This Man was Made For You and Me.

“‘My job,’ he said in 2009, ‘is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.'” Pete Seeger, songwriter, archivist, activist, and godfather of the folk revival, 1919–2014. “‘The key to the future of the world,’ he said in 1994, ‘is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.'”

Twelve + Three = The Doctor’s New Duds.

“Lifelong Doctor Who fan Capaldi said: ‘He’s woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. ‘No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100% rebel Time Lord.’ Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat said the new era meant for a new outfit. He said: ‘Monsters of the universe, the vacation is over — Capaldi is suited and booted and coming to get you.'”

Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor has chosen his duds and, as the comparison above by Tom Spilsbury illustrates, he’s gone pretty Pertwee — which is fine by me. As far as my favorite Doctors go, Jon Pertwee is a close second to Tom Baker. Anyway, very crisp, clean lines. I like it.

Also I neglected to post this earlier, but here’s Moffat on where the show is going with Twelve: “The last two Doctors have been brilliant, and have been your ‘good boyfriend’ Doctors. But the Doctor isn’t always like that. There is the sort of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston end of the spectrum, where he is mad and dangerous and difficult…We need the kick-up-the-arse Doctor, in a way, to frighten you and make you think, oh, it’s a different show again.” Yes, please.

Ten Forward Couture.

“And then the Enterprise also travels to the planet where everybody dresses like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense.” From successful sci-fi costuming to something of the more hit-and-miss variety, io9 takes a gander at the costumes of the first three Star Trek: The Next Generation seasons. Points for creativity, I suppose.

Chief O’Brien, Working Stiff.

“We know that Miles O’Brien had a lot more fun serving aboard Deep Space Nine than he did aboard the Enterprise, and these ennui-filled comics help explain why. Hanging out alone in the transporter room all day is bound to drive a fellow a bit mad.”

Need more ST:TNG-related humor? io9 also recently pointed the way to this amusing webcomic about Chief O’Brien’s daily grind (before getting reassigned to Deep Space Nine.) Can an actual honest-to-goodness Colm Meaney cameo be far behind?

The Knicks’ll Take Her.

“I mean, do you want context? Do you need it? Can’t you just enjoying this incredible GIF of First Lady Michelle Obama dunking a tiny basketball on LeBron James?”

What DCist said. Sorry if this 3.3MB file just crashed your browser, but, c’mon now, this is the First Lady dunking on LeBron — kind of the thing GIFs were made for. Enjoy — preferably with a Subway $5 Footlong, since they could use some love now that the crazies have declared a jihad on them, for all the usual reasons.

Leave This Academic Factory.

“I am what’s called an adjunct. I teach four courses per semester at two different colleges, and I am paid just $24,000 a year and receive no health or pension benefits. Recently, I was profiled in the New York Times as the face of adjunct exploitation…Rather than use my situation to explain the systemic problem of academic labor, the article personalized – even romanticized – my situation as little more than the deferred dream of a struggling PhD with a penchant for poetry.”

Another for the PhDon’t file: Im the Guardian, James Hoff sets the record straight about the reality of today’s academic factory floor. “The adjunct problem is about the continued exploitation of a large, growing and diverse group of highly educated and dedicated college teachers who have been asked to settle for less pay (sometimes as little as $21,000 a year for full-time work) because the institutions they work for have callously calculated that they can get away with it.” It’s a nightmare, people — avoid it if you can. (Adjunctimir via here.)

Those Socialists at Goldman Sachs.

“U.S. businesses have never had it so good. Corporate cash piles have never been bigger, either in dollar terms or as a share of the economy. The labor market, meanwhile, is still millions of jobs short of where it was before the global financial crisis first erupted over six years ago. Coincidence? Not in the slightest.”

Karl Marx? Try Goldman Sachs. Their chief economist, Jan Hatzius, recently argued that “strength (in profits) is directly related to the weakness in hourly wages“. In fact, 2012 saw the highest corporate profits and lowest wages and salaries ever recorded, as a percentage of GDP. But, please, let’s hear more whining and ridiculously overheated Holocaust metaphors from the top 0.1%.

The Good Doctor Prescribes.

“There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it ‘vengeful’ and ‘primitive’ and ‘perverse’ regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. ‘That kind of stuff is opinion,’ they say, ‘and the reader is cheated if it’s not labeled as opinion.’

“Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal ‘objective journalism.’ Mencken understood that politics – as used in journalism – was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it.”

Via Brain Pickings, the late and missed Hunter S. Thompson (RIP) makes the case for advocacy journalism. “With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” (HST pic via here.)

Let’s Put On a Show!

Cause your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well they’re no friends of mine. Mental health break: An intricate supercut of famous dance scenes from the movies. But no Center Stage? C’mon now.

This is Your Film on Drugs.

“What do those substances, when they’re not altering minds, actually look like? To find out…Schoenfeld turned to a logical source: photographs. She converted her photo studio into a lab, then set to work exposing drugs (legal and illegal) to film negatives. She took the images that emerged from the reactions and magnified them—to gorgeous, and sometimes fairly creepy, results.” The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber points the way to All You Can Feel, an often-beautiful gallery of drugs on film on drugs.