Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 65
March 5, 2015
Thursday Links!
* I have a short piece up at the Cambridge UP blog:�����We���re Sorry, the Final Frontier is Closed.�����It talks a bit about the recent revival of space frontier and space opera fantasy in big-budget films like Jupiter Ascending, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Interstellar…
*��Scientists determine the nation���s safest places to ride out a zombie apocalypse.
*��Woodland ‘fairy door’ tradition ‘out of control.’
Now the trustees of Wayford Woods have announced ‘fairy control’ methods which will curb the “profusion of elfin construction”.
Trustee Steven Acreman said the trend was “in danger of getting out of control” but stressed he was not “anti-fairies”.
“It’s a very complex situation and nobody’s admitting that they’re evicting the fairies,” he said.
*�����These beliefs persisted into recent times,��� says Butler. ���For example, in 1895 Michael Cleary convinced his family and community that his wife, Bridget, was a changeling. This was confirmed by a traditional fairy doctor, who attempted a herbal cure. When that didn���t work, they threatened her with fire, doused, and finally burned her to death.”��Well, that’s certainly less charming.
*��So by all means, criticize teachers when it is warranted. But resist education reformers at all costs, particularly when they rationalize their reforms as a way to address the problems of the teaching force. Education reformers, no matter their intentions, are the enemies of a unionized teaching force. They are the enemies of public education.
*��Sweet Briar���s Sudden Closure Plans Leave Students and Employees Scrambling.
“The faculty and staff,” Mr. Brown said, “are feeling traumatized by this���not just by the loss of the institution, but by the way it has been handled. They seem to have no answers about anything, and that is what feels so deeply troubling.”
I hadn’t even thought about how impossible it will be for Sweet Briar faculty to sell their homes. What a nightmare.
*��Who Gets the Endowment? I really hope higher ed media watches the dispersal of Sweet Briar’s endowment and property very closely.
*��
Indeed, at the heart of the standard capitalist narrative is magic, as if the will to realize the abstract ideal of a cornucopia for all will itself ��� through fervent wishing and belief that can only be called religious ��� bring about the imagined state. It is the ���invisible hand��� idea from Adam Smith ��� the conviction that there really is a hidden force that given free rein sets everything aright. It is the God meme in capitalism and its writings, Smith���s among them, that is to capitalism what the Torah is to Judaism, the Gospels to Christianity, and the Koran to Islam: holy texts whose authenticity and reality must not be challenged or questioned unless as an adolescent moment of doubt, eventually subsumed by the re-embrace of total belief.
* I’ve always wanted a Trek anthology series.��And with the ever-lowering cost of CGI effects it could be finally be done…
* In the short term, the contract faculty who teach the majority of courses at York University are striking for higher wages. In the long run, contract teaching needs to be abolished.
* The Unintended Consequences of Borrowing Business Tools to Run a University.
In some cases, regulation, not deliberative choice, has led campus leaders to rely on business advice. For example, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights II, signed into law in 1996, requires many of us to hire compensation consultants to ensure that “disqualified persons”���presidents, provosts, vice presidents for finance and administration, etc.���have not received an “excessive benefit” such as inappropriate compensation.In all situations that I have observed, this process has had unintended consequences. Using sophisticated tools developed for industry, the consultants have demonstrated that many higher-education leaders are undercompensated.
GASP! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED!��I wonder if a ���compensation consultant��� has ever, in history, determined that a CEO was receiving ���excessive benefit.���
*��Raped on Campus? Don���t Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing. I’d see the story about Oregon’s admin raiding the campus health center for ammo to use against its own students, but I’d never seen the outrageous legal justification for it before now.
If you are a student and seek counseling at your college���s counseling center, your medical records are most likely not protected by the typical medical-privacy laws, otherwise known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Instead, they fall under the aegis of Ferpa, just as Oregon said. And compared with Hipaa, Ferpa is about as protective as cheesecloth.
*��This Is What It���s Like To Go To Court In Ferguson,��Missouri.��DOJ Finds Ferguson Police Routinely Discriminate.��Ferguson Police Tolerate Sexual Harassment of Female Officers.��What Is Wrong With��the Ferguson Police Department?��Particular lowlights from the DoJ report.
* Ferguson, Inc:��The city’s protest movement tries to find a path forward.
*��What���s happening here is fundamentally simple: the surveillance state enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care. The state cannot teach its citizens, because it has no idea what to teach; it can only place them under observation. Perfect observation ��� panopticism ��� then becomes its telos, which is justifies and universalizes by imposing a responsibility to surveil on the very citizens already being surveilled.
*��Lao Science Fiction On the��Rise.
* 1906 novel predicted what New York would be like in 2015 exactly.
*��CSU profs: Stagnant pay pushing us out of middle class.
*��American Airlines To Phase Out Complimentary Cabin Pressurization.
* ��Just lean in!
*��Writers Block: TV Writers��� Rooms Have Even Fewer Women, Minorities Than Last Year.
*��Douglas Adams made me a writer: Neil Gaiman salutes his friend and inspiration.
*��The power of play: The effects of Portal 2 and Lumosity on cognitive and noncognitive skills.
*��Lots of Cases of Synesthesia Are Based on Alphabet Magnets.
*��Where���s The Funding For Women���s Soccer?
* Why Don’t Men Kick Each Other in the Balls?
*��Stop Calling Children���s Gun Deaths ���Accidental.���
* A singular event that has never happened in history before:��Kenosha officer admits to planting evidence in homicide case.
* 2016 watch:��Bernie���s Reasons Why��Not.
* And Boing Boing has your gallery of��Star Trek comic book��covers.
March 4, 2015
Can It Be? More Wednesday Links?
* …as long as critics and publishers frame African literature as always on the cusp, it will continue to be an emerging literature whose emergence is infinitely deferred. It will remain utopian, just out of reach.
* Also from Aaron Bady:��‘House of Cards’ Should Stop Trying to Be ‘The West Wing.’
*��How To Lower Univ. of Illinois Tuition��(and it can work at other universities too).
*��Columbia Graduate Students Push for a Labor Union.
* The Loser Edit That Awaits Us All.
*��How One University Unexpectedly Found Itself Ranked Among the ���25 Most Dangerous Colleges.��� This is pretty horrifying, even before you get to my intuition that this is all prelude to an extortion scheme.
* Teaching evaluations: Don’t use them!
*��Legendary, lost civilization discovered in Honduras rainforest 1,000 years later.
* Brian Williams has finally found the women responsible for his mistakes.
*��Iran Worried U.S. Might Be Building 8,500th Nuclear Weapon.
* My name is Ozymandias, Sim of Sims — look upon my work, ye Maxis, and despair.
*��Remember the Maryland parents who let their two kids walk home from a park alone and then had to deal with police and child protective services? They heard from the state today. The couple was found responsible for ���unsubstantiated��� child neglect, a confusing charge that resolved nothing and left the couple possibly more nervous and paranoid than ever.
*��Pharrell Made Only $2,700 In Songwriter Royalties From 43 Million Plays Of ‘Happy’ On Pandora. Disruptatational! Innovasmagoric!
* Daddy, what do you want me to be when I grow up?
* And from the too-good-to-check file:��Profile of Hulk, a 175-pound pit��bull.
Wednesday Links!
* 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%.
* 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.
*��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.
*��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.
* 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.
* 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.
*��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.
* 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?
*��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.
* 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
February 26, 2015
‘The Case for Faculty Self-Governance’
In my ideal system, literally no university would ever do an outside search for dean or provost, ever, and there would be a minimum time served requirement before any new faculty hires could do administrative tasks. This would ensure that all administrators are absolutely tied to the future of their current institution and would be anticipating rejoining the regular faculty in the future. If they screwed over their colleagues, they would have to live among them as a peer for decades to come.
Adam has a post building on my mismanagement post from yesterday arguing for maximally strong faculty governance as the solution to the administrative class’s production of permanent crisis. I agree wholeheartedly. The class of transient, careeriest administrators has brought waste, looting, and��an irresponsible boom-bust cycle to higher education everywhere they have taken hold, regardless of how nice or good any individual administrator is. Hence my satirical, wildly unpopular proposal for reverse tenure for admin: they only get to leave with faculty approval, otherwise they have to stay and deal with the fallout from whatever short-sighted stat-juking they instituted while they were polishing their CV.
But Adam’s proposal is what I would actually implement systemwide if I could snap my fingers and just do it: limited admin terms for tenured faculty, constitutionally behold to faculty senates, would produce a class of administrators invested in the institution’s long-term health rather than its very-short-term movements and manipulations, without producing pocket fiefdoms or another class of unaccountable gods��to contend with down the road. As Adam says:
This system would also presumably inculcate broader loyalty to academia as such, pushing against the destruction of the teaching profession via adjunctification, etc., etc. But even if it didn���t have such wide-ranging effects, it would at least keep administrators from actively destroying their own institutions, simply out of self-interest.
Check out his whole post.
February 25, 2015
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it yesterday: “Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis.”
*��Chomsky: How America’s Great University System Is Being Destroyed.
* “Faculty and Students Are Walking Out Today for Catholic Identity.”
* CFP:��Porn Studies Special Issue: Porn and Labour.
*��Igbinedion���s production company��Igodo Films recently shared Oya: Rise of The Orishas��in full online. They also revealed that the Oya project has been adapted for the silver screen with principal photography on the feature-length film version scheduled to begin later this year in Brazil. The London-based filmmaker shared in a recentinterview that he made the short film in order to prove that there is a market for sci-fi films revolving around African characters and storylines. In this regard, Oya joins Ethiopian post-apocalyptic flick Crumbs in forging a path for future film projects from the continent within the realm of speculative fiction. In addition to the full-length project, Oya���s creators have also confirmed plans for a comic book adaptation of the film, which is currently available for pre-order.
* Neil Gaiman reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.��Sounds bizarre and great.
*��Study: Killers are less likely to be executed if their victims are��black. What could explain it?
*��First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims.
* London,��the city that privatised itself to death.
* Once-homeless Baylor player ineligible, allegedly for accepting a place��to��live.
*��How Facebook is changing the ways we feel.
*��The creators of that (great!)��Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan film might be in trouble.
* Meanwhile everything old is new again: Duck Tales, Inspector Gadget, even Danger Mouse.
* The day we all feared is upon us.
*��It���s important that the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots succeed, either at achieving an outright ban or at sparking debate resulting in some other sensible and effective regulation. This is vital not just to prevent fully autonomous weapons from causing harm; an effective movement will also show us how to proactively ban other future military technology.
*��Meet Your Republican 2016 Front-Runner.
*��Thousands of oil refinery workers are striking for safer working conditions. Their fight is central to the struggle against climate change.
* Choose Your Own Adventure: So You’ve Accidentally Gotten Pregnant in South Dakota.
* And xkcd maps the future and the past.
Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis
Some loose, probably incautious thoughts, adapted from a couple of Twitter rants essays I’ve been writing the last few days.
The promise of the management class is that they could manage colleges better than faculty. They have wildly failed at this on every level.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 25, 2015
A multi-generation, multimillion-dollar institution (like a college) that has to administrate by emergency decree has in nearly every case been grotesquely failed by its leadership. And in the US today that describes nearly every college and university, in management rhetorics and policies dating back at least to the mid-2000s (when I first entered the profession as a graduate student).
If your college faced drastic emergency cuts after 2008, it was mismanaged. You expanded on an unsustainable basis, made the wrong commitments, spent too much.
If your college faces drastic emergency cuts now because enrollments will tick (slightly) downward in the 2010s, it was mismanaged. You had 18 years warning that this demographic wave was going to hit, 18 years to plan for what to do when it did.
As��every college administration invokes��generalized, free-flowing “emergency”��as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones��that contradict the other ones —��they are arguing��that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown��into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency��is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!
Nor is there ever��any accountability, or so much as an explanation, for how the crisis was ever allowed to happen in the first place. (Very often, of course, the guilty parties have already fled the state.)
Eternal organizations designed to last forever simply should not have to implement policy on a crisis basis — much less be forced to implement every policy in this way. Colleges and universities should have been managed so carefully up to now so that they can afford to phase in new policy changes over time, running experiments and pilot programs where necessary to ensure success. That’s what neoliberal shibboleths like “nimble” and “flexible” would actually mean in a world of rational management — graceful, deliberate movements, not wild��lurching and uncontrolled crash-landing.
Careful management,��good management, is the full and sole justification for the administration class that has bloated so entirely over the college landscape since the 1980s (and whose growth is still accelerating, even in the face of permanent cuts everywhere else). Simply put the promise of the management class was that they could manage colleges better than faculty. Even by their own estimation they have completely��failed at this��task��on every possible level.��Thirty years of running it like a sandwich has every college in the country living admission cycle to admission cycle, cutting budgets and services and��wages every year, careening from supposed emergency to supposed emergency without any stabilization or improvement.
Even bracketing endowments and donations altogether, generally speaking colleges have a built-in client base, already own all the land and��buildings, can borrow freely, and don���t pay taxes. I could devise a harder test of management acumen.��So it seems to me the approximately 100% of college administrations that are now claiming emergency and desperation year after year need to cop either to their own��incompetence, or else their dishonesty, or else their��active malice.
Canavan’s Razor would tell us that permanent crisis is a management strategy, the unacknowledged goal of every plan. But whichever precise combination of incompetence, dishonesty, and malice best describes a particular university administration��is irrelevant.��The management class simply has no reason to exist at all if their interventions in the university produce not stability but crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis…
run the university like a business, pay attention to mission-critical demographic trends before they became a crisis
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
run the university like a business, do a rational cost-benefit analysis on new construction
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
run the university like a business, borrow responsibly
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
run the university like a business, follow employment laws
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
run the university like a business, streamline overhead by ���rightsizing��� administration
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
run the university like a business, spinoff or eliminate money-losing divisions like sports and fraternities
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
promise? RT @claudiakincaid: @gerrycanavan and have you heard: if we don't pay them top dollar they will leave.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 25, 2015
February 24, 2015
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications:��The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and ���Anticipation��� in Peter Jackson’s��Hobbit Trilogy.”��And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book��400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse.��The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of��ludicrous��framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
*��None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog.��Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow.��More links below the map.
*��So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake:��“Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.”��A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death��may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
*��Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality:��People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
*��Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site.��This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago ���black site��� should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
*��The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
*��If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
*��Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year ��� far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano���s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC���s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can���t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students ��� which is supposed to be UC���s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
*��Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
*��SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
*��Marquette economist says there���s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin.��Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That���s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called ���Everyday Bias,��� by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That���s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we���re accused of ���privilege.���
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
*��These dream guns indicate the depth of white America���s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part ���safely��� in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you���ve likely never heard of.
*��At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside.��I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
*��America Has Been At War 93% of the Time ��� 222 Out of 239 Years ��� Since 1776.
* “Let���s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog:��Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
*��Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
*��Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
*��Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That���s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
*��Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
*��Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It.��GAAAAAAASP.
*����i��ek on Syriza.��He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin:��The strategy of Syriza���s leadership has failed miserably. But it���s not too late to avert total defeat.
*��Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
*��How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry:��Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation:��Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels.��I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
*��Algorithmic States of Exception.
*��Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck.��Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently.��It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro Gonz��lez I����rritu is a pretentious fraud, but it���s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was��fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system:��Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And��Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star.��Me too, but��maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
February 20, 2015
Weekend Links! So Many!
*��Harris Wittels has died.��I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today.��This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are��keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an��Alien.�����The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon.��Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama.��I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell.��What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
*��A Siberian blast���seriously, this air is from Siberia���has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there���s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
*��Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror.��They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action���even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo.��You’re welcome.
*��Would you like to understand how the ���new��� Harper Lee novel, ���Go Set a Watchman,��� came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to ���To Kill a Mockingbird��� ��� one of the definitive books of the American 20th century ��� when, by all the known facts, it���s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication?��Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
*��Congressman Says We Don���t Need Education Funding Because ���Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.�����Checks out.
* The��outlook for the rest of��Illinois isn’t much better.��We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea.��You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
*��Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities.��Though it still has one thing going for it.
*��Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
*��New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents.��The hottest U.S. presidents.��
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
*��We don���t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
The academic atmosphere, produced mainly by the humanities, is the only atmosphere in which pure science can flourish pic.twitter.com/Y51Vgb7gXq
— StuHum (@StuHum) February 15, 2015
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
*��Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
*��What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students?��Listen,��I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though.��Really strange study.
*��Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic��Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
*��But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
*��Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB��reviews��Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and��Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s��Guant��namo Diary��and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
*��Giant Ron English art-book: Status��Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near.��It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement.��And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it.��Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
*��Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry.��Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach.��However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
*��Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring:��The Trading Places hypothesis.
*��How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
*��Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
*��10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
*��Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder.��Take the plea deal!
*��The CIA asked me about controlling the climate ��� this is why we should worry.
*��To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it���s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
*��Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
*��Wearable Workplace ���Mood Monitors��� Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert:��Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And��in case that’s not��enough here’s some more��proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
I just found out that @BigBird is the ONLY PERSON on Twitter who can see @MrSnuffleupagus. This is a goddamn triumph. pic.twitter.com/KT2QuUifj2
— Mia Bee (@im_a_mia) February 19, 2015
February 14, 2015
Wes Anderson Cornell Boxes Update: Grand Budapest Hotel!
After years of anticipation, our set of Wes Anderson Cornell Boxes is once again up-to-date. Previously and Previouslier.
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine’s Day
*��Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in:��Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
*��Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted.��Oh, okay.
*��The UW: Update from the Struggle.
*��How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of ���just so��� arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
*��The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on��hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in��history, business and computer science at��461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those��institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here’s a link to the full article, which has a definition of “merit” (as/against “prestige”) I can’t make heads or tails of.
*��The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft���s work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft���s fiction was ���finicky,��� ���childish,��� and ���antagonistic to reality.��� But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being ���shocked��� is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren’t reading Jason Shiga’s Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it’s great.
*��The social network���s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees ��� the same level that Facebook strives for. ���We���re well below that now,��� he said.��I’m sure if you keep up what you’re doing you’ll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat:��The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he’s a communist.
*��Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
*��An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC ���16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant.��I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice,��but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
*��To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. “Restore.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
*��I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
*��When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
*��Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him.��I’ve come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.��
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I’m not a scientist.
*��Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where ���you didn���t know you were poor.��� But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin’.
*��The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony’s Secret Spider-Man Deal.
*��The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
*��By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I’ve resolved��to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
*��Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous���and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
*��South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
���If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks,��� the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
*��NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
*��Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn’t ‘Appreciate Her Tone.’
*��The Imprisoner���s Dilemma.
* The arc of history is long, but:��Putin Banned From ‘Mighty Taco’ Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc.,��Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc.��Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up:��Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week’s The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
*��The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals.��Wash that “good Vox” taste out of your mouth with this “bad Vox” chaser:��The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white��prisoners.
*��Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer.��Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Somber news this Valentine’s Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably��effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
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