* CFP: Modernism’s Child (Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, April 20, 2015).
* CFP: Obsidian Call for Submissions: Speculating on the Future: Black Imagination & the Arts.
* Martin Luther King’s other dream: disarmament.
* Our most cherished MLK Day ritual: remembering there is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.
* 13 Words of the Year from Other Countries. Another set of possible candidates.
5. DAGOBERTDUCKTAKS, NETHERLANDS
In the Netherlands, the Van Dale dictionary group chose dagobertducktaks, “Scrooge McDuck tax,” a tax on the super rich. The “youth language” category choice wasaanmodderfakker (someone with no ambition in life, from a blend of aanmodderen, “muddle,” and motherf***er). The “lifestyle” category choice was vergeetverzoek, “forget request,” a request to a search engine that sensitive information be removed.
* For-Profit College Investor Now Owns Controlling Share of Leading Education Trade Publication. IHE’s ownership statement says that editors retain full editorial independence.
* Aaron Bady told me “Trust Us Justice: 24, Popular Culture and the Law” was a great talk forever ago, but I didn’t have time to get to it until this week. But it was indeed great, and something that will be useful in my classroom to boot.
* Comics studies is not a busman’s holiday. Great rant. This goes for science fiction studies too! It’s hard and miserable work and you should leave it all to us!
* Photomediations Machine: Exploring the Anthropocene.
* Lili Loofbourow in the New York Times: “TV’s New Girls’ Club.”
Above all, promiscuous protagonism is interested in truths that are collectively produced. Its greatness stems not from a single show runner’s bleak and brilliant outlook but from a collaborative vision of art that admits a spectrum of shades. The central question driving this movement forward is no longer “How did these mad men come to be?” but rather “How did these women get so good at staying sane?”
* If anything I think Matt Reed’s concerns about the inevitable cuts to #FreeCommunityCollege don’t go far enough.
* Behold, Phase 2! That was quick.
* Free Community College Is Nothing to Celebrate, or What Piketty Means for Education.
* And from the leading light of the anti-schooling left: The hidden costs of free community college.
One of the ways we talk about the value of education is in terms of a student’s future “competitiveness.” It sounds like it should correlate directly with wages, but they’re competing against other workers like them. And from a worker’s perspective, a rising educational tide keeps wages under control for all boats. More schooling doesn’t necessarily mean better jobs, it means more competition for the same set of jobs. The so-called “skills gap” is a myth; if employers needed educated labor so badly, they would pay like it. Instead, the costs of training more productive workers have been passed to the kids who want to be them, while the profits go to employers and shareholders. The state assuming some of those costs for some of those students doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Rather, it’s another boon for the ownership class.
* Philly’s adjuncts seek to rewrite their futures.
* New talk of splitting off Madison from the rest of the UW system.
Mikalsen said the most persistent rumbling of late is that the universities would operate as a public authority, with the state playing a much reduced role in overseeing hiring practices, construction bids and other internal matters that university officials have long said could be done more efficiently and cheaply with more autonomy. The trade-off would come in reduced state aid, Mikalsen said.
* And it sounds like UNC is next.
* 1970s Film: Vintage Marquette University. More links below the video!
* It’s a bit of a weird way to be selling the world’s biggest sporting event—and we’re gonna build a super-cool stadium and then tear it down again because everyone knows stadiums suck—but points for honesty, at least.
* The second interesting thing about the Packers, or football, I’ve ever heard. Here of course was the first. Go Pack, times two!
* Nobody Expects the Facebook Inquisition. Also from Burke: An Ethic of Care.
Perhaps that means “check your privilege” is a phrase to retire because it invites that kind of ease, a lack of awareness about what that statement hopes for and requires. If it’s not an expression of an ethic of care, trying to radar-ping the world around it to find out who else shares or might share in that ethic, and not a threat with power behind it, then what it usually leads to is the moral evacuation of a conversation and the production of a sort of performative austerity, of everyone in a community pretending to virtue they do not authentically embrace and avoiding the positive or generative use of the forms of social power they might actually have genuinely privileged access to.
* Eric Holder ends the scandal of civil asset forfeiture, at least for now.
* Florida police use images of black men for target practice.
“Our policies were not violated. There is no discipline that’s forthcoming from the individuals regarding this,” Dennis said.
* While the ire of environmental activists remains fixed on the Keystone XL pipeline, a potentially greater threat looms in the proposed expansion of Line 61, a pipeline running the length of Wisconsin carrying tar sands crude. The pipeline is owned by Enbridge, a $40 billion Canadian company, which has been responsible for several hundred spills in the past decade, including one in 2010 near Marshall, Mich., reportedly the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history.
* The stark disparities of paid leave: The rich get to heal. The poor get fired.
* Few New Parents Get Paid Time Off.
* “Carry bolt cutters everywhere”: life advice from Werner Herzog.
* Last night “The Daily Show’s” Jessica Williams delved into a baffling Alabama law: HB 494. The law takes state funds — funds that are scarce in the Alabama justice system — to appoint lawyers for fetuses.
* How Gothic Architecture Took Over the American College Campus.
* Solar Is Adding Jobs 10 Times Faster Than the Overall Economy.
* “Zero Stroke Was A Mental Illness That Affected An Entire Country.”
* Love, marriage, and mental illness.
* The $4 billion worth of subsidies represents a record high outlay at the very time Christie says budget shortfalls are preventing him from making actuarially required pension payments. What could explain it this incomprehensible paradox? It’s been thirty-five years and the media is simply incapable of admitting that when Republicans claim to care about deficits they are lying.
* Some bad news, y’all, overparenting doesn’t work either.
* Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone.
* I’ll never punish my daughter for saying no.
* Group projects and the secretary effect.
* Making the school day longer will definitely fix it. I suppose every generation feels this way but I really feel like the 1980s and 1990s were the last good time to be a kid.
* Teach the controversy: Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists. Meanwhile, everything in the ocean is dying.
* But it’s not all bad news: Ron Howard recording new narration for recut of Arrested Development season four.
The biggest downside to a Walmart opening up in your community is that after all the protests, the negotiations, and, almost inevitably, the acceptance, the retail giant might just break its lease, pack up shop, and move a mile down the road. The process starts all over again, and Walmart’s giant, hard-won original behemoth of a structure sits abandoned, looming over its increasingly frustrated neighbours.
* Duke University announced it would broadcast the Muslim call to prayer from its iconic chapel, then backed down after threats of violence.
* Kepler has given many gifts to humanity, but we should be careful throwing around words like “habitable” when talking about worlds 1,000 light years away, about which we only know sizes and orbits. It’s not my intention to put a damper on things, or to take the wonder and imagination out of astronomy. Science requires both imagination and creativity, but also analytical thought and respect for observational evidence. And after only 20 years of exoplanet discoveries, the observational evidence is rich, beautiful, and stands on its own. We don’t know the odds that life will arise on other worlds, but we’ve got a few tens of billions of rolls of the cosmological dice.
* Kotsko shrugged: The perpetual adolescence of the right. Along the similar lines, but thinking of ethics instead of intellectualism, I always think of David Graeber’s “Army of Altruists” from Harper’s, almost a decade-old now, on the way elites have cordoned off all meaningful work for themselves and their children alone.
* Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty. But wait! Let’s quibble about the numbers!
* Hidden laborers of the information age.
* Just this once, everybody lives: Netflix Renews Deal for ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Luther,’ More BBC Series.
* Around the mid 2000s it became popular in Sweden for teenage boys to wear rubber bands around their legs on top of their jeans. The more rubber bands you had and variety in colors the more alpha you became to the other teenage boys.
* Like Uber, but for veillance. Of course the university is at the cutting edge:
We’ve got an early warning system [called Stoplight] in place on our campus that allows instructors to see what a student’s risk level is for completing a class. You don’t come in and start demonstrating what kind of a student you are. The instructor already knows that. The profile shows a red light, a green light, or a yellow light based on things like have you attempted to take the class before, what’s your overall level of performance, and do you fit any of the demographic categories related to risk. These profiles tend to follow students around, even after folks change how they approach school. The profile says they took three attempts to pass a basic math course and that suggests they’re going to be pretty shaky in advanced calculus.
* #FeministSexualPositions. (NSFW, obviously.)
* I guess I just don’t see why you’d bring your baby to work.
* Top 10 Biggest Design Flaws In The U.S.S. Enterprise. I can’t believe “elevated warp nascelles perched on extended towers are super vulnerable to attack” didn’t even make the top ten.
* Dave Goelz explains how to Gonzo.
* Apocalypse zen: photos of stairs in abandoned buildings.
* And I guess that settles it. Little Boy Who Claimed to Die and Visit Heaven Admits He Made It Up.
