Posts Tagged 'consent'
All Your Friday Links!
* The itself.blog Star Trek: Discovery event is underway! Star Trek: Discovery Is Optimism, But Not for Us. "Can you bury your heart"? Having feelings about Discovery. Star Trek: Discovery as the End of Next Generation Triumphalism.
* CFP: Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction (MLA 19).
* Jaimee Hills is officially a dangerous woman.
* The Male Glance.
* The university in ruins: UW Stevens Point. The administration clearly doesn't even understand what it's proposing:
When releasing the plan, university officials said that English majors for teacher certification would continue. But Williams said that under the state Department of Public Instruction's certification criteria, a person looking to become an English teacher has to have been an English major.
"They just both have to exist, or both have to be eliminated," Williams said. "One depends directly on the other."
The most salient fact of academia today is that low-cost humanities classes subsidize every other aspect of university operations. You will never hear a single administrator acknowledge this basic fact and indeed they insist that the money flows the other way.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 7, 2018
* Professors earn about 15 percent less than others with advanced degrees, finds a study circulated Tuesday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Though perhaps some of us make it up in job satisfaction (really).
* It's gotten so bad in the humanities even the Yale grads don't get jobs handed to them as soon as they graduate.
* Why Creative-Writing Programs Have Been Havens for Harassment.
* It has taken me two and a half decades to recognize that my experience of having a senior male nominal adviser and a female (usually more junior) actual adviser is common throughout academe. On Ghost Advising.
* Abusers and enablers in faculty culture.
* 5% raises in West Virginia. Onward to Oklahoma.
Today's front page is one worth saving pic.twitter.com/ig9SNqbpuZ
— Jake Zuckerman (@jake_zuckerman) March 7, 2018
* Marquette vs. Trauma.
* Snowflake students claim Frankenstein's monster was 'misunderstood' — and is in fact a VICTIM.
* On the Blackness of the Panther.
* Loved this from Barbara Ehrenreich: Body Work: The curiously self-punishing rites of fitness culture.
If anything, the culture of fitness has grown more combative than when I first got involved. It is no longer enough to "have a good workout," as the receptionist at the gym advises every day; you should "crush your workout." Health and strength are tedious goals compared to my gym's new theme of "explosive strength," achieved, as far I can see, through repeated whole-body swinging of a kettleball. If your gym isn't sufficiently challenging, you might want to try an "ultra-extreme warrior workout" or buy a "home fitness system" from P90X, which in 2016 tweeted a poster of an ultra-cut male upper body, head bowed as if in prayer, with the caption "A moment of silence please for my body has no idea of what I'm about to put it through." Or you could join CrossFit, the fastest-growing type of gym in the world, and also allegedly the most physically punishing. The program "prepares trainees for any physical contingency," the company boasts, "not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable, too. Our specialty is not specializing," and the latter category includes the zombie apocalypse. The mind's stuggle for mastery over the body has become a kind of mortal combat.
* Too big to tax.
* In this economy you're either burned out, or you're boxed out.
* The Secret NYPD Files: Officers Can Lie And Brutally Beat People — And Still Keep Their Jobs.
* A prosecutor who obtained a wrongful conviction that sent a Houston man to death row for nearly 10 years didn't just withhold evidence but also denied under oath that he had information that supported Alfred Dewayne Brown's alibi, court records show.
* Twilight of the cult film.
* Could Trump get a White House job if he weren't president? Didn't we already know Trump couldn't get a loan before he was president?
* Beware Liberal-Baiting "White House in Chaos" Stories. Trump's Position Is As Solid As It's Ever Been.
For that reason win or lose I think the fights on the liberal-left will be a lot nastier after 2020 than they've been before. A huge part of the Democratic base is still living in denial about what this country has become.
Well, I'd like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
— jesse farrar (@BronzeHammer) October 2, 2016
* Gratuitous cruelty by Homeland Security. Lying to the immigrant soldiers you promised citizenship.
* A Dozen Democrats Want To Help Banks Hide Racial Discrimination In Mortgages.
* Guess Who's Not Coming To America? International Students.
* Kobe Steel's Chief to Step Down as It Discloses Wider Quality Problems Fifty-Year Conspiracy to Defraud Customers.
* Toddler feelings helpline.
— If you still feel pretty messed up about how they were just going to burn the Velveteen Rabbit, please mash all of the keys but mostly 2.
* White flight remains a reality.
* Liberate our schools.
[future history class]
Teacher: How did World War 3 start? Anyone? Yes, Khaleesi.
Girl: It started bec-
Teacher: No, I meant Khaleesi M. She had her hand up first.
Girl 2: It started because president Trump was hangry.
Teacher: Correct. [holsters gun]
— OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) March 3, 2018
* '50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.'
* The grim reality of job hunting in the age of AI.
* The Marvel Cinematic Universe only really makes sense when you remember Captain America is a trans man.
* Wait, what exactly was Luke Skywalker's plan in Return Of The Jedi?
* The opioid crisis has become an "epidemic of epidemics." Meanwhile, a new study suggests opioids are no better than Tylenol for treating some kinds of pain.
* Kentucky's 'child bride' bill stalls as groups fight to let 13-year-olds wed.
* U.N. Report On Magical Realism Warns Of Increased Incidences Of Women's Tears Flooding The Entire World.
* False news stories travel faster and farther on Twitter than the truth.
* There's no idea so terrible there isn't someone in favor of it.
* York University philosophy professor and team submit brief supporting chimpanzee personhood.
* Ok, but you're on a very short leash.
* Her name was Kanga and she was trouble.
I thought of how it all used to be, back when C.R. was young, when we still all believed things would get better. When we still had hope. In a way, hope is as powerful a drug as honey.
— Lavie Tidhar (@lavietidhar) March 7, 2018
* I Am the Very Important Longread Everyone Is Talking About.
* The United States of Middle-earth.
* Understanding Fight Club.
* And the arc of history is long, but.
Tagged with academia, activism, actually existing media bias, advising, Amazon, America, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, Barbara Ehrenreich, Black Panther, capitalism, Captain America, chimps, class struggle, consent, creative writing, cult film, dangerous women, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, English departments, fake news, Fight Club, film, fitness, Frankenstein, fraud, games, graduate student life, guns, harassment, homeland security, How the University Works, humanzees, hyperexploitation, ice, immigration, international students, Jaimee Hills, job satisfaction, Kentucky, kids, liberals, Lili Loofbourow, longreads, Lord of the Rings, magic realism, Marquette, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mary Shelley, McSweeney's, Middle-Earth, Milwaukee, MLA, mortgages, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Oklahoma, opioids, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pain, parenting, perjury, poetry, police brutality, police corruption, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Return of the Jedi, school shootings, science fiction, segregation, sex, sexual harassment, Sopranos, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, steel, strikes, Super Smash Brothers, taxes, teachers, Teju Cole, tenure, the gym, the humanities, the male glance, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Twitter, unions, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, West Virginia, white flight, Winnie the Pooh, Yale
#OEBStudies for All Your #OEBStudies Needs
* I'm at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, presenting as part of the Octavia Butler studies conference here. Here's a great writeup from the organizers, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey. Hashtag #OEBStudies!
* Lumenscent Threads: Knowing Octavia Butler through a Community That Loved Her.
* I also got in a big Twitter to-do with Noah Berlatsky about the Oankali, if you want some extra bonus OEB content.
* Then next week I'm back in California for the Science Fiction Research Association conference at Riverside, giving a talk called "No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene" (and doing a bunch of SFRA executive committee stuff too I guess).
* "Rakka," a nightmarish SF film from Neill Blomkamp, narrated by Sigourney Weaver. Seems almost like proof of concept for the Alien sequel they won't let him do…
* And why not? Here's an Irish one.
* The Han Solo prequel film, like every other Star Wars followup Disney has attempted, has encountered problems that have crashed production. This time they've fired the directors and brought in Ron Howard to attempt to salvage the project.
* Jon Ossoff's Georgia special election loss shows Democrats could use a substantive agenda. Nonsense! They're doing great. Why Jon Ossoff's loss is bad news for Democrats' 2018 hopes. Keep hope alive.
* Memo shows what major donors like Goldman Sachs want from the Democratic Party. Class struggle in America doesn't look exactly like you think.
* Who Is Getting Rich Off the Secret Health-Care Overhaul?
* Senate Health Bill Gives Huge Tax Cuts to Businesses, High-Income Households. G.O.P. Health Plan Is Really a Rollback of Medicaid. A helpful chart of the differences between the Senate and House bills and the status quo. The Senate health bill is a recipe for a death spiral. Wheelchairs and zip ties. The littlest lobbyist: a 6-year-old, whose life depends on ACA, heads to Capitol Hill. There will be deaths.
Republicans: we're going to decimate the healthcare system unimpeded
Democrats: that's it, we're gonna *pulls out posterboard* pic.twitter.com/aZ8tzwwCnY
— Ayesha A. Siddiqi (@AyeshaASiddiqi) June 23, 2017
2015-2016 was when i finally learned to spell "millennial"
2017 was when i finally learned to spell "guillotine"
— Gravitas Free Zone🤖 (@NoraReed) June 22, 2017
#TrumpcareInOneSentence pic.twitter.com/aeSQgEZ3jS
— WorkingFamiliesParty (@WorkingFamilies) June 22, 2017
* Going on Fox News cost me my job, professor claims.
* Don't Trust a Republican Just Because He Hates Trump.
Frum, McMullin, etc will all sit 2020 out or reluctantly / not-so-reluctantly endorse a supposedly improved Trump over an unacceptable Dem. https://t.co/ZL7o44sxqs
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2017
* Corey Robin on China Miéville's October.
* The Pittsburgh Fairy Tale: Pittsburgh's much-touted revival has remade the region for the wealthy while leaving workers and the poor behind.
* Twilight of the CEOs. Uber doesn't even currently have a CEO, COO, CFO, or CMO, "in addition to other open positions."
* What if the Watchmen adaptation that shouldn't have happened in the first place happened again, but more so?
* Ted Chiang was right! Attractive Students Get Higher Grades.
* "The Castile case reminds me of a weird pattern we always see in the inevitable defenses of police who've shot innocent people."
* Probably the only good thing that has ever happened on Twitter.
* Hunting for Antibiotics in the World's Dirtiest Places.
* To even begin to defend Kipnis's actions requires some serious leaps of logic, but Kipnis gamely tries.
* The New Free Speech is a right-wing grift, part 29.
* "North Carolina is the only state in U.S. where no doesn't mean no."
* "Bill Cosby to Teach Young People How to Avoid Sexual Assault Charges."
I think it's unrealistic that Offred didn't flee America before the final takeover. https://t.co/vbLWS1iW5b
* But it's not ALL deranged misogyny! N.H. Republicans Accidentally Approved a Bill Allowing Pregnant Women to Commit Murder.
* Looks like the marketing team have had a word.
* This seems fine: Elections officials outgunned in Russia's cyberwar against America.
* #TheResistance.
* Sega!
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #TheResistance, A Series of Unfortunate Events, AHCA, Alien, America, antibiotics, Bill Cosby, calliagnosia, CEOs, charts, China Miéville, class struggle, consent, Dawn, DC Comics, democrat, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, elections, Elon Musk, Fox News, free speech, games, general election 2020, gentrification, Georgia, Gilead, Goldman Sachs, Han Solo, Handmaid's Tale, HBO, health care, health insurance, Huntington Library, hyperspace, Ireland, jokes, Jon Ossoff, Laura Kipnis, Liking What You See: A Documentary, maps, Mars, midterm election 2018, murder, my scholarly empire, Neill Blomkamp, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, October, Parable of the Trickster, Paul F. Tompkins, Philando Castile, Pittsburgh, police state, police violence, politics, Rakka, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Ron Howard, Russia, Russian Revolution, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, Sega, Star Wars, Ted Chiang, Title IX, Twitter, Uber, University of Wisconsin, Watchmen, Wisconsin, Xenogenesis
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mellon Postdoctoral Program invites recent PhDs to apply for its three two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The theme for 2017-2019 applicants is Translation, Adaptation, Transplantation.
* A message from the Marquette administration: Milwaukee, our home. And a letter from MUPD. Decades of grievances come to a head in Milwaukee after police shooting. The "unrest" in this city began decades ago. The Racial Segregation And Economic Devastation That Made Milwaukee A 'Powder Keg.' Powder keg. Decades in the making. Decades in the making. Ongoing tensions. Not a surprise. No one can deny. Outsider agitators! The radicalism of Black Lives Matter. "What can I do to help Milwaukee?" What It's Like To Experience Black Pain In Milwaukee. Half of Wisconsin's Black Neighborhoods Are Jails.
* Scientists say the US is facing the strongest hurricane season since Sandy hit the East Coast. California is in flames right now, with fires fueled by historic drought. A first-strike against climate change is the only solution.
* The 10 Most Overly-Specific Supervillains in Comics.
* The story no one asked for will finally become the series no one can watch. And when I made that joke on Facebook a friend reminded me of the goddamn forehead ridge thing that will be totally inescapable.
* I told you, Dad! New research from the Journal of Health Psychology seems to supports the theory that intelligent people spend more time being lazy than people who are more active.
* Racial Politics After Obama.
* Decolonizing sociology.
* Insurers say they're losing money under the Affordable Care Act and are fighting for double-digit rate increases. This week Aetna announced it is pulling back from most exchanges.
for every problem there is a solution that is complex, market-based and far worse than the government just doing it https://t.co/lRJsJ72z5c
— sean. (@SeanMcElwee) August 16, 2016
* When the Hospital Is Covered but the Health Care Isn't.
the hospital is in network, and the doctor is in network, ha ha very clever you caught that one! but that room is NOT part of the hospital
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) August 15, 2016
* Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans.
* Area Man's Wife Achieves Lifelong Dream Through Dedicated, Drive, and Incredible Physical Prowess. It gets worse, my friends. (It gets better too.)
* Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed. Right wing ratfucking though it may be, the cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously honor contemporary norms about sexual consent and the 90s-era "none of our business" defense of Bill Clinton's predatory behavior seems increasingly difficult to sustain.
* The amount of effort this took was the most alarming thing given his history," the guy told the Post. Anthony Weiner's Back at It Again With the Saucy Twitter DMs. I'm still saying it:
I'd really love to see a documentary called ABEDIN just with the footage of Huma they cut from WEINER. She's the enigma.
* This Andrew Cuomo fan fiction is now totally my head canon.
* Comedy Central Cancels Larry Wilmore's Late-Night Show. Comedy Central's decision this week to cancel "The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore" was a surprise. The reason it was a surprise is that Wilmore isn't the real problem with the cable channel's late-night offerings. Wilmore gone, but Comedy Central's late-night problem is Noah.
* The Life Aquatic's Seu Jorge Announces David Bowie Covers Tour. Chicago on (the day after) my birthday!
* NeverEnding Story Returns To Movie Theaters For Limited Run. I wish my kids were just a little bit older so we could do this.
* The Election Won't Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.
* How Cuba's greatest cartoonist fled from Castro and created 'Spy vs. Spy.'
* Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act.
* Hidden Figures really does look good.
* Suicide Squad and the bitter future of the DC Cinematic Universe.
* Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s.
* How to make your office gun-free. Why, it couldn't be simpler!
in order to make my office a gun-free zone, i have to tell every person they can't bring a gun in, every time pic.twitter.com/muJ5KUmrxF
— Gavin (@gavinsaywhat) August 15, 2016
* "People think a computer could run index funds­—and they're so wrong," says Brian Bruce, a former index fund manager who's now chief executive officer of Hillcrest Asset Management in Plano, Texas, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Index Investing. Five years, tops.
* The rise of neuroprosthetics.
* Augmented reality games and ethics. And just for instance: Mich. couple suing Pokémon Go for ruining their quality of life.
* It is easier to imagine the end of dads than the end of capitalism.
* How legroom on major airlines compare to one another.
* "People don't realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics." Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
* Don't Bring Your Dog to Work.
* Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on "Trump: The Game." Trump Could Sweep Toss Up States And Still Lose The Election. Right now polls show Donald Trump losing every single swing state. The kids are all right. Hell, even their parents are all right. The Great GOP Divide.
The good news is
1) Trump is unpopular
2) His positions are unpopular
3) He's a nutcase
4) His party hates him
5) He has no infrastructure
— HR-Compliant Freddie (@freddiedeboer) August 15, 2016
* Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction.
* Taken in cumulative, these data suggest two unusual possibilities:
A. Karl Marx is the single most important, influential, and far-reaching thinker who ever lived, and his empirically attested syllabus presence accurately reflects this extreme degree of influence that he has over virtually all aspects of human knowledge.
B. Karl Marx enjoys a grossly outsized presence on college syllabi relative to his importance as a thinker, owing to a similarly disproportionate affinity for his thought among university faculty and particularly those faculty outside of the economics profession.
I really think you could make a halfway legitimate case for some version of (A) — bracketing religious figures like Christ or the Buddha, and limiting the scope of influence to the mid- and post-20C milieu — but the later observations about the Manifesto as a kindergarten lesson probably poison that possibility.
* A genetic mutation that has been found to cause people to act outrageously when they're drunk also appears to lower the risk of certain metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity. Peculiarly, the mutation has so far only been found in Finnish people, and is thought to affect around 100,000 people in the Nordic country.
* You'll Get to See the Documentary About Roger Corman's Fantastic Four This Fall. And keep your eye out for For the Love of Spock.
* Time travel and RPGs.
* Why I'm loving No Man's Sky.
* Weird futurism watch: in the future, should everyone be a twin?
* Abridged classics.
* And this is basically just a panel from The Flash.
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, #dads, academia, adaptation, Aetna, Affordable Care Act, air travel, airplanes, alcohol, Andrew Cuomo, animals, Anthony Weiner, artificial intelligence, Barack Obama, Big Shampoo, Bill Clinton, black box voting, books, California, class struggle, classics, climate change, cognitive dissonance, Comedy Central, comics, computing, consent, cosmetics, Cuba, David Bowie, DC Comics, decolonizing the mind, democracy, diabetes, dogs, Donald Trump, elections, fan fiction, Fantastic Four, FDA, feminism, film, Finland, France, futurism, futurity, games, general election 2016, genetics, guns, hacking, head canons, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, hoaxes, How the University Works, Huma Abedin, hurricanes, index funds, insurance, intellectual history, intelligence, Juanita Broderick, Karl Marx, Klingons, Larry Wilmore, laziness, legroom, Leonard Nimoy, literature, Madison, maps, Marquette, Marx, Marxism, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mutants, NASA, neoliberalism, neuroprosthetics, New York, nostalgia, Olympics, outer space, outside agitators, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, photographs, Pokémon Go, police violence, politics, polls, postdocs, pranks, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, regulation, Republicans, riots, Roger Corman, RPGs, running, Seu Jorge, sexism, sociology, Spock, sports, Spy vs. Spy, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, stock market, strength, student debt, students fans, Suicide Squad, superheroes, supervillains, syllabi, teaching, television, the Beatles, the courts, The Daily Show, the Flash, the kids are all right, the law, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Neverending Story, The Nightly Show, the suburbs, the wisdom of markets, time travel, translation, Trevor Noah, twins, University of Wisconsin, Usain Bolt, Utopia, wildfires
* Marquette English's course offerings for summer and fall 2015, including my courses on Science Fiction as Genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, and American Literature after the American Century.
* Speaking of my courses, this is such an incredible answer to the last few weeks of my cultural preservation course I almost feel as though I somehow made it up.
* An amazing late comment on my Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis post, including some great commentary on the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
* My review isn't coming for a few months, but I really loved Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. I can't wait to talk to people about it. I don't want to spoil anything so I'll keep my mouth shut for now.
* If you want a vision of the future: Sweet Briar College, Citing 'Financial Challenges,' Will Close Its Doors in August. (More, more.) Clarkson U., Union Graduate College Explore Merger. It's Final: UNC Board of Governors Votes To Close Academic Centers. Jindal cuts higher ed by 78%.
* Where has all the money gone? The decline in faculty salaries at American colleges and universities over the past 40 years.
* It's always "the end of college."
* "De-tenure." Don't worry, it's just another regrettable drafting error!
* Why we occupy: Dutch universities at the crossroads.
* The academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has focused largely on how fake undergraduate classes helped athletes maintain their eligibility to compete. In an article in The News & Observer over the weekend, a former UNC official says athletics officials also sometimes asked the university's graduate school to bend the rules to admit athletes in order to extend their eligibility.
* This is the best Dean of Eureka Moments post yet. Maybe literally the best possible.
associate vice provost of failure successes
— Dean O. Eureka (@deaneureka) February 28, 2015
* College admissions and former inmates.
* Nine out of ten startups fail, which is why every institution in society should be converted to the startup model immediately.
* The Search for a Useable Past: An Interview with Paul Buhle on Radical America.
* The politicization of even the idea of knowledge.
* Michigan Frat's 48-Hour Rager Wrecks Resort, Causes $430,000 in Damages.
* Le Guin vs. Ishiguo: "Are they going to say this is fantasy?"
* The United States of Megadrought: If you think that California is dry now, wait till the 2050s.
* US sea level north of New York City 'jumped by 128mm.'
* A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years.
* Vox considers the end of American democracy: 1, 2.
* Against the West Wing.
* Against "learning styles."
* Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules. Hillary Clinton's personal email account looks bad now. But it was even worse at the time.
* …whose frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things…
* Why aren't the seven witnesses to Dendinger's nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren't the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger's prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.
* When A Newspaper Gave Blade Runner's Replicant Test To Mayor Candidates.
* "An ode to Juiceboxxx, a 27-year-old rapper from Milwaukee no one's ever heard of."
* "When Your Father Is the BTK Serial Killer, Forgiveness Is Not Tidy."
* Scott Walker Wants To Stop Funding Renewable Energy Research Center. Of course he does.
* Defense Bill Passes, Giving Sacred Native American Sites To Mining Company.
* The forgotten masterpieces of African modernism.
* Man gets life in prison for selling $20 worth of weed to undercover cop.
* Justice department determines Ferguson is a terrible place.
* Wrong way Obama?
* The Americans and austerity.
* Two ways of looking at income inequality.
* How a French insurer wrote the worst contract in the world and sold it to thousands of clients.
* Teach students about consent in high school.
* Vermont Town May Allow 16- And 17-Year-Olds To Vote In Local Elections.
* Crunching the numbers: How Long Can A Spinoff Like 'Better Call Saul' Last?
* What Marvel Characters End Up Being Called In Other Languages.
* Panpsychism's Labyrinth.
* Careers of the future: professional dumpster diver.
* It's where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son. After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson's but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.
* The globalist sublime.
* Mars One colonists better off eating frozen pizza than local veggies.
* Local Lab In Berkeley Accidentally Discovers Solution To Fix Color Blindness.
* Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.
* How the MFA Glut Is a Disservice to Students, Teachers, and Writers.
But there's another breed of MFA program out there, proliferating constantly. These programs have nearly 100% admittance rates, fund zero percent of their students, collect outrageously high tuition, and often pay their instructors very little. And because there are so many people (rightly or wrongly) clamoring for MFAs, they have no incentive for standards, either—no incentive to reject any person, no matter how badly they write. One person's money is as green as the next, after all. If you've received an undergraduate degree and can type on a computer, you're in.
* 10-Year-Old Math Genius Studying for University Degree.
* The Last Man on Earth really shouldn't work. And yet…
* Officials at Arizona State University probably weren't expecting the full Stormfront treatment when its English department advertised a spring semester class exploring the "problem of whiteness."
* No shades of grey in teaching relationships.
* Pendulum keeps swinging: Now Americans Should Drink Much More Coffee.
* But not Keurig.
* It's been so long so I posted one of these I haven't even linked to anything about the dress yet.
* In 1971, William Powell published The Anarchist Cookbook, a guide to making bombs and drugs at home. He spent the next four decades fighting to take it out of print.
* Why Americans Don't Care About Prison Rape.
* Robear: the bear-shaped nursing robot who'll look after you when you get old. What could possibly go wrong?
* The invention of blue.
* In the 1800s, Courts Tried to Enforce Partnerships With Dolphins.
* The 16 Strangest Dragons In Dungeons & Dragons.
* Mark your everythings: Community comes back March 17.
* First the gorilla who punched the photographer, now this.
* Wes Anderson's X-Men.
* Abra kazam.
* LLAP.
* And the arc of history is long, but: North Carolina Legalizes Call Girls For Politicians.
Meanwhile, in heaven … #LeonardNimoy #LLAP pic.twitter.com/kn1a6RiDuA
— Kirsten Heffron (@KirstenHeffron) February 27, 2015
Tagged with academic fraud, administrative blight, Africa, America, American century, American literature, Anarchist's Cookbook, anarchists, animals, apocalypse, Arizona State University, Aurora, austerity, Barack Obama, Better Call Saul, Bill Clinton, Blade Runner, blue, Bobby Jindal, books, Breaking Bad, California, Clarkson University, class struggle, climate change, coffee, collapse, college admissions, college sports, color, color blindness, comedy, comics, community, consent, contracts, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, deflation, defund everything, democracy, Democratic primary 2016, Department of Justice, dictatorship, dolphins, don't date your students, don't sleep with your students, dumpster divers, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, eldercare, emails, epistemic closure, eureka moments, fantasy, fascism, Ferguson, fraternities, frozen pizza, genius, genre, health, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, income inequality, insurance, Juiceboxxx, Kazuo Ishiguro, Keurig, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge, learning styles, lies and lying liars, live long and prosper, Louisiana, magic, Marquette, Mars, Mars One, Marvel, megadrought, MFAs, Michael Brown, Milwaukee, mining, mismanagement, modernism, Monica Lewinsky, MOOCs, moral panics, museums, Native American issues, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netherlands, New York City, North Carolina, nursing, obituary, octopuses, our brains work in interesting ways, Ozymandias, panpsychism, Parkinson's, Paul Buhle, pedagogy, permanent crisis, permanent cuts, photography, plantations, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, prostitution, race, racism, Radical America, rap, rape, rape culture, renewable energy, RIP, rising sea levels, Robear, robots, sabotage, sadness, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Scott Walker, serial killers, sex, shock doctrine, slavery, speculative realism, Spock, St. Louis, Star Trek, State department, Steve Shaviro, Students for a Democratic Society, subjectivity, Sweet Briar University, teaching, television, tenure, the 60s, The Americans, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, The Buried Giant, the courts, the dress, the kids are all right, The Last Man on Earth, the law, the rich are different, Tolkien, Twitterbots, UNC, Union Graduate College, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Voight-Kampff Test, voting, war on drugs, water, Wes Anderson, West Wing, what it is I think I'm doing, whiteness, Wisconsin, words, writing, X-Men
* Marquette English's medievalist search closes today! Get your applications in!
* Advice for academics: how to write a research statement.
* The digital humanities and the MLA JIL.
* Junot Diaz on academic freedom and Palestine.
* The Plot Against Public Education.
* Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance.
* Yet another roundup on the death of the faculty.
* Holy picket lines, Batman! Marxism and superheroes, part two: the struggle.
* Same-sex marriage crossed the 50% threshold yesterday, as it became legal as many as 30 states due to SCOTUS inaction.
* The right to die: Terminally Ill 29-Year-Old Woman: Why I'm Choosing to Die on My Own Terms.
* Is Rick & Morty the best cartoon since The Simpsons season four? Probably! You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty. Seriously.
* Google Glass and facial recognition.
* American Empire, by the numbers.
* An open access book: Joanna Zylinska's Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.
* Understanding reparations.
4. The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014
5. But because the claimants are dead, it is said that nothing can be done. Society shrugs, moves on, because, uhm, black on black crime.
* War is a racket, Prophet Samuel edition.
* Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion.
* The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past. Yet at least since the 1970s, most professional historians – that is, most historians holding doctorates in the field and teaching in universities or colleges – conducted most of their research on timescales of between five and 50 years.
* We're probably teaching math wrong.
* Daria Morgendorffer's Reading List.
* Hey, you, get your damn hands off her.
* Venus Green, who was 87 when she was handcuffed, roughed up and injured by police, will receive $95,000 as part of a settlement with Baltimore City. The quote doesn't even reflect the most bananas part: Woman, 90, locked officer in basement, settles with police.
* Ga. Cops Who Blew Off Toddler's Face With Grenade Won't Be Charged.
* Did I do this one already? Infinite Jest, as it was meant to be read.
* Stay informed: Nicolet National Forest is Milwaukee's "zombie safe zone."
* National Adjunct Walkout Day Planned.
* The gum you like is going to come back in style.
* And that gum you like is going to come back in style.
* Startups Did Not Get Last Month's Memo To Stop Burning All Their Money.
* MIT researchers are developing a "second skin" space suit lined with tiny coils that contract when switched on, tightening the garment around the body. The coils (image below) in the "BioSuit" are made from shape-memory alloy that "remembers" its shape when bent and returns to its original form if heated.
* Marvel will finally try to make some money off the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.
* Boston Review on vulture capitalism.
* MetaFilter mega-post on sex work and consent.
* The United States and alcoholism. Some anti-big-data-journalism pushback.
* And now at last we see the violence inherent in the system.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/8LS8TRMkAo
— congress-edits (@congressedits) October 7, 2014
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, adjuncts, alcoholism, America, Back to the Future, Big Data, books, capitalism, cartoons, class struggle, comics, Congress, consent, Dan Harmon, Daria, David Lynch, digital humanities, empire, English, ethics, facial recognition, gay rights, Google Glass, How the University Works, income inequality, Infinite Jest, Israel, Junot Díaz, kids today, LEGO, Marquette, marriage equality, Marvel, Marxism, math, medievalism, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, MLA, outer space, Palestine, pedagogy, police brutality, police state, politics, Prophet Samuel, rape culture, reparations, rich people, Rick and Morty, science fiction, sex work, slavery, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, startups, strikes, surveillance society, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, tenure, that gum you like is going to come back in style, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the long now, the right to die, Twin Peaks, vulture capitalism, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war is a racket, war on education, Wes Anderson, Wikipedia, William Shatner, zombies
Weekend Links! Some Especially Really Good Ones This Time I Promise
* ICYMI, some single-serving posts from the last few days: How to Grad School and KSR's The Lucky Strike. You may have also noticed that I've put a link to The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction pre-order page. Please alert all interested parties and institutional book-orderers!
* Hyping a project I have nothing to do with: you should also check out the Science Fiction BFI Film Classics series at Palgrave Macmillan, with monographs on Alien, Brazil, Solaris, Dr. Strangelove, and more.
* The final frontier of Star Trek fan canons: what if the Abramsverse universe is the Prime timeline? Read all the way to the end for some nice metacommentary on the project.
* According to a financial plan obtained by Crain's Chicago Business, UChicago faces operating deficits of $5 to $30 million a year through 2018, and "ratings agencies could downgrade the university's credit by as many as two notches." In comparison, the pay increases detailed above would constitute 8 to 50 percent of the projected deficits, and the eight administrators' overall pay would constitute 20 percent to 120 percent of the deficits.
* Unpacking the Myths of Financial Aid.
Why would the university award aid in this way? Couldn't it just adjust the ratio of merit aid to need-based aid? Unfortunately, the "high tuition/high aid" model only "works" when it's organized like this. That's because, for many university administrators, financial aid is not so much a form of charity as it is an instrument for maximizing tuition revenue.
* The liberal discourse on gentrification has absolutely nothing to say about finance or prison, the two most salient institutions in urban life. Instead, it does what liberal discourse so often does: it buries the structural forces at work and choreographs a dance about individual choice to perform on the grave. We get tiny dramas over church parking lots and bike lanes and whether 7-11 will be able to serve chicken wings. Gentrification becomes a culture war, a battle over consumer choices: gourmet cupcake shop or fried chicken joint? Can we all live side by side, eating gourmet pickles with our fried fish sandwiches? Will blacks and whites hang out in the same bars? wonders Racialicious. Liberalism and Gentrification.
* In Philadelphia, education reformers got everything they wanted. Look where the city's schools are now. How to Destroy a Public-School System.
* Democracy is not, to begin with, a form of State. It is, in the first place, the reality of the power of the people that can never coincide with the form of a State. There will always be tension between democracy as the exercise of a shared power of thinking and acting, and the State, whose very principle is to appropriate this power.
* Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
* …disaster relief and the "disaster narrative" is central to the development of the American welfare state.
* This is a very provocative critique of framing consent as a legal category: You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense.
If you accept the premise that someone's experience of sexual violation "counts" as rape, regardless of whether they granted verbal permission beforehand, then in order to avoid being accused of rape you'll have to shift your mindset from, "I'd better make sure I was told it was okay to do this first," to "I'd better make damn sure this person isn't going to wake up tomorrow and feel like I raped them." The latter is a standard requiring much more communication, understanding, and compassion from the people involved than the former, especially in situations with near-strangers like one-night stands, hook-ups, or play partners you might meet at a club.
I don't know anything about the author, and I think from an argumentative perspective the writing of the piece could definitely be stronger, but all the same it's an idea I'll be thinking about a while. There's a thought experiment in a later post that is illuminative: trying to identify the precise last moment that one can "withdraw" consent.
* "Presenteeism afflicts all business sectors, but some more than others." The Case for Staying Home from Work.
* An evaluation of course evaluations. This is an above average meta-evaluation for sure; you could really tell how much he cared about the material.
* The women I pretend to be: on working in a male-dominated industry. #4, the Victim, is especially disheartening:
I remember one particularly bad day at a games conference. The event was, as is typical, about 10 percent female. At the start of the day, one of those "I'm just really touchy-feely" men put his hands where I had not invited them when we were crushed together in a crowded corridor. Then, in a talk, one dude took it upon himself to give a very detailed and enthusiastic account of a "rape game" he'd invented—where you had to stare deeply into the eyes of the "other player" while describing to them how you're going to rape them, until they tell you to stop. It was genuinely traumatizing to hear the glee in his voice as he talked about it. Shaken, I went to sit in a quiet, empty room to regain my composure. A well-built man at least a foot taller than me came in, sat between me and the door and said: "You know, I messaged you on OKCupid but you never messaged me back." By this point I genuinely felt too afraid to tell him to just fuck off. So I played nice and smiled and apologized.
* New Media watch: the rise of the podcast network.
* The case against the Supreme Court.
* Those benefitting most from the secure property rights might be forgiven for conceptual ignorance – introspection being a scarce commodity amongst the wealthy – but the vociferous and cynical denial of the asymmetric benefits of securing property rights, both intra- or inter-generationally, whether due to some combination of attribution bias, feigned religious belief, or simple greed is less excusable. In a new gilded age, the idea that the rule of law is vastly underpriced by those who benefit most should be anything but contentious.
* Corey Robin on the emerging "right to be forgotten."
* Mentally Ill Inmate In Solitary Confinement Died Of Thirst, Autopsy Finds.
* With Red Mars finally actually happening, Y: The Last Man is my new I-can't-believe-they-haven't-made-a-series-of-this-yet text.
* That's they're actually making The ExpendaBelles is the actual literal end of culture. Mark it down.
* Provocation: It's not crazy for Mitt Romney to run for president again.
* Peace in our time: Marvel and the Kirby estate have settled.
* SMBC on proof by induction.
* The only link from this list you really need: There's A Life-Size Game of Mouse Trap in Milwaukee.
* And has any social media network gone from hype to big backlash as quickly as (Vermont's own!) Ello? Any faster and the entire social network would be goodbye-cruel-world manifestos…
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, administrative blight, America, austerity, Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, class struggle, comics, consent, continuity, course evaluations, democracy, disaster capitalism, Don't mention the war, Ello, Fanon, film, financial aid, gentrification, Google, governmentality, grad student life, graduate school, How the University Works, humanitarianism of a particular sort, Iraq, ISIS, Jack Kirby, Kim Stanley Robinson, legalism, liberalism, logic, Marvel, metacommentary, military interventionism, Milwaukee, misogyny, mousetrap, murder, my media empire, neoliberalism, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, presenteeism, proof by induction, public health, race, rape, rape culture, Red Mars, rule of law, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, sex, sexism, Silicon Valley, social media, solitary confinement, Star Trek, superheroes, Supreme Court, Syria, television, the courts, the end of culture, The Expendabelles, the law, The Lucky Strike, the mental fog of proceduralism, the right to be forgotten, torture, true crime, tuition, University of Chicago, Vermont, war on education, welfare state, Y: The Last Man
Tuesday Shazbat
* The world is awash in Robin Williams remembrances today, but for my money I'd recommend his recent appearances on WTF and Harmontown. Louie. Longreads has also collected four essays and his appearance on Charlie Rose. Robin Williams's Best Bad Movie. Suicide contagion and social media. How to report a suicide. The MetaFilter thread.
* It's primary day in Wisconsin. Endorsements from Shepherd-Express.
* Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend's death. Police Reportedly Refused Offer to Interview Man Who Was With Michael Brown During Shooting. Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard. Ferguson Police Cite Safety Risk in Decision Not to Name Officer in Shooting. Ferguson, MO, is 67 percent black, and its police force is 94 percent white. The FBI steps in to investigate ultimately sign off on everything's that happened. Dystopia as how-to manual.
* Paramilitary Police Are Changing Law Enforcement in the Suburbs. Jon Burge, Torture, and the Militarization of the Police. American Gulag.
* Against civil forfeiture.
* Hillary Clinton's campaign will be predicated on "peace, progress, and prosperity," with "peace" defined as "forever war."
* ISIS Post PR Photos They Took With John McCain.
* CFP: Mean Girls.
* Nnedi Okorafor's syllabus for ENGL 254: Science Fiction.
* On the greatness of Metroid.
* The NCAA Is a Wreck Now.
* What's less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That's a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.
* Ursula K. Le Guin: About Anger, Part I.
* The City and the City watch: a proposal that Israel and Palestine become grosstopic, overlapping states.
* Cary Nelson keeps digging: Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment. Corey Robin has been coordinating some boycott campaigning for English and Political Science / Philosophy, though personally I think the English statement's extension to tenure review cases is just too self-undermining to commit to.
* Announcing The Daily Show Podcast, without Jon Stewart.
* Marquette will give John Lewis an honorary degree at the new student convocation on August 20.
* California debates 'yes means yes' sex assault law.
Legislation passed by California's state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called "affirmative consent standard" that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as "an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision" by each party to engage in sexual activity.
Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it's also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep.
For some reason that escapes me, this is hugely controversial.
* The time Bruce Wayne had an affair with Barbara Gordon while she was dating Dick Grayson, impregnated her, before prompting her to head out and have a miscarriage while crimefighting. You know, for kids.
* Uber vs. Lyft: whoever wins, we lose.
* Apple's workforce after 30 years of operation is still 70% male. And that's better than most of the tech sector.
* Hoarders are the new Luddites.
Help a hoarder consolidate and safe-keep their things today. Lend them money to rent a storage locker. Volunteer to help them keep their things at your place. Their stuff is the final shred of resistance to the destruction of all non-Apple-approved human endeavors.
* Activision is making a new King's Quest. Space Quest and Quest for Glory next!
* How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.
* And because everything is a bummer today: Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey.
My question would be: can we not foresee a continuation of that ridiculousness for the foreseeable future, where you have one fiction built on another fiction, one crisis to the next?
Yes. I raise that question a bit in the book by saying there are these fictitious forms of capital that can continue to circulate and feed off each other, and they're all Ponzi schemes, which can sometimes go on for a long time. Yes, there may be some possibility we're moving into this era of fictitious capital formation and circulation, which is then managed by the central banks because they can just add zeros to the money supply at the drop of a hat, and have been doing so. First off, it seems to me increasingly senseless, and I suspect that people will start to say, well what's the point of all of this? Secondly, I think the internal contradictions of that are that there's going to be crashes, but then there have been financial crashes popping off all over the place for the last 20 years and capital has survived. For instance, there's one in Indonesia, one in Argentina and then there's one somewhere else. Dubai World goes bankrupt, somebody else goes bankrupt, there are all these asset bubbles popping up all over the place, and maybe we can continue in that vein for a while. But at some point, I think the possibilities will run out.
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, affirmative consent, anger, Apple, Barack Obama, Batgirl, Batman, California, capitalism, Cary Nelson, CFPs, China Miéville, civil forfeiture, class struggle, comics, consent, corruption, Dan Harmon, David Harvey, Death to Smoochy, depression, disruptive innovation, drones, dystopia, feminism, Ferguson, forever war, games, Gaza, general election 2016, Harmontown, health care, Heroes, Hillary Clinton, hoarders, How the University Works, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Jessica Williams, John Lewis, John McCain, King's Quest, Louie, Luddites, Lyft, malicious bullshitting, Marc Maron, Marquette, Marxism, Mean Girls, mental health, Metroid, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, misogyny, Missouri, NCAA, Nintendo, Nnedi Okorafor, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, Palestine, podcasts, police brutality, police state, politics, Ponzi schemes, primaries, prison, prison-industrial complex, public health, public transportation, race, racism, rape, rape culture, resistance, Robin Williams, scams, science fiction, sexism, Sierra, socialism, St. Louis, Steven Salaita, suburbs, suicide, syllabi, Syria, taxis, teaching, tenure, The City and the City, the courts, The Daily Show, the laws, Uber, UIUC, Ursula K. Le Guin, voting is the one and only solution to all problems big and small, Wisconsin, WTF, yes means yes, you know for kids, Zionism