Posts Tagged 'Karate Kid'
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids' virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I've been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you've been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I've been doing:
I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of "Science Fiction and Climate Crisis." It was a fun talk!
I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don't think the video from that one has gone up yet.
We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: "Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny."
My "Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots" article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
I don't think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article "Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene" is up at American Literature.
I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG's "Masks."
And I've agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole "incredibly busy" thing…
"I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird." – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973
"…but things got weird" is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don't do whatever it was I was supposed to do.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I've been reading this spring:
Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021
SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
Truly one of the best SF short stories I've read in years: MMAcevedo.
Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
The war on critical race theory.
The faces of higher education's historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. "This Agreement Protects Jobs": Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: "The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut." AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President's Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure's Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
The strange case of the '$100m deli' and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
Ground operations.
Reflections on the Market.
I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.
— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021
pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021
Dark academia.
How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students' right to organize as employees.
Firsting in Research.
A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
"A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department."
Reagan broke everything.
The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to "cancel" university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
'Climate emergency': Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic 'doomsday glacier' may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves 'will collapse amid 4C global heating'. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America's manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
Every day a new sadness.
Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth's Ecosystems.
How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
Jeff VanderMeer's Climate Fiction Reading List.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ
— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021
if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021
How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn't Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn't rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. 'We are witnessing a crime against humanity': Arundhati Roy on India's Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can't Go Back to Sleep.
Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
The Airline Safety Revolution.
Easily the most dystopian thing I've read in ten years.
Amazon's 'The Lord of the Rings' to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
A Tiny Particle's Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
Much-feared asteroid Apophis won't hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
The Muppets' secret weapon doesn't work in the Disney era.
The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity's Future.
The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
How much money does a writer need?
Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
It's Not Cancel Culture — It's A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.
My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."
— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021
Your Success Probably Didn't Come from Merit Alone.
So you want to acknowledge the land?
Decolonize Oregon Trail.
Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools' Fiscal Crisis.
There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.
https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC
— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021
We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
How Star Wars' Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you're at it…
America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here's what became of them.
The Jesuits pledge $100M to "atone" for slavery.
The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York's History of Slavery.
I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
"I'm an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd." "Retriever" by Stephen Kearse.
'I'm bursting with fiction': Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
Two from Ted Chiang: "The Author Behind 'Arrival' Doesn't Fear AI. 'Look at How We Treat Animals" and "Why Computers Won't Make Themselves Smarter."
Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
Sertãopunk.
The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda's Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
Chess World Champion Plays 'Bongcloud Attack' Meme Opening in Tournament.
The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
The Children's Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
Kurt Vonnegut's Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
The best game I've played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
Top 20 Irishisms.
Point: Civilizations don't really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We're Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it's changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin's future.
it's weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities
— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic job market, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Adorno, Afrofuturism, airplanes, Alan Moore, Amazon, America, animal studies, animals, apocalypse, arigata-meiwaku, artificial intelligence, austerity, Brazil, cancel culture, capitalism, Carl Sagan, CFPs, Chen Qiufan, chess, Chronicles of Pyrdain, civilization, climate change, college sports, conferences, course evaluations, COVID-19, Deadpool, democracy, digital immortality, disability, Disney, dissertations, dolphin intelligence, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Said, existentialism, fascism, Fermi paradox, financialization, Fledgling, futurity, games, glitches, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, gymnastics, Hawaii, Hayao Miyazaki, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, indigeneity, indigenous issues, Irenosen Okojie, Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, Kameron Hurley, Karate Kid, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, land acknowledgment, late style, LEGOs, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, malaria, McCarthyism, meritocracy, millennials, Milwaukee, mRNA, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nebula Award, neofeudalism, NFTs, Nisi Shawl, novels, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, orcs, pandemic, perimenopause, podcasts, pollution, race, racism, Random Trek, reparations, Republicans, research, rich people, Romania, Ronald Reagan, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sertãopunk, SFRA, Sherryl Vint, slavery, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, student debt, Ted Chiang, tenure, the Antarctic, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Muppets, The Outer Wilds, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UCR, unions, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, WandaVision, water, wealth, white supremacy, Wikifeet, wildfires, Wisconsin, wokeness, words, writing
* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and "Utopia in America" this time out.
* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: "Good Women" and "Perseveration."
* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.
* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.
* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?
* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.
* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there's still time jump on our "After Suvin" roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…
* CFP: ExRe(y) 2018. Exhaustion and Regeneration in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture.
* Gender Issues in Video Games.
* Tenure track job in carceral studies.
* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here's how they do it.
* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it's safe to be a know-it-all again.
* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.
* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.
* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.
* "Grade Inflation" as a Path to Ungrading.
* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.
* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!
* "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA's Voyager Probes Across the Universe": As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
* A Trip To The Men's Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA's Worst Nightmare.
* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.
* Privilege and video games.
* Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral.' Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
There's way more empirical evidence that men can't be trusted with power than that women are bad at math. [gestures broadly, to everything]
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 5, 2017
* You Are the Product.
* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump's government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump's approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump's base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.
* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.
* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.
* Rules don't matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.
* 2018 won't save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won't. Obviously.
* But sure I guess everything is fine now.
* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.
* Fired/Rehired: Police departments are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets.
* Also it's weird how we don't have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* After #TheResistance.
* When Trump trumps love.
* Can the subaltern vote?
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* How Trump's FCC aided Sinclair's expansion: Use of a regulatory loophole will allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune's stations.
* Y'all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.
* Hey Marvel, please don't take away female Thor's hammer. Don't give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.
* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.
* On names.
* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.
* More on Amazon and anti-trust.
* A short film about Chris Ware.
* "Karate Kid but the bully is the hero" has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.
* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.
* "Adversarial perturbations" and AI.
* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?
* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.
* Yes, we're angry. Why shouldn't we be? Why aren't you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.
* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.
* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).
* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.
* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.
* A People's History of the Gray Force.
* A People's History of Time Lord Regenerations.
* A People's History of Westeros.
* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?
* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.
* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.
* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There's always death to look forward to.
* Smartphones and The Kids Today.
* Zero at Rotten Tomatoes.
* Twitter is bad, YA edition.
* Time for some game theory.
* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.
* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana's first satellite now orbiting earth.
* Are you ready to LAUGH?
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* I knew it.
* Same.
* And please consider this my resignation.
Tagged with #dads, #TheResistance, academia, academia jobs, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, affirmative action, Africa, Afrofuturism, agricultural civilization, agriculture, aliens, Amazon, America, anti-trust, anxiety, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, arguments, artificial intelligence, asteroids, backfire effect, bar jokes, Battlestar Galactica, Big Data, Bob Mueller, books, carceral studies, CFPs, charts, Chris Ware, Christianity, cities, class struggle, Cleveland, climate change, cognitive presses, college basketball, comics, Confederacy, Constitutional Convention, Cory Doctorow, courts, CWRU, dark side of the digital, Darko Suvin, debt ceiling, Democrats, deportation, digitality, dinosaurs, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, dystopia, Escape from LA, FCC, film, friendship, Game of Thrones, game theory, games, gender, gerontocracy, Ghana, GIFs, Google, grad student nightmares, grade inflation, grading, grand juries, Greenland, hacking, Hamilton, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, human extinction, humanity, humor, ice, immigration, Internet-connected fish tanks, interviews, iPhones, Jaimee, Jedi, John Carpenter, John Kelley, Karate Kid, kids, Klingons, Kurt Russell, labor, love, machine learning, maps, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, midterm election 2018, milkshakes, misogyny, murder, my teaching empire, names, NASA, NCAA, Netflix, neurolinguistic programming, New Jersey, New York City, nuclear war, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, perpetual motion, Planetary Protection Officer, poetry, Poland, police, police dogs, police violence, politics, prehistory, prison, prison-industrial complex, private prisons, privilege, Putin, race, racism, regenerations, relationships, Rex Tillerson, robots, Rotten Tomatoes, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, sea level rise, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, SFRA Review, simulations, Sinclair Broadcasting, smartphones, social media, Space Race, speeding tickets, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, State department, student athletes, student labor, subalternity, suicide, syllabi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, teen girls, the Constitution, The Dark Tower, the Devil, the Force, the Internet, the law, the subway, the truth is out there, Thor, Tolkien, Tommy's, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Twitter, undergraduates, University of California Irvine, university presses, Utopia, voting, Voyager, Voyager 2, Voyager spacecraft, walking, Westeros, white victimhood, whiteness, wildfires, women, words, work, writing, you are the product, young adult literature
Wednesday Morning Links
* I'll be at SCMS 2013 in Chicago tomorrow, talking about War and Science Fiction in Battle: Los Angeles. I have to be back in Milwaukee that evening and Friday, but I'm hoping to meet up with some people while I'm there.
* How to Turn Higher Education into an Engine of Inequality.
* The Nation on the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. At FAIR. At the New Yorker (c. 2008).
* Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make. Trickle-Down Feminism.
* The technocrats are akin to conspiracists in that they both claim a monopoly on the sorts of political facts that should sway policy. Both groups come equipped with their own body of experts and studies to vouch for their prescriptions. And both Jones and Klein derive their legitimacy from having, through their supposed diligence and uniquely sharp analytical minds, privileged access to some set of truths of political significance. Both assume that answers to factual questions will make the necessary political action irrefutable. All that divides the conspiracist from the technocrat is the nature of the facts they fetishize.
* There's no direct analog to statistical analysis in baseball. But where Congress and the White House are concerned, what if the press put much greater emphasis put on "the sausage" and much less on the sausage-making? What if we judged legislators on their votes, Obama on what legislation he signs and vetoes, and left it at that?
* Jeb Bush disagrees with own book released yesterday.
* A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013. The Atlantic responds. Some commentary.
* If People Talked About Seinfeld Like They Talk About Girls.
* Gawker is shitty, but Amy Poehler makes it all okay.
"Aw, I feel bad if she was upset. I am a feminist and she is a young and talented girl. That being said, I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff. "
* Civilization with a global warming focus. Climate change will open up surprising new Arctic shipping routes. Los Angeles Aims To Be Coal-Free In 12 Years.
* China experiments with arcologies.
* Ralph Macchio finally old enough for long-awaited Karate Kid sequel.
* 12-Year-Old Victim of Bullying Dead After Being Attacked At School.
* Breaking: men aren't actually better at math than women. Gasp!
* Leaked Princeton rape survey from 2008 reveals one in six women on the campus have been sexually assaulted during their time there.
* Jon Stewart Is Taking the Summer Off to Make a Movie About Iran. John Oliver will guest host for 8 of the 12 weeks he's gone; I hope Jessica Williams takes the other four.
* "If she had said elephants, I would have said elephants." How does that make it better?
* This time, Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla asked all 12 to approach so she could shake their hands.
"I hope you continue your work in a law-abiding way," said Padilla. "I must say you are the most affable group of defendants I've ever come across." Jury acquits Occupy protesters.
* New Elevators Segregate Rich from Poor.
* Every f*cking website.
* Another new twist on the zombie genre: zombie rehab.
* And the only news around here that people really care about.
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Amy Poehler, arcology, Battle: Los Angeles, BBC, Big Catholic, Big East, bullying, Chicago, China, civilization, class struggle, climate change, coal, college basketball, conspiracy theories, Daily Show, don't work for free, ecology, energy, Ezra Klein, feminism, film, freelancing, girls, Hell, How the University Works, Hugo Chávez, I grow old, immigration, income inequality, Iran, Jeb Bush, Jessica Williams, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Karate Kid, Lena Dunham, Los Angeles, March Madness, Marquette, math, misogyny, mostly boring tax stuff, NCAA, Northwest Passage, obituary, Occupy, politics, Princeton, process, protest, Ralph Macchio, rape culture, science fiction, Seinfeld, sexism, someone actually said this, student loans, technocrats, The Atlantic, the economy, the Internet, the kids aren't all right, the law, they say time is the fire in which we burn, underemployment, unemployment, Venezula, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, websites, what it is I think I'm doing, worst financial crisis since the last one, writing, zombies
Black Friday Links
* Pepper spray and Tasers on Black Friday. Stay safe shoppers.
* Because the court didn't explicitly instruct federal prosecutors that they were required to follow the law, they didn't have to follow the law. Really, that's what this says.
Criminal contempt charges against the prosecutors were not called for, Schuelke found, because Sullivan never explicitly demanded, in a court order, that the government comply with their legal and ethical obligations concerning the revelation of exculpatory evidence to those defending the Republican senator from Alaska in the political corruption case.
"Because the court accepted the prosecutors' repeated assertions that they were complying with their obligations and proceeding in good faith, the court did not issue a clear and unequivocal order directing the attorneys to follow the law," Sullivan wrote, explaining his rationale for not explicitly ordering the government to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense.
That's insane. Via MeFi.
* Also at MeFi: The Karate Kid Rehearsal Movie.
* Area Man Has Far Greater Knowledge Of Marvel Universe Than Own Family Tree.
* Grant Morrison Bingo.
* The New Yorker had an interesting profile on Bitcoin recently. You can't read that one unless you're a subscriper, but here's Wired's.
* And the road to 270: How Obama can win.
Looking at this in this in terms of states, it means Democrats might be able to offset the loss of a state like Ohio that's more dependent on the white working class vote by winning big out West, where the growing Hispanic population plays in their favor. Colorado looks to be a crucial player once again and Democrats are eyeing Arizona, which went for native son John McCain in 2008, as a potential pickup thanks to a backlash over its anti-immigration crackdown. And in Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign thinks a less significant but growing Hispanic population will give them a boost as well. But even in the Rust Belt, Democrats get a demographic bump: the CAP study shows a higher concentration of college educated whites in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin versus 2008. If Obama can keep these voters from abandoning him, he can survive some erosion elsewhere.
Tagged with America, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, Black Friday, comics, consumerism, film, general election 2012, Grant Morrison, Karate Kid, Marvel, pepper spray, police corruption, politics, superheroes, tasers, the courts, the law
RT @utopianplay: The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it a… 1 hour ago
RT @PostCultRev: [doesn't check news for 10 minutes and tweets something like "I'm horny for beef chungus"] yeah [checks news and finds som… 1 hour ago
one of many things they have not properly disclosed is whether or not we did have a military coup last january twitter.com/AthertonKD/sta… 1 hour ago
Fyre Festival but this time you drown twitter.com/ABC/status/148… 1 hour ago
RT @ArmyStrang: Tfw you get funged twitter.com/StevenTDennis/… 1 hour ago
representation matters twitter.com/kejeral/status… 2 hours ago
Annoyingly Hilarious, or Hilariously Annoying?