Posts Tagged ‘BBC’
Friday Links!
The death of the academic job market really makes the MLA a kind of Children of Men situation.
— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) January 5, 2017
* Speaking of which! This Saturday morning! Infinite Jest at 20! Join us!
* In my mailbox: Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and the Environment. I’m a contributor; my word was “addiction.”
* Four Futures: using science fiction to challenge late stage capitalism and Thatcher’s “no alternative.”
* CfP: The 14th Annual Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont.
* Rebekah Sheldon: Save Us.
* How did the Soviet Union imagine 2017?
* When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?
* Another Big Drop in History Majors.
* Make College Football LD Again.
* A mystery player causing a stir in the world of the complex strategy game Go has been revealed as an updated version of AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence (AI) program created by Google’s London-based AI firm, DeepMind.
* GOP legislators in Wisconsin basically want line-item approval over syllabi at this point.
* Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than He Found It.
* Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election.
* James Joyce and the Jesuits.
* Republicans want to kill the mortgage interest deduction. So I’m bankrupt now, I think.
* House Republicans revive obscure rule that allows them to slash the pay of individual federal workers to $1.
* But while cinephiles have long become used to shelling out their hard-earned wonga to watch the same movie several times over, a new interview with the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hints that Hollywood’s habit of regurgitation goes further than we imagined. It reveals the film’s initial “cut”, designed to map out the movie before any shooting took place, was cobbled together by editor Colin Goudie using footage from hundreds of other existing films.
* George Lucas Can’t Give His $1.5 Billion Museum Away.
* Princess Leia Was Going to Play a Large Role in Star Wars: Episode IX.
* Some details on the supposed twelve-movie plan for Star Wars I’d never seen before.
* On chicken intelligence.
* Today in “virtually”: The storage chamber would be much deeper than Lake Huron and the company says there is virtually no chance of radioactive pollution reaching the lake, which is less than a mile away. This is a nice variant on the theme: Democrats to Fight Almost Any Trump Supreme Court Nominee: Schumer.
* Teaching the controversy: MIT Researchers Say 2016 Didn’t Have More Famous Deaths Than Usual. Give 2017 some exciting room to expand.
* We don’t, in fact, know what works in teaching composition. This one was more polemical, but good too I thought: The costs of social capture.
* Among other things, whiteness is a kind of solipsism. From right to left, whites consistently and successfully reroute every political discussion to their identity. The content of this identity, unsurprisingly, is left unexamined and undefined. It is the false foundation of the prototypically American model of pseudo-politics.
* The Troublesome Women of Sherlock.
* Modularity and the Seinfeld theme.
* A horrific hate crime in Chicago.
Every event feels like potential Reichstag fire. The OSU attack, this Chicago kidnapping, the situation in Whitefish, MT. On the precipice.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 5, 2017
* Drugs and the spirit of the times.
* Trump vs. the CIA: whoever wins, we lose. Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Is A Security Disaster Waiting To Happen. And then there’s this.
in the future, every superpower will be ruled by an unhinged narcissist for fifteen minutes
* How in Milwaukee’s cold hell did we only get #7?
* And the Monty Hall Problem, explained.
Tagged with 2016?, 2017, academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, animal intelligence, animals, Arnold Schwarzenegger, austerity, bankruptcy, BBC, Canada, Carrie Fischer, celebrity culture, Chicago, chickens, Children of Men, CIA, college football, college majors, computers, David Foster Wallace, decadence, democracy, Donald Trump, drugs, energy, Episode 9, faculty senates, film, Five Thirty Eight, Four Futures, Freddie deBoer, futurity, games, general election 2016, George Lucas, Go, hate crimes, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, Infinite Jest, James Joyce, Jesuits, Lake Huron, Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lord of the Rings, masculinity, math, math gremlins, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, MLA, Monty Hall problem, moral panic, mortgage interest deduction, museums, Nate Silver, national security, Nazis, neoliberalism, nuclear waste, nuclearity, oil, originality, pastiche, pedagogy, Peter Frase, pollution, power-pairing, Princess Leia, probability, race, racism, reality television, Rebekah Sheldon, Reichstag fire, reproductive futurity, rhetoric and composition, Rogue One, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Schumer, science fiction, Seinfeld, Sherlock, social capture, Soviet Union, sports, Star Wars, subprime mortgages, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, The Apprentice, the audacity of narcissism, the Left, Tolkien, tournaments, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, UVM, voting, white guilt, white privilege, white supremacists, white supremacy, whiteness, winter, Wisconsin, women, writing, zeitgeist
Sunday Links and Every Tab Is Closed, Forever and Ever Amen
* Second, and more surprising to me: Most papers simply lacked a soul—a compelling and well-articulated reason to exist.
* I’ve noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling’s readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author?
* Into the Black: Stories of People Getting Out of Debt. Via MeFi.
* Babies Before Tenure?
* The three student loan crises.
* Five years on Skid Row from University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart.
* Off to a great start: Rio officials had to open Olympic Stadium with bolt cutters after losing key. These Are the Actual Costs of the Rio Olympics. The ideology of the Olympics. A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics failed to report cases. With just days to go until the Rio Olympics begin, the AP—which has been testing viral levels since last year—reports water conditions are worse than ever. Inside the Gloria Marina, where the sailing races take place, adenoviruses per liter have jumped more than 42 percent since they first sampled it in March, 2015.
whymynotcaringmuchabouttheolympicsprovesmymoralsuperiority.Salon.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 6, 2016
I was never an Olympian because I reject the false promises of nationalism. That is the only reason.
* Burn your money the higher education way.
* Elsewhere in obviously functional organizations: Recent construction of emergency exit near chancellor’s office for security reasons symbolizes closed-off nature of Dirks’ administration.
* “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
* “We call on the U.S. Department of Transportation to conduct a thorough examination into the prevailing practices of major American air carriers, including Delta Air Lines, and to develop policy guidelines on the objective factors that are to be considered when determining that a passenger may legally be removed from a flight,” CAIR-Cincinnati attorney Sana Hassan said.
* Clinton’s tuition plan and private colleges.
* “Free college” is a moralistic ruse, in other words, used to smuggle in a market logic where it has no place without addressing the core question of exploitative, exorbitant college costs. It treats education like anything else you’d buy in a store, and scolds those who feel otherwise by pretending they want to get something without working for it. There ain’t so such thing as a free lunch, of course: students and the public have amply paid for it already. They’re just not eating.
* Ira Steven Behr has been working on a Deep Space Nine documentary that apparently somehow includes a “notional season eight.” And while we’re at it: Oh, That’s Where Carol Marcus Was During Star Trek Beyond. Rumor of the Day: Star Trek: Discovery to take place before The Original Series?
I wasn’t super-enthused about STAR TREK: DISCOVERY being set b/w TOS and TNG, but prospect it will be set before TOS fills me with despair.
* Roger Ailes Used Fox News Budget to Finance ‘Black Room’ Campaigns Against His Enemies. This story is just going to get more and more incredible as time goes on, I think.
* Seinfeld: “The Twin Towers.” An original spec script.
* Secrets of the Millennials Revealed: They’re Poor.
* But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry.
* This Joke Was Off-limits at Donald Trump’s Comedy Central Roast. Who Lies More? The Answer May Surprise You. You Always Hurt the Ones You Love. On Veterans. On Unlikely Voters. The Shrinking Electoral Map. Georgia as Battleground State. Bloodthirstier than Cheney. If President Trump decided to use nukes, he could do it easily. Congressman Proposes Law To Prevent Trump From Being Able To Launch Nukes On His Own. Only in America could proposals to bomb at least three nations and indefinitely occupy another be labeled “isolationism.” Senior GOP Officials Exploring Options if Trump Drops Out. What Happens If Trump Drops Out? If Trump Drops Out, The Result Will Be A Horrible Legal Quagmire. Premediating a Loss. Just 92 More Days in the Bunker. Here’s what an 8% Clinton Lead Looks Like. Trump, or Political Emotions. A Fable, by Teju Cole. Of course there’s more links after the chart.
* Anagha Uppal, an activist at the University of Tennessee, describes the meal plan rule as “an exercise in tyranny.” Ms. Uppal has not used her plan — “I don’t purchase from Aramark,” she said between bites of chicken salad in pita (cost: $5.74) at the Golden Roast Coffeehouse. On her laptop: a Food Recovery Network sticker; she’s a campus coordinator for the network, a national student group that fights food waste. It was Ms. Uppal who prodded officials to start the Big Orange Meal Share to let students donate swipes.
* google flossing truth
* Possibilia, or, Love in the Multiverse.
* Why Amish Children Rarely Get Asthma.
* When Exhaustion Became a Status Symbol.
* Travel reimbursement voucher, trip to Moon, July 16-24, 1969.
* Like the blog, my Tumblr has been languishing the last few weeks while I’ve been teaching, but every so often I throw up some gold. I don’t know what else I was expecting. I’m with Her(zog). You have every reason to go on living. The last week of my comics class.
* A Radioactive Cold War Military Base Will Soon Emerge From Greenland’s Melting Ice.
* Perhaps our billboards are the civic sludge, the highway litter, of America’s ambitions and aspirations — literally writ large.
* A Brief Publishing History of Game of Thrones.
* Tolkien: The Lost Recordings.
* On La Jetée.
* Quantum Computing, Getting Closer.
* Crows Continue to Be Terrifyingly Intelligent.
* A new report from Zillow estimates that with a six-foot sea level rise, “almost 1.9 million homes (or roughly 2 percent of all U.S. homes) – worth a combined $882 billion – are at risk of being underwater by 2100.”
* Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter.
* What’s Wrong With the DC Comics Movie Franchise? Report: Warner Bros. Turned Suicide Squad Into a Mess in Its Panic Over BvS Criticism.
At this point Zack Snyder and his deranged artistic vision has cost Warner Brothers, what, 2 billion dollars at least?
* …it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. The function of video game criticism.
* The end of sex.
* Men, am I right. Marriage, men, and alcohol.
* The “biological mystery” of the female orgasm.
* Last year, though, the National Institutes of Health banned funding of animal-human chimeras until it could figure out whether any of this work would bump against ethical boundaries. Like: Could brain scientists endow research animals with human cognitive abilities, or even consciousness, while transplanting human stem cells into the brain of a developing animal embryo? Would it be morally wrong to create animals with human feet, hands, or a face in order to study human morphology? Modern medicine thinks before it acts. SMASH CUT TO: After a nearly year-long ban…
* Life in the city without cops or firefighters would be unpleasant and, inevitably, tragic. But, she notes, “if sanitation workers aren’t out there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”
* Malcolm Harris reviews The Last Days of New Paris.
* Head shots of all of the ways US intelligence thought Hitler might try to disguise himself.
* In Super Mario Galaxy, whenever Mario drowns in a swamp, his hand reaches out from under the surface before being sucked in. However, since Mario’s head is so big, he cannot raise his hand above the surface without his head being still visible. To solve this, the game simply shrinks Mario’s head so it doesn’t interfere with the animation.
* How Bill Cosby Finally Landed in a Courtroom.
* The Blackest Superhero Story That Marvel Comics Ever Published.
* Everything is not fine.
* And Wisconsin, once again in the news.
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic writing, administrative blight, air travel, airlines, airplanes, alcohol, America, animal intelligence, Apollo 11, asthma, babies, BBC, Berkeley, Bill Cosby, billboards, biological clocks, birds, books, Brazil, Buzz Aldrin, Captain America, Catholicism, Cheney, children, China Miéville, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comics, consumer culture, criticism, crows, DC Comics, debt, Deep Space Nine, Delta, documentary, Donald Trump, donations, donor class, ecology, editing, Electoral College, emergency exits, endowments, everything is not fine, exhaustion, fables, female orgasm, Florida, flossing, Fox News, Game of Thones, games, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, Georgia, graft, Green Bay, Greenland, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, highways, Hillary Clinton, Hitler, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human-animal hybrids, I'm with Her(zog), ice sheet collapse, ideology, immigration, isolationism, J.K. Rowling, Japan, jokes, journals, Kelly Link, kids today, La Jetée, lies and lying liars, life, love, mad science, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marvel, masculinity, meal plans, medicine, men, military-industrial complex, millennials, moral superiority, nationalism, neoliberalism, NIH, Nintendo, nuclear war, nuclearity, nuns, Olympics, parenting, pigoons, play, politics, polls, poverty, private colleges, protest, quantum computing, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Rio, roasts, Roger Ailes, romance, room and board, Salon, sanitation, science fiction, sea level rise, secret exits, Seinfeld, sex, sociology, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, student debt, student loans, student movements, Suicide Squad, Super Mario, Teju Cole, the Amish, The Last Days of New Paris, the Moon, time travel, Tolkien, tsunamis, tuition, unlikely voters, veterans, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Wisconsin, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, World War II, writing, Zack Snyder
Don’t Look a Day Over 240 Links
* SFRA Awards 2016. Congrats all!
* Note to all sf writers: If your future doesn’t somehow address the problem of distributed harassment networks, you’re not taking the present seriously enough.
* The Student Loan Suicides. New Jersey’s Student Loan Program is ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking.’
* There is money available in the digital humanities in a way that there has never been money in English departments, ever. With very limited exceptions, the idea that one could get a six-figure grant for doing something in English is just unheard of. The only types of grants people typically got — with the exception of major career-capping grants like Guggenheims — were salary replacement for a year to write a book. That was the best we could hope for. So the idea that all of a sudden there was some part of English where someone could get $300,000 to $400,000 grants was both politically striking and disturbing. It wasn’t like the leading figures in English were saying we have to have this large pot of money for DH. It was external people, especially Mellon and the NEH — under the influence of some of the big DH people, whose animus for the rest of English was palpable and explicit — who decided to do this. This has had a tremendously deforming effect.
* So the problem isn’t that we can’t win reformist victories for workers. History has shown that we can. The problem is what comes after victory, and we need a theory of socialism and social democracy that prepares our movements for that phase.
* Is it better to hope or to despair? Do you want to create better art, or do you want a better world in which to create? Are you an artist or an activist? Yes.
* Life after the end of the world: California Heat Wave Spells Doom For Avocados.
* The richest, most powerful, most prosperous nation in human history.
* Guy Leaves Fake Animal Facts All Over Los Angeles Zoo.
* Guns & D&D.
* Brain-drain as social justice.
* Butler and Trump (though I should say she was really thinking of Reagan, who used the same slogan).
* The greying of the homeless.
* Teen who urged boyfriend to kill himself will stand trial.
* A Look at the Use of Drones During the Obama Administration.
* Stereogum reports five years of hard paperwork for Apple has finally paid off, and the company has obtained a patent on technology that will disable your phone’s camera when it detects a specific infrared signal. In the time it took you to read that sentence, you probably also had the three seconds of reflection time it would take a reasonable person to think, “Oh, that sounds extremely problematic.”
* 2 weeks out, and Trump’s convention is a total mess. Sad! TPM continues to pound the Trump fundraising saga. Tracing Donald Trump’s Social Media Ties to White Supremacists. The latest example.
* Hillary Clinton was the force behind a little-known breakthrough in transgender rights. So why doesn’t she talk about it?
* Still one of my favorite images on the web ever: Richmond Golf Club, Temporary Rules (1940).
* You just can’t win: Closing apps to save your battery only makes things worse.
* The things you learn from Lazy Doctor Who: the original series one did an (now lost) Dalek episode without the Doctor or Companions.
* New Study Busts the Myth That Knights Couldn’t Move Well in Armor.
* We can either spend our time thinking and funding tentacle porn or we can spend our time thinking and funding civilization. I know what I’d pick…
Tagged with academia, activism, aging, anti-Semitism, Apple, armor, art, avocados, Barack Obama, batteries, BBC, brain drain, bullying, California, China Miéville, Chris Christie, civilization, class struggle, climate change, copyright, corpocracy, daleks, debt, democracy, digital humanities, Doctor Who, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, drones, Dungeons & Dragons, dystopia, English departments, entrepreneurs, fantasy, Fermi paradox, futurity, general election 2016, golf, grants, guns, harassment, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hugo awards, infrastructure, iPhones, knights, Make America Great Again, medieval times, medievalism, Mellon grants, meritocracy, money, Nazis, NEH, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, police state, politics, revolution, roads, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, science fiction studies, SFRA, shrapnel, social media, socialism, student debt, student loans, suicide, surveillance society, television, tentacle porn, texting, the Left, the Singularity, transgender issues, true crime, true facts, Twitter, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on terror, white supremacy, World War II, zoos
* Over the past decade numerous stories have come out about Soviet and American military personnel who were given orders to fire nuclear weapons between the 1960s and 1980s. Their conscience stopped them, only to learn later that it was a mistaken order. We now have another horrifying story to add to that growing list of possible post-apocalyptic futures.
Former Air Force airman John Bordne is now an elderly man. But in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962 he and his fellow airmen nearly launched their nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force has only now given Bordne permission to tell his story of how America nearly started World War III.
* Time travel short film of the day: “Therefore I Am.”
* Kurt Vonnegut’s Electric Literature.
* Stored grain can’t melt steel beams.
* NASA is taking astronaut applications.
* The BBC will adapt His Dark Materials.
* Bullets dodged: Aaron Sorkin once pitched a Pixar movie about talking office supplies.
* How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics).
* The rating game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses.
* Another McKenzie Wark piece on the Anthropocene.
* Don’t believe the Democratic Party is in crisis? Then read this tweet. How badly has the Obama era damaged the Democratic party?
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That's some legacy.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) November 4, 2015
* The book includes diary entries about the tensions between Mrs. Bush and Nancy Reagan (“Nancy does not like Barbara”) and his private comments about Michael S. Dukakis, his 1988 opponent (“midget nerd”). It reports that as defense secretary for the elder Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study of how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary. (The answer: 17.)
* Meanwhile, back at the ranch: The Most Militarized Universities in America.
* These teams earned the most from “paid patriotism.”
* Prose and poetry—all art, music, dance—rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. Once we get the beat, the right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it—the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a while. Ursula K. Le Guin, y’all.
* Students suspended or expelled over allegations of sexual assault rarely succeed in lawsuits against the institutions that punished them. That’s starting to change.
* Ada #8: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital.
* “What’s your secret?” ““Oh, we just kick out the bad ones.”
* Elmo looks into the Ark of the Covenant.
* And Meet Dakotaraptor: the feathered dinosaur that was ‘utterly lethal.’ Cutie!
Tagged with Aaron Sorkin, Ark of the Covenant, astronauts, atheism, Barack Obama, BBC, Ben Carson, Bush, Cheney, class struggle, Democrats, dinosaurs, Elmo, football, gender, globalization, His Dark Materials, How did we survive the 1990s?, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Iraq, Kate Hayles, Kurt Vonnegut, McKenzie Wark, military-industrial-academic complex, NASA, neoliberalism, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, patriotism, Philip Pullman, Pixar, Player Piano, politics, propaganda, stories, teach the controversy, technology, the Anthropocene, the dark side of the digital, the digital, the pyramids, time travel, Uber, Ursula K. Le Guin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, writing
* In case you missed it, last night I put up my syllabi for the fall, on J.R.R. Tolkien and American Literature after the American Century.
* Mark your calendars, East Coasters: Jaimee Hills reads from her award-winning book How to Avoid Speaking at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC on October 26. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that preorders are available now at Amazon and Waywiser Press.
* The world’s most popular academic article: “Fuck Nuance.”
That is the kudzu of nuance. It makes us shy away from the riskier aspects of abstraction and theory-building generally, especially if it is the rst and most frequent response we hear. Instead of pushing some abstraction or argument along for a while to see where it goes, there is a tendency to start hedging theory with particulars. People complain that you’re leaving some level or dimension out, and tell you to bring it back in. Crucially, “accounting for”, “addressing”, or “dealing” with the missing item is an unconstrained process. at is, the question is not how a theory can handle this or that issue internally, but rather the suggestion to expand it with this new term or terms. Class, Institutions, Emotions, Structure, Culture, Interaction—all of them are taken generically to “matter”, and you must acknowledge that they matter by incorporating them. Incorporation is the reintroduction of particularizing elements, even though those particulars were what you had to throw away in order to make your concept a theoretically useful abstraction in the first place.
See also: nuance trolling as academic filibuster.
* More ACLA CFPs: Utopia Renewed: Locating a New Utopian Praxis. Innovation, Creativity, and Capitalist Culture.
* Trying to figure out what percentage of instructors are adjuncts is the world’s most dangerous game.
* But Thrun and other MOOC founders seem less than concerned about living up to their earlier, lofty rhetoric or continuing that tradition of bringing education to an underserved population. True, they haven’t entirely abandoned their rhetoric about equal access to educational opportunities. But they’ve shifted to what’s becoming a more familiar Silicon Valley narrative about the future of employability: a cheap and precarious labor force. That’s the unfortunate reality of “Uber for Education.”
* Artisanal college. Cruelty free, cage free, farm-fresh.
* Aggrieved students find books dangerous; neoliberal administrators say they’re useless. I’d take the former any day.
* From Corporate Leader to Flagship President?
* Reform Higher Ed? Treat Badmin Like Bankers.
* Literary magazines for socialists funded by the CIA, ranked.
* The strategic value of summer.
* Forty years of Born to Run. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
* Fun Home at Duke: 1, 2.
* Meanwhile, in today’s exciting new anti-academic moral panic: UNC’s The Literature of 9/11.
* As Murray Pomerance points out, plagiarism is a form of theft, and we don’t steal our own work. On the contrary, we expand its reach, and build on it, thereby making it more relevant as the contexts that produce it change.
* UT Knoxville encourages students to use ‘gender-neutral pronouns.’ Washington State University disavows syllabus with ban on certain words.
* The Largest-Ever U.S. Gallery Of Jack Kirby’s Comic Art Heads To California.
* And no one talks about it: Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins. More here. I’m an outlier on the progressive side of the fence insofar as I think Clinton might really have to pull out of the race over the emails — so it’s even worse than it seems.
* The cartoon bodies of Mad Max: Fury Road.
* How Many Men Did The Golden Girls Sleep With, Exactly?
* The FBI’s surveillance of Ray Bradbury. And the Sad Puppies.
* Cold Opening: The Publicity Campaign for Go Set a Watchman.
* The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina serves as a reminder that resilience is a function of the strength of a community. Gentrification’s Ground Zero: In the ten years since Katrina, New Orleans has been remade into a neoliberal playground for young entrepreneurs. The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover.
* Incredible essay by Lili Loofbourrow on her sister’s death by suicide this summer.
* Psychology is bunk.
* Žižek Says Thing.
* Against the Anthropocene.
* Whatever happened to DC Comics?
* Being Stephen Colbert.
* The free encyclopedia anyone can edit.
* Tinder as video game.
* Another Samuel Delany interview.
* Janelle Monáe Vows To ‘Speak Up’ On #BlackLivesMatter.
* I love dumb stuff like this, when the corrupt screw up and lose: Business owners try to remove all voters from business district, but they forgot one college student.
* Cancer cells programmed back to normal by US scientists.
* British Library declines Taliban archive over terror law fears.
* Upstate New York Secessionists Demand Freedom From City They Mooch Off Of.
* I told you that if there were something beyond the grave, I would contact you.
* RIP, Oliver Sacks.
* Inside Wisconsin’s Slender Man stabbing.
* I confess I am totally stunned by the Jared Fogle case. I thought I was cynical enough.
* The arc of history is long, but at least that Coach reboot has already been cancelled.
* The Racial Politics of Disney Animals.
* Mars by 2039?
* Renaming Denali.
* Why Dolphins Are Deep Thinkers.
* Fall In Love with Your Job, Get Ripped Off by Your Boss. Related: workers shouldn’t work for free.
* Firstborn Girls Are the Best at Life. Any Zoey could have told you that!
* The law, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike not to clean up their billion-dollar toxic oil spills.
* The New Servility.
* Militarized drones are now legal in North Dakota.
* Future Jails May Look and Function More Like Colleges. And, you know, vice versa…
* Never say “unfilmable”: The BBC is going to try to make a show out of The City and the City.
* Declare victory and go home to your panic room: America Has Lost The War Against Guns.
* And some things mankind was just never meant to know: See how easily a rat can wriggle up your toilet.
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 9/11, academia, ACLA, adjunctification, adjuncts, afterlife, Alison Bechdel, America, American literature, animal personhood, animals, art, artisanal college, austerity, Barack Obama, BBC, Born to Run, Boston Market, cancer, canons, CFPs, charter schools, China Miéville, CIA, Coach, college, comics, corruption, daughters, DC Comics, death, Democratic primary 2016, Democrats, Denali, disaster, Disney, disruptive innovation, do what you love, dolphins, drones, Duke, Exxon, filibusters, Fun Home, Fury Road, games, gender, Golden Girls, guns, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, Hugo awards, Hurricane Katrina, innovation, Jack Kirby, Janelle Monae, Jared Fogle, libraries, literary magazines, Mad Max, Marquette, Mars, MOOCs, moral panic, Mt. McKinley, music, my scholarly empire, NBC, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, no thank you, North Dakota, nuance, oil spills, Oliver Sacks, plagiarism, police state, police violence, precarity, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, psychology, race, racism, rats, Ray Bradbury, Sad Puppies, Samuel R. Delany, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, secession, self-plagiarism, servility, sex, Slender Man, Springsteen, Stephen Colbert, Subway, suicide, summer, syllabi, Taliban, television, the Anthropocene, the archives, The City and the City, the courts, the law, theory, Tinder, toilets, Tolkien, trigger warnings, true crime, UNC, University of Iowa, Utopia, voting, what it is I think I'm doing, Wikipedia, Wisconsin, words, work, Zoey, Zygmunt Bauman, Žižek
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* Heinlein shrugged.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
A disability version of the “Bechdel Test,” maybe?
1) There’s a disabled character visible
2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,
3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* Labeling the market natural and the state unnatural is a convenient fiction for those wedded to the status quo.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, aliens, altac, Andrew Cuomo, Andrew Jackson, animal personhood, animal rights, Apple, ASLE, Atlanta, Auschwitz, austerity, autism, bankers, banks, Batman, BBC, Bechdel test, body cameras, books, capitalism, cash, Catholicism, CFPs, charter schools, Chevron, class struggle, college basketball, college sports, comics, Commissioner Gordon, Cooper Union, cultural preservation, David Chase, DC Comics, Department of Justice, desegregation, disability, Disney, dolphins, dystopia, ecology, English, entrepreneurs, environmentalism, Episode 7, Eric Harris, Expanded Universe, FBI, feminism, Fermi paradox, film, Game of Thrones, Gawker, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, graduate school, graduate student unions, Green Planets, Harry Potter, hate-watching, HBO, history, Hitler, homelessness, homeschooling, hope-watching, How the University Works, Hugo awards, ideology, Illinois, intelligence, Israel, Italy, Jesus, job creators, kids today, Los Angeles, Mad Men, maps, Marquette, misogyny, money, my pedagogical empire, my scholarly empire, NCAA, negative interest rates, neoliberalism, New York, nightmares, North Carolina, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, nuns, Obi-Wan, Occupy Cal, oil, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, PhDs, photography, Poland, police, police corruption, police state, police violence, politics, pop culture, Princess Leia, Princeton, prison-industrial complex, privatization, privatize everything, privilege, race, racism, radio, religion, rendementsdenken, Return to Oz, RFK Jr., Robert Heinlein, run it like a sandwich, Sad Puppies, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Sea World, SETI, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, Sopranos, standardized testing, Star Wars, student debt, SUNY, Superman, Sweet Briar, television, terror, the Amazon, the contemporary, the courts, the Force, The Force Awakens, the Holocaust, The Joker, the law, The Left Hand of Darkness, the past is another country, the Pope, they, toilets, trailers, tuition, UC Davis, unions, University of Amsterdam, University of Oregon, Ursula K. Le Guin, war on drugs, war on education, white people, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words, worrying, Yoda
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.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Thank goodness we were able to take all that valuable real estate we were wasting on schools and turn it profitable again.
* 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. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* Gender and J School.
* 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.”
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 end of Miami.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* Charting the Bechdel Test.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* Defund DHS.
* 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.”
* In the current movement against white supremacy and the police we can see the beginnings of a new Black Arts Movement.
* 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 Guantánamo 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.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* 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.
* Best wishes, Ed Balls.
* 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.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* 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
Tagged with academia, academic interviews, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, addiction, affirmative action, Africa, Alien, Amazon, America, American exceptionalism, AP History, apocalypse, Apple, art, asexualism, austerity, bankers, Barack Obama, BBC, Bechdel test, Big Bird, Black Arts Movement, blizzards, books, Boston, Brazil, Bruce Rauner, bureaucracy, Burger King, cancer, Charlie Brown, charts, child abuse, CIA, Clarissa, class struggle, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, cop shows, creepiness, cultural preservation, cuteness, David Graeber, DC Comics, demisexualism, do what you love, dogs, drugs, dystopia, Earwolf, East Coast, ecology, Ed Balls, Eliezer Yudkowsky, English departments, epidemics, fantasy, film, Florida, Franklin, games, gender, geo-engineering, George Washington, Go Set a Watchman, God, Greece, Guantánamo, guns, Harper Lee, Harris Wittels, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, historically black colleges, HIV and AIDS, homeland security, homelessness, How the University Works, humblebrag, Iceland, ideology, Illinois, ISIS, journalism school, Kelly Link, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, liberal arts, LOLapocalypse, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, M&Ms, Madison, management, Mark Dayton, measles, medicine, medievalism, melancholy, Miami, Middle East, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Milwaukee, Minnesota, misogyny, MLA, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Ms. Marvel, Muppets, museums, Neill Blomkamp, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oliver Sacks, Ona Judge, Oscars, Peanuts, penises, Philadelphia, Philip K. Dick, Plato, podcasts, police corruption, politics, pornography, poverty, Presidents, Prez, Princess Leia, prison labor, prison-industrial complex, quirk, race, racism, real estate, Republicans, Ron English, Rudy Giuliani, Samuel Beckett, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, segregation, Sesame Street, Settlers of Catan, sex, sexism, snow, Socrates, standardized testing, Star Wars, state parks, STEM, summer, superbugs, Syriza, technopositivity, television, tenure, The City and the City, the cold, the Confederacy, the Holocaust, the humanities, The Man in the High Castle, The New Inquiry, The Rules of Utopia, the Wachowskis, To Kill a Mockingbird, transmisogyny, transphobia, true crime, tuition, Twitter, University of Wisconsin, Waldo, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, war on terror, West Coast, whistleblowing, white supremacy, winter, Wisconsin, You Made It Weird