Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 60

June 11, 2015

Thursday Links

* America, I just want you to know there’s still time to stop this.


* Really got our number here: All Possible Humanities Dissertations, Considered as Single Tweets.


RT @gerrycanavan: This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.


Scholarly Associations Defend Tenure and Academic Freedom in Wisconsin.


* Now Cooper Union’s president is out, too.


Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this. Fascinating, frightening read.


* Unhappy career advice from the Chronicle: “You might not be ready for promotion.”


* UNC gets put on one-year probation for its recent student-athlete scandals. In other news, accreditation is a joke.


11-Year-Old Boy Played in His Yard. CPS Took Him, Felony Charge for Parents.


The Post-Ownership Society: How the “sharing economy” allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer.


* History is a nightmare from which we are trying to wake George R.R. Martin.


This Artist Is Taking The Condemned Homes Of Detroit And Turning Them Into Gorgeous Fuddruckers Franchises.


* Clever girl: Reviewer From The Guardian Says Jurassic World Passes Bechdel Test Because of Female Dinosaurs. See also.


* Teach all girls self-defense.


* Bold new horizons in student debt moralism.


* The history of America, as seen through the Census.


* Twilight of “you guys.”


Quentin Tarantino is ‘retrofitting 50 theaters in the world’ with special projectors so they can show his new film properly.


* John Roberts, liberal hero?


* Being Kumail Nanjiani.


Doogie Howser, M.D. gets the gritty reboot you never knew it needed.


*  There really should be an app for this.




eBooks should have least offer the option of universal gender-flip. @felixgilman


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 11, 2015



* Male film critics are apparently unable to understand the explicit, surface text of Goodfellas.


* Alanis Morissette, before Jagged Little Pill.


* The arc of history is long, but.


* This is close, but I for one believe the hottest take is still out there.


* And I guess some people just see farther.


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Published on June 11, 2015 13:12

June 10, 2015

Wednesday Links!

Fans aren’t the irrational ones. They know how to seize pleasure from the world and hold tight even as it hurts them. If fandom is simply an obedient response to the signals of the consumer market, it is an obedience which threatens to overrun its master while saying yes.


* On unprofessional bodies.


* Another “I’m a professor” essay.


What my experience has taught me must become every instructor’s priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a “docile and contingent workforce” whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn’t do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.


Tenure, Fairness, and Fear(lessness).



But that is not really something that makes professors special. Rather, it is good for people to make their lives less fearsome and their minds less fearful. Those of us who have some of that privilege in our working lives should hold our heads high and try to be allies to others who are working to get their share of it. There’s no shame in having security, only in keeping other people from it.



In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure,” System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.


Can the University of Wisconsin Survive Governor Walker?




Is tenure a property right (implication: loss of tenure violation of contract, lawsuits to follow)? Maybe, says UW lawyer #OurUW


— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 9, 2015



* Unless you are in highly unusual circumstances, really, do not think of adjuncting as a long-term career.


* What different colleges could do with $400 million.


In Heated State-Budget Fights, Students Strive to Be Heard.


* Scenes from the class struggle at Cooper Union: Five Trustees, Including Daniel Libeskind, Abruptly Resign.


The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.


* On disliking poetry.


But the emerging field of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election is something else altogether. Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way.


* And then there was Rand, scooping the Democrats again.


“We will make them appear less Asian when they apply,” he says. “While it is controversial, this is what we do.”


Concerned that kindergarten has become overly academic in recent years, this suburban school district south of Baltimore is introducing a new curriculum in the fall for 5-year-olds. Chief among its features is a most old-fashioned concept: play.


* From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying, love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment.


How Utah Became A Bizarre, Blissful Epicenter For Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.


* New government research shows that female military veterans commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women, a startling finding that experts say poses disturbing questions about the backgrounds and experiences of women who serve in the armed forces.


Apple is finally fixing the reason your Mac and iPhone’s Wi-Fi sucks.


The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.


Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies.


* music is inefficient beep bop boop


Why Franklin Richards Is The Most Ridiculous Character In All Of Comics.


* Information wants to be free! With regard to the pornographic material Osama Bin Laden had in his possession at the time of his death, responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in the operational files. The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA. To the extent that this material exists, the CIA would be prohibited by 18 USC Section 1461 from mailing obscene matter.


Six days in North Korea.


* “Officer Involved.”


Iceland put bankers in jail rather than bailing them out — and it worked.


* And Germany’s oldest student, 102, gets PhD denied by Nazis.


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Published on June 10, 2015 10:32

June 9, 2015

Ten Thousand Tuesday Links

* Susannah Bartlow has been writing about her side of the Assata Shakur mural controversy: 1, 2.


Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.


* Ursula K. Le Guin Calls on Fantasy and Sci Fi Writers to (Continue to) Envision Alternatives to Capitalism. What Can Economics Learn From Science Fiction?


Muslim fiction writers are turning to genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and comics.


Slavoj Žižek’s Board Game Reviews.


How to Advocate for the Liberal Arts: the State-University Edition.


Post-tenure review: BOR-ed to death. Don’t believe the lies about UW and tenure. On Tenure and If You [Really] Want to Be a Badger. Upocalypse Final Update. Does Tenure Have a Future? An Open Forum. Twilight of the Professors. The End of Higher Education As We Know It.




Accidentally read another thinkpiece hectoring UW acs for daring to think of themselves while adjuncts exist. So wrongheaded on every level.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015





Anyone who thinks what’s happening in Wisconsin is welcome news for contingent faculty, adjuncts, or grad students is completely deluded.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015





what if i told you “UW could see increase in adjunct faculty under proposed budget cuts” https://t.co/iajYj1Yd6R


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 9, 2015



* Now more than ever: “Privilege” and the rhetoric of austerity.


* Meanwhile: college presidents are getting paid.


* Counterpoint: I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.


* How to Tailor Your Online Image, or, Don’t Go to Grad School.


* The poet-scholar.


* McKinney nightmare. Disciplining Black Bodies: Racial Stereotypes of Cleanliness and Sexuality. Memories of the Jefferson Park Pool. Summer heat.


* America is still incredibly segregated.


Kalief Browder was one of those African American men. But in 2010 he was a boy of 16, sent to Riker’s Island for a crime he did not commit. As reported by the great Jennifer Gonnerman, Browder sat there for three years without a trial. He was repeatedly beaten by guards and inmates while in Rikers. He spent two years in solitary confinement—a euphemism for living under torture. On Saturday the effects of that torture were made manifest.


You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.


* Enter manslamming.




My sister is doing an experiment: Whenever men walk towards her, she doesn’t move out of the way first. So far she has collided with 28 men.


— Anna Breslaw (@annabreslaw) December 13, 2014



* Bernie Sanders: Let’s Spend $5.5 Billion to Employ 1 Million Young People.


* Meanwhile, Clinton advance the Canavan position on voter registration: just make it automatic. Now let’s talk about letting noncitizen permanent residents vote!


* And Chafee wants the metric system! This Democratic primary is truly devoted to Canavan demo.


* The Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare.


* The Middleman Economy.


* The gig economy triumphant.


NLRB: Duquesne Adjuncts May Form Union. 


* Nice work if you can get it: Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise, watchdog says.


You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History.


The Apple Watch could be the most successful flop in history.


Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation,  which oversees the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California’s water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.


* The rules of Quidditch, revised edition.


What’s Happening To Players At The Women’s World Cup, Where The Artificial Turf Is 120 Degrees.


* TSA is a hoax.


* All about Fun Home: Primal Desire and the American Musical.


Here’s what it would take for the US to run on 100% renewable energy. Bring on 2099!


Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child.


The quick, offstage choreography of SNL costume changes.


100-year-old blackboard drawings found in Oklahoma school.


* How Clickhole Became the Best Thing on the Internet.


* Shocked, shocked: claw machines are rigged.


* Everything you know about wolf packs is wrong.


Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter.


Sleuthing reveals Shorewood home was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.


* I’ve been spending too much time on recommendation letters.


* I also chose the wrong career: I should have been a psychic, or at least whatever this guy was doing before he managed to lose three-quarters of a million dollars to a psychic.


Different People Have Different Opinions About Burning Their Own Children Alive, And That’s Okay.


* “What ‘Game of Thrones’ Can Teach Us About Great Customer Service.”


* Warp drives and scientific reasoning.


* The things you learn having a good editor: “Mexican Standoff” predates film by fifty years, and probably is participating in anti-Mexican prejudice.


* Language is like gymnastics.


* It’s a bad world.


* But keep hope alive: J.K. Rowling says there’s an American Hogwarts.


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Published on June 09, 2015 10:36

June 5, 2015

Friday Friday!

Killing tenure is academia’s point of no return. Wisconsin’s Fight Over Faculty Rights: What’s at Stake, and What’s Next. What’s Gone Wrong in Wisconsin? Prof says Regents failure to protect tenure is the beginning of the end of UW. Why Wisconsin Matters to You.




Changing condition of employment for faculty would definitely seem 2 violate HLC Accreditation Criteria #2. https://t.co/zDL6AK9GCK


— Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) June 5, 2015



One College’s Method to Prove Its Value: Scanning Students’ Brains. Sure, that’ll solve it!


A University Banks on Ph.D. Stipends to Better Compete With Its Peers. Seems wise!


Secret Aerial FBI Program Uncovered By 23-Year-Old Journalist.


* After Water.


What Happens When The First Texas Town To Run Out Of Water Gets Record Rainfall.


Before Lego Ripped Off Minecraft, Minecraft Ripped Off Lego.


How did “rabbit hole,” which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land, evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction?


* When Rebecca Schuman interviewed Arne Duncan about for-profit colleges.


* Fermat’s Last Theorem watch: How Math’s Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke.


* Solidarity or ally-ship?


* The chess sublime.


* And our debate yesterday was a blast. Thanks to FutureTense for the invitation! Next resolution: does it still count as winning if you sway more voters to your side, but still don’t clear 50%. I’ll take the aff…


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Published on June 05, 2015 08:10

June 4, 2015

Resolved: Thursday Links Will Take All Our Links

* Tonight! DC! 6:30! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs!


* Help, University Administration Is Terrible! Kids these days.




Let's grant that today's students make more complaints by and large. It's still administrators who are acting on them.


— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) June 3, 2015





It's not students' fault that they've become pawns in admins' proxy war against faculty.


— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) June 3, 2015





“The bad faith of administrators” is still the single cause that explains everything wrong with the university.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 3, 2015



Statement by PROFS in response to JFC omnibus motion #521, item #39. Foxes in the Henhouse: The Republican Takeover of the University of Wisconsin System. A turning point for the UW Colleges.




UW faculty were told to do X for Y. Now… no Y. That's called a broken contract.


— Chuck Rybak (@ChuckRybak) June 4, 2015





.@ChuckRybak I have never understand the labor basis of the US university system, where admins can just arbitrary change the terms at will.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 4, 2015



* Han’s wife shot first.


Forgetting Lolita: How Nabokov’s Victim Became an American Fantasy.


* Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth: Time for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track.


How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes.


Every United Airlines flight was grounded this morning in the US.


More People Work at Fusion Than Are Reading Its Most Popular Post.


The problem is that the IRB system is so fundamentally misconceived that it is virtually a model of how to regulate badly.


French Court Rules It Is Unconstitutional To Cut Off Water To Anybody.


Teen got arrested after cop tried to pick her up, failed. Warrants issued for people who cheered at Senatobia graduation. In the last seven years at least 29 police K-9s have sweltered to death after officers left the dogs inside hot patrol vehicles.


School kitchen manager fired for giving lunches to hungry students.


* Sepp Blatter resigns. Something something joke about George Lucas character names.


The Secret 1949 Radiation Experiment That Contaminated Washington.


How Ridic Are the New Scrabble Words?


* How Ridic Are Call-In Shifts?


Alternative Idea for Resolving Sexual-Assault Cases Emphasizes Closure. “Administrators promised to keep her charges confidential and to protect her from retaliation.” For what it’s worth, I had some general thoughts on Title IX earlier this week that I Storified on the off-chance anyone is interested. I don’t think the outlook is good.


The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire. Is Hillary Clinton in trouble?


* Draft, uh, let’s say Bloomberg.


* The Tampon: A History.


* Google NBA Jam truth.


New Study Confirms Self-Evident Truth: Time Warner Is Literally The Worst.


* Hell is working at the Huffington Post.


* Teach the controversy.


* And the arc of history is long, but Arrested Development season five will air in spring 2016.


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Published on June 04, 2015 06:45

June 2, 2015

Every Tuesday Link! Every One!

* Just a reminder that I’ll be in DC for a debate, Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs.


* The sad story of the São José.


* Against this backdrop, UW System leaders’ public statements in response to JFC’s omnibus bill—statements whose overriding tone is one of gratitude undergirded by obsequiousness—make perfect sense, even as they alternately disgust and infuriate the rest of us. Amid the general calamity for faculty, academic staff, classified staff, and students, there is an alignment of legislative priorities with administrative interests.


* It’s sad to say that when the administrators shut down any possibility for dialogue, when administrations withdraw into cocoon-like gated communities in which they’re always on the defensive, I think that it’s probably not unreasonable to say that this is not just about an assault, this looks like a war strategy. It looks like power is functioning in such a way as to both stamp out dissent and at the same time concentrate itself in ways in which it’s not held accountable.


* Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains?


* Recrimination in the language of the university is the image of a ruined hope that things would be different.


* Who’s getting Koch money today? University edition.


* Dispatches from dystopia. And one more from LARoB: Gender and the Apocalypse.


* Under these weird meritocratic dynamics, bourgeois characteristics make you more valuable not because they are good characteristics in themselves, but merely because they are bourgeois characteristics, and therefore relatable to the top of the economic hierarchy that directs the resources top spots in top firms are competing to get. This poses obvious problems for social mobility, which is the direction people usually take it, but it poses even deeper problems for the idea of “skills” more generally. Where “skills” refers, not to some freestanding objective ability to produce, but rather to your ability to be chummy and familiar to those with the money, they don’t actually seem to be “skills” in the sense most people imagine the term. Upper crust professionals no longer appear to be geniuses, but instead people who went to boarding school and whose manner of conducting themselves shows it.


* When a child goes to war. We talked about the Dumbledore issue a ton in my magic and literature class this semester. Stay tuned through the end for what is indeed surely the greatest editorial note of all time:


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* That Oxford decides its poetry chair by voting is just the craziest thing in the world to me.


* Mass Effect, Personal Identity, and Genocide.


* Ghostwriters and Children’s Literature.


* Shaviro: Discognition: Fictions and Fabulations of Sentience.


* Recent Marquette University grads staging Shakespeare in 13 state parks.


* The map is not the territory (from the archives): The Soviet Union’s chief cartographer acknowledged today that for the last 50 years the Soviet Union had deliberately falsified virtually all public maps of the country, misplacing rivers and streets, distorting boundaries and omitting geographical features, on orders of the secret police.


* When My Daughter Asks Me if She Looks Fat.


* Some discussion of the Hastert case that explains why his supposed “blackmailers” may not be facing any charges: it’s legal to ask for money in exchange for not suing somebody.


* Body Cameras Are Not Pointed at the Police; They’re Pointed at You.


* Of course FIFA knew.


* Wes Anderson’s The Grand Overlook Hotel.


* The poison is the cure: Amid the ruins of its casino economy, NJ looks to build more casinos. And that’s only the second-most-ridiculous debate currently rocking the state.


* “Do we really want to fuse our minds together?” No! Who wants that?


* The Time War was good, and the Doctor changing it was also good. Take my word for it, I’m an expert in these matters.


* Everything you want, in the worst possible way: Michael Dorn is still pitching Captain Worf.




Captain Worf
First Officer Harry Kim
Helmsman Lt. Nog
Security Officer Neelix


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 2, 2015



* Uber, firmly committed to being the absolute worst, in every arena.


* The Learning Channel, horror show.


* And after a very uneven season the Community series (?) finale is really good. The end.



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Published on June 02, 2015 06:55

May 31, 2015

Sunday Won’t Procrastinate Itself: Links!

A City Where Everyone Works, There Is No Police, And The Salary Is 1200 Euros.


This piece and the comments (read both) constitute one of the only serious or substantive discussions of Laura Kipnis’s CHE pieces I’ve seen. I just finished a long and frustrating but possibly ultimately consensus-building Facebook debate about the minutiae of this thing, so I’m basically an expert on the case now.


* “With its new flavor, Save Our Swirled, Ben & Jerry’s is urging fans to dig their spoons into climate change activism.” That’s solve it!


California’s Snowpack Is Now Zero Percent of Normal.


* It’s so hot in India the roads are melting.


For those who want to build a stronger left in the US, there is no substitute for the work — however slow and painstaking it might be — of building social movements and struggles at the grassroots and of organizing a political alternative independent of the Democratic Party.




I can give you a solution, too, it’s just like everything else: withdraw support from Democrats, build coalition for new Constitution.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015



‘American Universities Are Addicted to Chinese Students.’


Black dolls and American culture.


* Jessica Springsteen, born to jump.


How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.


PROFS Statement on Joint Finance Committee Action on UW System Budget. UW Struggle: Final Update. An Idiot’s Guide to the Tenure Process. Don’t mourn, organize. In all its glory.




Die Public Universities is bipartisan consensus. Like most austerity, the difference is Republicans = “we love it,” Dems = “sadly, we must.”


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015





Definitely an argument the lizard people who control everything will respond to positively https://t.co/2RyceIKiF2


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015





America’s robust public university system produces the medical technology that will keep lizard people alive forever. #pleasefundeducation


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015





Lizard people need educated humans to act as the middle-men enforcing their regime of total control. #pleasefundeducation


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015





Public universities are a key source of the exorbitant speaking fees and no-show sinecures lizard people crave. #pleasefundeducation


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015





Without public education, lizard people would have as many as three weekends a year without sports on tv. #pleasefundeducation


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 30, 2015



* And then there’s Texas.


* Can academics really “have it all”?


* The fall of Rome.


To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as stun guns and deaths in police custody.


* Boing Boing covers Rashida Jones’s “amateur porn” documentary Hot Girls Wanted.


* Science proves music really was better back then.


* It also proves nothing likes being eaten.


* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Philosophy: 1, 2.


* The Wire, but for Israel/Palestine.


* And the arc of history is long, but production on TRON 3 has been shut down.


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Published on May 31, 2015 06:39

May 30, 2015

Wisconsinned

In short, Wisconsin Republicans have declared total war on public education. Both the K-12 bill and the UW bill were negotiated and written totally in secret by committee Republicans, with the details released to the public only hours before the final, fore-ordained votes were held. Moral and political commitments aside, this leaves one to wonder whether those legislators who are quickest to cite “market-based” considerations have even a basic understanding of what Wisconsin’s comparative advantage is. Wisconsin has a hard-earned and well-deserved reputation for its excellent public schools and universities. Without those, what is the point of living in Wisconsin as opposed to some other state? Set aside the fact that no UW campus will ever be able to recruit a top-tier scholar again. Why would anyone choose Wisconsin as a place to raise their family? Why would anyone in their right mind move to Wisconsin after this budget? More from Chuck Rybak and the Journal-Sentinel itself.


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Published on May 30, 2015 07:32

May 29, 2015

Weekend Mega-Links, Please Use Responsibly

In 2015, we will open applications for Tiptree Fellowships. Fellowships will be $500 per recipient and will be awarded each year to two creators who are doing work that pushes forward the Tiptree mission. We hope to create a network of Fellows who will build connections, support one another, and find collaborators.


* It’s a small exhibit, but I really liked A Whole Other World: Sub-Culture Craft at the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Consumer Couture exhibit running at the same time.


A new economics paper has some old-fashioned advice for people navigating the stresses of life: Find a spouse who is also your best friend. Hey, it worked for me!


* I went off on a little bit of a tear about dissertation embargoes and grad-school gaslighting the other day: part 1, part 2. Some “highlights”:




I’ve never really liked the “academia is a cult” framing — I read too much Barbara Herrnstein Smith in grad school… [1/2]


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





…but I do think gaslighting is pretty central to the way academia indoctrinates and professionalizes grad students and young scholars. [2/2]


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





As a young academic you are presented w/ a totally dysfunctional system, given contradictory advice, and then blamed for the outcome. [3/2]


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





And this really begins at the moment of graduate admissions—even graduate APPLICATIONS—where you have totally inadequate information. [4/2]


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





To assert “the commons” as a global value, and then use it to grab the intellectual property of the people on the bottom rung, is bad.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





If you were going to promote “the commons” as a new norm in scholarship the place to start would be with full professors, not grad students.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





But creating a new burden of total openness *only for grad students* is an enclosure movement under the banner of the commons.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015





There’s just no rational justification for inflicting this on grad students, much less moralizing it as a commitment to ethical scholarship.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 27, 2015



* Next week in DC! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs. A Future Tense Debate.


Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine? NPR has the official odds.


What If Everybody Didn’t Have to Work to Get Paid?


Shields said these perceptions of race were the focus of his work and he aimed to deconstruct them through imagery that reflected a striking role-reversal. Not only do the individuals in this particular lynching image reflect a distinct moment or period in history, they are positioned as opposing players in a way that delivers a different message than those previously shared. This one of a cop is amazing:


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19 Pop Songs Fact-Checked By Professors.


For those who didn’t go to prestigious schools, don’t come from money, and aren’t interested in sports and booze—it’s near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs.


So, going by (17) and (18), we’re on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.


New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds.


Uber hard at work on effort to replace drivers with machine.


Uber: Disability Laws Don’t Apply to Us.


* The prison-industrial complex, by the numbers. Cleveland police accept DOJ rules you can’t believe they didn’t already have to follow. Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration. The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration. How to lock up fewer people. The Myth of the Hero Cop.


* Poverty, by the numbers.


* Science Fiction: For Slackers?


CGI7dHpU0AAOtHr* Presenting Matt Weiner’s wish-list for the final season of Mad Men.


How to be a fan of problematic things.


* Bernie as the official opposition. And then there’s the issue of the bench.


* A new day for the culture war, or, the kids are all right.


* Can Americans update their ideas about war?


* “I often wonder if my forefathers were as filled with disgust and anger when they thought of the people they were fighting to protect as I am.” Would you like to know more?


The Political Economy of Enrollment.


Now, the UC administration claims that the cost of instruction is greater than in-state tuition. But these claims are at best debatable and at worst simply not credible, because as Chris Newfield and Bob Samuels have shown they include research and other non-educational expenses in order to inflate the alleged instructional cost. (It’s gotten to the point that, as Samuelsobserves, the administration literally claims it costs $342,500 to educate one medical student for one year.) According to Newfield, a more reasonable estimate of the cost of instruction for undergraduates would be somewhere between 40-80 percent of the administration’s figures. Even using the higher rate, then, the administration still generates a net profit for every extra student they bring in.


LIBOR for the universities?


UW System faculty’s role in chancellor picks could be diminished. Also let’s make tenure not a thing. Also, no standards for teachers, just while we’re at it.




My counter-proposal is that we eliminate board-of-trustees-level administration entirely. http://t.co/sU6N8NuPQb


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 29, 2015





More fully: Eliminate boards of trustees and give faculty senates procedural power to hire and impeach admin.


— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 29, 2015



* Meanwhile, Wisconsin to burn $250M on famously losing basketball team.


Board of Governors discontinues 46 degree programs across UNC system.


How Poor And Minority Students Are Shortchanged By Public Universities.


How NYU squeezes billions from its students—and where that money goes.


What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled.


Midcareer Melancholy: life as an associate professor.


A Top Medical School Revamps Requirements To Lure English Majors.


* Academia and legitimation crisis. This situation (and distrust/abuses from both sides) is going to get worse yet.


* Parenthood (and especially motherhood) in the academy.


* The cost of an adjunct.


* On opposing capitalism on its good days, too.


This supposed opposition serves the interests of both sides, however violent their conflict may appear. Helped by their control of the means of communication, they appropriate the general interest, forcing each person to make a false choice between “the West or else Barbarism”. In so doing, they block the advent of the only global conviction that could save humanity from disaster. This conviction—which I have sometimes called the communist idea—declares that even in the movement of the break with tradition, we must work to create an egalitarian symbolisation that can guide, regulate, and form the stable subjective underpinning of the collectivisation of resources, the effective disappearance of inequalities, the recognition of differences—of equal subjective right—and, ultimately, the withering away of separate forms of authority in the manner of the state.


Ecology against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red.


* Stunning photos of the California drought.


The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.


Why Are You Still Washing Your Clothes In Warm Water?


Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context.


Carbon Nanotubes Were An Ancient Superweapon.


Amazon rolls out free same-day delivery for Prime members.


* Breaking: The Web is not a post-racial utopia.


* Breaking: it’s all downhill from 29.


* The waning thrills of CGI.


* Horrible: DC to Begin Placing Ads on Story Pages. Even more horrible: the end of Convergence is the dumbest universal reboot yet.


* The science of awe.


The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares. Interesting, but really flattens a lot. It’s not geography that constrains kids’ futures, it’s class.



* The World Cup and prison labor. The World Cup and slavery. The World Cup and total universal corruption.


* They say Charter Cable is even worse than Time Warner. I don’t believe such a thing is possible.


Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany.


U.S. Preparation Lagging to Battle Potentially Devastating EMP.


The Ethical Game: Morality in Postapocalyptic Fictions from Cormac McCarthy to Video Games.


10 bizarre baseball rules you won’t believe actually existed.


* Congrats to John Scalzi.


So you’re related to Charlemagne? You and every other living European…


Timeline of the American Transgender Movement.


* Judith Butler: I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support. That is most important in my view.


* The PhD: wake up sheeple! Still more links after the image, believe it or not.


phd052215s* Muppet Babies and Philosophy.


* Broken clock watch: Instapundit says fire administrators to fix higher ed.


* Became self-aware, etc: campus climate surveys said to be triggering.


Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.


The Proof That Centrism is Dead.


* Against consensus.


* Understanding Sad Girl Theory.


* Dialectics of union activism. I’ve been really fascinated by what’s been going on at Gawker Media.


Someone Has Done A Statistical Analysis Of Rape In Game Of Thrones.


* The arc of history is long, but that Florida community college will no longer force its students to practice transvaginal ultrasounds on each other.


* Trigger warnings, still good pedagogy, still bad administrative policy.


* A fetish is born: Porn actors must wear protective goggles during shoots.


* Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels.


* This roundtable from Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, and others on sexism and comedy is pretty dynamite.


* The age of miracles: New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function.


* How to Bash Bureaucracy: Evan Kindley on David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.


The ongoing legacy of the great satanic sex abuse panic.


* Teaching pro-tips from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.


* Google Drought Truth.


Moore’s Law Keeps Going, Defying Expectations.


* The morality of robot war. Counterpoint: Killer robots will leave humans ‘utterly defenceless’ warns professor.


* Parental leave policies don’t solve capitalism. You need to solve capitalism.


* Against Mars.


The Nuclear Freeze campaign prevented an apocalypse, so can the climate movement.


* Honestly, you get used to the taste after a while.


* And at last it can be told! The real story behind the Bill Murray movie you’ve never seen.


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Published on May 29, 2015 12:54

May 24, 2015

Memorial Day in the Backwards Universe

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.


The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.


When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.


The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.


–Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, chapter four


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Published on May 24, 2015 17:27

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