More links.

* New trailers for Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Road.

* The EPA has announced new guidelines to regulate greenhouse gases.

* The oldest living things in the world. (via)

* Richard Kahlenberg argues at Washington Monthly towards class-based affirmative action.

* Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted.

Saturday morning links!

* RIP, Walter Cronkite.

* Fox is apparently trying to screw the Futurama voice cast, though there are some hints that this may just be an ill-conceived publicity stunt. For what it's worth Variety seems to think it's legit. Why does Fox hate nerds?

* I think it would be great to have a Kindle, but Amazon keeps making it harder and harder for me to buy one. Yesterday they unpublished two books by George Orwell without warning, deleting the books from the Kindles of those who bought it.

* On teaching Infinite Jest.

* And Pat Buchanan, it must be said, is a terrible human being.

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

Excitement on the SCOTUS beat as the Court overturns the lower court Ricci decision in a 5-4 vote along the usual partisan breakdown. Since Sonia Sotomayor had been part of the Second Circuit's upholding of the original decision, now overturned, this decision will undoubtedly receive a lot of attention even beyond the usual contentiousness that surrounds affirmative action. I haven't followed the case closely enough to say much of anything about it—and to be fair it sounds like an especially hard case—though my gut reaction to any 5-4 decision from the Roberts court closely matches this take from conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru in the New York Times:

The debates on these issues are highlighting a deep inconsistency in the way my fellow conservatives approach race and the law. Many conservatives oppose Judge Sotomayor’s nomination because she does not appear to support originalism, the notion that legal texts, including the Constitution, should be interpreted according to the meaning that the informed public assumed them to have when they became law. We argue as well that judges should try to overcome the biases of their backgrounds in the name of self-restraint. But when it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint.

Where Ponnuru and I differ, of course, is in his belief that originalism as a judicial philosophy has any useful content whatsoever. I don't think it does; as I've said before, it's a rhetorical strategy, not a method, deployed when convenient and passed over when not.

As a white dude from the suburbs my objective application of universal human reason is, of course, beyond reproach, and it admits to some abstract discomfort with affirmative action. It is, on the one hand, significantly under-responsive to class privilege, which seems in my experience to be more wide-ranging and pernicious than either race or gender privilege. Second, affirmative action is, I think, under-responsive to the passage of time, especially with regard to the timeline of its eventual elimination. Finally, I regret that policies that promote justice in the main across the population sometimes require arbitrary and unfair discrimination at the level of the individual, even, in boundary cases, rising themselves to the level of injustice.

Affirmative action, in other words, is not something you'd enact if you were designing a polity from scratch—but of course America was not designed from scratch. Less than fifty years from Jim Crow, we need it, at least for now, and probably for as long as any of us will be alive. But it is not uncomplicated or easy, and a subject about which reasonable people can certainly disagree.

All this is just prelude to a particular sort of outraged right-wing response to the Sonia Sotomayor appointment, the claim that she (in Michael Goldfarb's words) "has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life" or that she has (in Fred Barnes's words) "benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously." There is, it must be said, no evidence that either of these prejudiced, kneejerk assumptions is remotely accurate; it is the mere fact that Sotomayor is Latina that not only suggests the preferential treatment she must have received but, in fact, puts it beyond all possible dispute. As these pundits now cast about aimlessly looking for proof of what they assumed went without saying, it's worth wondering what else a valedictorian of her high school class who went on to graduate from Princeton summa cum laude, winning the prestigious Pyne Prize in the process, before heading off to Yale where she served as editor of the Law Review, before pursuing a distinguished career in law including high appointments from both Democratic and Republican presidents could possibly achieve before her accomplishments were allowed to speak for themselves.

The real affirmative action. Via Atrios.

Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes that researchers with access to the college admissions data that many institutions keep a tight guard on found that 15 percent of freshmen at 146 "highly selective" colleges are white students who didn't meet the school's minimum admissions standards for high school GPAs and SAT or ACT scores. There are more than twice as many sub-par privileged white kids at highly competitive institutions than there are black and Latino students whose race gave them a boost in competing for a spot, the researchers found. Some of the white kids are athletes, and many others are the children or friends of alumni, politicians, faculty members, donors, and administrators.

Schmidt also notes that these schools spend just 40 percent of the money for financial aid on students with a documented financial need; the bulk of it goes to students they think will enhance the college's reputation or become big donors later in life. As a result, kids from the wealthiest quarter of the country are 25 times to go to a selective college than the bottom quarter -- so, big surprise, everything about college in America today still perpetuates historical privileges.