Of course my ice cubes are sculpted to order. What is this, the Dark Ages? // Days of future past. // Flight attendant relaxes passengers. // That’s not pole-dancing, this is pole-dancing. // For granny’s birthday card, some Tom of Finland stamps. // Recharge your smartphone in 30 seconds. // Children baffled by ancient technology. // Your Body During Adolescence, (1955). // Algae-eating robot. // Watching the watchmakers. // Wall dogs with strong stomachs. // One father’s Saturday mornings. // “He would sing us an entire string arrangement.” // Jet engine snowboarding. // “Over 3-4 days the brain will fill with ice.” // Moonshine. // Vittles. // Lovely, lovely snails. // And finally, well, you can’t fault his ambition. 

Ace’s headline pretty much sums it up:

Selfless Crusader Against Income Inequality to Heroically Accept $225,000 for Nine Months of Sub-Part-Time Work from State-Funded Organisation to Occasionally Give a Few Quotes About the Scourge of Income Inequality.

Hiring Paul Krugman, a Guardian contributor and the left-leaning owner of this humble abode, is part of the City University of New York’s latest “inequality initiative.” Mr Krugman’s will be “a modest role” with no teaching or supervision commitments. In fact, neither party seems able to define what, exactly, that “modest role” will be. Hence the salary of $25,000 per month.

Update, via the comments:

Further to the Dartmouth “micro-aggression” saga, Victor Davis Hanson notes the comforts and privilege of our campus role-players:   

President Hanlon apparently felt the students’ pain of what they had called “micro-aggressions,” or the day-to-day psychodramatic angst that these young elites feel are their own versions of the world of the Wal-Mart checker, the roofer in Delano who nails in 105 degree August heat, or the tractor driver who has disked half-mile long rows day in and day out on the farm. If you have never done such things, and you have $60,000 a year to spend on Dartmouth, then I suppose you could conceivably dream up a micro-aggression of being tortured to read ‘women’ for womyn, or having to use either the boys’ or girls’ bathroom…

They and their faculties enjoy privileges undreamed of by 99.9% of the population. DeVry and Phoenix trade schools cannot afford to offer Dartmouth-like race, class, and gender courses to contextualise their accounting, computer programming and nursing programmes because none of their students have the cash for such psychodramatic indulgences. Our aggrieved .01% can play act that they are embattled, precisely because free market capitalism gave them those dramatic opportunities in a way unknown in Mexico or the Congo.

And as we’ve seen, the longer and more ostentatiously this role-play is indulged, the more bonkers it becomes. Seven years of it can really leave a person beyond the reach of reason. 

Larry Sand on children’s education versus teachers’ job security: 

In the last ten years, only 91 teachers out of about 300,000 (.003 percent) who have attained ‘permanence’ [tenure] lost their jobs in California. Of those, only 19 (.0007 percent) have been dismissed for poor performance. Is it possible that Golden State teachers are that good? Such an astronomical permanence rate doesn’t square with the performance of California’s fourth- and eighth-graders, whose scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests persistently rank near the bottom.

And Steven Malanga notes some more academic high-mindedness: 

Readers can perhaps get a sense of the current state of the anthropology field by considering the most absurd claim against [Napoleon] Chagnon: that he was a McCarthyite. The evidence for this was little more than [an] observation that Chagnon grew up in the 1950s in a rural area of Michigan, where “anti-Communist feeling ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support.” Critics also sniped at Chagnon for being… “a free-market advocate.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

The paintings of Alyssa Monks were featured here a few years ago. In the following link, Ms Monks crops up again, along with some other rather talented people. 

Via MeFi. 

At least we are according to the aesthetes behind Swansea’s taxpayer-funded art festival Art Across the City, which improves the locals with things like this, and specifically conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, whose work, above, is sited in a car park behind a shopping centre. The press release for this mighty piece tells us, “Deller’s plaintive request gets straight to the point. Everybody and everywhere could do with more poetry.” Likewise, presumably, “everybody” could “do with” more conceptual art too.