Four for Monday.

* The Most Amazing Halloween Costume Ever. (via Steve)

* Whose America? Mark Bauerlein and Duke's own Priscilla Wald debate a new Harvard anthology of American literature.

* Tetris zen.

* A collection of bank robbery notes. There was apparently a successful robbery at the Wachovia on 9th Street a few weeks ago, so look for that one on the site soon.

This one's local interest, but anyone in the Triangle who is interested in an "Ecology and the Humanities" working group sponsored by Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute and administered by the Polygraph 22 editors should shoot me an email for details about our first meeting on Nov. 12. We're reading Radkau and Dana Philips the first week.

BREAKING MUST CREDIT GERRYCANAVAN.BLOGSPOT.COM: David Cross is pretty funny.

Believe it or not: "New study finds Raleigh-Durham the smartest metro in US."

Been busy today. Here are links.

* Pam Spaulding talks about the Durham City Council meeting last night at which a pro-same-sex marriage resolution was passed.

* "In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes."

* More bad news for Republican Chris Christie as a nonpartisan ethics group, NJ-CREW, has now called for an investigation into his time as U.S. Attorney. He's also facing criticism over unreported interest from a loan made to current staffers at the U.S. Attorney office.

* The Obama White House says reports of the death of the public option are greatly exaggerated. (No word yet on the pubic option.)

* David Cross was funny last night on the Daily Show.

* Mad Men footnotes.

* Xenophobia for Dummies: A District 9 Primer. Of particular interest are the historical details surrounding apartheid-era District 6. Via this AskMe, with more.

* Meanwhile, the usually-more-astute Spencer Ackerman denies that America is anything like those nasty racists in District 9's Johannesburg. What's a million Iraqis give or take?

* And the absolute worst news of all time: "Arrested Development movie is nowhere near happening."

More on that John Mackey editorial and the possibility of a nationwide Whole Foods boycott from TPM, Pandagon, Ezra Klein, Daily Kos, Daily Kos, Daily Kos, Facebook, and the Whole Foods forums. This backlash has been a long-time coming; their anti-union politics are bad enough.

But I can't decide whether my new "boycotting Whole Foods since earlier this morning" tagline is a joke or not; being honest, where else are we supposed to shop for food? It's not as if Food Lion and Harris Teeter are known for their commitment to fair labor practices, progressive causes, and sustainability.

Durhamites, where do you shop for food?

Some upcoming events that might be of interest to my fellow Durhamites:

* The Mountain Goats kick off their fall tour with a performance at the 2nd annual Durham Be Easy festival. (Thanks, EH!)

* Laurence Dubois will be running a very cool soccer and politics series all semester at Duke, including screenings of Zidane and The Other Final. (Thanks, DF!)

In better news, Yo La Tengo is touring again, including a trip to Durham in September. Here's a free MP3 from their upcoming album.

Durham's own Regulator Bookshop has a new "keep it local" ad on YouTube.

Band of the morning/week/month/other arbitrary length of time: Durham's own The Mountain Goats.





(Thanks Eric and Kate!)

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

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.

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.

Raleigh is #1 and Durham #3 in Forbes's list of top cities for business and careers. Will Durham never climb out of Raleigh's terrible shadow?

The geography of the recession. Atrios's comment is, I think, perceptive:

I think the colors chosen for this map actually make things "look" a bit better from a national perspective. It's important to realize the second lightest color goes all the way up to 10% unemployment. And then realize a non-trivial numbers of counties are seriously into holy fuck levels of unemplomeny.

The map also demonstrates the extent to which the Northeast (and Durham and the Research Triangle, for that matter) have gotten off relatively light thus far. California and Michigan, in contrast, are looking like disaster areas.

Coach K and Obama get into it—what are you going to do now, Su?—while The New Republic traces the relationship between Duke hatred and homophobia.

Duke is probably the most despised team in college basketball. And proud Duke haters--like my colleague Jason Zengerle and Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry--have often imbued their dislike of the Blue Devils with a political subtext. To many of its staunchest enemies, Duke is a malevolent Goliath--an elitist, corporate, conservative force out to crush more virtuous, liberal Davids. In the UNC-Duke rivalry, Blythe explains, "[i]ssues of identity--whether you see yourself as a populist or an elitist, as a local or an outsider, as public-minded or individually striving--get played out." He also notes that UNC's long-time coach Dean Smith, who retired in 1997, was a vocal Democrat while Duke's coach Mike Krzyzewski is an active Republican. This has only added to the sense that there is something fundamentally liberal about loathing the Blue Devils.

But there's one major problem with the neat morality play that left-leaning Duke haters have constructed for themselves: the jarring and disproportionate level of homophobia that routinely gets directed at the basketball players. There's the classic "This is Why Duke Sucks" YouTube video that has received more than 1.6 million hits--and boasts lyrics about one Duke player being a "bitch" and another having a "dude's face all on [his] balls." Or the more recent (and explicit) video, "Greg Paulus--'I Kissed a Boy,'" which mocks Duke's senior guard for, among other things, enjoying the taste of men's sweat. Or another video about Paulus ("Tea Bag: A Greg Paulus Tribute"), posted by user TarHeel32Blue, which shows several clips of the guard near or between the legs of other players.

Exhibit A, however, is the cascade of homophobia directed at superstar three-point shooter J.J. Redick during his years in Durham. In 2004, N.C. State guard Scooter Sherrill said publicly that, after Redick shot threes, he had "his hand up like he's gay or something." A quick perusal of Redick's Wikipedia history reveals dozens of now-deleted comments like, "J.J. Redick is a confirmed homo sexual" with whom it's rumored "coach K made sexual arrangements." A notorious photo snapped during a game shows a Duke fan with a "JJ is Redickulous" sign standing unsuspectingly next to a Maryland supporter who adds "-ly gay" with his own poster. The New York Times wrote about the cheers of "Brokeback Mountain" often shouted at him during games, and you can still find photos on Tarheeltimes.com that show Redick's face superimposed on images from the movie.

The winners and judges of Independent Weekly's 2009 poetry contest will be reading tonight at the Pinhook in downtown Durham starting at 7 PM—and that includes Jaimee. Come around if you can make it...

With Durham looking like this:



(though increasingly less so), it seemed like a good time to put up some pictures from Albuquerque. Which I have done—here.

#2: culture!

* How HBO changed TV.

* Is Sarah Connor canceled?

* Europe names crew for simulated mission to Mars. Devotees may remember that this is strikingly reminiscent of the first episode of The Twilight Zone.

* Examined Life is your crash course in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life." In fact, I'm quite sure she didn't. But as with Taylor's previous film, "Zizek!" (whose subject, the Slovenian madman Slavoj Zizek, appears here at a London garbage dump, claiming that mankind isn't alienated enough from the natural world), the movie has a philosophical element of its own that is not free of guile. By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O. Trying to rehabilitate the concept of revolution while rowing in the Central Park lake, post-Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt literally runs aground on a half-submerged boulder. I'm far more sympathetic to Hardt's intellectual project than I should admit, but, really, what can you say?

* The great American novel v. women. (Or maybe that's the other way around.)

* Alan Moore v. comic book films. More Moore here and here.

* How they marketed Watchmen: a look back at the original solicits from 1986.

* Gary Westfahl: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future. Another thing Suvin makes clear in his very good book on science fiction is that if you're expecting science fiction to predict the future you're asking the wrong questions.

* The Indy just announced the winners of their 2009 poetry contest, and once again Jaimee was one of the judges.

* And Neil sends along some optical illusion fun.

Still working through a backlog of open tabs. First up: ecology and the environment.

* There's no such thing as clean coal. Just ask the Coen brothers. Also at Grist: dealing with the fact of environmentalism's soft public support.

As I have argued before, our attention to wide but weak public support is misplaced, leaving us vulnerable to the cycles of an ADD media and alienating our potential core. It is increasingly evident that the vast scale of climate risk provokes a number of numbing psychological responses -- pre-conscience cognitive dissonance and buffering in various forms -- which exacerbates the usual forces of diffusion.

The only means by which a worldview and solution that is significantly at odds with majority public opinion may be driven onto the public agenda is through the agency of "a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" -- in other words, a determined, partisan core.

* George Will: still lyin'.

* 'Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?' First up: a sunshield. I guess it's true what they say: from the dawn of time mankind really has yearned to block out the sun.

* Sympathy for the Unabomber? Don't open any packages from Kevin Kelly for a few days.

* Times Square and several blocks of Broadway are being shut down to cars for most of the year in the name of traffic management and pedestrian malls. Awesome.

* Nuke your city. Via BLDG BLOG (which has a lot of examples) and io9. Of course, we've already done Durham.