Posts Tagged ‘zero tolerance’
Weekend Links! Piping Hot!
* Don’t forget! The deadline for the SFFTV special issue on the Mad Max franchise is February 1.
* The local beat! The day Milwaukee almost killed the NFL.
* Expert says Michigan officials changed a Flint lead report to avoid federal action. Bernie calls on Snyder to resign. This is how toxic Flint’s water really is.
* A Bonus Keyword for the Age of Austerity this week: Meritocracy.
* The end of Al Jazeera America.
* NYPD Demands a Mere $36,000 “Copying Fee” for Access to Cops’ Body Cam Footage.
* I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their jobs, but this seems sacrilegious to me.
What a time to be alive.
* Rickman, Bowie, and class mobility.
* Teach the controversy: thebeatlesneverexisted.com
* The latest from KSR: What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
* The game’s afoot! Something Is Killing Off America’s Orange Supply.
* The incredible tale of irresponsible chocolate milk research at the University of Maryland.
* Girl Suspended for 30 Days Because She Lent Her Inhaler to a Gasping Classmate.
* Throw a save against narcissistic self-regard: “Role-playing Gamers Have More Empathy Than Non-Gamers.”
* Retired Art Teacher Leaves $1.7 Million to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
* 2016 pessimism watch: Democrats are in more trouble than they think. And changing demographics won’t save them.
* My people? 0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world, new poll reveals.
* And “Late stage capitalism” is the new “Christ, what an asshole.”
Tuesday Links!
* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.
* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:
Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”
* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:
October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction
October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)
October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference
* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.
* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).
* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?
* The Humanities at the End of the World.
* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.
* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.
* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.
* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.
* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.
* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.
* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* A Centre for Laziness Studies.
* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.
* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.
* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.
* The politics of the campaign mixtape.
* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.
* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”
* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.
* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?
* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.
* First, they came for my assault rifle.
* Nihilistic password security questions.
* The end of the Perkins loan.
* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.
* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.
* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.
* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.
* If it’s good enough for Zappos…
* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.
* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.
* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.
* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.
* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.
* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.
* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?
* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”
* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.
* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.
* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.
* Hydrofracking ruins everything.
* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”
* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.
* End zero-tolerance school discipline.
* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.
* The law, in its majestic finality…
* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.
* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.
* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?
* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.
* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.
* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.
* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.
* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”
* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.
* What’s the most American ______ ever made?
* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”
* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…
Weekend Links!
* The future of war, from the author of The Forever War. And a nice flashback from the archive: Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True.
* The dead zones of hypercapitalism.
* There’s some really weird, interesting stuff happening in X-Men fandom right now. It’s almost the inverse of the “Bad Fan” problem that tends to plague Quality TV shows like Breaking Bad: fans so devoted to “appropriate” affective investment in a story that the story itself can no longer be pleasurable to them…
* Insane: The EPA is accusing Volkswagen of illegally using software to cheat emissions standards, allowing the German automaker to sell half a million cars that produce nitrogen oxide, which creates smog, at up to 40 times the legal limit. Criminal charges?
* New details released Friday by researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University reveal that 96 percent of NFL players the group has examined showed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease impacting the brain. It seems hard to believe this sport can have much future.
* A Brief History of Toilet-Based Animal Attacks.
* The first, last, and only alignment chart you’ll ever need.
* Counterpoint: no, Jesus Christ, save money in your twenties if you can.
* Counterpoint: no, PhD programs exist to produce future professors. They can’t be saved independently of that, and why would you try?
* Counterpoint: no, actually that popular antidepressant was totally unsafe for teens.
* #IStandWithAhmed and the Criminalization of the American Schoolyard.
* The University As Ed Tech Startup.
* Ursula Le Guin’s guide to the impossible craft of storytelling.
* Meet the Engineers Trying to Prevent the Destruction of Humanity.
* Sometimes, though, it’s the little things.
* And the word’s come down: The FBI Says Retweets Are Endorsements.
Thursday Morning Links
* This is not an SF postdoc per se, but Liverpool has a tremendous SF archive and it would be a great opportunity for an SF scholar.
* Some impressive student journalism from Marquette undergrads: “Marquette’s reporting to the federal government misses just less than half of sexual assaults on campus.”
* Really interesting piece on how not to build a Star Wars MMORG. MetaFilter mostly hated it, but I thought the idea of limiting the Jedi to a minigame where you inevitably get hunted down and murdered by Darth Vader was brilliant.
* Louisiana State University on the brink. More here and here. This really is the end of the university system — or at least tenure — in America. I can’t believe it’s happening so quickly.
* I mean, the LSU thing is so terrible I can barely even be bothered to get upset about the ASU MOOCs.
* One of the Original X-Men Is Gay, And It Matters More Than You Think. It’s a nice piece by Rachel Eddidin and a bummer that it’s at playboy.com. I’m amazed that they don’t maintain a SFW skin of their site for prose writing that goes viral.
* Tell Us About the First Time You Realized Dudes Were Checking You Out.
* Fugitive Turns Himself In After 40 Years So He Can Get Health Care.
* The rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense.
* How to think about the risk of autism.
* Clickhole’s Oral History of Mad Men.
* The disturbing world of bootleg Disney’s Frozen games.
* Star Trek 3 is apparently Star Trek Beyond, and Idris Elba is the villain. I’m okay with the title — I like the ethos if not the continued insistence on reading “trek” as a verb –but wish they could do one that doesn’t have a “villain” for a change.
* The good news is: this civilization is over. And everybody knows it. And the good news is: we can all start building another one, here in the ruins, and out of pieces of the old one.
* DC is going to try to attract girl readers of comics with a special Super Hero Universe Designed Just For Girls, where, I presume, sex and sexual violence are somewhat less of an overriding focus.
* Pseudoscience in the Witness Box: The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science.
* DID YOU KNOW that academic departments use curricular requirements to encourage enrollment in courses that don’t just automatically fill by themselves? It’s true!
* The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game.
* And from the genius behind the art in Braid and one of my absolute favorite web comics of all time, A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, comes Zelda pastiche Second Quest. Man I miss that web comic.
Gerry Canavan 