Thursday links part two.

* The headline reads, "Civil War Raging in Right-Wing Blogosphere." It is simple impossible for me to believe that the founder of Little Green Footballs has become a leading voice for calm and reasoned discourse among the wingnuts. That's a perfect demonstration of just how crazy things have gotten over there.

* Crooked Timber talks about neoliberalism and the euphemism treadmill.

* There's a lot to be said for this article at the Valve arguing that a first book no longer be considered the "gold standard" for tenure—but all the same admitting that most of what your discipline produces not only isn't being read but isn't worth reading in the first place seems like something of a bad strategy for academics.

* The film version of Isaac Asimov's deeply underappreciated time travel story, The End of Eternity, has a director.

* And the Guardian has your quiz on literary apocalypses.

Thursday!

* Following up on my article in the Indy this week on the excessive costs of nuclear power, here's a report from the head of FERC claiming "We may not need any [new nuclear or coal plants], ever."

* Also at Climate Progress: Obama vs. the Ponzi scheme and what the climate of the U.S. might look like a hundred years from now.

* Republicans aren't just talking about secession to rile up the base; they're actually invoking neo-secessionist legal strategies. It's funny, but it's not a joke.

* Jonathan Martin on why the Republican noise machine can't seem to get anywhere against Obama. It's interesting that the issue that seems to have to most traction against this White House is his failure to prosecute the previous, Republication administration for its many crimes. It's the only place where their attempts to derail Obama have worked, but it's not a viable strategy for electoral success.

* And speaking of prosecuting the Bush White House: Vermont Senator (and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) Patrick Leahy is determined to move forward with a torture probe. Amen to that.

After a decade of inaction, U.S. News has updated its ranking of English PhD programs, and the results may horrify you:

Two articles in the Independent on nuclear energy this week, one by Sue Sturgis on the thirtieth anniversary of Three Mile Island and the other by me on the future of nuclear power both nationally and in North Carolina.

NJ-Gov: Corzine is in very bad shape.

Adjunct faculty members and their advocates put forth lots of arguments for improving the benefits paid to those off the tenure track. But Marquette University's theology faculty has come up with an unusual argument that involves a power higher than a college president.

After discussion of a memo questioning how Marquette could stay true to moral and Biblical values while not paying for health insurance for part-time instructors, the theology department voted to call on the administration to start paying for health insurance for those who teach at least two courses at a time at the university. While it is unclear whether the theology department can sway administrators, Marquette is a Jesuit university, so the views of its theologians might carry weight -- and at the very least can be embarrassing if ignored.

Given the Catholic Church's well-known reluctance to participate in immoral activities for its own benefit, I'm sure this argument will easily carry the day.

Links for Wednesday.

* First-gen Sierra adventure games in your browser. Your childhood says come back home, all is forgiven.

* The setup for this Flash Forward show seems pretty good, but man do I wish Brannon Braga weren't involved.

* McSweeney's has the syllabus for "ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era."

* Long-time Republican strategist declares defeat in NY-20, while Norm Coleman presses on in the courts with his unique metaphysical argument that he is the only logically possible winner in the Minnesota Senate race.

* David Simon on Bill Moyers.

* Roberto Bolaño, 2666, and the Ciudad Juárez murders.

* What happens when you "run government like a business."

* I don't agree with everything Amanda Marcotte has to say about prostitution here, but she's certainly right about Eliot Spitzer; it's completely insane to me that some people actually seem willing to give the guy another chance.

* The best article about the "sexting" crisis you're likely to read.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

If your laws allow people to be charged with distributing child pornography for sending other people naked pictures of themselves, you need some new laws.

* Nate Silver thinks the libertarians are taking over the Republican Party. That would certainly be a huge improvement, as long as we're not just talking about glibertarians.

* The headline reads, "Obama keeps prosecutions on the table."

Failure to "see" the concave face optical-illusion is apparently an indicator for schizophrenia.

Dima and Jonathan Roiser of University College London wanted to understand why people with schizophrenia aren't fooled. They put 13 schizophrenia patients and 16 healthy control subjects in an fMRI scanner that measures brain activity, and showed them 3D images of concave or convex faces. As expected, all of the schizophrenic patients reported seeing the concave faces, while none of the control subjects did.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the "guides" themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology. Some are vaguely eugenic (guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity); others prescribe standard-issue hippie mysticism (prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite).

The Georgia Guidestones are instructions for restarting civilization after the apocalypse. They seem a little bit like a setup for an eco-friendly, hippie Canticle for Leibowitz.

But many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. There were already 4.5 billion people on the planet, meaning eight out of nine had to go (today it would be closer to 12 out of 13). This instruction was echoed and expanded by tenet number two: guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to draw an analogy to the practices of, among others, the Nazis. Guide number three instructed readers to unite humanity with a living new language. This sent a shiver up the spine of local ministers who knew that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist. Guide number four—rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason—was similarly threatening to Christians committed to the primacy of faith over all. The last six guides were homiletic by comparison. protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. avoid petty laws and useless officials. balance personal rights with social duties. prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite. be not a cancer on the earth—leave room for nature—leave room for nature.

Via MeFi. More photos at Flickr.

Okay, I think YouTube and I have reached an accord, and all of the clips from the Morton/Rudy roundtable are now up and viewable. The whole playlist is in order here.

Rudy Introduction
Morton Introduction
On Discursive Intervention in Ecology
On Ontology and "Ground"
On WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
On Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism

MFA programs vs. the still-warm body of J.G. Ballard.

The human ecology of vampires.

In case you're wondering, Buffy's Sunnyvale reaches a stable equilibrium with a population of about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires.

And so Buffy emerges as the deeply anti-ecological force she is, disrupting nature's balance with her pointless persecution of an endangered species...



Via Pharyngula.

Toothbrush! You came back to me! The State on DVD (finally!) in July.

Puns I'm only just now getting: Oh, it was that sort of deal...



I always thought it was a new accord/compromise/understanding/pact...

Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph "Ecology, Ideology, Politics" Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You'll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.

The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.

Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and "ground") (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and "Bambification"
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)

Monday morning.

* Following up on this post from Sunday: Rahm Emanuel says there will be no Bush-era prosecutions. OpenLeft wants to know whether Eric Holder is "a Gonzales-like lackey" in light of his apparent willingness to allow political judgments to influence DoJ policy.

* And speaking of political judgments influencing DoJ policy, this Rep. Harman story is pretty unbelievable, even for the Bush administration.

There are a lot of hairy details on this one. But the gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a "suspected Israeli agent" in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee -- a position she ended up not getting.

...

The story suggests that the tapes show Harman crossed the line. And the gears were in motion to open a full blown investigation. But then Alberto Gonzales intervened and shutdown the whole thing.

Why? Here's where it gets into the realm of bad novel writing: because Gonzales (and the White House) needed Harman to go to bat for them on the warrantless wiretaping story that the New York Times was then on the brink of publishing.

Find me one honest Congressperson.

* The Hollywood Reporter says the chances of a Dollhouse renewal are 50/50. That's actually a lot better than I thought.

* Tuna projected to be wiped out by 2012.

* Maps from the recession.

Sad news: J.G. Ballard has died.

Sunday misc.

* Calling bullshit on the feel-good story of the week, Britain's Susan Boyle.

* Why can't clowns and cops learn to get along?

* The Sunday Herald has your brief history of manga.

* Joss Whedon on the future of Dollhouse.

So how far of an arc have you planned for the series already?

When I pitched it, I gave them a six-year plan with a lot of leeway for change. But what I really mapped out was the first 13, and even though we start in a different place than I had originally intended, we end up exactly where I'd intended in the 12th episode. Then, in the 13th episode, things just get stranger. There's some twisted sh-- coming.

Can you give us an idea of what to expect from the second half of the season?

The second half of the season, especially starting with episode six, "Man on the Street," just kicks the entire franchise up a huge notch. It's where we start to pay off on everything we've been setting up for five episodes in terms of the relationships and the progression that Echo's going through. And then I just start twisting the knife and I don't stop. Hopefully it's still accessible to people; we're still doing standalones and every episode has its own resolution, so it's not just a rabbit's hole. The first half was definitely, "This is the world and here's how it works." And then the second half just takes that up to an intense level and then we really start to mess with the audience.

Stick around for some creepy and unprofessional comments about his coworker Eliza Dushku.

I updated the "Comics" and "Web Comics" subsections of the sidebar in the process of putting together some links for my summer comics class. Most of what's there I've linked before, but you may find something you missed the first time around.

Other stuff.

* Jaimee has a piece in the Indy Green Guide this week comparing dueling energy initiatives in the North Carolina State Legislature.

* Begging as labor: Alex Greenberg thinks it over.

* Science fiction's most evil corporations.

* Hope for Dollhouse? 'Prison Break return disappoints,' scoring 75% of Dollhouse's regular audience in the Friday night death slot.

* Making Samuel Beckett.

* The Brick Testament has reached The Book of Revelations.

* "Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism," by Terry Eagleton. Via MeFi.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

*Think Progress says "Obama’s Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions Of Senior Bushies On The Table." People need to accept that Obama's going to let us down on this. He told us he would. He will.

* Your taxes at work. See also.

* A major EPA ruling this week declared carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. More analysis at the Oil Drum.

* Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

* The Wire series bible.

I have a ton of tabs open representing the blogging I intended to do this week but never did. Let us begin with the ongoing implosion of the Republican Party.

* Secession! It's everyone's favorite new fantasy. Polls show a quarter of Texans like Gov. Crazy's crazy idea, though said governor is now backpeddling. And if Texas does secede, some people are saying this time we should just let them go.

It would be the world's thirteenth largest economy -- bigger than South Korea, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia. But its worth would crater precipitously, after NAFTA rejected it and the United States slapped it with an embargo that would make Cuba look like a free-trade zone. Indeed, Texas would quick become the next North Korea, relying on foreign aid due to its insistence on relying on itself.

* In less hilarious eliminationist wingnuttery, an Illinois state senator has repeatedly suggested that "Illinois residents 'are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes' as much as Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing." This talk never should have started back during the election, and really needs to stop.

* The ante's likely been upped for forthcoming Republican antics because the teabagging parties were such a bust while Obama's popularity remains consistently high, no matter what sort of shit they fling at the wall.

* How to become the Republican candidate for vice president. It's easier than you think!

A.B. Culvahouse, a powerful Washington lawyer and former counsel to President Reagan, told an audience of Republican lawyers that for McCain, selecting a vice president came down to three questions: Why do you want to be vice president? Are you prepared to use nuclear weapons? And the CIA has identified Osama bin Laden, but if you take the shot there will be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?

Big thanks to everyone who was able to come out to our Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph Roundtable last night. Preliminary results indicate a huge success...

The Daily Show visits the site of a tea party protest in Morristown, New Jersey, approximately five minutes from the house I grew up in.

Somehow still-local members of the extended Canavan clan were able to avoid on-screen humiliation, for which we can all be thankful...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Tea Party Tyranny
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Reminder: the big Tim Morton/Kathy Rudy Roundtable, sponsored by the Duke Center for International Studies and moderated by Polygraph, starts today at 5 PM in the Friedl Building on Duke's East Campus. Hope some of you can make it...

Our brains don't work: ...the mere presence of a salad on a fast food menu makes people more likely to order french fries. Via Marginal Revolution.

Is Terminator canceled? Yes. No. No one knows. Ask again later.

YouTube Thursday!

* 1988 Inside Edition report on Super Mario. Don't miss the cameo appearance by a marginally less evil Bill O'Reilly.

* The Diff'rent Strokes titles recut as a horror sequence.

* Star Wars/MacGyver mashup.

Shades of 30 Rock, a hastily made video for the Cleveland Tourism Board.

Survive the Apocalypse: a blog. Note: in event of actual apocalypse you'll probably want a hard copy of this blog.

This just in: I am an immature child.

Fun: 137 uncomfortable plot summaries. Some highlights:

ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
GROUNDHOG DAY: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker.
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
JFK: Family man wastes life for nothing in crusade against homosexuals.
JUNO: Teen fails to get abortion, ruins lives.
JURASSIC PARK: Theme park’s grand opening pushed back.
KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RAMBO III: The United States provides arms, equipment and training to the terrorists behind 9/11.
RED DAWN: Despite shock-and-awe tactics, a superior occupying force is no match for a tenacious sect of terrorist insurgents.
STAR TREK: Over-sexed officer routinely places crew in danger.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE - Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
TERMINATOR: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.

Via MeFi.

Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can't convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don't want to go there, because that's suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right -- people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it's about time that somebody says that again.

He's riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I'm rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more.

Tuesday, I'll never forget you.

* Precision Hacking: 4chan hacks a Time poll not just at the top but all the way down.

* In the fifth and final installment of his Wes Anderson series, Matt Zoller Seitz annotates the prologue to The Royal Tenenbaums.

* You and I know it's fair and balanced, but believe it or not there are those who argue that the reporting on Fox may show a slight rightward tilt.

* On the making of Swamp Thing #20.

* And Blographia Literaria calls FAIL on failblog.org.

Al Franken has been declared the winner in the Minnesota Senate race, though Pawlenty and his secretary of state still has to sign off on it for Franken to take office—which they won't, because Republicans are cheaters. Don't miss the spectacle of nearly the entire Minnesota Supreme Court recusing themselves from Coleman's inevitable appeal.

"If you asked me what I would do, I would step back. I just think the healing process is so important. The possibility of any change of this magnitude in the voting system we have would be so remote — that would be my judgment. Mr. Franken will decide what Mr. Franken will do."
—Norm Coleman, two days after election day.

UPDATE: Minnesota's secretary of state is elected, not appointed, and is actually a Democrat now, Mark Ritchie. gerrycanavan.blogspot.com regrets the error. Mistakes were made.

Exxon is betting Americans will never again purchase as much gasoline as they did in 2007.

By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce. Or, apparently, not-keeping-it-in-your-pants-ism:

Children almost always complicate the issue. How to limit paternity obligations is a challenge for pro athletes. Former NBA forward Shawn Kemp (who has at least seven children by six women) and, more recently, Travis Henry (nine by nine) have seen their fortunes sapped by monthly child-support payments in the tens of thousands of dollars. Last month Henry, who reportedly earned almost $11 million over seven years in the NFL, tried and failed to temporarily reduce one of his nine child-support payments by arguing that he could no longer afford the $3,000 every month. Two weeks later he was jailed for falling $16,600 behind in payments for his child in Frostproof, Fla.

Also via MeFi.

Probably the greatest thing ever: The ROM for a seventeen-year-old unreleased sequel to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch, has surfaced on the Internet.

The game was not just a demonstration of Tyson's outer space boxing prowess, but also a showcase of the amazing ineptitude of publishers to generate capable follow ups to hit games at the time. The sequel removes both Little Mac and Doc Louis, replacing them with Tyson and manager Don King.

At Kotaku, via MeFi.

Even if you think my periodic endorsements of This American Life are just so much hot air, you should really give a listen to this week's podcast, "Mistakes Were Made." Act 1 on the disastrous birth of the cryogenic movement is a great listen, and the William Carlos Williams spoofs in the second act are a good time too.

Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it's just links tonight.

* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.

* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr's low approval ratings. So say we all.

* 'Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.' With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can't fail!

* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.

In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent."

* The mutants walk among us: 'Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.'

* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?

* Can poetry save the Earth?

Cultures of Recession
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Hosted by The Program in Literature, Duke University
November 20 & 21, 2009
http://www.duke.edu/~gc24/culturesofrecession.html

Keynote Speaker: Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY), author of How Class Works and Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of a Jobless Recovery

Around 5:00 AM on Nov. 28—the day after Thanksgiving—a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by shoppers eager to participate in the store’s annual “Black Friday” sales blitz. On Dec. 1, after three months of violent upheaval in the banking sector, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the U.S. had been in economic recession for almost a year. On Dec. 5, a group of mostly Hispanic workers staged a sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors after being laid off from the Chicago-based factory with only three days’ notice. Throughout mid-December 2008, critics lauded the “tightness” and “economy” of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, an 80-minute long independent film featuring a young woman, a dog, the Pacific Northwest, and not much else. Meanwhile, the country of Iceland—designated a terrorist state by Britain in an effort to freeze some of its assets—has declared bankruptcy. Widespread economic and institutional breakdown has resulted in a new wave of urban radicalism spreading across Greece, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. In China, mass deprivation and joblessness riots have escalated as authorities struggle to prop up a falling GDP. Despite unprecedented bailout and stimulus spending by the Bush and Obama administrations, the U.S. stock market has receded to levels last seen in 1997, with the unemployment rate crossing 10% in some states.

This conference invites graduate students from humanities and social science disciplines to think about how the idea and experience of recession—a sustained national or global-economic downturn that makes itself visible through declines in industrial production, employment, sales, and income—frames the cultural life and livelihood of affected communities, places, and governing bodies. This shift in communal and political makeup opens space for discussion about the impact of recession on cultural forms. What sort of cultural phenomena—artistic, political, or otherwise—find expression during times of recession? Are there features of recession that seem to transcend history or geography? Are certain socioeconomic climates more or less poised to give birth to recession—and what sort of political positionalities or modes of thought find themselves competing to “solve” recessive crises? How does recession change the parameters of social and political institutions? Within the governing structure, how do power dynamics shuffle as blame is distributed between institutions and people? How might the idea of recession compare to related concepts like depression, inflation, deflation, unemployment, crisis, or overproduction? Can we identify specific literary or artistic forms, motifs, and icons that emerge during times of recession?

Possible panel or paper topics
• Recession and cultures of work
• Recession and the global economy
• Recession and the language of loss, failure, or decline
• Recession and establishment discourse
• Recession, labor struggle, and “class warfare”
• Recession and the banking-sector bailout
• Recession and debt
• Recession and the politics of greed or waste
• Recession, crisis theory, and the logic of capital
• Recession and radical political resurgences
• Recession and nostalgia
• Recession and consumer culture
• Historical recessions: the post-war ‘40s, the 1970s, Japan’s Lost Decade, etc.
• Recession in an age of Facebook, blogs, and “instant” information
• Recession and cultural production
• Recession and the politics of religion
• Recession and the politics of race, gender, and/or sexuality
• Recession and environmental/energy crises
• Recession and the university

Please send a 250-500 word abstract to culturesofrecession@gmail.com by August 31, 2009.

ORGANIZERS
Sara Appel
Gerry Canavan
Alex Greenberg
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
culturesofrecession@gmail.com

According to James Dobson, the culture wars are over, and we won.



Or, if you prefer:

Sunday!

* Literature: no cell phones allowed.

JULIET: Fakn death. C U Latr.

ROMEO: gud plan.

Recently published narrative fiction is still uneasy about the telephone, much less cell phones or the Internet...

* In defense of The Life Aquatic: Jamie Rich defends the most unfairly maligned of all of Wes Anderson's films. (Via Rushmore Academy.)

* 'North Carolina Town Prints Own Currency to Support Local Business.' I support the effort, but I thought that was illegal...

* The Washington Post continues its efforts to make up for allowing George Will to lie with impunity on its editorial pages.

* Muppets vs. Zombies. If only it were real.

How I wasted my Saturday: Braid is out for the PC as of Friday, and is exactly as awesome as everyone says. $15 Download here...

I think tonight's Dollhouse gave me whiplash. It was a very good episode with several truly superb moments, and on the level of pure adrenaline I probably enjoyed it better than any other episode thus far—but you can tell Joss has no faith in renewal. The twists, reveals, callbacks, and payoffs in that episode alone could have covered a couple seasons on a show with Joss's usual glacial pacing...

The final Terminator: Is this a joke? That was the last episode ever? Come on, Fox, the show got decent-enough ratings before you moved it to Fridays, and anyway, you can't end a show like that.

Via grinding.be.

Good Magazine has a feature on how to reduce your water usage. It should surprise no one that the most effective single step to take is, as always, vegetarianism.

io9 has details on that final episode of Dollhouse we may never actually get to see. Sounds fairly promising, actually...

Just a few links.

* I'm only going to say this once, media bloodsuckers: Leave Bruce alone.

* Pink Tentacle has your vintage alien landscapes from Kazuaki Saito.

* The Dollhouse situation and what Joss Whedon should do next.

I would like to see what kind of wonderfully dense, risk-taking project Whedon would come up with when he is not hampered by the current conservative climate at the networks, which these days want most story lines to wrap up by the end of the hour. Can you imagine what a Whedon show on HBO, Showtime, FX or AMC would look like?

...

My point is this: Whedon needs to make his next show on cable. End of story.

Ironically, this is also what Joss should have done this time, and the time before this one.

* Florida Power & Light and a real estate developer have announced that they will build the first solar-powered city in the U.S., a community of 19,500 homes, offices, retail shops, and light industry whose electricity will come from the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant. The new city will be called Utopia Prime Future One Alpha City Babcock Ranch.

Obama science adviser John Holdren says that geo-engineering isn't on the table after all.

Rather than focusing on what Holdren doesn’t believe, let’s focus on what he does. I asked him a simple question. Does he stand by what he published 3 years ago, which I often quote:

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

He wrote back, “I said exactly that to Seth Borenstein.” In his earlier email, Holdren wrote bluntly:

I said that the approaches that have been surfaced so far seem problematic in terms of both efficacy and side effects, but we have to look at the possibilities and understand them because if we get desperate enough it will be considered. I also made clear that this was my personal view, not Administration policy. Asked whether I had mentioned geo-engineering in any White House discussions, though, I said that I had. This is NOT the same thing as saying the White House is giving serious consideration to geo-engineering – which it isn’t — and I am disappointed that the headline and the text of the article suggest otherwise.

Also at Climate Progress: 'How climate change is causing a new age of extinction.'

Super Happy Insomnia Linkdump.

* Here come your Simpsons stamps.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD is finally coming out this July. Meanwhile, State alums Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have a new show and a new blog.

* Only 53% of Americans think capitalism is better than socialism. What happens when we cross 50%? Does it mean over-educated literary theory PhDs suddenly get to be in charge? I certainly hope it means that.

* The dark side of Dubai. Ugly, ugly stuff.

* On the neuropsychology of zombies. Via Pharyngula.

* A good post I forgot to link to a few days ago from FiveThirtyEight.com: Nate Silver predicts when various states will legalize gay marriage. My expectation is that a federal court ruling will make gay marriage a nationwide reality via the full faith and credit clause long before Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat of injustice—gets its chance in 2024.

* And Part 4 of Matt Zoller Seitz's Wes Anderson documentary is up. This part's on J.D. Salinger.

Here's a nice video on open- and closed-mindedness from that paragon of skepticism, Candleblog.

Wells Tower reads a personal favorite, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned."

Fox, which had previously committed itself to airing all of Dollhouse's first season, now says it won't be airing episode thirteen, "Epitaph One." This is apparently because Fox can't count. A note of continued cautious optimism on the renewal front:

A last, and very important, note: According to sources on the network side, them not picking up and airing "Epitaph One" has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not they pick up the series for a second season, a situation which, I'm told, is "100 percent in the decision phase." You can obviously believe them or not as you choose, but I take them at their word. I may be a sucker like that.

More from Sepinwall, io9, and Whedonesque, but watch out for some already-well-circulated Who Is Alpha? spoilers.

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown has some good advice for our friends of the Asian persuasion. Yglesias points out that South Asians are the real villains here—your Duraiswamies, your Ayyagaries, your Balasubramanians...

Abomination, thy name is Cinnamon Chex.

Presenting a profile of the great Margaret Atwood.

Her sensibilities were shaped by the fact that she was raised largely in the Canadian woods by “two environmentally-aware biologists, back when that was a pretty moony thing to be.” The family often went without electricity. “It was almost like a 19th-century way of life,” she said.

She applies the same theory to nature as she does to financial debt: Humankind will doom itself by taking more than it gives back. “Our technology has become so clever that it can chew things up much faster than we can replace them,” she said.

I'm seeing this sort of realigning of public/private debt with ecological/futurological debt in a lot of places—just off the top of my head, it's something Kim Stanley Robinson talks a lot about as well—and it is, I think, is one of the most pressing theoretical concerns in our moment. There is more than one sense that capitalism is, in Kapp's phrase, an economy of unpaid costs.

“‘Dhalgren’ is like the ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or the ‘Ulysses’ of science fiction,” says fantasy and sci-fi novelist Gregory Frost ("Shadowbridge").

And it is no less controversial than Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce’s respective masterpieces: Legendary scribe Philip K. Dick called “Dhalgren” “a terrible book (that) should have been marketed as trash.”

Presenting a profile of the great Samuel Delany.

How Disney cuts corners. Via MeFi.

Hour-long Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religion.

The Obama administration says they'll consider geo-engineering as a possible solution to climate change. What could possibly go wrong?

(UPDATE: See update.)

More than 300 years ago, a man thought lost at sea re-appeared in Italy with accounts of a civilization inhabiting the interior sea of an undiscovered southern continent. Giuseppe Cognomi composed numerous volumes on this advanced and isolated culture - which he called The Linians - and the singular environment they inhabited at the bottom of the world. Though widely disregarded by the scientific community, the tradition of Linian scholarship has been kept alive through the years by a devoted few. The Society for Linian Studies is the first organized attempt to preserve Cognomi's legacy and progress his research.

Via Boing Boing. These guys sure are going to be pissed that we messed up all their ice.

Here comes a "Buffy" movie? The story checks out; I read it on the Internet. Via io9.

Homemade Girl Scout cookie recipes.

Just a pair of painfully funny Daily Show / Colbert clips from last night.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a District - New York's 25th - Dan Maffei
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Matt Zoller Seitz pits Wes Anderson vs. Hal Ashby in the third part of his Moving Image documentary, coming to a startling conclusion:

There's nothing inherently wrong with Anderson's selective adoration. But when you look at the totality of what Ashby accomplished—the social and political dimensions that all his films explored, the blunt honesty of their expression—Anderson's work can't help but come up short, just as the work of Anderson's imitators is overshadowed by the genuine article.

Tell Matt Seitz he just made my list of things to do today. In all seriousness, I guess I can see Seitz's point, but you can only conclude "Anderson's work can't help but come up short" when you demand of Anderson's work the things it is quite pointedly refusing to do.

Last of the great Tuesday night linkdumps.

* Daily Kos has a nice round-up post on eliminationist rhetoric and its consequences in light of last weekend's Pittsburgh shooting.

* Barack Obama as a character from a Bob Dylan song. Via TPM.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.
Multimedia

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage - cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Lenin's Tomb on crisis, accumulation, Barack Obama, and neoliberalism.

* MyDD wants you to encourage NC AG Roy Cooper to run for Senate.

Tuesday night linkdump #3.

* Here comes the Dollhouse? 'Scientists Erase Painful Memories Without Drugs.'

* Both Inside Higher Ed and Barack Obama himself can declare victory alongside UNC.

* Even the National Review says it's time for Coleman to concede.

* Environmental reporters at The Washington Post hit back at George Will over the many inaccuracies in his climate change columns.

* More on the Morristown UFO hoax.

Tuesday night linkdumps can't/won't stop.

* The Vermont legislature overruled the governor and legalized gay marriage in the state. Vermont had been the first state to approve civil unions; now it is the first state to introduce gay marriage via the legislature. Way to go Vermonters.

* Obama is very popular. Republicans are not. More gloating at Washington Monthly, Matt Yglesias, and MyDD.

* Franken continues to win and yet somehow continues not to take office. Odd how that works.

* How not to photograph.

I was going to follow up that Kal Penn post with a more substantive post, but I decided to take a nap instead. Advantage: Canavan!

* The U.S. dollar as Ponzi scheme. Via Alex Greenberg. See also: The Investment Delusion and Money and the Crisis of Civilization.

* Paging Superman: Barack Obama calls for a world without nuclear weapons. More at Attackerman.

* Things more likely to kill you than terrorist attacks.

* Two visits to the Mets' new Citi Field. I still miss Shea.

Who's Barack pallin' around with now?





The attack ad just writes itself.

Consider this the first of several reminders of our April 17th Polygraph event, "Ecology, Ideology, Politics." It should be a really great discussion—I really hope some of you can make it.

To sweeten the pot, I can guarantee free food and drink.

Nine words you might think came from science but which are really from science fiction. Via Boing Boing and Poli-Sci-Fi Radio.

Homer's Twodyssey.

Believe the impossible: hope for Dollhouse? Airlock Alpha says Fox is "leaning" towards renewal. Are they really so desperate to erase our bad memories of Firefly?

It won't work.

Is the Christian right finished as a political entity? Or, more to the point, are principled Christians finished with politics?

It's not the end of Christian America, but this period could mark a change in the way conservative Christians understand their relationship with the state, and in particular put an end to the toxic alliance between the Christian right and the Republican party.

Rural civil defense TV spots from 1965. Via MeFi.

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I use my fingers as quotation marks, is part of the cooling process.

Part 2 of Matt Zoller Seitz's five-part Wes Anderson documentary is now up. The focus this time is on Scorsese, Lester, and Nichols.

If you missed the video for the first one, it should be said that the video (and not the text) is the whole link. The link to the video is practically invisible; scroll down and keep your eye on the right side of the page.

Two self-admitted skeptics who rigged highway flares to weather balloons to create a UFO hoax are now facing misdemeanor charges in Morristown, New Jersey for endangering public and air traffic safety. (via Posthuman Blues)

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. And it gets worse: the robots are already eying the Moon.

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the Foundation series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism.'"

Krugman and I have something in common. (via io9)

Having finally recovered from their last tussle, your liberal guilt and your sense of humor are ready for another ten rounds. Here comes Brüno.

Does the word postcapitalism look odd to you? It should, because you hardly ever see it. We have a blank spot in our vision of the future. Perhaps we think that history has somehow gone away. In fact, history is with us now more than ever, because we are at a crux in the human story. Choosing not to study a successor system to capitalism is an example of another kind of denial, an ostrich failure on the part of the field of economics and of business schools, I think, but it’s really all of us together, a social aporia or fear. We have persistently ignored and devalued the future—as if our actions are not creating that future for our children, as if things never change. But everything evolves. With a catastrophe bearing down on us, we need to evolve at nearly revolutionary speed. So some study of what could improve and replace our society’s current structure and systems is in order. If we don’t take such steps, the consequences will be intolerable. On the other hand, successfully dealing with this situation could lead to a sustainable civilization that would be truly exciting in its human potential.

What comes after capitalism? Kim Stanley Robinson has a report on the future, while David Harvey investigates what comes right before what comes after capitalism.

Missed another day this week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

* Major gay-rights victory in Iowa (!) today as the state's Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of marriage equality. Some commentary from Daily Kos, Matt Yglesias, and Washington Monthly. It'll be interesting to see how this affects presidential politics in 2012—given Iowa's importance in the primary process Republican candidates may feel significant pressure to move to the left on this issue. Iowa is now the third state where gay marriage (as opposed to some version of civil union) is legal, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.

* Wild new technology demoed at TED. It's a projector that turns basically any surface into a touchscreen, including your own body.

* National Catholic Reporter has a report out this week demonstrating the decades-old origins of the Catholic Church's priest scandal. My sense is that this continues to badly hurt the reputation of Catholicism, though perhaps I just run with a bad crowd. Via Cogitamus.

* Because Bush's DOJ bungled the prosecution of Ted Stevens, the Alaska GOP wants a do-over election. That sounds reasonable. That's usually how these things are handled, right?

* Also on the Sarah Palin beat the poetry of Sarah Palin and the poetry of Glenn Beck. Via MetaFilter.

"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

I really don't care for April Fools' Day on the Internet—people have been kicking around the same joke for nearly twenty years now—but even a Scrooge like myself has to confess that Improv Everywhere's entry in the genre is actually pretty good.

The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, "the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation." (Tarantino who?) Here's Part 1.

When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.

But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.

The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we've talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one's own film...

Ryan sends along an etymology of the word "recession."

Before the 1930s, any serious economic downturn was called a depression. The term "recession" didn't come into common use until "depression" became burdened by memories of the 1930s, said Robert McElvaine, a history professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.

"When the economy collapsed again in 1937, they didn't want to call that a new depression, and that's when recession was first used," he said. "People also use 'downward blip.' Alan Greenspan once called it a 'sideways waffle.'"

Metafilter links to your ultimate find-all-99-Seinfeld-reference photo. Here's your answer key.

Ladies and gentlemen, Toothpaste for Dinner.