Posts Tagged 'Godzilla'
* CFP: Call for Papers: Series Books and Science Fiction (National PCA Conference). CFP: Contemporary American Fiction in the Age of Innovation. CFP: Indigenous lands, waters, and ways of knowing.
* The Labor Movement's Newest Warriors: Grad Students.
* "Time and again we've seen university administrators accommodate neo-Nazis with pious encomia to free speech only to cosign or encourage repression when it comes to Palestine and other matters of anti-racism."
* Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming.
* Appeals court consider whether youth can sue the government over climate change. A Levee Fails and an Illinois Town Is Thrown Back in Time. White House blocked intelligence agency's written testimony saying human-caused climate change could be "possibly catastrophic." Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it. The Democrats are climate deniers too. And some more good news: Industrial methane emissions are underreported, study finds. 130°F heat index in South Texas, 13 days from the start of summer.
Like I was saying the other day, denialism is the price of admission to public life: to be taken seriously as a commenter one must signal that they will not under any circumstances discuss what is actually going on.
we demand a DNC debate on climate change highlighting all the positions the party currently holds on climate change, from "do nothing" to "do nothing and pretend to feel bad about it"
* The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which David Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben notably refuse — is that the story we're living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.
* Border Patrol is confiscating migrant kids' medicine, U.S. doctors say. Reports reveal 'egregious' conditions in US migrant detention facilities. US opens new mass facility in Texas for migrant children. Third undocumented migrant in 3 days dies after being apprehended at US-Mexico border. ICE is struggling to contain spread of mumps in its detention centers. "He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay…He did a bad thing."
I keep coming back to the points made in this thread. There is simply no opposition in the US whatsoever, only an out party with a different sense of what good manners are. https://t.co/5J5DdUD0BX
* In 2014, China released sweeping plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Local trials covering about 6% of the population are already rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, with Beijing due to begin its program by 2021. There are also other ways the state keeps tabs on citizens that may become part of an integrated system. Since 2015, for instance, a network that collates local- and central- government information has been used to blacklist millions of people to prevent them from booking flights and high-speed train trips.
* From Whole Foods to Amazon, Invasive Technology Controlling Workers Is More Dystopian Than You Think.
* While bioethics fiddles.
* YouTube is a radicalization engine for fascists.
* Prez in 2019: Are These Teenagers Really Running a Presidential Campaign?
* The heroes are split on opposing sides, and among the key matchups was a Wolverine vs. Mr. Fantastic battle that ended with Reed Richards pinning Wolverine down, extending his hands until they're one molecule wide, and using them as scissors to cut the mutant's arms off. You know, for kids.
* When it comes to westerns, the difference matters. Especially in the streaming era, the words "television" and "movie" have gotten disconnected from their origins; no one watched the Deadwood "movie" in movie theaters (and the old "television" show lives in the same HBO app, on the same computer, as I watched the movie). But television Westerns are all about the gap between one event and the next — and the random vagaries of life that get lived in the interval — while it's film Westerns that tell the Big Stories about History, epics about Beginnings and Endings and Grand Historical Transitions (with plenty of capital letters), with ordinary people getting swept by the tides of modernity and progress.
* John Wick as modern fairy tale. John Wick 3 Delivers the Justice We All Crave. I'm so out of touch I haven't seen one of these.
* John Rieder reviews Nisi Shawl's New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color.
* A more honest show, I think, would acknowledge that there isn't that much of a difference between Serena and Commander Lawrence. They're both smart people who created a hell on Earth to justify their own twisted notions of superiority, and they both realize that fact, on some level, and are tortured by it (though not nearly as much as their victims are and have been). I think episode 3 is trying to draw a distinction between them when it has Lawrence continue his mind games with June (and his casual acceptance of female fawning from the dependent members of his household) while Serena at least opens herself up to the idea of rebellion. It might be rooting that distinction in gender, in arrogance and humility, and even in religious faith. But I don't buy it. A person who did the things Serena has done (notice how her orchestrating June's rape has simply been memory-holed? Not just ignored for the sake of expediency, but completely forgotten) wouldn't be as open to remorse as she is. You don't just wake up one morning and think "you know, maybe creating a fascist, theocratic rape-dystopia was a bad idea."
* The New Yorker remembers How To Read Donald Duck.
* The Importance of 'Godzilla' Cannot Be Overstated.
* A finely oiled machine.
* A Joe Biden Nomination Would Solidify All Our Worst Fears About the Democrats. I mean really.
When Trump dies, Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Bush, both Clintons will all be at his funeral, praising an American original who, love him or hate him, always did it his way.
* Newly Discovered Files Suggest GOP Lawmakers Lied in Court About Racial Gerrymandering to Stop An Election.
* Inside the Fight to Define Extreme Poverty in America.
* Pfizer had clues its blockbuster drug could prevent Alzheimer's. Why didn't it tell the world? Give you one guess.
* Why aren't states doing more to lower the cost of insulin ONE GUESS
* A truly bizarre trend is having an impact on the economy — wealthy people and corporations have so much money they literally don't know what to do with it.
* Reflections of an Incarcerated Worker.
* Beach Blanket Barbarism.
* Men with guns.
* Star Trek's characters, like all of us, live in a universe full of injustice, suffering, and struggle—not a utopian vision, but an optimistic one, because they also live as if that better world is possible. We have to do that. We have to. When someone tells us that they're in distress, in pain, in danger, or in a time loop, we have to say "I believe you. I'll help however I can."
* Catholic Church spent $10 million on lobbyists in fight to stymie priest sex abuse suits.
* The new American religion of UFOs.
* Ultimate limit of human endurance found. Me at the end of spring semester, am I wrong folks.
* 108 Women's World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything.
* Dodgeball is a tool of 'oppression' used to 'dehumanize' others, researchers argue. As an incredibly unauthentic and uncoordinated kid, I was unusually good at dodgeball — so I've got mixed feelings here to say the least.
* And it's a cookbook! A cooooooookbooooooook!
DEFINITIVE X-MEN MOVIE RANKING
1. X-MEN THE ANIMATED SERIES
2. X-MEN stand up arcade game, four players, c. mid-1990s
3. LOGAN
4. Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast
5. dim memories of having liked X2 when I saw it
6. rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ
7. Deadpool?
8. field
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adminsitrative blight, Afrofuturism, Alzheimer's, America, apocalypse, Ariel Dorfman, asylum, Bernie Sanders, Big Pharma, biodiversity, bioethics, border patrol, capitalism, Catholic Church, CBP, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, climate trials, college presidents, comics, concentration camps, corpocracy, Dark Phoenix, Deadwood, Democratic primary 2020, denialism, deportation, diabetes, dodgeball, don't be evil, doomed to repeat it, ecology, endurance, ethics, fairy tales, Fantastic Four, fascism, films, free speech, futurity, general election 2020, gerrymandering, Godzilla, Google, graduate student movements, guns, Handmaid's Tale, history, How the University Works, How to Read Donald Duck, ice, immigration, indigenous peoples, indigenous studies, innovation, insulin, Joe Biden, John Rieder, John Wick, Jordan Peele, kids today, labor, Margaret Atwood, Marvel, mass extinction, mass shootings, methane, Mexico, misogyny, mumps, Nazis, New Suns, Nisi Shawl, North Carolina, now my story can be told, politics, poverty, prison-industrial complex, radicalization, rape culture, religion, rich people, Santa Cruz, schools, science fiction, science fiction studies, soccer, social media, Star Trek, superheroes, surveillance, surveillance society, television, Texas, the courts, the Democrats, the law, tragedy, UFOs, unions, Us, Utopia, war on education, Westerns, Wolverine, women's sports, work, World Cup, X-Men, YouTube, zunguzungu
Because Saturday Night Links just weren't enough.
* Catching Up With the Next Generation of Sci-Fi Writers at the Village Voice.
* My name is Wil Wheaton. I Live With Chronic Depression and Generalized Anxiety. I Am Not Ashamed.
* Diversify your workforce the Marvel way!
"We're 100 percent committed to diversity…Marvel is the world outside your window and we want not only our characters but our creative talent to reflect that world and it hasn't been an easy road to be honest with you. Going back to the 60s when Marvel were created it was created by a number of white men here in New York City who were working in our studio… But now, we do not have any artists that work in Marvel. All our writers and artists work — are freelancers that live around the world so our talent base has diversified almost more quickly than our character base has."
* Accountancy used to be boring – and safe. But today it's neither. Have the 'big four' firms become too cosy with the system they're supposed to be keeping in check? The financial scandal no one is talking about.
* The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation. Meanwhile, they keep openly admitting obstruction, and nothing matters.
* During one December 2013 hearing, still available online, Scott questioned an applicant about illegally voting after his release from prison. When the man replied he voted for Scott, the governor chuckled and, seconds later, granted his voting rights.
we talk a lot about fascism on here, but a system where a small group of rich media personalities faint over the insults one member of the ruling class calls another while thousands of people in a colony die of deliberate neglect is just straight-up, like, Bourbon France
— dr. robert "west" world, phd (@JayHClay) May 31, 2018
* I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.
* Families of Four of Eight Students Killed in Santa Fe Shooting Are Suing Gunman's Parents.
* Hacking the mosquito.
* "The most common complaint I receive from students and faculty members is that we don't have enough administrators."
All of the essential admin at universities are engaged in some form of instructional work (student/faculty services, technology, libraries, etc.), or skilled technical and infrastructure work (cleaning, communication, maintenance). It's the presidents like this guy no one needs.
— M.P. (@OmanReagan) June 3, 2018
* "All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "That's a very shocking state of affairs." Say what you will about critical theory in the humanities, it's predicted just about everything that's happened since…
* The one thing that we can I think be sure of is that if we get a signal, we will know it's an artificial signal [and not from an astronomical source]. And then we'll know that we are not alone. Will we ever be able to understand it? I don't know. The researchers who study alien linguistics.
* The Soviets' secret map of Seattle tells a lot about us.
* Itsa me!
* And I'd at least give it a watch.
Dan: "Your mother is dead, Darleen."
Darleen: "No dad. I can bring her back. As a Robotic Online Synthetic Empathic Android Neural Network Entity."
Dan: "You mean a—"
[opening titles]
R.O.S.E.A.N.N.E.
— Daniel Kibblesmith ☃️ (@kibblesmith) June 2, 2018
Tagged with academia, accounting, adjunctification, administrative blight, aliens, anime, anxiety, critical theory, democracy, depression, diversity, Donald Trump, fascism, finance capital, Florida, freelancing, gig economy, Godzilla, guns, How the University Works, impeachment, Ingmar Bergman, King Kong, linguistics, maps, Mario Kart, Marvel, mass shootings, massacres, Nintendo, NRA, obstruction of justice, physics, police, politics, race, racism, Rick Scott, Robert Mueller, Roseanne, science, science fiction, Seattle, SETI, Soviet Union, Super Mario, the courts, the humanities, the law, theory, TNG, USSR, voting suppression, Wil Wheaton, worst financial crisis since the last one, xenolinguistics
Monday Links!
* Academic freedom in Wisconsin.
* This is silly, but I confess I found it an interesting wrinkle: Wonder Woman Actor Says Chief Is Actually a Demi-God.
* People shouldn't live in Arizona.
* Sinofuturism in LARB.
* Why work?
* Democrats Don't Need Trump's Voters To Retake The House. The overall message of 2017 special elections is that Republicans are in trouble. Why Paul Ryan's race for Congress next year bears watching, even if he'll be hard to beat. An Associated Press study of U.S. House races found that Republicans may have gained up to 22 additional seats in the 2016 election due to redistricting. The AP's analysis also found four times as many states with GOP-skewed state legislative maps as Democratic-skewed ones. Voter suppression is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than Russian election tampering, if you can imagine it.
* Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers.
* Senate GOP expected to add new penalties for the uninsured into their health bill. Privately, health plan worries Senate bill would "cause most small employers' premiums to go up." Coverage Losses Under the Senate Health Care Bill Could Result in 18,100 to 27,700 Additional Deaths in 2026. Crazy waivers: the Senate bill invites states to gut important health insurance rules. Medicaid Cuts May Force Retirees Out of Nursing Homes. You're Probably Going to Need Medicaid. Pure Class Warfare, With Extra Contempt. Can the moderates save us? Even Ron "Horrible" Johnson: 'We should not be voting' on healthcare this week. (But, you know, partial credit at best.) The principled support for the bill is apparently pass it no matter what's in it just cause Team Red. Trump and Social Darwinism. Keep calling.
The health insurance industry is where you pay a company to keep you alive and then they deploy a huge bureaucracy to worm out of doing it.
feeling old? this is what the guy from a-ha looks like now pic.twitter.com/0ryYzELAsi
— mitch said (@said_mitch) June 23, 2017
* What we have just witnessed can, I think, be legitimately referred to as the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble. That is, the ending of the assumption that a tepid, compromised, market-friendly, bureaucratic centrism that nobody actually liked was the only form left-of-centre politics could take, because everyone was convinced that everyone else thought so.
* What It Was Like to Star in the Trump-Themed Julius Caesar.
* Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please.
Watching the centrists talk themselves into supporting Zuckerberg, on no grounds, two years before the primary. Genuinely incredible.
* Trump's Deflections and Denials on Russia Frustrate Even His Allies.
* Remember when we had laws and dumb stuff like that? God, we were such dorks.
* NJ Assembly Passes Bill Requiring Kids Be Taught to Interact With Police. Maybe give some of the same training to off-duty cops next?
* Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed.
* I wasn't one, but congratulations to all the Locus Award winners!
* The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man.
* Pale Blue Dot. The Weinersmith Test for Artificial Intelligence. Everything happens for a reason. Hot lava. Markov dating.
* Alarmingly, one source speaking to THR claims that upon the announcement to the crew that Ron Howard would step in to take over the film a day after Miller and Lord's firing, applause broke out. Report: Lucasfilm Was So Concerned About Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo Performance It Brought in an Acting Coach. What a mess.
* The race to save Florida's devastated coral reef from global warming.
* Crimebook noplane freedomhate.
* High Court Mostly Revives Trump Travel Ban, Will Hear Appeal.
* High-stakes scenarios and market failure.
* The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it.
* Everyone, get your guesses in! Last call for Kennedy bets.
* This is no time for optimism.
* Prince Was a Secret Patron of Solar Power.
* Flashback: David Bowie's Failed Attempt to Adapt George Orwell's '1984.'
* 150 times actors were forced to say the title of the movie they're in.
* Riot at Disney tonight, details TK.
* Superhero Rescues Put Everyone in Danger, Urge Scientists.
* This is why we can't have nice things. Do not panic; the authorities are in complete control. Bitch I might be. Happy last week of summer school.
* And I've said it all along: don't blame me, blame the world.
Tagged with 1984, A-Ha, academic freedom, AHCA, air travel, Anthony Kennedy, artificial intelligence, asteroids, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, books, Burlington, Burlington College, Chief, class struggle, climate change, coral reef, dating, David Bowie, David Graeber, DC Cinematic Universe, democracy, Democrats, depression, Disney, Donald Trump, drama, everything happens for a reason, FBI, film, Florida, general election 2016, gerrymandering, Godzilla, Hall of Presidents, Han Solo, health care, health insurance, hot lava, Islamophobia, Jane Sanders, Julius Caesar, labor, leisure, light, Locus Award, Magritte, malapportionment, Mark Zuckerberg, Markov generators, medieval wound man, midterm election 2018, Minnesota, music, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Orwell, Paul Ryan, Philando Castile, plays, police #BlackLivesMatter, police violence, politics, polls, prediction markets, Prince, Putin, race, racism, reality, Republicans, Ron Howard, Ron Johnson, rule of law, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Scott Walker, Sean Spicer, Sinofuturism, Social Darwinism, social justice, solar power, St. Louis, Star Wars, summer school, superheroes, Supreme Court, Take on Me, techno-Orientalism, the 1980s, the courts, the law, the Senate, theater, this is not a pipe, this is why we can't have nice things, title drop, Tony Blair, true crime, TSA, Vermont, Victor von Doom, voter suppression, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman, work, xkcd, Yellow Peril
* Coetzee: There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?
…in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society.
* If you can't make a case for a discipline on the basis of the actual objects studied by that discipline, it's doomed. The field needs to have confidence in the things it takes as its subject matter.
* Huge drop in humanities majors at Swarthmore.
* Not for the first time, vandals are wreaking havoc in central Europe. Russian police say they're looking for the intellectually minded miscreants who graffitied "Kant is a moron"—along with a flower and heart—on the philosopher's home outside Kaliningrad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 16: Flexibility. Special appearance by Plastic Man.
* Higher Education and the Politics of Disruption.
* Black UVA Student Beaten Bloody by Police Over Alleged Fake ID: Reports. UVA's White President Outsources Outrage Over Martese Johnson to Two Black Administrators.
* Chapel Hill Will Pay $335,000 to Whistle-Blower in Fraud Scandal.
* More Scrutiny of Decision to Close Sweet Briar.
* Penn State Fraternity's Secret Facebook Photos May Lead to Criminal Charges.
* Despite Progress, Only 1 in 4 College Presidents Are Women.
* The New York Times ran the Duke story—a story about the internal politics of an English department—on its front page.
* I can't remember if I already linked to Jalada #2: "Afrofuture(s)," but it's great. I think my favorite little piece is one of the short poems, "Found: An Error in the System."
* Schools Plan Massive Layoffs After Scott Walker Guts Funding.
* 21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor.
* Why The U.S. Won't Let the U.N. Look Inside Its Prisons.
* Modern-Day Caligula Orders Everything Bagel.
* Everything's different in Denmark: Porn belongs in the classroom, says Danish professor.
* What could possibly go wrong? The Scientist Who Wanted To Bring A Death Row Inmate Back From The Dead.
* Starbucks loses its damn mind. Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race. But Does It Want To Talk To You About Racism? Starbucks's Race to the Center of Civic Life.
Big opportunity for a competing coffee chain to guarantee that their employees absolutely won't try to talk to you about race if you go in.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 17, 2015
"No awkward conversations. No eye contact.That's the Cup O' Canavan guarantee."
* Simians, Cyborg-Women, and Godzilla: 40 Years of Terror of Mechagodzilla.
* 41 Awesome Euphemisms For Vagina Around The World, Because Your Pupusa Speaks All Languages.
* Mars One Finalist Explains Exactly How It's Ripping Off Supporters.
* The New Optimism of Al Gore.
* Antarctica appears to be melting from below.
* Climate change and full communism.
* When the CIA funded the National Student Association.
* The Problem With History Classes.
* Rise of the Gender Novel: Too often, trans characters are written as tortured heroes. We're more complex than that.
* The lonely shame of student debt.
* Queer Silence and The Killing Joke.
* #LightenUp: On Comics and Race.
* I'm Al Lowe and I created a series of games called Leisure Suit Larry for Sierra back in the '80s and '90s along with another 20 games and titles back in that period. I was with Sierra from 1982 until 1998 when it — well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals. How about that for an opening?
* Did Terry Brooks save epic fantasy? Given the years involved if anything did it seems more likely to me that it was Dungeons and Dragons, but it's a nice remembrance of the franchise regardless.
* I'm good for five seasons at least: Bridgeport Priest Who Ran Meth Ring Pleads For Leniency.
* Really bad idea watch: Sherlock Goes Old-School For Its Christmas Special.
* The Walking Disney.
* The Hidden History of Miscarriage.
* One chart that shows just how ridiculously huge Wall Street bonuses are.
* Where to expect upsets on your NCAA bracket.
* New edition of Catan coming down the pike.
* You had me at fully automated luxury communism (FALC).
* And because you demanded it! Sam Jones Says New Flash Gordon Is A Sequel.
Tagged with #accelerate, academia, academic fraud, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, Al Gore, America, Antarctica, austerity, automation, bagels, Batman, Brave, Breaking Bad, CEOs, CIA, class struggle, climate change, Coetzee, coffee, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, cyborgs, Disney, disruption, drugs, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, English departments, English majors, epic fantasy, fan art, Flash Gordon, flexibility, fraternities, fully automated luxury communism, games, gender, Godzilla, graffiti, history, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, innovation, Kant, Leisure Suit Larry, mad science, March Madness, Mars, Mars One, Mecha-Godzilla, meth, miscarriage, misogyny, NCAA, neoliberalism, outer space, Ozymandias, Penn State, police brutality, police violence, politics, pornography, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, queer theory, race, racism, rape, rape culture, robots, ruins, science fiction, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, Shannara, Sherlock, Sierra Online, simians, Starbucks, Stephen Moffat, street art, student debt, Sweet Briar, Terry Brooks, the humanity, The Joker, The Killing Joke, The Walking Dead, trans* issues, true crime, UNC, United Nations, UVA, Wall Street, war on education, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, words, zombies
Sunday Links for the Sunday Reader
* This president delivers compassion with a kind face and from a decorous and understated height. And that seems to be the role he prefers to play in the world too. It was doubtless the posture from which he would have liked to address the Arab Spring, and for that matter the civil war in Syria, if only Assad had obeyed when Obama said he must go. Obama has a larger-spirited wish to help people than any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter; though caution bordering on timidity has kept him from speaking with Carter even once in the last five years. Obama roots for the good cause but often ends up endorsing the acceptable evil on which the political class or the satisfied classes in society have agreed. He watches the world as its most important spectator.
* Meanwhile: Obama Steps Up Efforts To Deport Unaccompanied Children Crossing The Border. And all at the low, low cost of just $2 billion!
* Local news: Wisconsin second only to Alabama in cuts to education funding, study shows.
* On college debate, race, and the very idea of rules.
* You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
* …the only definitive statement I can make about Game of Thrones has less to do with what was happening on screen, and more with the popular and critical reaction to it, the fact that the fourth season was the one in which a critical mass of people suddenly noticed just how rapey this show is.
* The point is that Godzilla is not an external menace. Godzilla is built into the system. Godzilla is our way of life.
* Whoa if true.
* The secret world of oil.
* Academia and disability: Why Are Huge Numbers of Disabled Students Dropping Out of College?
* The New York Times has a followup Q&A on its controversial piece about student debt from last week.
* "Far from being complacent about higher education, America is the site of a perpetual crisis narrative about our colleges."
* In November 2012, when Kamel's lawyers showed the video evidence to the assistant district attorney handling his case, the prosecutor dropped the charges immediately, motioning for a dismissal. The case was built on police testimony that was clearly false. But though Perez's untrue statement had forced Kamel to endure months of anxiety and trial preparation, and sent prosecutors most of the way towards trying him, the officer suffered no consequence for his actions. On police perjury.
* Arizona State Universities takes the side of a cop abusing one of its own professors on video. Arizona Professor Body Slammed By Police During Jaywalking Stop, Now Charged With Assaulting Officer.
* Today, the UCPD is, as the university told me in a statement, "a highly professional police force," and one of the largest private security forces in the country. Hyde Park "remains one of the safest neighborhoods in the city," according to the statement sent to me by the University, and, "All of the neighborhoods patrolled by the University of Chicago benefit from the extra service."
* Three Ways (Two Good, One Bad) to Fight Campus Rape.
* It Took Studying 25,782,500 Kids To Begin To Undo The Damage Caused By 1 Doctor.
* An illustrated history of Westeros.
* Independent Weekly catches Counting Crows phoning it in in Raleigh.
* Poor whites and the left.
* Advocacy in the Age of Colorblindness.
* This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy: Hate Crimes Against The Homeless Jumped 24 Percent Last Year.
* U.S. Pledges To Stop Producing New Landmines. The dream of the 1990s is alive.
* Mexico tried giving poor people cash instead of food. It worked.
* How Sci Fi Visionary Octavia Butler Influenced This Detroit Revolutionary.
* Britain's Nuke-Proof Underground City.
* When the Amish get rich.
* "Can anyone say no to this?"
* The Golden Gate Bridge will get suicide nets.
* Against the Fermi Paradox.
* Psychologists Find that Nice People Are More Likely to Hurt You. I knew those dicks were hiding something.
* On Facebook science: The real scandal, then, is what's considered "ethical."
* Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?
* Ripped from the pages of the Colbert Report: NC General Assembly Allows Possum Drop Exception.
* And Martin Freeman says no more new Sherlock until December 2015.
Tagged with academia, Alabama, America, animal cruelty, Arizona State University, autism, Barack Obama, Britain, bunkers, campus police, cartoons, cash transfers, Chicago, class, class struggle, Colbert, Counting Crows, debate, deportation, Detroit, disability, Disney, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, empire, ethics, Facebook, Fermi paradox, film, Game of Thrones, Godzilla, Golden Gate Bridge, hate crimes, homeless, How the University Works, immigration, income inequality, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, jaywalking, landmines, lies and lying liars, maps, metadebate, Mexico, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, mothers, nice people, North Carolina, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, oil, perjury, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, post-raciality, psychology, race, rape, rape culture, revolution, rules, San Francisco, scams, science, science fiction, Sherlock, student debt, suicide, television, the Amish, the BBC, the courts, the law, the Left, Title IX, underground cities, University of Chicago, vaccines, war on education, Westeros, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?
Tuesday Links
* My favorite website is having big financial problems. The New Internet Gods Have No Mercy.
* The museum as classroom: Marquette professors use art for pilot project.
* Insuring the apocalypse.
* Commencement speakers, reaction, and the hatred of students. In Defense of Protesting Commencement Speakers. Remember: writing a letter to a public figure is wildly inappropriate, but personally attacking students from the podium at their own graduation is just fine.
* A Commencement Address from Jonathan Edwards.
* Online Education and The Erosion of Faculty Rights.
* Whole Foods Realism: US-China Relations, futurity, and On Such a Full Sea.
* It makes a canny kind of sense, then, that a 2014 incarnation of the film that bears his name would reprise visual scenes of global environmental catastrophes and dare us to think of them in tragic terms. is a film for the anthropocene — the age when human actions have caused irreversible ecological damage. Tragedies, like feelings, happen at a human scale. But ours is a time when human actions work off the human scale, causing events in our world that require much more strenuous interventions than sympathy and tears. It's hard to know what to feel, in the face of the catastrophe we have made, or what difference our feelings would make.
* Silicon Valley Dreams of Fascism.
* NYU Issues Apology for Mistreatment of Workers on Abu Dhabi Campus. Well, that settles that!
* Executive Compensation at Public Colleges, 2013 Fiscal Year. Former University Presidents and Their Pensions. A new report finds that student debt and low-wage faculty labor are rising faster at state universities with the highest-paid presidents.
* NLRB May Reconsider Unionization Rights For Graduate Students In College Football Case.
* What are the humanities good for? The negative magisterium of the humanities.
* …or what's an MLA for?
* Disruptive Innovation! The original theory comes from Clayton Christensen's study of things like the hard drive and steel industries where he realized that disruptive products tend to combine new technologies, cheaper production, and — crucially — worse products.
* Pamela Anderson, survivor.
* Torture of a mentally ill prisoner in a Miami jail.
* Buzzfeed and Schizophrenia. And they said theory is useless!
* Economics in Fantasy Literature, Or, Why Nerds Really Like Stuff.
* Clickbait dissertations.
* We've hit Peak Should I Go to Grad School.
* Exit Through the Gift Shop: 9/11 Museum Edition.
* Three months in jail for Cecily McMillan.
* The United States has 710 prisoners per 100,000 people. Iceland has 150. Total.
* White House Promises To Never Again Let The CIA Undermine Vaccinations. Oh, okay, then all is forgiven!
* 'There Will Be No World Cup': Brazil on the Brink.
* Add "DUI" to the list of crimes rich people don't have to worry about anymore.
* Duke Libraries is still running its Mad Men series of period advertising. Here's the link for the latest episode.
* Presenting the Netflix Summary Glitch.
* Washington Archdiocese takes to the heavens, with a drone. Can autonomous robot baptism be far behind?
* The water main breaks will continue until morale improves.
* The actress who helped Lincoln defeat the Confederacy.
* Corey Robin: The Republican War on Workers' Rights.
* David Harvey reviews Piketty.
* Law and Order: Westeros.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your fond memories of Star Wars, forever. At least the maximally unnecessary Harry Potter prequels suddenly have a chance of being good.
* And the 90s are literally turning to dust.
Tagged with 9/11, Abu Dhabi, academia, administrative blight, advertising, alcohol, Alfonso Cuarón, America, apocalypse, archives, Brazil, Buzzfeed, Capital in the 21st Century, Catholicism, Cecily McMillan, CEOs, China, CIA, Civil War, class struggle, clickbait, climate change, college football, commencement addresses, cultural preservation, David Harvey, Digital Dark Ages, disruptive innovation, dissertations, drones, Duke, ecology, economics, espionage, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, fantasy, fascism, film, futurity, Game of Thrones, gift shops, glitches, Godzilla, Google, graduate student life, Harry Potter, How the University Works, Iceland, insurance, James Franco, Jonathan Edwards, labor, Law and Order, Mad Men, Marc Bousquet, Marquette, mental illness, MetaFilter, Miami, Milwaukee, MLA, museums, NCAA, Netflix, NLRB, NYU, Occupy, On Such a Full Sea, online education, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pamela Anderson, pedagogy, police violence, polio, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, rape, rape culture, religion, Republicans, rich people, science fiction, Should I go to grad school?, Silicon Valley, slavery, Star Wars, student debt, student movements, students, teaching, the 1990s, the Anthropocene, the humanities, the Internet, the rich are different from you and me, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Thomas Piketty, torture, unions, vaccinations, water, water main breaks, Whole Foods Realism, work, World Cup
Wednesday Night Links
* The craziest thing you'll see today: public opposition to a statue in Charleston, SC, honoring black abolitionist Denmark Vesey, on grounds that are frankly baffling.
* An Oral History of Ghostbusters.
* To test the dispersal of those weapons, they found a US city that resembled those cities in the USSR, and gassed it.
* Young scholars are compelled to transform themselves into academic entrepreneurs, creating a brand that they promote through their blogs, tweets, and online profiles.
* The college of about 600 undergraduates announced last month it will eliminate 22 of its 52 faculty positions; it has cut 23 staff members and 16 of its 31 academic programs. How Much Can Be Cut?
* Suggestions on a More Humane Academic Job Market.
* How to Earn Tenure.
* From the archives: The Digital Humanities Postdoc.
* Late Pay: One CUNY Horror Story.
* Gasp! U.S. Lags Behind World in Temp Worker Protections.
* MFA vs NYC: Whoever Wins, We Lose.
* After L.A., Chicago, and NYC, the U.S. prison system has the largest population in America. The American Prison Writing Archive.
* Throughout human history, people have done these ridiculously difficult one-way voyages for one reason: because where they lived was so awful they were willing to get on a little wooden vessel that might sink and go across an ocean to some unknown place that they would probably never return from because it was so crummy where they were. Maybe we'll do that for ourselves. We'll make the world so miserable that living in some harsh environment on Mars might seem attractive.
* Here's Your State's Favorite Band.
* I don't understand (1) why this is legal (2) why a governor would be supervising hiring and firing at such a low level.
* Researcher doing her master's thesis at Halifax's Saint Mary's University on missing and murdered aboriginal women found murdered. What a horrible story.
* Publishers Withdraw More Than 120 Fake, Computer-Generated Papers.
* Why are they sending paratroopers against Godzilla? Also, must admit I'm taking Godzilla's side here.
* Despite Harold Ramis' death, Ghostbusters 3 is still moving forward. Is there a single person alive or dead who wants this movie to be made? Besides Dan Akyroyd.
* The sad truth about power is that its sidewalks are littered with PhDs.
* New head canon: Andy's Mom and Toy Story.
* And Daleks have now been invented. What could possibly go wrong?
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolitionism, academia, academic jobs, academic writing, adjuncts, America, austerity, chemical weapons, class struggle, cultural preservation, CUNY, daleks, digital humanities, ecology, film, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 3, Godzilla, graduate student life, How did we survive the Cold War?, indigenous peoples, maps, Mars, memorials, memory, MFAs, military-industrial complex, misogyny, murder, music, neoliberalism, New Yorker, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, postdocs, power, prison-industrial complex, prisons, race, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, slavery, South Carolina, space colonies, St. Louis, surveillance society, temp workers, tenure, Toy Story, Wisconsin, writing
Me in TNI, Occupy MLA, Seven Short Stories about Drones, Wes Anderson's 'Godzilla,' and More
* My piece on ecological science fiction and pessimistic despair from the "Weather" issue of The New Inquiry is online: Après Nous, le Déluge. Don't let the title fool you; it's in English!
Perhaps Lear would have thought it all a bit too on-the-nose—but now our suicidal urges and our selfishness and our sickening disregard for the future come back to us as hurricanes and heat-waves. Let a thousand science fictional panoramas bloom: the Statue of Liberty frozen over, toppled in the sand, neck-deep in water. Hollywood on fire. Texas cracked with drought. Hundred-year storms every other year. Après nous, la glace, le feu, le désert, le déluge.
* In case you missed it last night, my course this semester: "Thrill and Dread in the American Century."
* Profhacker has a writeup from the people behind the Occupy MLA hoax for people who are still curious just what was going on there. If my Twitter timeline is any indication, it's fair to say this was not well-received. Personally I think it's very hard to argue this was about advancing cause of adjuncts and NTT faculty in any meaningful way, though I can see why they want to say so now. Nothing about the portrayal of the Occupy MLA participants either this year or last year cast critics of academic labor in a good light. Bérubé agrees! For a somewhat more nuanced take, see Noel Jackson's timeline.
* Bad news for the for-profit education industry. But don't worry! We've got the next revenue stream all queued up.
MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering. Public institutions of higher education then become shells for private interests who will offer small grants on the front end and reap larger profits on the back end.
* Wes Anderson's Godzilla.
* But, in fact, we've got two grand experiments of her theory," he said. "The first is the American South, where teachers unions are weak and the schools are not lighting the world on fire. The other is charter schools, which are 88 percent non-unionized. In charters, you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do — fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre results."
* Teju Cole: Seven short stories about drones. Mirrored at TNI.
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
* io9 tells you to set your DVR to Continuum, "the most intriguing new time travel show in years."
* Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator. I'll save you the trouble:
The probability of at least 1 conservative justice dying by 2017: 46.62%.
* While popular culture has for centuries reflected an older form of law and justice, its capacity to undermine the very pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring, demonstrates the dangers to which the rhetoric of urgency and the emotional power of medium and message are prone. In a world shorn of its faith in the traditional structures which sustained the moral economy and the moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice sustained by an emotional pitch which is in '24' at every moment apparent, opens the prospect of legal terrorism.
* "Dean Kamen, inventor of the SegWay, has a new invention out! This one is for dieting, and it sucks food out of the stomach before the body can absorb it." Well, that all checks out.
* Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers.
* And a public service announcement: Harmontown comes to Wisconsin next week…
Tagged with 24, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, actuarial science as politics, adjuncts, American century, après nous le déluge, charter schools, climate change, community, Continuum, copyright, Dan Harmon, Dean Kamen, death, dieting, dread, drones, ecology, fatopia, film, for-profit schools, Godzilla, hoaxes, How the University Works, JSTOR, labor, Marquette, Michael Bérubé, Michelle Rhee, MLA, MOOCs, mortality, my media empire, netprov, Occupy MLA, Open Access, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, privatize everything, science fiction, Segways, Supreme Court, Teju Cole, the law, The New Inquiry, the South, thrill, time travel, unions, war on education, weather, Wes Anderson, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin
Let's Start Over
9 Misconceptions People Have About Godzilla.
Tagged with Godzilla, Japan, science fiction
But Downey Kissed Paltrow and You Probably Thought It Was a Happy Ending
With this excellent post Christian Thorne almost convinces me that Iron Man 2 was not the absolute least interesting movie of all time. Almost. Via Vu.
Tagged with American exceptionalism, film, Godzilla, Iron Man, nuclearity, superheroes, violence
Monday Afternoon Links
Monday afternoon links.
* PopMatters says happy birthday to Godzilla.
* Literary studies is in crisis!! Still!!! But lucky for us there is a solution:
Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.
* More good news from North Carolina: Liddy Dole is polling neck and neck with her challenger for November, Kay Hagan, and it's only May.
* And Obama's taken the lead in superdelegates, with signs indicating that Clinton may actually soon drop out…
Tagged with Are the primaries over yet?, Barack Obama, Godzilla, Hillary Clinton, Kay Hagan, Liddy Dole, North Carolina, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, scientism, theory
On Godzilla
A product of the bomb, yes surely. But far more than that Godzilla is a metaphor for the bomb, as the movie makes clear in almost every frame. This is not your parents' Godzilla, the 1956 recut with Raymond Burr inserted as American interlocutor, a paragon of western stoicism with his boxy suit and pipe held aloft like a talisman. The Japanese original is far darker and more seamless, a topical fantasy of uncommon power. It may not be a great film, but it is an important one, a surprisingly sombre meditation on means and ends, on when exactly the price of peace becomes too costly to pay.
The Guardian apparently gave away DVDs of the original 1954 Godzilla with yesterday's issue; at CommentIsFree, Christopher Orr explains why Gojira is not just another monster movie. Of course, most monster movies aren't "just another monster movie," either; in fact almost none of them are…
Tagged with film, George Romero, Godzilla, monsters, politics, zombies