Tokyo at night. 

Once again you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links in the comments. I’m sure that by now you know what to do. I’ll set the ball rolling with a new-fangled old fashioned, an interactive sewer map of San Francisco, a parental project for the weekend, and an innovative breakthrough in mid-day “stress relief.” 

Play nicely. I’ll be checking in later.

Those of you with a taste for academic papers that actively resist human comprehension may wish to follow the tweets of Amir Sariaslan, who catalogues some of the more challenging items in supposedly scholarly publishing. 

It’s an acquired taste, I know, but there’s a grim fun to be had in spotting the ostentatious and apparently random use of the word “neoliberal,” as, for instance, when pondering “neoliberal” orgasms and the “technology of sexiness.” Alternatively, music lovers can mull the pressing need for hip-hop to “escape from false consciousness and resist hegemony,” and some of you may be seduced by “queer architecture theory,” specifically, a “theatrical queer feminist interpretation of architecture.” Others may wish to while away their lunch hour with a paper “using straight and white teeth as a metaphor for straight and White identity,” thereby revealing how “straight White identities” are “arrogant and ignorant” and “often problematic.”

No, please. There’s no need to thank me.

Feminist Current is apparently “Canada’s leading feminist website.” Its editor Meghan Murphy tells us that “female students are under constant threat” and that all women everywhere live in a state of unending terror:

And who is it we fear? Is it other women? No. It is a male. A male with a penis that he may or may not use as a weapon.

Armed with a mind of infinite subtlety, Ms Murphy has more than a few ideas on how to combat this throbbing phallocratic menace:

There are solutions: a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity… all of that would help. 

An end to masculinity. Yes, I know, it’s quite a project. But first, baby steps:

It’s time to consider a curfew for men.

One more time: 

While a curfew would not resolve the problem of patriarchy and male violence against women, it does, in a way, address entitlement and privilege… The more I consider the idea of a curfew for men, the more it makes sense.

Why, it almost sounds like a gratuitous power fantasy, the product of an unwell mind. Of course a curfew will make dating rather difficult if you’re not a lesbian, and overnight motorway maintenance will have to be done exclusively by ladies. And there’ll be no more working nights to support your family, you indecently privileged patriarchal shitlord. Happily, however, our collective punishment as menfolk may not be eternal: 

The only power we have as authors is if we unionise and go on strike.

Amanda Craig, novelist, mouthing what I fear may be another classic sentence for our series.

Via Tim Worstall, who has more.

Update:

Spotted by Chester in the comments – Fintan O’Toole, literary editor of the Irish Times, calls for a “national arts strike” to extort further cash from the taxpayer. “The public has to be reminded that it really does care,” says he. And until more wallets land on the bonfire of publicly funded art, the nation’s creative titans should “close the arts centres” and “hold no poetry readings.”

It’s probably best to charge it before you set off. // Cheese heists in the Netherlands. // I think it’s called comeuppance. // Because Paris isn’t real. // The properties of lenses. // A library of pigments. // They disentangle yarn. // Tiny snack, eaten whole. // Whiskey glass of note, $50. // Avatar verisimilitude. // The loveliness of bee puke. // The product manual archive. (h/t, Things) // Siberian ice percussion. // Alphorn in a parking lot. // Hearing loss simulator. // Model of note, 1964. // HTML 909. // Every Batman fight scene onomatopoeia in one alphabetical gif. // The shelf lives of single-serving condiment sachets. (h/t, Coudal) // When a famous footballer turns on his Instagram notifications. // And finally, via Damian, some children really are very hard to please.

It’s the latest thing, according to Riyad A Shahjahan, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and whose areas of expertise include “social justice theory” and “pedagogies of dissent.”

In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and centre embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonise our academic lives. I show how this entails slowing down and ‘being lazy’.

Yes, comrades. We must “disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.” And temporalities, obviously. Postcolonial theorising is the only way to challenge the “neoliberal higher education climate” – hold that thought – and those “colonial binaries such as superior/inferior.” We must “dislodge higher education from neoliberal personhood.” As the exact nature of Dr Shahjahan’s problem has been buried under rhetorical rubble, I’ll translate as best I can. You see, being expected to keep up with the pace of lessons and deliver course work on time can induce feelings of discomfort and inferiority in those less able and conscientious, thereby resulting in “exclusionary effects,” which, it turns out, are oppressive and unjust:

These internalised temporalities may have especially exclusionary effects on bodies and selves. For example, Brandt (2008) found that the hurried pace of homework, exams and research associated with molecular biology laboratory class conflicted with a Navajo student’s sense of time. Thus, Navajo students internalised a sense of ‘being less than’ and felt guilty.

However, armed with our postcolonial theorising and postmodern bafflegab, and by stressing the mystical exoticness of people with browner skin, we shall set the people free from the “dominant culture of disembodiment” and the “temporal colonisation of our bodies” – i.e., expectations of punctuality, attentiveness and general competence:  

To undo this colonisation of our bodies, we should strive to ‘embody’ ourselves: inhabit our bodies fully, acknowledge the interconnection between mind, body, spirit, and contest the insertion of the body into the market.

Yes, we must contest the insertion.

As it’s Monday, I thought I’d cheer you with another chance to marvel at the mind-shattering talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a performance artist whose adventures with lettuce and underwear have previously entertained us. Being as she is so fearless and uncompromising, her latest work entails,

A series of research based actions in public spaces that explore automated systems that are triggered by human movement.

Specifically, Ms Schaefer is filmed walking past automatic doors, repeatedly and radically, and much to the indifference of passers-by:

Says she:

Through this enquiry, I hope to discover new possibilities for collaborations with these everyday machines.

So there’s that to look forward to.

Canned air, $19. // Cough syrup of yore. // Slow motion gargling. // Give good tongue. // Of Oz the Wizard. Because all films should be alphabetized. // How to store your bunnies. // Deter burglars with a fog cannon. // Wheeled robot climbs walls. // Mystery solved. // The Bigger Luke Wiki. (h/t, MeFi) // Meanwhile, in Iran. // Made of ice. // An app for the blind. It works on bananas and wine but not much else. // Erotic e-books sync to your sex toy. “Breathing on the screen will trigger vibrations.” // A stiff breeze. // Impress your guests no end with an Inception table. // Instant iced tea. Some travel involved. // No, after you. // Chip fingers. // Crime and correlation. // Discussing intelligence. // New Zealand has disappeared. // And finally, inevitably, moss watching is now a thing.

This just in:

An artist has been given thousands of pounds of public money to simply live in Glasgow for a year.

Oh come on. There’s at least one joke in there.

Scottish Government quango Creative Scotland is giving £15,000 to Ellie Harrison after she vowed not to leave the city limits for all of 2016. The 36-year-old believes this will allow her to “increase her sense of belonging, by encouraging her to seek out and create ‘local opportunities’ – testing what becomes possible when she invests all her ideas, time and energy within the city where she lives.”

All her ideas.

It is understood that the project will see her maintain an internet blog and that her whole life here will be a “work of art.”

How staggeringly convenient.

Harrison was born in London but has already lived in Glasgow for a number of years.

There we go.

Update, via the comments: