anti-Semitic Book. A Brief, Depressing Compendium of Alice Walker’s Apparent Conspiratorial Beliefs.
* The Brexit Breaking Point. Government gives Britain’s 6 million businesses 101 days to prepare for a No Deal Brexit.
* Everything old is new again! Forever and ever amen.
* I’ve polled Twitter and it’s officially okay to take pleasure in the suffering of these Trump voters whose property is going to wind up on the wrong side of the wall.
* The rapper who allegedly received Dorsey’s facial hair, I’m very excited to share, was Azealia Banks. She tweeted about this exchange in 2016, writing that Dorsey “sent me his hair in an envelope because i was supposed to make him an amulet for protection.”
* The Cities Where The Cops See No Hate.
* A method for creating extremely convincing fake faces.
* Trans Teenager Claims Teacher Demanded He ‘Prove’ He Was a Boy In Bathroom.
* As an intellectual historian, I’ve found it puzzling that no one has scanned Ross Douthat’s writings from the Harvard Salient, 1998-2002. So I checked out as much of it as I could and there’s some pretty good stuff.
* “We have six people on board,” one pilot said a few minutes later, according to an audio recording available via LiveATC.net. “Airplane is completely uncontrollable.”
* Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.
* Are we living with the Chickenocene?
* When you fit the description.
* Well you tell me how you’d make baby powder without asbestos.
* Wild story from the animal beat: An Officer Placed a Retired Police Dog in a Shelter. Now He’s Been Demoted.
* An Atlas of American Gun Violence.
* Today in the best $____ I ever spent: top surgery.
* What’s the greenest way to travel? We built a sim of world’s climate battle – here’s what happened when delegates played it at COP24. Inside the most destructive fire in American history—and why the West’s cities and towns will keep on burning. Weather 2050.
* Starting to think Woody Allen might be a bad guy.
* Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix: The Interview.
* Why We Still Don’t Know How Many NFL Players Have CTE.
* The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.
* How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship.
* The ‘Weird Events’ That Make Machines Hallucinate.
* Journey of an American Bomb.
* DC must have heard about my Graz talk: they’re making a Swamp Thing show. Meanwhile, another followup from Graz: Aquaman, From Super Friend To Surfer Dude: The Bro-Ification Of A Hero.
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
Avoid Your Family with This Very Special Thanksgiving Edition of Thursday Links
* 100 New Debate Topics You and Your Uncle Can Turn into an Argument about Republicans.
* Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Ferguson. Police violence. Ferguson. America. Ferguson. Turkey pardons. Ferguson. New York. Cleveland. Cleveland. Utah. Everywhere. Everywhere.
* Winners are mad when winning lights the shadows.
* Nation Doesn’t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing.
* We should get rid of local policing. Ferguson shows why the system just doesn’t work.
* Rescind Cosby’s honorary doctorates?
* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”
* An expert hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) argued in court that a 9-year-old girl seeking damages after she was sexually assaulted would be protected from emotional stress by her low IQ.
* 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes.
* While Detroit contended with largest municipal bankruptcy, its lawyers were robbing it blind.
* Tyler Cowen, for one, welcomes the hyper-meritocracy.
* Anthropology as white public space.
* Here’s the guy who wants to run to Hillary Clinton’s left. Democrats! Catch the fever.
* While he wasn’t second in command of the United States nuclear arsenal, Rear Adm. Timothy M. Giardina not only had a 15 hour a week gambling habit he also may have had a one-man poker chip counterfeiting operation in which he used paint and stickers to make $1 poker chips into $500 poker chips. This led to repeated bans from local casinos, eventually a lifetime ban and finally his nuclear weapons were taken away.
* What is your research agenda for the coming year?
* Just another Afrofuturism megapost.
* Town Bans Winnie The Pooh For Lack of Genitals, “Dubious Sexuality.” Finally, someone said it.
* At some point this guy took a moment and smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge that he’d covered all his bases.
* SDSU suspends all frat activities after members wave dildos, throw eggs at rape protesters.
* UVA has expelled 183 students for honor code violations — and none for sexual assault.
* Alexey Pajitnov, hero, creator of Tetris.
* Frederik Pohl Made Doing Literally Everything Look Easy.
* Strange Horizons reprints Darko Suvin’s “Estrangement and Cognition,” with a 2014 postscript.
All of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times. Perhaps the richer among us, up to 5% globally but disproportionately concentrated in the trilateral U.S.A.-western Europe-Japan and its appendages, have been cushioned from realizing it by the power of money and the self-serving ideology it erects. But even those complain loudly of the “criminality” and in general “moral decay” of the desperately vicious outside their increasingly fortress-like neighbourhoods. We live morally in an almost complete dystopia—dystopia because anti-utopia—and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective.
In a look backwards to my writing of the 1960s from this most endangered cusp of history, I see a main limitation to my “Poetics of SF” essay in its innocently and naively Formalist horizon. That is, I presupposed the tide of history was flowing, even if with regrettable eddies, towards socialism or democratic communism, and concentrated on the problems of understanding, pleasure, and form within that tide. Thus I seem to have felt I could freeze or even freeze out history, as all pursuits of aesthetics do: transcending the moment. I was wrong.
* The official SF short film of the Thanksgiving holiday: Survivors Of A Nuclear War Find A Secret Bunker—But There’s A Catch
* Maybe the most twenty-first-century artifact possible: ‘Sunburn!’, A Gravity-Based Puzzle Video Game Featuring a Doomed Spaceship Crew That Is Determined to Die Together.
* The good news: There is no substantial technical or economic barrier that would prevent the U.S. from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that would help put the world on track to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, there are multiple pathways to that target, each involving a different mix of technologies. Achieving the goal would cost only around 1 percent of GDP a year out through 2050, and if we started now, we could allow infrastructure to turn over at its natural rate, avoiding stranded assets. The bad news: Pulling it off would require immediate, intelligent, coordinated, vigorously executed policies that sustain themselves over decades.
* LEGO is dead, long live LEGO.
* Guys, it’s not all bad news: After The Sun Incinerates Earth, Life Could Evolve On Titan.
* And this blog’s most sacred annual tradition: William S. Burroughs – A Thanksgiving Prayer.
Special Bonus Monday Links – Do Not Read – Full of Bees
* It takes special gumption to argue not all US interventions are horrors in support of intervening in a horrorshow caused by US intervention.
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* Jacobin breaks kayfabe: The story of pro wrestling in the twentieth century is the story of American capitalism.
* The swelling of the federal government’s communications bureaucracy to more than 3,000 workers reflects a “public relations state” designed to keep pace with the news cycle and politicize government messaging, experts say.
* Salon says once a cheater, always a cheater.
* The Systemic Implications of the Salaita Case.
* Hillary Clinton 2016: Because the Forever War Won’t Forever Itself.
* We Have a Rape Gif Problem and Gawker Media Won’t Do Anything About It.
* As @jbouie says, “with the critical exception of the situation of African-Americans” is the ultimate “to be sure” of all time.
* Probably the first time I’ve ever linked to anything at National Review approvingly: It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.
* Afrofurism: Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle. She even calculated the flight path for the first American mission to space.
* The kids are all right: Mo’Ne Davis, 12, Leads Philly Team To Little League World Series.
* Just how deep does the rabbit hole go? 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
* The Saved by the Bell renaissance has claimed Arya Stark.
* The Marvel-Fox rights fight as autoimmune disorder.
* Can colleges do anything about parties and “tradition”?
* And this may not be the future we wanted, but it’s the one we have: Civilians in Abandoned McDonald’s Seize Control of Wandering Space Satellite.
Sunday Links!
* The science fictional sublime: the art of Penguin science fiction.
* From the syllabus of my wonderful Cultural Preservation class: “Can Auschwitz Be Saved?” and “The Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.”
* Great moments in the law school scam. Wow.
* Fraternity expels 3 linked to statue noose, suspends Ole Miss chapter.
* Where the money goes: what $60,000 tuition at Duke buys you.
* The Definitive Guide to Never Watching Woody Allen Again.
* Pedophiles Are Still Tearing Reddit Apart.
* The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet.
* The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will launch in 2015.
* Always worth relinking: StrikeDebt’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
* On most policy questions of any importance, there are enough academics doing work to generate far more policy ideas than can seriously considered by our political system. When it comes to systemic risk, we have all the ideas we need–size caps or higher capital requirements–and we have academics behind both of those. The rest is politics. What we really need is for the people with the big megaphones to be smarter about the ideas that they cover.
* Milwaukee’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program running out of money. Income inequality grew rapidly in Milwaukee, study finds.
* Actually, climate trolls, January ended up being the fourth-warmest on record.
* EPA moves to toughen pesticide safety standards for the first time in 20 years.
* Scientists are appalled at Nicaragua’s plan to build a massive canal.
* South Carolina Legislators To Punish College For Assigning Gay-Themed Fun Home Comic To Freshmen.
* A sequel film for Farscape is in the early phases of development.
* NBC officially giving up, bringing back Heroes.
* How wrong is your time zone?
* Presenting the lowest possible score in Super Mario Brothers.
* The Amtrak Writers Fellowship.
* And now they’re saying the Voynich Manuscript might not be a hoax after all. Oh, I hope so.
Thursday Links
* Research shows that if a child discloses sexual abuse, chances are very, very good that no matter how young he or she is, how angry his or her parent is at the accused, how numb or stiff he or she seems discussing it, how willing she or he is to back off from the claim at any one point, how little physical evidence there is, that child is probably telling the truth. Six Reasons Why Dylan Farrow Is Highly Credible.
* A Brief History of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at NYU.
* Wildly popular accounts like @HistoryInPics are bad for history, bad for Twitter, and bad for you.
* On Saying the Same Thing a Thousand Times.
* Male, Mad and Muddleheaded: Academics in Children’s Picture Books.
* “Oppressed Majority”: Life as a Woman.
* Also at Buzzfeed (sorry): What Arbitrary Thing Are You?
* The latest in terrible education reform ideas: the “parent trigger.”
* The latest in weird weather: “frost quakes.”
* Train Spills 12,000 Gallons Of Oil In Minnesota, No Major Cleanup Effort Planned.
* Jerry Seinfeld, philosopher.
“You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that.”
* True facts that sound false.
* Stolen Stradivarius violin recovered, sources say.
* Marriage equality in Scotland.
* The tactical brilliance of BDS becomes clearer with every passing month.
* Iran Is Apparently Adopting Universal Health Care.
* ‘Shy’ male sues Women’s Studies teacher for failing him after he refused to attend class.
* What happens when two chatbots try to seduce each other.
* Finally, a Bachelor Contestant Exposes the Show’s Weird Sex Issues.
* At some point we jumped the tracks and wound up in a really polemic 1980s dystopia.
* Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.
* Bill Watterson wins the Nobel Prize of Comics.
* So much for my doomsday prepping: The Great Lakes May Be Drying Up.
* Single Mother Fired For Staying Home With Her Son When Schools Closed For Subzero Weather.
* XStat Rapid Hemostasis System for Gunshot Wounds Works in 15 Seconds.
* Wisconsin’s law on police accountability in custody deaths goes unused.
“That is as bad as anything I’ve ever heard,” he said of the decision to let Weston work with cleaning products. “Not only did they know he was suicidal, they know how he did it, and they gave him the very agent that he’s used to try to commit suicide. That sounds criminal.”
* Your iPhone Has a Secret Undo Button.
* There’s a new TNI out, on H8.
* They’re making a movie out of High Rise, which is great news.
* The first fear is always the fear of the doppelgänger.
* And LifeHack has some important Beard Facts.
First Day of the Semester Links!
* CFP for this year’s meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, which will be meeting at feminist science fiction convention WisCon in Madison this year.
* MLA Delegates Narrowly Approve Controversial Resolution on Israel. Can all-out war be far behind?
* The question is: Is such a life and such a career available now? In the Age of Adjuncts? When graduate students refer to themselves as ‘the pre-unemployed’?
*A reason FT and PT should organize together: Part-time professors at UNB are obliged by contract to continue teaching even if full-time faculty strike unless UNB administration decides otherwise. UNB professors on strike starting Monday. Some relevant video.
* David Gordon on discovering he’s huge in Japan.
* Beginning in January, approximately 1,600 all-electric vehicles registered in North Carolina and newly-registered all-electrics are required to pay a $100 annual fee in addition to other required registration fees because Republicans literally just straight-out hate the planet that’s why.
* All December Job Gains Went to Women.
* 7-Year-Old Girl Asks Scientists To Breed Her a Dragon.
* NBA to Pay $500 Million to ABA’s Spirits of St. Louis to Get Out of 38-Year-Old Deal.
* UNC Professor Receiving Death Threats For Revealing Athletes’ Low Reading Levels.
* Disney totally screwing up Star Wars watch.
* I missed this profile of Mia Farrow depicting her daughters’ allegations of child molestation against Woody Allen in November, but how utterly horrifying. Was there not time for the Golden Globes to rethink that “lifetime achievement” award?
* And paging Louis Althusser: school uses drone surveillance to stop students from cheating in exams.
Friday Links
* CFP: Foundation, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames (15 Apr 2014).
* Tor has an excerpt from the introduction to Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure.
* In their complaints to federal authorities, students and alumni have faulted campus officials for missteps at nearly every juncture: Telling students who report rape to take time off until their assailants graduate. Treating judicial cases like educational exercises. Slapping perpetrators with penalties less severe than those for stealing a laptop.
* The costs of raising a child from birth to age 17, including housing, food, clothing, health care, education, and other expenses, will come to $241,080 for a child born in 2012, up 2.6 percent from the year before, according to new data released by the Department of Agriculture. The annual cost for a child in a middle-income, two-parent family ranges from $12,600 to $14,700.
* Scandal! Exactly Zero Of The 17 Suspected Voter Fraud Cases In Boulder, CO Exist.
* Propublica crowdfunds an intern to study interns.
* A quality product in the digital age: Cleveland.com’s Review of the Cheesecake Factory Reveals the Sorry State of American Newspapers.
Yesterday Was No-Post Monday
Sorry about No-Post Monday; my summer course starts tomorrow and I’m scrambling to get everything ready. I have a few links before I declare this No Post Tuesday.
* Eliza Dushku is twittering that Dollhouse renewal talks are going on as we speak. A better indication than if they weren’t.
* Miscellaneous Star Trek links:
* A fairly well-known story about TOS and MLK.
* Ultimately, then, “Star Trek” was prescient not for its futurism, with the Enterprise crew using communicators that look like flip-phones, but for exploring a universe absorbed with pop-culture history. David Hadju on Star Trek and popular culture.
* Continuity errors as honeypot.
* “Star Trek sucked so bad I can’t even think of a title for my rant.”
* The secret history of Jughead’s hat.
* Larry David is Woody Allen as Larry David in Whatever Works.
* Apocalypse and the academy in The New Yorker.
* And some sad news: Craig Arnold is now believed to have died while traveling in Japan.
Gerry Canavan 