#Iowa State University Press

[mooredanxieties]

It takes one to know one

Article: The FBI isn't just hunting psychopaths, they're head-hunting them too, offering competitive pay and benefits in the hopes of using one demented mind to catch another. Sure, we're familiar with the stereotype of the FBI profiler, swaggering onto a crime scene, fitting the pieces together like a master puzzler with his 1000-piece jigsaw. In reality, these profilers should be likened to harridans reading a cup of spent tealeaves- passing off their active imagination as incisive fact.

Fact Check: Drunk Iowa Driver's Alcohol Level Was Nearly Eight Times Legal Limit Article: Florida Woman Busted For DUI Tells Cop, "This Is What I Get For being a bridesmaid" Press Pass: South Carolina Man Attacked Grandmother Over Bizarre Chick Salad Mix-Up Press Pass: Open Gown, A Universal Hospital Indignity, Leads To Indiana Man's [unreadable]

Another Shrike In the Nest?

by Frederica Lounds

As reported before by Tattlecrime, the FBI maintains jurisdiction in the case of Garret Jacob Hobbs, the Minnesota Shrike. But as days turn to weeks, desperation has begun to take hold amongst the investigators. An embarrassing truth is beginning to emerge: There are no new leads on the whereabouts of the Shrike's seven missing victims. As families await any word at all about their lost daughters, the case looks as though it has stalled. Tip lines are open, but they have so far yielded little to nothing. Where lie these poor women who deserve a proper funeral? When approached for comment on the investigation, things with Graham took a surprising and dark turn. Upset at the probity of the questions at hand, Graham threatened, "It's not very smart to piss of a guy who thinks about killing people for a living." A statement like this calls into question the very mind and method of Will Graham and his FBI apologists. This is a man who skirted normal FBI... Read More

It Takes One To Catch One?

PHOTO EXLUSIVE - INSIDE THE LEEDS HOME

Exclusive photos of house where the Jacobi family was slaughtered.

The Jacobi home nestled in a sleepy suburb of Chicago that was startled awake by the shocking murder that has changed the area forever. Residents that have lived in the area for almost twenty years have said that they will now consider moving. See the disturbing exclusive photos inside.

Insane Fiend Consulted in Mass Murders by Agent He Tried To Kill

by Freddie Lounds

FEDERAL MANHUNTERS, stymied in their search for the Tooth Fairy, have turned to the most savage killer in captivity for help. Hannibal the Cannibal has gotten a call from a very special visitor- none other than Will Graham himself. I saw it with my own eyes, Graham coming form the main entrance to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane on a recent afternoon. This mysterious visit had this reporter curious to its nature. What could Graham, who was almost a victim of Lecter himself, have to discuss with the Mad Doctor? A bit more digging lead me to face to face discussion with Will Graham. Needless to say he was evasive. But I was able to suss out that Graham has begun working for the FBI again on the Tooth Fairy investigation. And he was in fact visiting Lecter to help him get information on the Tooth Fairy murders. Is this really where to FBI has sunk? Hiring a man with questionable stability to get information form a clinically insane psychotic? If this is where the FBI has been able to take this investigation, this reporter is worried. Worried for the family left behind by the Leeds and Jacobi murders. And worried for the next family on whatever deranged list the Tooth Fairy has made. For surely there will be a next family. There have been three so far the the Tooth Fairy shows no sign of stopping. And frankly- what's to stop him? Certainly no local police agencies. Certainly no the FBI who have done nothing to further the investigations since they took over several months ago.

CANNIBAL KILLER FEEDS THE FEDS

[alt] FBI IN BED WITH THE DEVIL

[alt] TOOTH FAIRY INVESTIGATION BUNGLED BY FEDS?

Desperation Leads to Partnership with Cannibalistic Killer The recent apparent partnership between the FBI and Hannibal Lecter has this reporter wondering if there is anyone with whom the FBI won't partner. One wonders the validity of whatever information can be gleaned from someone who is so clinically insane as to devour those around him. How much can Lecter be trusted not to give misleading information to protect perhaps a fraternity of killers with whom he would most definitely be a member. And what does Lecter get from all this? Special privileges? Or maybe just the excitement of getting inside information on the violent nature of the Tooth Fairy crimes. This would no doubt a source of great pleasure for someone so diabolical in nature. I wonder how this makes the families of the victims feel. To know that Hannibal the Cannibal is drooling over the bloody remains of the lost loved ones. Is whatever little information can be provided by this this 'expert' killer worth making the victim's families continue to suffer?

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Unique straining affects phase transformations in silicon, a material vital for electronics

When Valery Levitas left Europe in 1999, he packed up a rotational diamond anvil cell and brought it to the United States. He and the researchers in his group are still using a much-advanced version of that pressing, twisting tool to squeeze and shear materials between two diamonds to see in situ, within the actual experiment, what happens and verify the researchers' own theoretical predictions. How, for example, do crystal structures change? Does that produce new, and potentially useful properties? Does the shearing change how high pressure needs to be applied to create new material phases? It's research "at the intersection of advanced mechanics, physics, material science, and applied mathematics," wrote Levitas, an Iowa State University Anson Marston Distinguished Professor of Engineering and the Murray Harpole Chair in Engineering.

Read more.

[mpchev]

You like reading fanfics? How about reading about fanfics? 😏

Here’s what I've read so far (or am currently getting through) for my dissertation on fanfiction bookbinding! I'll be updating it as I go until the end of July. If you have any recs to add to the towering pile or any questions/opinions about something on there, I’m all ears!

on fan studies & ficbinding ✔

Alexander, Julia, ‘Making fanfiction beautiful enough for a bookshelf’, The Verge, 9 March 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/22311788/fanfiction-bookbinding-tiktok-diy-star-wars-harry-potter-twitter-fandom> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén, ‘Binding fan fiction and reexamining book production models’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler, ‘Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Jenkins, Henry, Textual Pochers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routeledge, 1992)

Jenkins, Henry, ‘Transmedia Storytelling 101’, Pop Junctions, 21 March 2007 <http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html#sthash.gSETwxQX.dpuf> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Hellekson, Karen, ‘Making Use Of: The Gift, Commerce, and Fans’, Cinema Journal, 54, no. 3 (2015), 125–131

Kennedy, Kimberly, ‘Fan binding as a method of fan work preservation’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Minkel, Elizabeth, ‘Before “Fans,” There Were “Kranks,” “Longhairs,” and “Lions”: How Do Fandom Gain Their Names?’, Atlas Obscura, 30 May 2024 <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fandom-names> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Penley, Constance, Nasa / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997)

Price, Ludi, ‘Fanfiction, Self-Publishing, and the Materiality of the Book: A Fan Writer’s Autoethnography’, Humanities, 11, no. 100 (2022), 1–20

Schiller, Melanie, ‘Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences’, in Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, ed. by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 99–107

on folklore, the internet, other background reading ✔

Barthes, Roland, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984)

Blank, Trevor J., Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2009)

Mauss, Marcel, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.’, L’année sociologique, 1923–1924; digital edition by Jean-Marie Tremblay, Les classiques des sciences sociales, 17 February 2002, <http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html> [accessed 10 June 2024]

McCulloch, Gretchen, Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing (Random House, 2019)

Niles, John D., Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1999)

hopefully coming up next (haven't started yet)

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. by Paul Booth (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018)

A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, ed. by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021)

Dietz, Laura, ‘Showing the scars: A short case study of de-enhancement of hypertext works for circulation via fan binding or Kindle Direct Publishing’, 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ‘23), September 4–8, 2023, Rome Italy (ACM: New York, 2023)

Fathallah, Judith May, Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017)

Finn, Kavita Mudan, and Jessica McCall, ‘Exit, pursued by a fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe’, Critical Survey, 28, no. 2 (2016), 27–38

Hjorth, Larissa et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017)

Jacobs, Naomi, and JSA Lowe, ‘The Design of Printed Fanfiction: A Case Study of Down to Agincourt Fanbinding’, Proceedings from the Document Academy, 9, issue 1, article 5

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

Jenkins, Henry, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning In A Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013)

Kennedy, Kimberly, and Shira Buchsbaum, ‘Reframing Monetization: Compensatory Practices and Generating a Hybrid Economy in Fanbinding Commissions’, Humanities, 11, no. 67 (2022), 1–18

Kirby, Abby, ‘Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching’, Humanities, 11, no. 87 (2002), 1–9

Kustritz, Anne, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction (New Work: Routeledge, 2024)

Lamerichs, Nicolle, Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affecive Reception in Fan Cultures, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Universtiy Press, 2018)

Popova, Milena, ‘Follow the trope: A digital (auto)ethnography for fan studies’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Rosenblatt, Betsy, and Rebecca Tushnet, ‘Transformative Works: Young Women’s Voices on Fandom and Fair Use’, in eGirls, eCitizens: Putting Technology, Theory and Policy into Dialogue with Girls’ and Young Women’s Voices, ed. by Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves

Soller, Bettina, ‘Filing off the Serial Numbers: Fanfiction and its Adaptation to the Book Market’, in Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. by Johannes Fehrle, Werner Schäfke-Zell (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 58–85

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

Donald Trump demanded on Sunday that pollster Ann Selzer be investigated for releasing a preelection poll of Iowa that showed him losing to Vice President Kamala Harris.  “A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!” Trump attacked Selzer after the longtime pollster announced that she is retiring from conducting election polling. 

“Over a year ago I advised the [Des Moines] Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,” she wrote in a column in the newspaper, whose polling she conducted for decades. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve done for the Register, for the Detroit Free Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and for other public and private organizations interested in elections. They were great clients and were happy with my work.”

Seltzer’s final Iowa poll was way off the mark. It showed Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points, but Trump went on to win the state by 13 points. However, releasing a poll that turned out to be incorrect is not illegal. And subjecting pollsters to ridiculous investigations if their polls were incorrect would have a chilling effect on the industry because pollsters wouldn’t want to risk their financial security or freedom and would either not release their surveys or shut down altogether.

On Oct. 31, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News, falsely alleging that the “60 Minutes” interview the network aired with Harris was doctored and amounted to a “deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news."

[...] MSNBC is preemptively kissing Trump’s ring ahead of his inauguration in January. The co-hosts of the network’s “Morning Joe” program, who have been loudly critical of Trump since he incited an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, went to Mar-a-Lago to clear the air with Trump before he takes office. "Joe and I realize it's time to do something different," Mika Brzezinski said on air Monday morning. "And that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him." What “Morning Joe” just did is a perfect example of Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder describes in his book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” as “obeying in advance.” “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder wrote in his book. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Unhinged demagogue Donald Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday demanding that retiring pollster Ann Selzer be investigated for releasing a poll that had Kamala Harris up 3 in Iowa right before the election.

Selzer announced her retirement from the Des Moines Register, which was in the works for a year.

[justinssportscorner]

Li Zhou at Vox:

Caitlin Clark, a college basketball phenom and the top pick at Monday’s WNBA draft, will make a staggeringly low salary in her rookie year compared to her NBA counterpart. Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark’s base salary will be $76,535 as a rookie. In the NBA, meanwhile, the first draft pick is expected to make roughly $10.5 million in base salary their first year.

Players like Clark, who was picked by the Indiana Fever Monday night after multiple blockbuster seasons as a point guard for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, and former Louisiana State University forward Angel Reese, who was signed by the Chicago Sky, have helped women’s college basketball achieve a landmark year. For the first time ever, the women’s final March Madness game, which drew as many as 24 million viewers, surpassed the viewership of the men’s final. “It’s been catapulted this year to a whole new level,” says University of Michigan sports management professor Ketra Armstrong. “People are tuning in to the WNBA draft that never had before.” The fresh attention for the WNBA draft, however, is also spotlighting the problems the league has had with pay equity. For years, the WNBA’s salaries have lagged the NBA’s by a massive margin. That’s due in part to the leagues’ differences in revenue and season lengths. But other factors, like differences in collective bargaining agreements and revenue-sharing, also play a big role. [...]

The pay-gap problem is bigger than any one player

Despite her record-breaking performance in the NCAA and the energy that she’s generated for the sport, Clark will earn less than 1 percent of what her male counterpart will make in her first year. She will be able to supplement her salary through endorsement and marketing deals, but even with those, her estimated earnings will be lower than the base salary of a first-round NBA pick. Clark isn’t alone. WNBA star Brittney Griner — who spent months jailed in Russia — spoke about the reason she played abroad in the offseason, and noted that a big part of it was to supplement her income: “I’ll say this ... the whole reason a lot of us go over is the pay gap,” she said at a press conference in April 2023. In 2023, a WNBA player made a $113,295 base salary on average, while an NBA player made an average base salary of $9.7 million. The NBA’s much larger revenue is part of the reason for this discrepancy: It takes in an estimated $10 billion annually, compared to the WNBA, which has been projected to bring in roughly $200 million. Its season is also about twice the length of the WNBA’s, including 82 games compared to 40 games. Those factors alone, however, don’t tell the full story.

It's a grotesque insult that WNBA stars (and potential stars) such as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Brittney Griner are appallingly underpaid compared to their male counterparts in the NBA.

The large gender pay gap between WNBA and NBA players is why WNBA players choose to play in overseas leagues during that league's offseason to supplement their income.

[considerourknowledge]

Caitlin Clark May Not Get Paid As Well As Her Male Counterparts, But At Least She Gets Sexually Harassed by the Press

Caitlin Clark was introduced as a member of the WNBA's Indiana Fever for the first time Wednesday, as the No. 1 draft pick met the media at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. While Clark will make much less than her male counterparts in the NBA, the star guard from Iowa will also have to deal with unwanted and inappropriate comments from male reporters. When it was his turn to ask Clark a question, Gregg Doyel, an award-winning columnist for The Indianapolis Star, made a heart gesture with his hands in her direction, which Clark recognized as the signal she gives her family after every game. That gesture has become associated with Clark and was featured in one of her State Farm commercials. When Clark made the association, Doyel responded in the most creepy misogynistic way, “Start doing it to me, and we’ll get along just fine.” There was near-universal agreement that what Doyel said was inappropriate, disrespectful to Clark, and generally uncomfortable. He has since apologized, but come on!

[uispeccoll]

Rita Dove #VoicesFromTheStacks

For #NationalPoetryMonth, this post will highlight UIowa alumnus Rita Dove. Dove is an American poet, essayist, and novelist from Akron, Ohio. Dove was the first Black U.S. Poet Laureate in the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. 

From PoetryFoundation.org, "photo courtesy of the poet"

Dove received her undergraduate degree from Miami State University. She was also a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1974-75. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 1977. In addition, Dove has received 29 honorary doctorates, including from Yale University, Emory University, and the University of Iowa.

Dove received a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah, her semi-fictionalized poetry collection about her grandparents. She is the only poet that has received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton (1996) and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama (2011), along with many other awards.

Dove has written and curated poetry columns for New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post. Her current position is as the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia University. She has held a position in their English Department since 1993. 

Dove’s influences are often varied, over her 40 year career she has published 11 volumes of poetry, a play, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and a novel. Her early works especially focus on the lives of individual people with backdrops in wider historic moments. She has also curated projects during her career, including a collection of writings about the African diaspora during her time as Poet Laureate, and The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry in 2011. Her most recent work is a 2021 poetry collection titled Playlist for the Apocalypse. 

Included above is a broadside of Dove's poem "Evening Primrose" from Atalia Press. Printed on handmade Barcham Green paper and one of only 120 ever printed, this poem is signed by its poet. It is one of the items that Special Collections & Archives holds in our collections; call number BROADSIDE PS3554.087 E94 1998. For more of Dove's work in our collection, view here.

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World by Eva Skrande

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee:

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-boat-that-brought-sadness-into-the-world-by-eva-skrande/

The poems in The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World address #exile both literally and metaphorically. The book addresses the literal exile of the poems’ main speaker as well as the hard migrations of refugees. It discusses how exile might “swallow [one] whole” and the pain of #refugees, whom the speaker imagines long to see their homeland once more. Metaphorically, it looks at life as a #journey of and to exile. The book explores, for example, the journey from childhood through older ages and suggests that death is the ultimate exile as we leave the country of the body. These #poems are incantations that challenge, refuse, and accept loss and longing.

Eva Skrande is the author of three volumes of poems, including My Mother’s Cuba and Bone Argot along with the chapbook, The Gates of the Somnambulist. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace the American Poetry Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, the Inprint Foundation, and the Houston Arts Council. She teaches for Writers in the Schools in Houston. She is a faculty tutor at Houston Community College and is a writing coach and founder of Write for Success Tutoring.

PRAISE FOR The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World by Eva Skrande

“I start,” Eva Skrande writes, “where I always start: in the nave of the throat / where the hymns of fish decree that stars shall ride on their backs forever.” In The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World, the poet constructs a rich symbolic landscape populated by lilies and crows, moons and fish, yearning mothers and displaced daughters. What emerges from it all is a brilliant meditation on exile—exile as displacement, as state of mind and body, as metaphor and as fact—beautifully imagined and intricately interconnected. “I am made of countries / and bone,” Skrande concludes. “Made of wishes / of juniper and pine / of the promises told to the exiled.” This is a gorgeous book, one I will return to with pleasure.

–Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems

“I am made of countries/and bone,” Eva Skrande writes in this magical book of sorrow and mystery, blessing and lament. These surreal hymns sing with a sacred air!

–Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

“Eva Skrande‘s poetry sails again through the universal realms of her spiritual ancestors –Gabriela Mistral, Esther Raab, Yehuda Amichai, Charles Simic — with her own flowing, sensuous and distinct music of psyche and language. Skrande’s work leaps with primal joy into humility, longing, ecstasy, and above all, profound gratitude for both the natural and the diverse cultural worlds she has inherited by birth. Now, in her third still miraculously ingenuous book the poet wings her visionary way through perilous journeys into the shared territories of Divine Love and human forgiveness.”

–Victoria Tester, author of Miracles of Sainted Earth

In her impressive third collection, Eva Skrande fashions an island out of memory. With elegant, sometimes Biblical language and bold strokes she unpacks a shared history of exile, opening wide the doors to a place where the past is both refuge and roadmap. Intimate and expressive, The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World becomes a manual for the disenfranchised and the hopeful, a graceful primer for “those with nowhere to dock their dreams.”

–Silvia Curbelo, author of Falling Landscape

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

[ejb59195]

Works Cited

¹ Çelebi, E. (17th century). Seyahatname. [Book of Travel].

² Krautheimer, R. (1986). Hagia Sophia: A History. Princeton University Press.

³ Hagia Sophia Research Team (n.d.). Hagia Sophia. [Photograph of Hagia Sophia exterior]. Harvard University. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_files_xxlarge/public/whoseculture/files/hagia_sophia_exterior.jpg?m=1607399097&itok=xge9nGpj

⁴ Peyssonnel, C. de. (2011). The Ottoman Empire in the 18th century: An account by Charles de Peyssonnel. (R. Dankoff, Trans.). Istanbul: The Isis Press. (Original work published 1791)

⁵ Wohl, S. (2017). The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: The Emergent Unfolding of A Complex Adaptive System. Delft Technical University and Iowa State University. https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f478ee3b-4098-4630-996b-024d6eefca01/content

⁶ Sèbah, J. P. (1890). Istanbul Grand Bazaar. [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Istanbul-Grand_Bazaar_Sebah.jpg

⁷ Zelazko, A. (2024). Topkapı Palace Museum. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Topkapi-Palace-Museum

⁸ Crocker, S. (2021). What life was like as a member of the sultan’s harem in the Ottoman Empire. Grunge. https://www.grunge.com/337783/what-life-was-like-as-a-member-of-the-sultans-harem-in-the-ottoman-empire/

⁹ Britannica. (n.d.). Third courtyard. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Topkapi-Palace-Museum/Third-courtyard

¹⁰ William J. Bowe, (n.d.). Topkapı Palace Museum. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://cdn.britannica.com/86/148586-004-9ADEC63B/Topkapi-Palace-Istanbul-Turkey.jpg?s=1500x700&q=85

¹¹ Field, J. F. (2023, July 6). Süleymaniye Mosque. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Suleymaniye-Mosque

¹² Sinan, M. (2017). The Book of Architecture of Sinan, the Chief Architect (H. Crane & E. Akin-Kivanc, Trans.). Leiden: Brill. (Original work published 1588)

¹³ Agiel, A. (2020). Süleymaniye Mosque (1550) in Istanbul. [Photograph]. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ahmed-Agiel/publication/342666235/figure/fig1/AS:909290281914379@1593803105947/Sueleymaniye-Mosque-1550-in-Istanbul.jpg

¹⁴ Janissary Letter. (1526). [Letter written by a Janissary to his family]. Ottoman Empire Historical Archives.

¹⁵ Aksan, V. H. (2007). Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged. Pearson Education Limited.

¹⁶ Nasuh, M. (1558). Ottoman Janissaries [Painting]. https://www.realmofhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/facts-ottoman-janissaries_14-min.jpg?ezimgfmt=ng:webp/ngcb20

[beardedmrbean]

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — After years of opposition to any form of marijuana legalization in Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers are now working privately to build support for a medical cannabis program that could win bipartisan backing and be enacted into law later this year, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos told The Associated Press on Thursday.

For now, the group of lawmakers — whom Vos declined to name — are working only among Assembly Republicans to build enough support, and he hopes to introduce the plan this fall. Vos has long backed some form of medical marijuana program, but no bill has ever received a vote in either the GOP-controlled Assembly or Senate.

Vos said he remains steadfastly opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana and does not want to create a medical program that would be a precursor to that. Wisconsin remains an outlier nationally, with medical marijuana legal in 38 states and recreational marijuana legal in 21. The push for legalization in Wisconsin has gained momentum, as neighboring Illinois and Michigan allow recreational use while Minnesota and Iowa have legalized medical use.

“We are not Illinois. We are not California. We are not Colorado,” Vos said in an interview. “We are a state that’s at best purple. And purple is not legalization of recreational marijuana.”

Vos’s announcement that Republicans have been working on a deal he hopes can pass the Legislature comes on April 20, or “420 Day,” marijuana’s high holiday. Advocates for pot legalization planned to announce a “Grass Routes Tour” that will make four stops across the state to promote cannabis legalization.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, who is leading the fight for full legalization, cast doubt on Vos’ intentions.

“We’ve seen this story before — but actions speak louder than words,” Agard said in a statement. “Session after session, the Speaker has come forward with empty promises but no tangible steps toward any form of legal cannabis Wisconsin.”

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers proposed full legalization of marijuana in his state budget, an idea that Republicans vowed to reject. Last April 20, a Republican-authored bill creating a medical marijuana program received a public hearing, the first time any such bill made it that far in the GOP-controlled Legislature.

However, the bill died in committee.

Senate Republicans have been less open to pot legalization than those in the Assembly. But in January, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said a bill to create a medical marijuana program could pass this legislative session — as long as regulations are put forward to ensure it’s for those in serious pain.

Sixty-four percent of Wisconsinites support legalizing marijuana for any use, according to October polling by the Marquette University Law School. More than 80% of Wisconsinites supported the idea of a medical marijuana program, according to 2019 polling.

[thehorrortree]

Deadline: July 1st, 2024 Payment: Contributor's Copy Theme: Speculative poems and micro-prose (300 words max.) engaging with themes of environmentalism, climate change, technology, and more through a lens of Midwestern experience. Middle West Press LLC, an independent micro-publisher based in Central Iowa, has issued a call for human-generated poems and micro-prose (300 words max.) engaging with themes of environmentalism, climate change, technology, and more through a lens of Midwestern experience. The working title of this project is Midwest Futures: Poems from Tomorrow's Heartland. Deadline for submissions is Jul. 1, 2024. Publication is projected for Spring/Summer 2025. Submit via Submittable here at this link. This is explicitly a speculative poetry (and related micro-flash-prose) market. We are interested not only in the gritty and grounded, but also near-future science-fiction-infused visions of the possible. For inspirations and vibes, see also movements such “Solarpunk,” “Eco-modernism” and “Climate Fiction” (“Cli-Fi”), as well as these potential exemplars of eco-poetry and other writing: Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota: Poems by Amelia Gorman “Botanical Fanaticism” and “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost” by Thylias Moss “8 Black Eco-Poets Who Inspire Us” - Sierra magazine “Five Indigenous Poets Explore Loss and Love of their Native Lands” - Natural Resource Defense Council Forever War by Kate Gaskin “Imagining the Future of Phoenix” - Arizona State University climate-writing exercise Special “Cli-Fi” issue of Guernica magazine Flyway: Journal of Writing and the Environment While we envision the Middle West as a renewing, evolving, and complicated place, but we are also not blind to the social and environmental challenges we face. We want to illuminate real-world problems specific to the region, including but not limited to climate change, racism, water quality, aging populations, rural/urban divide, and healthcare deserts. We want to imaginatively celebrate new possibilities, solutions, and futures. As with previous Middle West Projects, we hope to publish work that intersects in some way with the people, places, nature, and history of the terrains and cultures we inhabit, especially works stemming from the lived experiences of women, youth, poets of color, poets who identify as LGBTQ+, military veterans, and other marginalized voices. Our informal rule-of-thumb is that the modern U.S. states carved from the Louisiana Purchase, and/or states located west of the Ohio River and east of the Missouri River, safely define our intellectual playground. The Middle West is a moveable feast, however. We recognize that the “Middle West” includes themes, characters, and geographies that cannot be contained by mere borders. In fact, the Middle West may be most apparent in places where it is not—or when viewed and experienced by geographic “outsiders.” Editors of the project write: Our intent with this project is to have fun, but also to illuminate, interrogate, and challenge (via the still-human domain of poetry!!!) the ways people think about place, people, and culture. We are looking for terrain-shifting, mind's-eye-bending, firmament-rending expressions of new and future realities. Be provocative. Be poignant. Be human. Even if you write like a Giant Robot Tractor. Ideally, many of the works submitted will engage questions such as: How could we change the ways we build, grow, live, work, and travel on the land? What would be the results? How could we change the ways we interact with and honor the land (and our predecessors, ancestors, and neighbors), toward visions of a "new" Midwest? In creating and crafting their own original concepts and works, contributors might consider various modes of commenting, observing, or even inhabiting technologies, histories, mythologies, or Midwestern stories depicted in popular culture. Consider, for example: Starship captain James T. Kirk will be born in Riverside, Iowa.

Paul Bunyan’s companion blue ox Babe is likely the result of genetic engineering. The first binary electronic digital calculating device was constructed at Iowa State University. It was not powered by corn. George Washington Carver both attended and later taught at Iowa State University. What futures did he imagine? There are 15 nuclear power plants & unknown number of kaiju located in the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Giant. Robot. Tractors. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Deadline for submissions is Jul. 1, 2024. Notifications will be sent not later than Nov. 4, 2024. Target publication date for this project is Spring/Summer 2025. Submit from 1 to 3 poems in the same file (.DOC or .DOCX). Work generated using ChatGPT and similar computer-assisted word "AI" will NOT be accepted. Human-generated poems only, please. New and original work is preferred. Please note in cover letter whether specific works have previously been published elsewhere. Simultaneous submissions are accepted. Please notify the editors via Submittable if one of more poems becomes unavailable during the consideration period. Publisher requests non-exclusive, worldwide, English-language print and e-book anthology rights. Contributors will receive one complimentary print or digital (where postal delivery is not available) contributor's copy. Via: Middle West Press.

[kenyatta]

The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat; a team of scholars has been working for almost 10 years to detail exactly how the rigging works. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, later joined by Claire Grossman, began by noticing that poetry readings they regularly attended were held in “mainly white rooms.” They wanted to know why. To find out, they would need to widen their purview. The wider they went, the hungrier they became to understand who gets to succeed as a writer in the United States today. They wanted to reveal the system, to see all of it.

So, they collected data. Because prizes are a normative standard for success, they collected data on prizes — every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022 dollars. They recorded who won, what their gender and race were, where they earned their degrees, and who served as judges. Then they published what they found in aseriesofessays. What did they find?

They found that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.” They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.” Iowa has special clout: its alumni “are 49 times more likely to win compared to writers who earned their MFA at any other program since 2000.”

They found that “in recent years, about a quarter of the titles that won prizes were published by […] imprints of Penguin Random House; about half were published by an additional four presses: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan), Copper Canyon, Graywolf, and HarperCollins.”

They found that race is more complicated than they initially thought. Prizes were — for long stretches exclusively — white throughout the 20th century. But that has changed in recent years: “From 2000 to 2018, 33 percent of prizewinners identified as other than white, coming close to the 36 percent of the population who did in the 2010 census.” (Publishers did not keep up; their lists remained far whiter.) But nonwhite writers needed elite credentials more than white ones. Black writers who won prizes, for example, were much more likely than white writers to hold Ivy League degrees and MFAs.

All this power is routed through people. Grossman, Spahr, and Young show how a small group of writers who served often as judges wielded disproportionate influence; in poetry, these figures include Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Wilbur. Grossman, Spahr, and Young show how often prizes appear reciprocal: those who give later receive, and vice versa.

[signipotens]

1, 2, 4 for the ask game?

Ooh! Thank you for indulging me :​]

I realised after I reblogged the ask game that almost all of what I’ve read recently has been research for my new big Mormon alternate history/fanfic project, so I’ll give you a Mormon thing and a non-Mormon thing for each :​p

1. What’s something you read recently and enjoyed?

For Mormon stuff, most of the books I’ve been reading are things I’ve read before, but I recently bought Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard UP, 2010) and it’s so good. As much a history of a lake and a mountain as it is a history of the people who have come to live there, and even more so a history of the way that Americans—Mormons, Indians, and Gentiles alike—have used and conceived of the lands that they have built their homes on, Farmer does a fantastic job of situating Mormon Zionism both in its American and its particular Mormon contexts, and of showcasing the ways that mythology, history, folklore, and everyday life have come crashing together as the Mormons have made Utah into their national homeland and the Timpanogos have been wrenched from theirs.

For non-Mormon stuff, I’ve recently finished reading The Book of Abraham by Marek Halter (completely unrelated to the Mormon thing of the same name). Though at times it can be a bit of a bit of a who’s who of famous Europeans and pogroms, and the portrayal of women is lacking throughout (charitably, this is drawing on a general theme in Jewish and European historical chronicles, which also sideline women), I think it’s worth reading for the form alone. Drawing on all manner of epistolary, journalistic, biblical, and aggadaic styles, Halter follows the lives of generations upon generations of one Jewish family (after about 1600, his own) as they live their lives in various locales across Europe and SWANA between the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 and the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Makes me want to read Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms again, since I think that’s one of the few books that might have the same vibes. Also going to read the sequel here soon.

2. What’s something you read recently and disliked?

Despite being, in my opinion, one of the seminal moments in Mormon history, and despite it being extremely well-documented, the Exodus to Utah is surprisingly poorly covered in the academic literature. That Richard Bennett’s duology We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Deseret Book, 1997) and Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) is the best we’ve got is honestly a bit more a condemnation of the state of current Mormon scholarship than it is praise of Bennett’s work. That’s not to say that they’re bad, and I like the ideas at play—the establishment of legitimacy in the post-Martyrdom Church, the role of Religion™ in defining how Mormons went about finding their Promised Land, the practical mechanics of funding and moving several thousand people across a country—but the narrative, sourcing, numerical analysis, and Bennett’s writing style are fairly weak, and his analysis is lacking a certain breadth and depth as I would prefer for what ought to be the seminal work on the subject. Must be read alongside at least Lawrence Coates’ “Refugees Meet: The Mormons and Indians in Iowa” (BYU Studies Quarterly 21, no. 4, 1981) and something like Carol Madsen’s Journey to Zion: Voices from the Mormon Trail (Deseret Book, 1997).

For general fiction, at the beginning of summer I read through the first couple books in the Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, and Abaddon’s Gate, and while I think they’re decently good and recommendable, I also couldn’t really get into them, I guess? My disappointment with how the books treat Mormons can be found elsewhere and is kinda pertinent to this; otherwise I just didn’t really vibe with the setting and didn’t particularly like the authors’ treatment of future religion and politics, tho I did enjoy the characters well enough, especially Holden. Don’t know if I’ll continue into the next arc, but I probably won’t for the time being, unless someone wants to convince me :​p

4. What are your top 3 comfort reads?

Mostly stuff I loved in my childhood. I think my main go-to is Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, but I also love Jules Verne, especially Voyage au centre de la terre and Tour du monde en 80 jours, both of which never fail to cheer me up. My third, weird answer is Winthrop Sargeant’s eminent translation of the Bhagavad Gita, both for the content of the story itself and especially for Sargeant’s extensive glosses (each line is given in Devanagari, IAST, a word-for-word translation, and a prose translation, with an exhaustive concordance on each page giving the roots, inflectional information, and translations for each word in that page’s stanza. very fun for linguistics brain :​] ).

[iowacovid19tracker]

As Iowans learn to live with the COVID-19 pandemic, data and opinions have come at them from all directions. One of the leading voices in Iowa (leading because the Iowa press made it so) is Sara Anne Willette, otherwise known on Twitter as @/amethystarlight. She dubs herself the “chief data officer” of iowacovid19tracker.org, a website devoted to all sorts of pandemic data.

According to court documents, Willette completed her undergraduate training at the University of Iowa, which focused on medieval history, religious studies, and classical languages. She completed that undergraduate work in 2005, and her resume shows no work history until 2013, when she started working as a dog walker under the trade name of “Furry Friends Pet Care.”

Willette apparently abandoned her career as a dog walker in March 2020 for the new enterprise of being the “chief data officer” of her website iowacovid19tracker.org. She also started “IAC Tracker, Inc.” an Iowa non-profit corporation.

According to Iowa Secretary of State records, she filed articles of incorporation for IAC Tracker, Inc. on September 8, 2020, as the sole officer of the corporation. The stated business activity of the corporation is to provide “data transparency, education, outreach, and guidance regarding COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.” The articles also state that the corporation is intended to qualify as a tax-exempt organization as a 501(c)(3) with the IRS, which means that donations to the corporation are exempt from taxation.

But despite the claimed charitable purpose of her corporation, a search of the Internal Revenue Service’s database of tax-exempt organizations shows no record of the corporation having actually filed with the IRS for that status. Without such an IRS filing, IAC Tracker, Inc. cannot legally claim that it is operating as a 501(c)(3) charity.

Iowa Secretary of State documents show that IAC Tracker, Inc. was administratively dissolved on September 7, 2021. Because there is no record of the corporation having filed its annual report,so it seems likely that the corporation was dissolved for this reason.

Willette’s educational background and work history were revealed in an affidavit submitted in litigation challenging the Iowa legislature’s decision to prohibit school districts from requiring students, staff, and visitors from wearing masks. A parent from Council Bluffs has sued Governor Reynolds and several other state departments and their directors challenging that law. The affidavit included Willette’s resume:

UPDATE:

Friday, September 10th 3:02 pm CDT

After the publication of this article, Willette tweeted that she had been listed as the co-author of two academic articles. Both articles listed her husband, Iowa State University Associate Professor Auriel Willette as the primary author. One article, titled “Using machine learning to predict COVID-19 infection and severity risk among 4,510 aged adults: a UK Biobank cohort study” was published January 5, 2021. It listed Sara Willette’s academic affiliation as “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker, Ames, IA, USA.”:

The second article, from July 2021, was titled “Inflammation, negative affect, and amyloid burden in Alzheimer’s disease: Insights from the kynurenine pathway.” It listed Sara Willette’s academic affiliation as “Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.”:

But a review of that department’s website by Iowa Field Report does not list Sara Willette as a member of its staff or faculty. Iowa Field Report has submitted an inquiry with the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition to learn of Sara Willette’s affiliation with it. This story will be updated when we receive a response.

UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 13th

Iowa Field report reached out to ISU and the Interim Department Chair Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition to determine what if any, affiliation Ms. Willette has with Iowa State University.

The University replied with a single sentence:

Sara Willette is not a student or an employee with Iowa State University. Thank you

Read the full article:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trudy Ring at The Advocate:

Twenty-six Republican state attorneys general are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the anti-transgender sports laws in Idaho and West Virginia. The AGs of Idaho and West Virginia have already asked the high court to review rulings that blocked them from enforcing their laws barring trans athletes from competing under their gender identity in school sports. The justices, who are in recess for the summer, haven’t said if they’ll take the case. The AGs calling on the court to uphold the laws filed friend-of-the-court briefs, known formally as amicus curiae, August 14. Such briefs are filed by people and organizations that are not directly involved in a case but want to express an opinion on it. The attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming signed on to the Idaho brief, and the same ones, with the exception of West Virginia and the addition of Idaho, signed on to the West Virginia brief — that’s because Idaho and West Virginia, respectively, are the states directly involved.

They assert that such laws are needed to assure equal opportunities for cisgender girls and women in sports. “Amici States all have laws or policies like Idaho’s that restrict girls’ sports teams to biological females,” the Idaho brief reads. “Basing the distinction on biology rather than gender identity makes sense because it is the differences in biology — not gender identity — that call for separate teams in the first place: Whatever their gender identity, biological males are, on average, stronger and faster than biological females. If those average physical differences did not matter, there would be no need to segregate sports teams at all.”

[...]

Arkansas AG Tim Griffin and Alabama AG Steve Marshall are the leaders in filing the briefs. “Like Arkansas, West Virginia has a strong interest in safeguarding the benefits of equal access to athletic opportunities for women and girls,” Griffin said in a press release. “They deserve the opportunity to shine on a level playing field. Biological males should not be robbing females of their opportunity to compete for athletic accolades or scholarships, nor should they be threatening the safety of women in competition. I will continue fighting to protect girls’ sports teams and the opportunities of female athletes.” In Idaho, Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman track athlete at Boise State University, filed a suit challenging the state's law, the first in the nation, shortly after Republican Gov. Brad Little signed it in 2020, along with Kayden Hulquist, a then-senior at Boise High School who is cisgender and was concerned about being subjected to the law’s invasive “sex verification” testing. They are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and its Idaho affiliate, Legal Voice, and Cooley LLP.

Idaho Chief U.S. District Court Judge David C. Nye issued an injunction blocking the ban in August 2020. He noted that it appears to be on shaky constitutional ground. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed his action in 2023. In West Virginia, trans girl Becky Pepper-Jackson, then 11, filed suit challenging the law in 2021, represented by the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and a private law firm. U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin that year issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement of the law and said she could try out for girls’ sports, noting that the suit “seeks relief only insofar as this law applies to her.” Goodwin also wrote that Pepper-Jackson, who is on puberty-blocking drugs, “has shown that she will not have any inherent physical advantage over the girls she would compete against on the girls’ cross country and track teams. Further, permitting B.P.J. to participate on the girls’ teams would not take away athletic opportunities from other girls.”

26 Republican AGs ask the MAGA majority on SCOTUS to uphold Idaho and West Virginia’s laws banning trans people from playing sports competitions matching their gender identity.

[bllsbailey]

University of Iowa Claims It's Closing Gender, Women's Studies Department - but It's Just a Reshuffling

Much as I love Alaska, I also acknowledge that, deep down inside, I'm still a farm-country kid from Iowa. Iowans are, in my experience, by and large well grounded, sensible folks. Unfortunately, Iowa academics can be just as loony tunes as academics anywhere, and Iowa's university systems still offer some courses and programs that are the purest of the stuff that I used to shovel when working summers in my uncle's livestock auction barn.

Some sanity may be returning, though. In a recent press release, the University of Iowa announced that it will be shuttering its Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Department.

The University of Iowa announced that it would close its Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies department as public universities in the state continue to respond to a changing DEI landscape.  "Under the proposed plan, the college would close the departments of American Studies and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the current majors in American Studies and in Social Justice, which have fewer than 60 students combined, and create a new major in Social and Cultural Analysis," the University of Iowa announced in a press release on Dec. 17. The decision comes after Iowa's state Board of regents approved 10 recommendations to scale back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the Hawkeye State./p>

Of course, it would be better to see the Board of Regents eliminating DEI initiatives rather than just scaling them back. But, sadly, this appears to be more of a reshuffling than an outright elimination.

"We are excited to reposition these programs for the future," dean of the University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), Sara Sanders, said. "The creation of a School of Social and Cultural Analysis would allow us to build on our considerable legacy in areas that are essential to our mission, while creating more sustainable structures and room for innovative new curricula."  "Right now, these programs are administered by multiple department chairs and multiple directors," CLAS associate dean for the arts and humanities, Roland Racevskis, said. "Under this proposed plan, the school would have a single leadership team dedicated to overseeing the operations of the programs."

The dean is wrong. These programs should not exist. Here's why.

See Related: Biden Administration Gives Up on Student Loan Bailouts

Alaska vs. US Department of Education: Alaska 1, ED 0

Like all the various DEI and other Underwater Ethnic Dog-Polishing Studies programs, the ones described here at U of Iowa contribute nothing to the sole purpose of any educational establishment - to take young skulls full of mush and fit them out with marketable skills. There are no marketable skills taught in any of these classes or programs; they are the purest of corral litter, suitable only for enriching lawns or fertilizing vegetables. They contribute nothing to the educational process. They contribute nothing to the employment marketplace these kids will soon be entering. They are a waste of time and money.

This is why education financing has to be tied to educational outcomes. At a minimum, every university should be required to be a co-signer on any student loans taken on by any student. If the student cannot find gainful employment, and therefore cannot pay back their loans, the university is on the hook. That should help dry up a lot of these zero-value-added "studies" programs.

In the meantime: Come on, Iowa. As a product of Iowa's university system myself (University of Northern Iowa, Class of '87), I expect more from you.