Sid Meier wants to destroy your productivity forever.

Monday!

* Steve Benen covers the behind-the-scenes wrangling around the public option. Surprising to see a hack like Bill Frist on board. Is he trying to make up for his past?

* io9's ten essential Superman stories. Missing: Alan Moore's Supreme, Superman in all but name. (Also: Kingdom Come? Dark Knight Returns?)

* Conservatives have finally gotten around to removing the Bible's liberal bias.

* The life story of Richard Leroy Walters, a homeless man who left $4 million dollars to NPR.

* Superhero Status Updates.

* The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis.

* And Angel is ten years old today.

Facebooking your way in and out of tenure. (Thanks, Negar!)

UPDATE: More here.

UPDATE 2: Wanted to highlight something Cathy Davidson said in reply:

If sex tapes are now the requisite initiation rite of any young star or starlet, maybe the intemperate digital snark-fest revealed to one's future profs and colleagues is the academic equivalent. What once shocked is now getting so commonplace as to be pro forma and, eventually, may even be laughably old-fashioned.

Day after Labor Day links.

* The U.S. drops to second-place in international competitiveness, behind the hated Swiss.

* Food flags.

* Washington Monthly foretells the death of the university in favor of trade schools like ITT. MeFi debates.

* Also at MeFi: Google Maps Monopoly and a time-travel linkdump.

* Gawker reports Facebook makes you smart and Twitter makes you stupid. Be advised.

* And a commenter on my Flickr account asks the real question: what's a young George W. Bush doing in my current blog icon?

Sunday! Links!

* Jaimee has a new poem online at Country Dog Review.

* Traxus has a nice post on status update activism jumping off my post at HASTAC the other day.

* In praise of the sci-fi corridor.

* All about ocean acidification, the climate change disaster no one is even talking about.

* Confessions of an Aca/Fan has two good posts about where District 9 came from, one on transmedia promotion strategies and the other on Afrofuturism.

* NeilAlien is your source for Disney/Marvel merger news, especially more Photoshopped images than you can possibly handle. Here are even more Photoshopped images.

* Why is Glenn Beck wearing an East German military uniform on the cover of his new book? No, really, why?

Thursday!

* I'll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.

* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.

* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson's review of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.

* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.

* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you're two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.

* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can't find them. Meanwhile, this year's Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.

* So you've invented a board game. (via)

* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.

* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.

Is a psychopath attacking Twitter and Facebook?

UPDATE: Annother take from CNET claims the attacks were directed against a single account, a pro-Georgian blogger using the name Cyxymu.

Is word of mouth on Twitter and Facebook hurting the first-day box office of bad movies? Via The Chutry Experiment.

Facebook's never-ending mission to destroy itself takes a great leap forward today as they announce status messages, photos, and videos will become visible to all by default. The situation is actually much worse than this, as Facebook continually resets selected privacy options whenever it feels like it—so not only will you have to make yourself private again this one time, you'll have to maintain constant vigilance against mission creep.

Other links.

* Ze Frank wants to sell you some art. Is this The Show slowly coming back?

* The fifty most-looked-up words at The New York Times website.

* Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono unite in service of "meat-free Mondays."

* Top ten comedian Twitterers. Top ten filmmaking Twitterers. Top ten magazines on Twitter. Via Candleblog.

* How Facebook is affecting school reunions. I was remarking just this weekend that Facebook has made the high school reunion completely obsolete. (via Neil, whom Facebook has also made obsolete)

* Fans, vampires, trolls, masters: an academic bestiary.

It's always other people who are 'fans': our own attachments, we like to pretend (to ourselves; others are unlikely to be convinced) have been arrived at by a properly judicious process and are not at all excessive. There's a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification. 'Maturity' insists that we remember with hostile distaste, gentle embarrassment or sympathetic condescenscion when we were first swept up by something - when, in the first flushes of devotion, we tried to copy the style, the tone; when, that is, we are drawn into the impossible quest of trying to become what the Other is it to us. This is the only kind of 'love' that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis. Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what - all good sense knows - is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man. Which isn't to make the fatuous relativist claim that devotees of Badiou are the same as Trekkies; it is to make the point that Graham has been tirelessly reiterating - that the critique from nowhere is nothing but trolling. Trolls pride themselves on not being fans, on not having the investments shared by those occupying whatever space they are trolling. Trolls are not limited to cyberspace, although, evidently, zones of cyberspace - comments boxes and discussion boards - are particularly congenial for them. And of course the elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects - of energy-drain and demoralisation - the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is - by contrast, we have to conclude, with the superb work routinely being turned out by 'professionals' in the media and the academy.

In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent - in the worst way - than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from - the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted - the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people's toys away from them).

Via Larval Subjects, who adds the Minotaur:

To K-Punks bestiary, I wonder if we shouldn’t add Minotaurs and their Labyrinths. One of the most frustrating things about the trollish figure of the scholar is the manner in which they proceed as minotaurs presiding over labyrinths. For the Minotaur it is never possible for there to be a genuine philosophical difference or a genuine difference in positions among philosophers. Rather, the Minotaur converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape. The Minotaur is even willing to go so far as deny explicit textual evidence to the contrary, speculating about the motives animating the Minos-Master they defend, suggesting that the thinker was either being humble or didn’t really mean such and such or that it is just a manner of speaking.

* Atheists vs. believers: who's funnier? The answer is George Carlin.

Facebook backer announces his new Facebook group: 1,000,000 Strong Against Women Having the Right to Vote.

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."

As he did on the campaign trail last year, Obama is filling out a bracket.



The Presidential Seal is a nice touch.

As in years past, I've filled out a March Madness bracket on Facebook using my usual method:

Higher seeds always beat lower seeds unless

* I know someone who went to the lower-seeded school, or otherwise just sort of dig it;
* I have a beef with the city or state in which the higher-seeded school is located;
* I have a special feeling.

unless

* I have a special feeling the other way.

It never fails.

Twipocalypse Now: What does it mean when hundreds of third party services (with questionable, if any, business models) are dependent upon a single service which itself has no business model? Via, of course, my Twitter feed.

There's a lot of talk this weekend about Facebook "jumping the shark" with this ubiquitous "25 Random Things You Don't Know About Me" meme. I don't think I've ever actually participated in one of these memes, and frankly at this point I hardly notice them even when they do pass my screen. Facebook will survive this; the thing that will kill Facebook is an even more flexible social networking portal that's so elite right now none of us even know about it.

The Indy's special issue on Abe Lincoln came out today and I had a small piece in it trying to make sense of the recent explosion of "popular Lincolnology" read against the Obama and Bush presidencies.

There's a lot of good stuff in the issue, from twelve ways of looking at Abraham Lincoln to Lincoln in music to Lincoln in film to Lincoln on Facebook. Even Gore Vidal gets his shout-out...

Wednesday, Wednesday.

* Why is Boing Boing giving valuable blog real estate to global warming denialism? I see Cory has admirably tried to push back against the guest blogger, but still. What a sad day for Boing Boing.

* Michael Bérubé just took the GRE Literature in English subject test again. And lived to tell about it.

* Rethinking plagiarism? Sorry, but this isn't that hard. Students know exactly what they're doing when they plagiarize. Turn them over to Judicial Affairs and don't think twice.

* Ten privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

* Joe the Plumber is now advising the GOP. WTFRepublicans?

* Fimoculous has found Wikipedia's list of lists of fictional things.

* The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertberg was not impressed with Obama's first inaugural. More shocking still is the unabashed anti-Hindu prejudice expressed in a demand that they be listed last in the litany of religious belief, even after hated atheists. Via Edge of the American West.

Linkdump!

* The headline reads, "Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected."

* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don't exist.

* 'Going Under': Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.

* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.

* I don't know if I'm more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.

* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.

* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.

* Blago: owned. More discussion here.

* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance's latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.

* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.

(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)

Son of news roundup.

* Burger King is pushing the viral marketing hard lately, following up its gag body spray with a Facebook application that gives you a free hamburger for every 10 people you unfriend.

* Speaking of body spray, here's an interesting study suggesting it's not about the smell.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

* Obama to team up with Spider-Man. Which wanted criminal will he pall around with next?

* Zipcar comes to Duke. More here.

* Larry Flynt says porn needs a bailout. Via MeFi.

* Creative billboards.

* Malcolm X on a Canadian game show.

* The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

* It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. Gary Lutz on the sentence, via the too-sporadically-updated Black Garterbelt.

* And will The Dark Knight win Best Picture? Eli Glasner says it just might.