Thursday!

* The First Rule of J-School Is You Don't Talk About J-School Debt.

* Nowhere in Manhattan. Hard to believe it is Manhattan. Via MeFi.

* Nnedi Okorafor has a nice guest post at Nebula on Africa and science fiction.

* The CEO of Whole Foods doesn't want us to have health care. OpenLeft doesn't want us to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Everyone at MetaFilter is mad at everyone.

* Top 10 Superhero Comics 2000-2009. I've read more of these than I would have expected, and can plug a bunch: All-Star Superman, Monster Society of Evil, New Frontier, Omega the Unknown, and Planetary are all worth reading in their own ways, as are some of the sillier Big Two offerings (I'll admit to being fond of Booster Gold). Y: The Last Man is good, too, but of course it doesn't really count. Via NeilAlien.

* Language and time. I found this interesting.

David Hauser and colleagues first showed that people with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them. You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it's now changed to Friday, then you're someone who thinks of themselves as moving through time, whilst if you think the meeting is now on Monday, then you're more passive, and you think about time passing you by.

I'm a Monday person for sure. I see can see why Ezra thinks it would be Friday, but it seems very unnatural to me to spatialize the week that way.

* And you can now tweet @Gliese581d.

Midday Tuesday!

* Those of you participating in Infinite Summer (hey kate) may enjoy IJ blogging from Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and others at A Supposedly Fun Blog.

* Bleeding Cool reviews Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man script.

* Maybe information doesn't want to be free? Malcolm Gladwell pours cold water on Chris Anderson's Free, itself famously in trouble for some apparent plagiarism:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

* Kunstler: Don't call Americans "consumers." Because when you rename a problem it suddenly goes away.

Monday!

* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether "Charlie Kaufman" is officially a genre yet.

* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.

* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren't a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.

* Also not useful: classifying "protests" as "low-level terrorism activity."

* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.

* What's wrong with the American essay? I'm not sure anything is, but certainly not this:

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.

It doesn't seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.

* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.

Other links.

* Boycott General Motors? It makes perfect sense if the only thing you care about is embarrassing President Obama.

* Krauthammer: "What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality." At least he admits it...

* Republicans have asked for 610 days to prepare for the Sotomayor Supreme Court hearing. What could be more reasonable than that?

* Futurama renewed. Saved by the Bell reunion draws one step closer. Shia LaBeouf will not ruin Y: The Last Man.

* Meme of the day: 30 Rock vs. The Muppet Show.

* And what is destiny?, from Very Small Array.

Transformers, Indiana Jones, now Y: The Last Man: All your franchises belong to Shia Labeouf.

The New York Times reports on King Kirby, the Fourth World, and Y: The Last Man.

We're in the Spring Break stretch now; I have an hour of class tomorrow and then at last we're all free. Let's celebrate with a few sci-fi links.

* Holy shit: Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

* One year till midnight: character stills from the upcoming Watchmen movie.

* Three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in eight minutes.

* How to repopulate a world without men.

Two from io9, the first about organized attempts by science and the state to control human reproduction and the other about the secret Silver Age origins of your favorite modern comics.

io9 has a neat post with links to seven science-fiction comics available for free online, including the first issue of the very awesome Y: The Last Man, which I enjoyed a lot when I read the whole damn series last summer.

Earlier today, responding to my post about Earth Abides, Chris at Cynical-C asked, "What’s your favorite book that deals with a post-apocalyptic world?" There are a lot of good answers in the thread; I threw out Vonnegut's Galápagos (of course), as well as Philip K. Dick's perennially out-of-print The Penultimate Truth. (The real jewel of the thread for me was Chris's own contribution, Wikipedia's exhaustive list of apocalyptic fiction. I'm going to make use of this.)

If I were answering him now, though, I think I'd have to add that some of the best and most interesting apocalypse work I've seen lately has been in Brian Vaughan's comic Y: The Last Man. ("Best" and "most interesting," I said—not plausible or realist.) I'm about five years late to the party here, but I ran across a copy of Unmanned in a used bookstore the other day, and it's really good. Now I just need to find the rest.