* Extrapolation is seeking essays for a special issue on Indigenous Futurism, edited by Grace L. Dillon, Michael Levy and John Rieder.
* Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
* No state worse than Wisconsin for black children, says new national study. The Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul. Other People’s Pathologies.
* University of California graduate students explain why they’re striking. Students Occupy Dartmouth President’s Office. Coaches Make $358,000 In Bonuses For Reaching NCAA Tournament Final Four. Emory University Eradicates its Visual Arts Department. Dear Harvard: You Win.
* A Brief Report from the University of Southern Maine. Armed guards at faculty meetings.
* Major attack on academic freedom in Michigan.
* Academia Under the Influence.
* Surveillance, Dissent, and Imperialism. NSA Surveillance and the Male Gaze.
* The secret history of Cuban Twitter. If this tweet gets 1000 favorites Castro’s beard falls out.
* Kingdom Prep is one of dozens of basketball academies that have popped up in recent years to cater to “postgrad” players—recent high-school graduates who need to improve their standardized-test scores to meet the NCAA’s academic requirements.
* Just when I thought I was out: Marquette hires Duke associate head coach Steve Wojciechowski.
* The really rich are different from the rich, who are different from you and me.
* An heir to the du Pont fortune has been given probation for raping his three-year-old daughter because you know damn well why.
* What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?
* Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).
* Libertarian Police Department. Koch Brothers Quietly Seek To Ban New Mass Transit In Tennessee.
* A new study shows how Lake Tahoe might serve as a mammoth reservoir that could significantly mitigate California’s chronic water shortages without tarnishing the lake’s world-renowned beauty. What could possibly go wrong?
* The geographic sublime, from the Rural Assistance Center.
* How to Think About the Risk of Autism.
* Sepinwall vs. How I Met Your Mother.
* How To Negotiate With People Around The World.
* Gasp! CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says.
* Gasp! Torture Didn’t Lead to Bin Laden.
* New G.O.P. Bid to Limit Voting in Swing States.
* You once said: “I’m part-android.” Has that revelation haunted you?
* The kids are all right: Talking With 13-Year-Old Leggings Activist Sophie Hasty.
* Bourbon and Girl Scout Cookie Pairings.
* The Definitive Ranking Of Robin’s 359 Exclamations From ‘Batman.’ 25 Weird Batman Comic-Book Covers.
* Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy.
* Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the rRise of the BBbad Fan.
* Original Star Trek II: Wrath Of Khan VFX Storyboards Are A Visual Feast.
* The greatest, richest, freest country in the history of the world.
* The wisdom of markets: Walmart Realizes It’s Losing Billions Of Dollars By Denying Workers More Hours.
* Classic good news / bad news situation: Television Without Pity Archives Will Stay Online. Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come.
* Weird science: Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death.
* On Moretti-ism: Knowing is not reading.
* The New Inquiry’s “Money” issue is out with some great pieces, including one on China that really highlights a key contradiction in American ideology, which simultaneously holds that capitalism is the only possible economic system and that the future belongs to China. And Rortybomb’s piece on human capital is super chilling: basically dystopian literature, and it’s pretty much already real. And then the freedom piece! And the egg donation one! Great issue all around.
A person may be free because she can choose among a broad range of possibilities, or she may be free while she undertakes some action about which she has no choice at all, but whose compulsion she deems legitimate. Or she may be free when she faces a range of options, one of which is clearly superior to the alternatives, so that her behavior is perfectly predictable despite a formal freedom to choose. Freedom is not, at bottom, about the range of possibilities one faces but about the degree of consent one offers for the action to be taken or the circumstance to be endured.
* Japan Ordered To Stop Killing Antarctic Whales For “Science.”
* Teen Wins $70,000 Settlement After School Demanded Her Facebook Password.
* Is being thin more deadly than being obese? Take that, skinnies!
* I’ve had this dream: Student claims college instructor spent months teaching class the ‘wrong’ course.
* I dream of the day that Seattle and Portland can get along.
* And please don’t make me say it again.
