Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 68
December 29, 2014
Monday Links!
* Somebody thinks 2015 could be a doozy: Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees.
* Trends We Can Work With: Higher Ed in 2015.
* Remembering the reason for the season: During Holiday Season, City Erects Cages To Keep Homeless People Off Benches.
*��Christmas Eve Document Dump Reveals US Spy Agencies Broke The Law And Violated Privacy.
*��But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? ��No. The opposite is true. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, ���the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.���
*��Ending excessive police force starts with new rules of engagement.
*��What Does It Mean to Be Anti-Police?
*��How to Survive a Cop Coup: What Bill de Blasio Can Learn From Ecuador.
*��And whether or not people accept it, that new normal���public life and mass surveillance as a default���will become a component of the ever-widening socioeconomic divide. Privacy as we know it today will become a luxury commodity. Opting out will be for the rich.
*�����Enhanced interrogation��� is torture, American style. Exceptional torture. Torture that insists it is not torture. Post-torture? This uniquely American kind of torture has six defining characteristics.
* “The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled”: In praise of The Usual Suspects.
* Decades of Bill Cosby’s shadow ops.
*��Justice Denied to Steven Salaita: A Critique of the University of Illinois Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure��Report.��This was my reaction as well.
* Anti-intellectualism is taking over the US.
* Are ideas to cool the planet realistic?��Meanwhile:��Pope Francis Could Be Climate���s Secret Weapon Next Year.
*��The architecture of dissent.
* The red state economic miracle that wasn���t.
* Airlines want you to suffer.
* Games are ancient, and they are not going anywhere anytime soon. But their stock is not rising at the rate that their fans��� Twitter streams and Web forums might suggest. Instead of a ludic age, perhaps we have entered an era of shredded media. Some forms persist more than others, but more than any one medium, we are surrounded by the rough-edged bits and pieces of too many media to enumerate. Writing, images, aphorisms, formal abstraction, collage, travesty. Photography, cinema, books, music, dance, games, tacos, cats, car services. If anything, there has never been a weirder, more disorienting, and more lively time to be a creator and a fanatic of media in all their varieties. Why ruin the moment by being the one trying to get everyone to play a game while we���re letting the flowers blossom? A ludic century need not be a century of games. Instead, it can just be a century. With games in it.
* Death toll among Qatar���s 2022 World Cup workers revealed.��Migrant World Cup workers in Qatar are reportedly dying at alarming rates.
* Enterprise, TOS, and “the scent of death” on the Federation.
* How Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
*��I am no fan of the North Korean regime. However I believe that calling out a foreign nation over a cybercrime of this magnitude should never have been undertaken on such weak evidence.
* Longreads best crime reporting 2014.
*��A Drone Flew Over A Pig Farm.
*��The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don���t they are seen as irrelevant. This gives their literature weight, but dooms it with monotony. Who wants to constantly read a literature of suffering, of heaviness? Those living through it certainly don���t; the success of much lighter fare among the reading public in Africa proves this point. Maybe it is those in the west, whose lives are untouched by such suffering, who find occasional spice and flirtation with such a literature. But this tyranny of subject may well lead to distortion and limitation.
* I’m a pretty big fan of “Jean & Scott”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,��7, 8, 9.
* A profile of David Letterman from 1981.
*��How Colonel Sanders Became Father Christmas in Japan.
The filmmakers��� cartoonishly evil vision of Saruman is unfortunate, as it deprives a fascinating narrative of its complexity, while also being untrue to Tolkien���s own vision. Jackson and his team seem incapable of imagining that a person can be wrong without also being evil. For example, the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit was greedy, but he was an elected official, generally well regarded by the community (at least until he absconds with the municipal funds, a fact revealed only on the last page of the book); in the film The Desolation of Smaug, he is a murderous tyrant who opposes even the idea of elections. An even worse example is the case of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, who in the books has been driven mad by grief and despair, partly owing to the cruel machinations of Sauron himself; in the film (The Return of the King), he is made so irredeemably evil that Gandalf actually attacks him, while we the viewers are expected to cheer. If this is what Jackson does to weak and pitiable characters, what must he do to Saruman, who is a legitimate ���bad guy��� in The Lord of the Rings?
*��Quiz: Find out how your salary stacks up against other American��workers.��You know, fun.
*��L.A. studio to restore venerable ���King���s Quest��� to its gaming��throne.
* Is the anti-vax movement finally dying?
* You can’t beat the media at its own game.
* America’s own 7 Up: Johns Hopkins’s Beginning School Study.
* Sober People against New Year’s Eve SuperPAC.
* And of course you had me at Grant Morrson’s All-New Miracleman Annual #1.
December 26, 2014
Christmas Leftovers Links
* Listen, when Chris Ware tells you to buy a book, you buy it.
*��For a small group of comedy writers, however, their yearly viewing couldn���t be further from Bedford Falls. Instead, they gather ���round a never-aired 1996 Comedy Central special:��Escape From It���s A Wonderful Life.
smh if you don���t realize that George Bailey died in that river and the happy ending is just his sad delusion as he drowns
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 26, 2014
*��Caganer ��� the strangest, most scatological part of Catalan nativity scenes �����explained.
* Jacobin remembers the Christmas truce, one hundred years old yesterday.
* Let 2015 be Year One of the post-carbon future.��4 Legal Battles This Year That Were All About Climate Change.��Sewage in the streets of Miami.��Could flooding finally wake Americans up to the climate��crisis?��Irreversible But Not Unstoppable: The Ghost Of Climate Change Yet To Come.
a dark, gritty CHRISTMAS CAROL reboot where Scrooge refuses to repent and then civilization is destroyed through excess carbon emissions
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2014
* The crazy history of Star Wars.
*��The Class Struggle in the North Pole.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: A Milwaukee doctor says he has the answer to concussions.
* And, sadly:��Milwaukee’s poet laureate passes away.
*��Among recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the jobless rate for blacks last year was 12.4 percent versus 4.9 percent for whites, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
* I missed this one in August: Tobias Wolff on the heart of whiteness.
* Subway sandwiches and the halo effect.
* 90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out Christmas Eve Dinner.
* I can’t believe they made a movie out of Bill, The Galactic Hero.��I can’t wait to see it.
* A look inside 8chan, the worst place on the Internet: “The Mods Are Always Asleep.”
* There’s magical thinking, and then there’s��“Believing in Santa Claus could help your kids develop a cure for cancer.”
* Behold, the baby in the sun from Teletubbies.
* This was a nice, short, readable explanation of��how all the statistical analysis in The Bell Curve was bullshit.
*��10 Story Decisions Scifi And Fantasy Writers Ended Up Regretting.��Tough list to get down to just ten!
*��In the 1950s, Egypt and Britain played an old version of tit-for-tat. Egypt took the Suez Canal. The British decided to pay them back by stealing the river Nile itself. Yes, the whole Nile.
* A very J.R.R. Tolkien Christmas.
*��Parents Are Moving To The Same Towns Where Their Kids Go To College. When my kids go to college, I’m enrolling in their freshman classes. I don’t want to miss a moment.
*��New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks.
*��Pope Francis: ���One in 50��� Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals is a paedophile.
*��Pious Anxiety: Flannery O���Connor���s Prayer Journal.
* On Facebook and��Algorithmic Cruelty.
*��The Marvel Movie Universe, In Completely Chronological Order.
*��The melancholy of all things done” is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.��Buzz Aldrin and the dark side of the Moon.
* Of course you had me at “There’s a serious proposal to send astronauts to a floating cloud city in Venus’s atmosphere before heading to Mars.”
* A public service announcement: Black Mirror: White Christmas was fantastic. Find a way to watch it!
My idea of a Christmas miracle is my in-laws having Direct TV so I can watch BLACK MIRROR tonight.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 25, 2014
* And if you squint just right it looks like the world isn’t ending.��Happy Holidays indeed!
December 24, 2014
Christmas Eve Links!
* My article about Battle: Los Angeles is finally up at Democratic Communiqu��: ���I���d Rather Be in Afghanistan���: Antinomies of Battle: Los Angeles. It’s part of a special issue on “Media, Technology, and the Culture of Militarism: Watching, Playing and Resisting the War Society.”
* A horrid, horrifying story of an organized campaign��to harass a random Brandeis undergraduate for her tweets.
*��UIUC Report Condemns Dismissal of Steven��Salaita.��I said this on Twitter, but “It was wrong to��arbitrarily break the rules then to fire Salaita, but we should arbitrarily break the rules now to reconsider his hiring” is a bullshit conclusion. Either he was hired or he wasn’t.
* Santa���s magic, children���s wisdom, and inequality.
* Are Parents Obliged to Pay for College?
* Today’s police killing non-indictment comes to us form Houston, Texas.
*��Former Buffalo Police officer Cariol Horne in a battle to get her pension. She was fired for trying to stop a fellow officer she says was abusing a suspect.
* When White Men Love Black Women on TV.
* Fast-Food Consumption Linked to Lower Test Score Gains in 8th Graders.
*��The numbers are shocking: In the United States, according to the GED Testing Service, 401,388 people earned a GED in 2012, and about 540,000 in 2013. This year, according to the latest numbers obtained by Scene, only about 55,000 have passed nationally. That is a 90-percent drop off from last year.
*��Creditonormativity: Asserts that participation in the credit system of finance is the norm and is therefore the only and expected financial orientation. This orientation is then used to legitimate participation in a range of otherwise exclusionary social exchanges and relations. A creditonormative society is compulsory and involves the alignment of body, mind, and wallet with the biopolitical governance of financialization.
* Against the idea of bystander intervention as a solution to rape culture.
*��Do #BlackLivesMatter In��Academia?
* An oral history of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
* On sneaking a lesbian relationship past the censors in an anime in 2014.
*��We have created a public education system designed to assess our students and teachers on measures we perpetually keep just out of reach, so that the most successful students, teachers, and schools have nothing to worry about while the least successful among us must worry constantly about whether we���re smart or not, under review or not, employed or not���������worth something or not. We demand that the people we fail define self-worth as judged by us. Other kinds of literacy (or even last year���s literacy) simply need not apply.
*��Seeing this part of my family always introduces me to new Christian alternative media I���ve never heard of before.��This time it was Bibleman and the ���Unwind Dystology,” a sort of pro-life Divergent.
* Meanwhile, from the annals of my very serious research.
*��Coming to Terms With My Father’s Racism.
* Panspermia in the 19th century.
* The arc of history is long, but The Interview will play in 200 theaters this Christmas after all.
* And I thought this was supposed to be Christmas:��Ohio homeowner told to take down his zombie nativity scene.
December 23, 2014
All Your Christmas Eve Eve Links
* De Blasio and the police.��Some amazing stuff in there.
According to a former de Blasio aide, during the general election campaign in 2013, de Blasio���s team was even convinced that members of his police detail were eavesdropping on his private conversations in his city-assigned car. Things got so bad that de Blasio, according to the staffer, would step into the street to make sure he was out of earshot of plainclothes officers.
*��NYPD Union President Patrick Lynch Is Completely Nuts: A History.
*��The NYPD Shooter Had A History Of Mental Health Issues And Violence Against Women.��Slimy Baltimore FOX Affiliate Caught Faking “Kill a Cop” Protest Chant.��The absolute bad faith of blaming protestors.
*��Die-ins demand that we bear witness to black people’s fears that they’ll be next.
* “The Cossacks were never funny. Cops never are. I invite you to imagine the international outrage and American horror, had one of Putin���s police choked an innocent man to death on camera for the crime of selling loose cigarettes.”
* Ex-Milwaukee Cop Who Shot Unarmed Man 14 Times Will Not Be Charged.��The National Guard has been on alert for the city since the weekend.��A statement from the ACLU.�����It may out-Ferguson Ferguson���: Why Milwaukee���s police violence will horrify you. And at HuffPo:��Why I Was Arrested Standing Up for Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee.
*�����Ya���ll Ain���t Hearing Me���: White Liberalism and the Killing of Aura��Rosser.
*��Charges Expected To Be Filed Against MOA Protest��Organizers.
* The idea of “police reform” obscures the task. Whatever one thinks of the past half-century of criminal-justice policy, it was not imposed on Americans by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies���the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects���are, at the very least, byproducts of democratic will. Likely they are much more. It is often said that it is difficult to indict and convict police officers who abuse their power. It is comforting to think of these acquittals and non-indictments as contrary to American values. But it is just as likely that they reflect American values. The three most trusted institutions in America are the military, small business, and the police.
* And W. Kamau Bell has a one-off podcast on Earwolf called “Coptalk.”
Sorry, I know that was a lot of police links today. Some other stuff I’ve been looking at:
*��The National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling last week that could clear the way for much more unionization of faculty members at private colleges and universities.
*��There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.��I think I’d maybe like to hear more about how “eventually artificial intelligence will basically wipe out the demand for higher education completely” before I sign on to this part of the proposition all the way.
* Facts are stupid things:��New Congress Dumping CBO Chief To Clear Way For Special GOP Budget Math.
*��How Vermont’s single-payer health care dream fell apart.
* Jacobin��looks ahead to the new Cuba.
* Markets in everything: Rare book investment trust believed to be Ponzi scheme.
*��Which Jobs Have the Highest Rates of Depression?
* What 2000 Calories Looks Like.
* 101 Critical Theory Books That Came Out in 2014.��As a society we probably could have gotten away with just the clean one hundred.
* An empirical study of heterosexual college sex practices based on a six-year survey.
* The Sony hack has cancelled what I bet would have been a great comic adaptation of Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang. At least I’ll have this in my back pocket the next time I��teach it.
* Meanwhile:��A Lot of Smart People Think North Korea Didn’t Hack Sony.��Let’s not let��caution��get in the way of a good prank war.
* That’s solve it:��MLA Will Discuss How to Deal With Controversial Issues.
*��The night before filming begins, however, I get this new script and it was shocking. The character was gone. Instead of coming in at the very beginning of the movie, like page 8, the character came in on page 68 after the Ghostbusters were established. His elaborate background was all gone, replaced by me walking in and saying, ���If there���s a steady paycheck in it, I���ll believe anything you say.��� So that was pretty devastating.
* The FBI saw the film. They didn’t like it.��Stick around for a nice little factoid��about copyright!
*��The Year Having Kids Became a Frivolous Luxury.
*��The Best New Webcomics Of 2014.
* These Ant-Man rumors suggest Marvel really is going to go all the way with its “Civil War” plan for Phase 3.
*��No More Tony Starks: Against “The Smartest Man in the Room.”
Perhaps this is a good time to notice that when Anders says the Smartest Guy in the Room provides “wish-fulfillment for reasonably smart people” her examples go on to demonstrate that by people she happens always to mean only guys and even only white guys. She does notice that the Smartest Guy does seem to be, you know, a guy and provides the beginnings of a gendered accounting of the archetype: “the ‘smartest guy’ thing confirms all our silliest gender stereotypes, in a way that’s like a snuggly dryer-fresh blanket to people who feel threatened by shifting gender roles. In the world of these stories, the smartest person is always a man, and if he meets a smart woman she will wind up acknowledging his superiority.”
That seems to me a rather genial take on the threatened bearings of patriarchal masculinity compensated by cyborg fantasizing, but at least it’s there. The fact that the Smartest Guy keeps on turning out to be white receives no attention at all. This omission matters not only because it is so glaring, but because the sociopathic denial of the collectivity of intelligence, creativity, progress, and flourishing at the heart of the Smartest Guy in the Room techno-archetype, has the specific and catastrophic counterpart in the white racist narrative of a modern technological civilization embodied in inherently superior European whiteness against which are arrayed not different but primitive and atavistic cultures and societies that must pay in bloody exploitation and expropriation the price of the inferior. The Smartest Guy in the Room is also the Smartest Guy in History, naturally enough, with a filthy treasure pile to stand on and shout his superiority from.
* Star Trek as anti-Smartest-Guy fiction.
* And speaking of Star Trek:��they’ve chosen��a new director to ruin 3tar Tr3k 3. Kudos to all involved. Meanwhile Adam Kotsko is pitching the Star Trek anthology series I’ve always wanted to the��unfeeling Philistines at the Daystrom Institute. Unrecognized in his own time…
December 22, 2014
…Maybe Next Year
Someday at Christmas man will not have failed
Hate will be gone and love will prevail
Someday a new world that we can start
With hope in every heart
Monday Morning Links!
* You’ve been waiting for it: the inevitable “Too Many Cooks” followup, “Unedited Footage of a Bear.” Here’s your instant criticism on the Adult Swim infomercial phenomenon.
* I got hooked on this after a Facebook recommendation, so why shouldn’t you? Papers, Please.
* No one could have predicted:��Cuban Oil May Prove A Boon For U.S. Companies.
* NYT: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses.
* Andrew Liptak at Kirkus has your brief history of the Culture.
* UW-Superior to suspend 5 academic programs.
* Your guide to academic interviewing from The Professor Is In: The Question Is Not the Question.��It’s a little hard for me to believe how absolutely clueless I was about all this back when, but this lesson was by far the most helpful thing I learned from my mock interview.��Absolutely do a mock interview if you have the option.
* M.F.A.s: An Increasingly Popular, Increasingly Bad Financial Decision.
* Dissent on the invention of jaywalking.
* Tragedy in Brooklyn as two police officers are assassinated.��Aside from how horrible this event is in itself, I’ve been stunned how immediately and how viciously this has been politicized,��not just by known bad actors like Giuliani but even by middle-of-the-road empty suits like Pataki.
* NYPD Officer Repeatedly Punches 12-Year-Old Black Boy As Colleagues Subdue Him, And A Lawyer Sees The Whole Thing. Prosecutor Says He Knew Some Witnesses Were Lying To The Ferguson Grand Jury. Meet the Pro-Slavery Fairview Park Auxiliary Cop. Family of toddler critically injured by SWAT team facing $1 million in medical bills. Woman Tries To Trademark ‘I Can’t Breathe’ To Sell Merchandise. ���I Can Breathe,��� and the Occasional Fear of Covering Protests.
*��High incarceration may be more harmful than high crime.
* Appeals Court Rules People Institutionalized for Mental Illness Still Have Right to Guns.
* If Apple Were A Worker Cooperative, Each Employee Would Earn At Least $403K.
* In Defense of Economic Disobedience.
* Justine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came To Peace With Her.
* #realtalk: Serial Sucked And Wasted Everyone’s Time.��I’ll allow it, SNL.
*��How the NFL leaves players broken ��� and��broke.
* Incognito mode:��Americans aren���t getting married, and researchers think porn is part of the problem.
* It’s almost 2015, which means it’s time to convince ourselves that the Obama administration hasn’t been a��complete and total disaster.��Over to you Matt.
*��Indeed, this is one of the crowning lessons of Pay Any Price: that the United States is suffering from a widespread crisis of accountability, one that transcends distinctions between the public and private sectors and that encompasses both. The sources of power, real power, seem more remote and mysterious to Americans than ever before. It is no coincidence that this November���s midterm elections saw the lowest voter turnout in 72 years (a pathetic 36.3 percent). Most Americans now spend their lives hostage to forces they can neither understand nor control nor hope to shape in any meaningful way. People see themselves as objects to be acted upon, not as thinking subjects. If the architects of our post-9/11 politics believed they were subverting democracy in order to save it, that we should pay any price to keep our people safe, they should be applauded for succeeding in at least one, crucial, part of their proposition. We have paid, again, and again, and again.
* An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a “non-human person” unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday.
* And why do you hate the South? I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!
December 19, 2014
A Very Special Second Helping of Friday Links
* A new Kelly Link story at McSweeney’s.��It’s a very Merry Christmas indeed.
*��Serial��decided when it would end, so it could continue.��What’s the Verdict? Racism and the Case against Serial.��More on That Later: The Truth about Serial.��I don’t want to brag guys but I solved this whole thing yesterday in just one tweet:
SINGLE TWEETS THAT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING: legality, legitimacy, ethics, and ���the truth��� are distinct but overlapping categories.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 18, 2014
* Silent Spring:��Autism linked to 3rd trimester pollution exposure.
*��Why Many Inner City Schools Function Like Prisons.��School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of��Ferguson.
*��Over the past two weeks, I have fluctuated between anger and grief. I feel surrounded by Black death. What a privilege, to concern yourself with seeming good while the rest of us want to seem worthy of life.
*��Your Waitress, Your Professor.
My perhaps na��ve hope is that when I tell students I���m not only an academic, but a ���survival��� jobholder, I���ll make a dent in the artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work and ���intelligent��� work.
* The best thing on the Internet today: Pulp Nintendo 1, 2, 3.
* You’ll never get me into one of those things: the transporter is real.��
* John Protevi has another good post on the situation at Marquette��for those following this story on which I am not commenting (am not commenting, AM not commenting, am NOT commenting…):
As to Marquette’s current course of action, I find it troubling, but I would hazard a guess at to their motivations, based on a presumption that university administrations use a risk management rationality: MU may think that their risk of losing a Title IX suit or OCR complaint claiming that they did nothing when a student was subject to the creation of a hostile work or education environment was greater than the risk of their losing a wrongful discipline case by McAdams, as well as the cost to their reputation if people cast this as an academic freedom issue and the cost to their donor base by alums who take McAdams’s side.
The above is an explanation, not a justification. The university’s risk management calculations might converge with normative values if one feels that a claim of academic freedom does not excuse the creation of a hostile environment for a student.
* Gritty Realism, Snowpiercer, and the Tedious Trauma of the Real.��I’m just glad��we���ve finally found a scenario where rotating enslavement of children is the progressive solution.
* Who do you think would win if Batman fought Superman?
* And Merry Christmas, just kidding:��Santa’s real workshop: the town in China that makes the world’s Christmas decorations.
Friday Links!
* The Department of Education is surprisingly frank about how impossible it is to turn Obama’s gibberish on education into a usable ratings system.��And here is the tentative list of stats colleges must now juke.
*��Serial��missed its chance to show how unfair the criminal justice system really is. What Serial really taught us.
* Aaron Bady interviews Sofia Samatar on steampunk, Afrofuturism, science fiction, and more.��The latest in his Post45 series.
*��Marquette says it hasn’t suspended professor John McAdams.
* The best list like this I’ve seen:��5 Reasons To Study The Humanities.
Uber claims Done wasn’t even the driver who was supposed to pick the woman up, and points out that he passed a background check before he started driving for them.
So did the L.A. driver charged with kidnapping and rape, the San Francisco driver charged with��hitting a passenger in the head with a hammer, and another San Francisco driver accused of assault who turned out to have prior felony convictions and was on parole for a previous battery charge.
* But in statehouses across the country, Uber has fought against legislation requiring background checks as strong as those demanded of traditional taxis. Other ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Sidecar, Uber���s chief rivals, have also pushed against the laws, but supporters of stronger background checks say Uber has been by far the most aggressive.
*��The Winning Images From National Geographic‘s 2014 Photo Contest.
* The very last Colbert.��RIP.��Today marks the exact moment this��stops being a relevant reference for students, so expect to see it fade from classrooms around 2027.
* And I too wish my snowman were alive.
December 18, 2014
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
*��Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette.��Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long.��As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat��constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to��discuss this all��at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example��on��Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech��for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a��campus and for the��students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation��for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21:�����Indigeneities.���
* Climate change comes to��Shishmaref, Alaska.��Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
*��But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: ���hands up��� transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it���s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages���the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, ���hands up��� isn���t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one���s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other���deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black���become the objects of state violence. ���Hands up��� cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
*��Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man.��Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops.��California Cop Tweets That He Will ���Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill��� Protesters.��Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality.����UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’��Cops Off Campus.
*��Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse ��� If You���re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn���t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien���s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
*��Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
*��Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners.��The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built.��They Said ���No��� to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years.��Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase.��ASU English by the Numbers.��Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
*��Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
*��The ���Job Market��� That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile:��According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp!��The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
*��The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It���s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
*��The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
*��Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both��I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything��and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions,��suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
*��This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
*��Five Stories About��Addiction.
*��Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after��protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and ���alternative modes of learning��� as they continue to cope with what���s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be ���replaced with a no-fail mercy period,��� and said ���basically no student ���especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.���
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It���s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so.��On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA���s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
*��The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state���s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
*��Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
*��All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
*��Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
*��18 Badass Women You Probably Didn���t Hear About In��2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand ��� a stern ���hush hush��� to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens���s claim that ���our belief is not a belief��� could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, ���atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.��� He claims being an agnostic would be ���a truer liberation��� since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming ��� a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett���s Hamm when he exclaims, ���The bastard! He doesn���t exist!���
*��The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing���It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k��altogether.
December 14, 2014
Good Morning, It’s Sunday Morning Links
* A rare correction: actually your pets will burn in hell. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com regrets the error.
* Watch out, modern-day slaves, the Pope might un-denounce your exploitation next!
* Sad update: Cheryl Abbate has been run out of��Marquette.
*��Adding that to the explicitly military and overseas contingency funding, the real dimensions of the US military-intelligence-police-prison complex begin to come into view: a staggering $830 billion, more than 80 cents out of every dollar in the funding bill, is devoted to killing, spying on, imprisoning or otherwise oppressing the people of the world, including the American people.
* The federal government is using data gimmicks to mask the true scope of homelessness.
* To end police violence, we must end policing as we know it.
* Timelapse video reveals massive size of New York City protests.
*��Ferguson to Increase Police Ticketing to Close City���s Budget Gap.
* Point/counterpoint: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says torture is totally legit. Ex-NFL punter Chris Kluwe says maybe not.
*��“I resign. Happy? Goodbye.”
* But what we do know is that the histories of slavery and of capitalism look very different if we understand them in relation to each other. The next time we walk the streets of Lower Manhattan or the grounds of Harvard University, we should think at least in passing of the millions of enslaved workers who helped make some of that grandeur possible, and to the ways that slavery���s legacy persists today.
* U.S. Schools Saying Goodbye to Foreign Languages.��Horrible.
* Cruel optimism we can believe in: What if Democrats had their own Tea Party���esque rebellion?��Why the Democratic Party could seriously change ��� for real, this time.
* Ever Say Never Again: On the History and Future of James Bond.
* Scientists think the Big Bang could’ve created a mirror universe where time flows backward.
* What are the bastards ruining now? Buffy.
*��Is Studying Buffy the Vampire Slayer More Important Than Studying Shakespeare? I say teach the controversy.
* I think I would say Freddie is probably the worst possible spokesperson for the conversation the feminist left should be��having in the wake of the Rolling Stone UVA scandal. But no one else seems to want to talk about it at all.
* Meanwhile, Matt Fraction walks away from Twitter.
*��As recruitment dips, TFA leader says New York training site to close.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say “racism.”
*��The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon.
* A Tolkien true believer vs. the nerds.
*��Hear Philip K. Dick Talk About SF And The Mainstream In 1976.
* Playboy ranks every��Star Trek episodes. “Mirror, Mirror” at #3 is a deeply weird choice. And “Arena” at #6 is just insane.
*��They did a TV movie where the McCallisters get divorced? Pretty dark,��Home Alone!
* Portuguese Street Artist Creates Stunning 3D Graffiti That Seems To Float In The Air.
* The Hobbit: A Middle-Earth Workplace.
* Now it’s the Kindle version of Green Planets that has inexplicably gone on deep discount for the weekend, if you’re in the market. And don’t forget to pre-order The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, out in January!
* And they say our society is no longer capable of achieving great things: This scientist solved the mystery of belly button lint.
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