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Posts Tagged 'diversity'
I've been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I've closed all my tabs...
A few of the academic publications I'm associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I've written a couple short things online too: "Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years"; "Disney Will Not Save You"; "Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power"; "Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton's Mickey7." I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
A fun project at Marquette I'm marginally associated with: "J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript."
Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. "Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa." Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls' Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
The CoFutures Prizes.
Building a New Framework of Values for the University.
Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities' forays into the realm of what they call "becoming entrepreneurial," which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of "student assistance" for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn't enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.
Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City's Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
The humanities' scholarly infrastructure isn't in disarray — it's disappearing.
Love's Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, "Quit Lit," and the Great Resignation.
Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It's a Sham.
That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.
Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY
— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022
another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI
— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022
Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
'I didn't really learn anything': COVID grads face college.
I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022
What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word 'The'.
I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr
look I don't think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022
All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi's Portrait of Octavia Butler.
Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.
Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler's old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel
— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022
Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore's Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
Legally defining Peter Parker.
Marvel adjective chart.
this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022
The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of "fantasy," "adventure," "frontier," and "tomorrow," with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you'll find anywhere.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022
science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation
Art Is Not Therapy.
The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
Asimov's Empire. Asimov's Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele's Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu's "The Three-Body Problem" and Mark Bould's Climate Criticism.
🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.
For one: more sequels & comic book movies.
In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu
— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022
Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy's Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a 'different' time in Middle-earth.
Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on 'Rings of Power.' I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
Video games can help boost children's intelligence. My plan all along…
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F
— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022
oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F
"Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe."
Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
Equal population mapper.
The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: "As much as we try, we might be stuck."
This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022
The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.
the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD
— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022
A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
When Chess Gets Weird.
Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
America's slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile "Zone of Death" where you can get away with murder.
The United States of Abandoned Places.
A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don't suppose they would, no.
An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that's okay.
New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests 'something weird' is going with our universe, Nasa says. I've been saying this!
The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
In a Parallel Universe, Another You.
I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.
It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022
pic.twitter.com/V0tmZsNfrA
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022
We're a modest company with modest goals:
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god
— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014
How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
Americans keep moving to where the water isn't. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
An 'extreme heat belt' will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. "If you don't feel despair, you're not opening your eyes." A Strategy for Ruination.
As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson's Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: "Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now." Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
Tomorrow Isn't Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
'A new way of life': the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
Anthropocene Gothic.
Olúfémi O. Táíwò's theory of everything.
Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that's true, I'm against it.
Amazon activists mourn death of 'man of the hole', last of his tribe.
It can always get worse.
They say time is the fire in which we burn.
How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won't be dismantled for Jeff Bezos' superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.
if you don't oppose nuclear war when you're 25, you have no heart. if you're not in favor of nuclear war by the time you're 35, you have no head
This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D
— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022
The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels
—  (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022
from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022
Tagged with abortion, academia, Adam West, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alan Moore, aliens, Alzheimer's, Amazon, America, animals, Anthropocene, anticapitalism, apocalypse, art, artificial intelligence, Asimov, autism, Baby Boomers, basketball, Batman, Bojack Horseman, boycotts, cancer, cars, cartoons, CFPs, Chaucer, chess, child poverty, child tax credit, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, Choose Your Own Adventure, civilization, Cixin Liu, climate change, CoFutures, college rankings, colonialism, comics, conferences, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, cosmic horrors, COVID-19, Dan Harmon, Davarian Baldwin, democracy, Democrats, depression, Disney, diversity, droughts, Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, English departments, English majors, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Extrapolation, fantasy, fascism, Father Marquette, floods, fraud, Game of Thrones, games, God, grading, graduate student life, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, H.P. Lovecraft, homelessness, House of the Dragon, How the University Works, hydrofracking, intelligence, Isaac Asimov, Italy, Jackson, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, Jordan Peele, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kindred, lead, literature, longtermism, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, Mark Bould, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, Matrix Resurrections, MCU, memory, Mickey7, Milwaukee, Mississippi, my publishing empire, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, Nope, nuclear war, NYU, Octavia Butler, Ohio State, pandemics, pedagogy, peer review, Peter Parker, PhDs, Phoenix, Picard, Pixar, politics, pregnancy, quit lit, race, racism, rich people, Rick and Morty, Rings of Power, Rotterdam, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, sequels, Severance, sheriffs, Sony, Soviet Union, Star Trek, story circle, student debt, suicide, syllabi, teaching, The Batman, the Gothic, the humanities, the law, The Man of the Hole, the Senate, the Sims, The Sopranos, The Three-Body Problem, the Universe, therapy, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, Tolkien, trademarks, trains, Trump, UFOs, US News, USSR, Utopia, video games, violence, voting, Wakanda, Wes Anderson, Wikipedia, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing, yachts, Yellowstone
March Links!
pic.twitter.com/rSVy8EDzeq
— Manish (@ManishEarth) March 1, 2021
SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I'm so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper's, and LRB.
Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.
CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977's entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
How to Build a World.
How to Land on Mars.
Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
"Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction" at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings' Second Age. Tolkien's Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut's Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
Is Wanda's 'paradox' of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
So my pitch for a retcon:
* Westview is a place where Something Bad happened; say, a place where they rebuilt the school after a fire during the five years and a bunch of kids un-Snapped into solid walls.
* Wanda is openly in charge of the bubble and trying to help them and her.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 6, 2021
If the core of Wandavision were "everyone got a miracle, but I/we didn't" I think that would be a lot more interestingly specific than the flattened thing about generalized grief.
An abusive reckoning for "Buffy," a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Joss Whedon's 'feminist' shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It's Like to Be a 'Buffy' Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving 'Star Wars' Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and 'Raya and the Last Dragon.'
So many Batman: The Animated Series episodes end with the villain in tears, unable to process their fears and obsessions, while Batman, a looming presence born of the inability to rationalize terror, is the only one there to comfort them.
It's, umm, a really sad show. pic.twitter.com/sCYTFkFCdx
— Daniel Dockery (@dandock) February 19, 2021
President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
New Retro-Style 'Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru' Web Game Promises To Be "Nearly Impossible" To Beat.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
The demise of secure work and the rise of 'precarity' is a theme of the modern world – and now, it's finding its way onto the big screen.
When asked about fears of automation in 1969, Arthur C. Clarke famously said that we shouldn't worry about automation: "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play." I have never seen his answer quoted in full. pic.twitter.com/36Wk0MhAkA
— Aaron Benanav (@abenanav) February 10, 2021
'This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life': When QAnon Invades American Homes. 'I Miss My Mom': Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. 'What's the Point?' Young People's Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can't Go Back to Sleep.
The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson's Run for Sheriff.
English departments rethink what to call themselves.
A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing "breach of contract." Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan's small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The "Amazonification" of Higher Education Has Arrived. It's Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
from "financial exigency" to "budgetary hardship" as the justification for firing tenured faculty https://t.co/mcSs19CHVK pic.twitter.com/C3Z9x6bCu0
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) March 5, 2021
Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City's Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
What We've Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we've learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries.' Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Ministry for the Future.'
The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
'I don't have money for food': millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren't coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
Kazuo Ishiguro: 'AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.'
Voyager's Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you'd never be able to tell from the series's careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
Why we (still) can't have nice things. The situation is not good.
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4K pic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
I'm not sure people get this. Several US states no longer qualify as "democracies" in any meaningful sense and the US federal gov't is rapidly moving in the same direction. https://t.co/pXX0Eex2NV
— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 13, 2021
The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
The Tyranny of Parents.
Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
Deepfake porn is ruining women's lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
The realest tweet.
kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century
— Heinz Baked Jeans (@Merman_Melville) February 22, 2021
1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
2020s: Find Outhttps://t.co/eUK1eQyR77
— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) February 23, 2021
the 2020s are going to be just countless climate disasters and massive insfrastructural failures in quick succession, destructive events that ruin & end lives en masse caused by govt & private cruelty, all blamed on acts of God or personal responsibility or political allegiances
— found a new type of widening gyre (@Boringstein) February 16, 2021
Chess is bad now. This is good.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
Finally, someone is making sense.
Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
Bring back the nervous breakdown!
Is This the End of Tipping?
The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov's Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
And there's just one rule that I know of, babies.
During every disaster big and small, I think of this quote from @doctorow Be kind and help when you can. pic.twitter.com/FzZzrDT8j7
— Dr. Reverend Rob Walker (@timidwerewolf) February 17, 2021
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, Alabama, Angel, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, Arthur C. Clarke, artificial intelligence, artificial meet, Batman, Batman: The Animated Series, Bitcoin, bracketology, Buffy, capitalism, carbon coins, cephalopods, CFPs, chess, class struggle, comics, conservatives, coronavirus, Cory Doctorow, COVID-19, cults, deepfakes, District 10, District 9, diversity, divorce, Dr. Doom, Dr. Seuss, eating meat, ecology, English departments, film, food service, fuck around and find out, full unemployment, futurity, games, gene-editing, geoengineering, Hollywood, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ICFA, J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, Kameron Hurley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kelly Marie Tran, Kentucky, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Klara and the Sun, Kobayashi Maru, Kurt Vonnegut, Lord of the Rings, March Madness, Mars, marshmallow test, Marvel, MCU, miscarriage, misogyny, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nabokov, neoliberalism, nervous breakdowns, Octavia Butler, pandemic, parenting, Peter Lang, podcasts, poetry, police state, politics, pornography, postcoloniality, precarity, presidential fitness, QAnon, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, sexism, SFRA Review, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, Superman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, tenure, the Gothic, The Light Brigade, The Lorax, The Ministry for the Future, the Senate, the sirens, the university in ruins, tipping, Tolkien, trans* issues, Twilight Imperium, unemployment, vaccines, vegetarianism, Vonnegut, Voyager, WandaVision, World Science Fiction Studies, worldbuilding, worst financial crisis since the last one, Zoom, Zork
Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21
My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it's been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper's recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on "Mutual Symbiosis" I hope you'll check out!
Next week I'm giving a talk on 1984. Here's a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, 'The future has gone bad; we need a new one.'
Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
And the obvious Plan B.
CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
'If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?': sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a 'joyful' responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer's Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler's Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
In praise of The Life Aquatic.
Making Room for Santa in Tolkien's Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: "Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia."
As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron's motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: "He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction."46 As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: "It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope."47 In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter's radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:
I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.
In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas's argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.
"A moment of moral and political nihilism": Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
War by Other Means.
Education is teaching people what Republicans don't want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University's Mission.
10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.
this is funny in that "this is an extremely serious problem at American universities" sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021
Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
'The Agile College.'
How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.
the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them
— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020
We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can't Disaster Movies Evolve?
Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where's the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don't use their trifecta to rebalance America's electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021
Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It's Legal.
The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
Frozen and Queer Coding.
California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
Who really created the Marvel Universe?
Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang's "Exhalation."
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
Huge, if true: Humans could move to 'floating asteroid belt colony' within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.
This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021
The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: "Somewhere in Time."
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
Behold: the megacycle!
Okay this just seems mean.
And take heart: America's best years are still ahead of it.
Tagged with 1984, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, Adam Kotsko, Afrofuturism, aliens, Amazon, America, amputation, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, Black Panther, Breath of the Wild, California, capitalism, cars, CFPs, Charles R. Saunders, CIA, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theory, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, cyberpunk, Democrats, diabetes, disaster, diversity, Dragonlance, ecology, esports, film, food, Frozen, futurity, galactic empires, gambling, games, gig economy, glitches, Grad School Vonnegut, Green Planets, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, interviews, Jack Kirby, Jameson, Jeff Bezos, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, Le Guin, lithium, mad science, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, Michael Hardt, Middle-Earth, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Nathan Grawe, neoliberalism, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, outer space, pandemic, pedagogy, politics, postdocs, protest, queerness, race, racism, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, Santa, science fiction, science fiction studies, Slaughterhouse Five, socialism, Stan Lee, technology, The Life Aquatic, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Ministry for the Future, the stock market, the wisdom of markets, theory, this is not a place of honor, Title IX, Tolkien, Utopia, UVM, Wakanda, Walter Benjamin, Wes Anderson, white supremacy, work, Zelda, zombies
Could This Be the Last of the Great American Linkposts?
This has been a really difficult month/semester/year/decade and it's causing me to rethink the way I do these linkposts. For the next bit of time, at least, I'm really going to pull back and try to highlight only those things that I really think deserve attention; for this one in particular that means tossing out basically everything going on with Trump and Biden and the political situation of the United States more generally. Suffice it to say: everything is very bad! And now, this:
ICYMI: Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future." I was also one of the scholars to pop in on Science Fiction Studies's new "Thinking Through the Pandemic" symposium.
American Literature had a COVID symposium, too.
A few more Ministry for the Future links: Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson's Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction. Kim Stanley Robinson Holds Out Hope. How new novel The Ministry for the Future lays a blueprint for fighting climate change. Chicago Review of Books interviews KSR. Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias. Shaviro's review. The Sibilant Fricative review. 'There is no planet B': the best books to help us navigate the next 50 years. We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us?
I'd also like to plug the Marooned! on Mars podcast by Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang, which is reading Ministry for the Future right now as we speak.
You heard the man: Rewild the globe.
Science Fiction Film and Television 13.3 is out! "Screening Utopia in Dystopian Times"!
I'll be doing a little Zoom talk on N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season trilogy for the Brooklyn Public Library next month. Check it out!
The Most Important SF Books of the Last 15 Years.
Really cool pair of hires at UBC Creative Writing: Graphic Forms and Speculative Fiction.
CFP: Mormonism and SF. CFP: Speculative Fiction in the Age of Hybridity. CFP: Call for Papers: Global Indigenous Literature and Climate Change. CFP: The 42nd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Climate Change and the Anthropocene. And don't forget to send in your proposal for the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies!
Tolkien as he was always meant to to be seen.
nothing screams Tolkien like "Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (Intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set)." https://t.co/AC8xGefaWp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 6, 2020
A good piece from my buddy Dan HF: "Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises."
Professors Disheartened (By Potential Layoffs). Marquette students organize sit-in in support of faculty. Our Marquette.
Berkeley Faculty Association: The University We Stand For.
Right-wing trolls attacked me. My administration buckled.
2020 Has Been A Hard Year for Higher Ed. Could 2021 Be Worse? Higher Education's Nightmare Scenario. Extinction Event. Higher Education Needs An Actual Recovery Plan, Not Wishful Thinking. How the Pandemic Has Shrunk Higher Education. Administrative Bloat Meets the Coronavirus Pandemic. Organizing the Neoliberal University. At the Heart of Pandemic University: A Moral Vacuum. College Was Never About Education. How Working-Class Academics Are Set Up to Fail.
Essential reporting from @danbauman77. Since the pandemic began, higher ed's workforce has shrunk by 7 (!) percent. That's around 337,000 people: https://t.co/ZqVQIJ35du
— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) October 7, 2020
have you guys heard of this new thing called ungrading? it's a radical pedagogy where you're too depressed to grade so you don't
— Immanuel Content (@dee_bee_h) October 16, 2020
Well, I'm now the Secretary/Treasurer of the Marquette University chapter of @AAUP. Thanks to @uwmaaup and @nickfleisher for their help in getting us set up!
Home with the Humanities: American Engagement during the Pandemic.
Colleges Comb Diversity Programs for Content That Could Trigger Feds.
Colleges should offer a major in sports. It could solve some problems.
Decolonizing Cornell English. LitLab at Harvard.
"Many respond 'and you're surprised?!' whenever news of some fresh Trumpian horror drops; it's a reflex that suggests we are medicating hopelessness with a know-it-all jadedness and mistaking cynicism for control."
How "Am I the Asshole?" Created a Medium Place on the Internet.
How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy.
Remembering a White Supremacist Coup.
Abolish the Senate! Please! Please! And it's only a start.
We Need a Truth and Reconciliation Process for the Trump Era.
Glücky!
RIP, Duke TIP.
The millionaires who run billion-dollar institutions are killing low-cost, high-reward programs that have been successful for decades because of one bad quarter. It's utterly deranged thinking driven entirely by treating Excel spreadsheets as holy scripture. https://t.co/7Eq7iGKhUC
Miracles and wonders.
The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed.
Today in unexpected consequences: Car Seats as Contraception.
Every HBO Show, Ranked. The 100 Scenes That Shaped Animation.
Winter is coming. Is it safe to socialize indoors? Sitting with the rage. Bodies on the line. Schools don't appear to be super spreaders. When can we safely reopen schools? Nearly 4 million US jobs have vanished forever. Forget Shutdowns. It's 'Demand Shock' That's Killing Our Economy. 8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid coronavirus pandemic, new study says. 'I Feel Like I Have Dementia': Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors. A 'second wave' of mental health devastation due to Covid-19 is imminent, experts say. No semblance of normality before 2022.
He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for almost two years. Here's how he got out. How the GOP learned to love QAnon. A Game Designer's Analysis Of QAnon. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. What Is The Internet Doing To Boomers' Brains? I'm a scholar of the "prosperity gospel." It took cancer to show me I was in its grip.
DCist uncovers what looks like a massive eviction-notice scam in DC.
Perfectly normal: Unions Are Beginning to Talk About Staving Off a Possible Coup.
idk why "reads like fanfiction" is used as a way to dunk on books lol if someone says a book "reads like fanfiction" I'll just assume that means they stayed up all night reading it then spent the next few weeks constantly thinking about it
AOC, streamer.
Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
Prepared for the Worst: Disaster Nationalism.
Some Planets May Be Better for Life Than Earth: Researchers Identify 24 Superhabitable Exoplanets. Somehow this just makes being stuck on Earth all the worse…
Imperfect Rhetorics: Neurodiversity in YA Literature and Popular Culture.
Transcending Gravity: The View from Postcolonial Dhaka to Colonies in Space.
Long Live the Zoom Class Chat.
What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art's recent deaccessioning announcement.
"We Don't Know Our Potential": A new book argues that socialism is necessary because innate differences in intelligence expose meritocracy as a sham. Socialism is indeed good, but this particular argument fails utterly.
The Town That Went Feral: When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists.
The Game That Ruins Friendships and Shapes Careers. Such a good game.
Dragonlance changed how we read fantasy.
How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud.
Revisiting Nabokov.
Always look on the bright side of life.
How will 2020 end?
And just one good old fashioned doom scroll, for old time's sake: Thousands of Dead Birds Are Dropping Out of the Sky and Nobody's Sure Why.
Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study. California Has Its First 'Gigafire' in Modern History. 'God intended it as a disposable planet': meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial. 'Video game planes emit real carbon': why gaming is not merely guilt-free escapism. The great unravelling: 'I never thought I'd live to see the horror of planetary collapse'. Stop! Stop! Stop before I get depressed again!
the reason the US government covers up the existence of extraterrestrials is because they talked to them and found out they are communists
— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) October 10, 2020
pic.twitter.com/VcyJtdFq17
— dinosaur (@dinoman_j) October 10, 2020
Tagged with 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, AAUP, abolish the Senate, academia, academic jobs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, Am I the Asshole?, America, Among Us, animation, art, autism, Baltimore, Berkeley, birds, California, capitalism, car seats, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, Cold War, college sports, comics, communism, conspiracy theory, contraception, Cornell, coronavirus, coups, COVID-19, creative writing, deaccessioning, Diplomacy, disaster nationalism, diversity, Donald Trump, Dragonlance, Duke, Duke TIP, dystopia, ecology, Ecuador, English departments, exoplanets, fan fiction, fascism, franchies, franchise fiction, futurity, games, grading, Harvard, HBO, hybridity, indigenous futurism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR, labor, libertarians, Lolita, Lord of the Rings, Louise Glück, Marquette, medicine, Mormonism, museums, N.K. Jemisin, Nabokov, NCAA, neoliberalism, neurodiversity, Nobel Prize, North Carolina, nostalgia, organizing, Pale FIre, pandemic, paranoia, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, prosperity theology, public universities, QAnon, race, racism, rewind the globe, rich people, schools, science, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, Sierra, socialism, student movements, television, the Amazon, The Fifth Season, the flu, the humanities, The Ministry for the Future, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, trolls, truth and reconciliation, UFOs, unions, Utopia, white supremacy, wildfires, Wilmington, Wisconsin, young adult literature, Zoom
612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs
* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.
* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, "Human Error."
* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it's geolocked at the moment and even I can't listen to it…
* Polygraph 22 ("Ecology and Ideology"), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…
* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!
* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.
* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.
* CFP: After Fantastika.
* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.
* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.
* Speculative Anthropologies.
* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.
* For and against hopepunk.
* The hope in dystopia.
* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.
* Snowpiercer was a documentary.
* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling's Wizarding World.
* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.
* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.
* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.
* The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More.
* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity's richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.
* What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?
* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a 'Stunning' 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.
* Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.
* The MSU autopsy.
* Being Poor in America's Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.
* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.
* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences' revenue stream.
* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the "genocidal regime" in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are "historical remnants" across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.
* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we're beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.
* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the 'Regular' Job Market. Okay, y'all, let's talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn't Always the Answer.
* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.
* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.
* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.
* College of Theseus.
* The university at the end of the world.
* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.
* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.
* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.
* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students' social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…
* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using 'smart uniforms' to track their students' locations.
* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they've killed off every industry they're parasitic on? BuzzFeed's Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?
* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who's thought about it for 20 years.
* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.
* Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame, and it is this: to divest itself from the shame of its power, while working to revive the fear it needs in which to thrive.
* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.
* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as 'Paranoia.' Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It's Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.
Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq
I don't see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We're losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2019
climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy
— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019
* Consider de-extinction.
* Soy boom devours Brazil's tropical savanna.
* The end of the monarch butterfly.
* Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that's about three weeks of Bezos's earnings.
A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018
* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.
* Politicians have caused a pay 'collapse' for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.
* Joe Manchin's Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.
* "If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History": The head of Harvard's astronomy department says what others are afraid to say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system.
* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.
by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody's too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019
* Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman.
* Surviving R. Kelly.
* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.
* J'Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment's 122-year old longevity record may be fake.
* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. "On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit." Star Trek 4.
standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:
7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly
200-1000 absolutely useless losers
* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
* What even is Fox News?
All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.
— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019
* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.
* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.
* Twilight of the UCB.
* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On "Bandersnatch" and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch's horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.
* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.
* I have a problem with Black Panther: Anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation must regard 'Black Panther' as a counterrevolutionary film.
* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?
* Dozens of college-age men dead from 'accidental' drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.
* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or "Buddha Boy" as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that's shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he'd experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal's Famous Buddha Boy.
* 'Nobody Is Going to Believe You.' How is Bryan Singer still working?
* Sex after Chernobyl.
* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There's more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.
* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.
* AAVE and court stenography.
* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.
* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?
* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?
* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.
* The United States of Rage.
* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.
* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.
* Maybe fixing schools isn't actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.
* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.
* The future is here, it just isn't very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.
* The Fascinating '80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.
* "Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life," says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.
* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.
* Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves.
* The Future of the Great Lakes.
* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.
* Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: 'Everybody is a potential target.'
* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?
* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.
* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.
* Tesla chief Elon Musk's corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called "the most difficult and painful year" of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.
* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston's economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.
* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.
* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.
* The end of tag.
* The generation gap in the age of blogs.
* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.
* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer's Earlier Than Doctors.
* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.
* Waukesha college helps answer 'What's next?' for people with autism.
* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.
* We're Working Nurses to Death.
* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.
* The DNA grift.
* "Look, a lot of Twitter is bad. No question. But only Twitter can take you on a journey like this. What a website."
* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the 'same' result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.
* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I've been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn't live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.
Tagged with 2018, 2019, AAVE, ACLU, administrative blight, adoption, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, AlphaZero, altac, Alzheimer's, Amazon, anger, Antarctica, anthropology, apocalypse, Arizona, art, artificial intelligence, Australia, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, baby it's cold outside, Bandersnatch, Black Mirror, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Bolsonaro, Boston, Brazil, breastfeeding, Bryan Singer, burnout, butterflies, California, Cambridge History Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, CBP, CBS All-Access, CEOs, CFPs, Chernobyl, Chicago, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, college admissions, comedy, Confederate monuments, corpocracy, cosmetology school, cyberpunk, de-extinction, deportation, dinosaurs, disability, diversity, DNA, Donald Trump, dystopia, Ecology and Ideology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, EpiPen, extinction, Facebook, forced arbitration, Fox News, Foxconn, game studies, games, genocide, George Saunders, gig economy, GoFundMe, Great Lakes, grifts, gym class, Hamilton, Hampshire College, Harry Potter, Harvard, health care, Hitler, hoaxes, hope, hopepunk, hospitals, How the University Works, humanism, ice, improv, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, IRBs, Isaac Asimov, J.K. Rowling, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, journalism, Kamala Harris, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, language, Larry Nassar, last names, layoffs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lisa Klarr, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Louis CK, lunch debt, Lyft, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, Medcare for All, medievalism, MFAs, Michelle Yeoh, millennials, Milwaukee, MLA, MSU, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazism, neoliberalism, Netflix, nurses, Octavia E. Butler, oh no, online preschools, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, photography, podcasts, polar vortex, politics, Polygraph, pornography, poverty, public transportation, pyramid schemes, queerness, R. Kelly, race, racism, rage, Random Trek, rape, rape culture, rich people, Richard Feynman, Running Man, Ryan Vu, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sea level rise, Sears, self-driving cars, sex, Ship of Theseus, slavery, Snowpiercer, social justice, socialism, Sokal hoax, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Trek: Discovery, statistics, student debt, suicide, Supernova Era, surveillance society, syllabi, tag, taxes, teaching, Tesla, the Arctic, the canon, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, The Jetsons, the law, the secret of my success, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, Utopia, veterinarians, Voyager, vulture capitalism, war on education, Washington D.C., Waukesha, weather, webcomicname, whiteness, wildfires, William Gibson, Wisconsin, writing
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: "TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance." CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: "Peak Oil after Hydrofracking." It's a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left's case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren't written to be read—they're written to be "broken." That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you're the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* I get it.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald's Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump's 'emoluments' battle: How a scholar's search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He's Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: "If You're a Predator, It's a Gold Mine." Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. 'Like I am trash': Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. 'Why Did You Leave Me?' The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It's happening here. Don't doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were "Totally Unaware" They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She'd Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won't share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn't determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn't permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it's up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I'm stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven't fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh's Legal Opinions Show He'd Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren't Really Employees Under The Law.
* The over-under on the Supreme Court's liberal minority cohort all continuing to draw breath is about five years.
* Imagine being a Democratic senator & actually telling yourself you are "playing the long game" by not doing everything you can to stop a lifetime Supreme Court appointment that will shift the entire American judicial system for the rest of everyone's lives.
* Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It's Having a Major Revival.
* Gasp! A New Zealand company that tried 4-day workweeks says people were more creative, more punctual, and more energetic — and they want to keep it going.
* Quiet Skies: Air Marshals are following thousands of random Americans through airports and on planes, for no articulatable purpose.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world's first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the "Coolness" of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the "coolness" of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Understanding "Kokomo."
* Why 'Sorry to Bother You' Is 2018's Sharpest Political Satire. "Crazy" Anticapitalism.
* The fracking of America.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world's plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world's discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime's Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California's wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It's a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don't worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there's just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn't mean "like now, but 2C warmer".
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming 'Dem garbage' into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* The Hacking of America.
* "Cooking Them to Death": The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We're Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there's no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* "I'm No Donna Reed": Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It's hard realizing that you're the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That's why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don't comprehend because they don't care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women's soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There's a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou's Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don't Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it's OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn't do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias' exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* Bet it's still a bit long.
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars' worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don't know me, computer!
* They're real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry's 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* WorldCon is crisis (again).
* Twilight of James Gunn.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to "Ancient Aliens."
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney's Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I've just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they're making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien's Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Spartacus (1960)
Plot hole
In the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People's History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies 'R' Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* Orwell knew.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell's heart I stab at thee.
* And you may ask yourself.
* We'll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It's Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Behold, the thagomizer.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City's grid layout, with a great punchline.
* Did… did a cat write this?
* The new astrology.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It's a living…
Tagged with #MeToo, 2018, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air travel, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, anarchy, ancient aliens, apocalypse, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, asteroids, astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, austerity, Bayeux Tapestry, Beach Boys, Bernie Sanders, Bigfoot, Bird, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, books, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Buffy, bullshit, California, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, cars, Case Western, cats, centrism, CFPs, Charles Stross, child abuse, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, communism, conspiracy theories, corruption, crisis, cyberpunk, David Foster Wallace, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, design, disability, Disney, diversity, doctors, Donald Trump, driving, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, EPA, Episode 9, ethics, Europe, evangelical Christianity, Facebook, fact-checking, fake news, Far Side, film, Flight of the Conchords, Flint, fossils, four-day work week, fracking, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, ghosts, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Greece, Groupon, Guantánamo, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, happiness, happy endings, Heaven, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, inflation, infrastructure, James Gunn, Japan, Jesuits, Joss Whedon, journamalism, justice, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kokomo, labor, leftism, libertarianism, Locke and Key, Lyft, machine learning, maps, mass transportation, McDonald's, Medicare, medicine, memes, Michigan, misogyny, Mizzou, Moby-Dick, moderation, Monopoly, moral panic, mortgage, motherhood, Mr. Rogers, MSNBC, music, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, New York, New York Daily News, New Zealand, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, oil companies, optical illusions, Orwell, our brains don't work, outer space, paleontology, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passports, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, philanthropy, philosophy, plastic, Plymouth State, politics, Portugal, postfeminism, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, QAnon, race, race culture, racism, rape, recycling, rich people, Roe v. Wade, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, Scandinavia, science fiction, scooters, security state, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, Shazam, Sheriff Clarke, Shuri, slave revolts, slaves, soccer, socialism, Sorry to Bother You, spiders, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, surveillance society, survivalism, Sweden, Swiss army knives, Talking Heads, teaching, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Devil, the discourse, the economy, The Hobbit, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, the stock market, Tolkien, Topher Grace, trans* issues, trillionaires, trolls, Tronc, Uber, USC, Utopia, Venezuela, victimization, voting, vulture capitalism, water, white supremacy, wildfires, wiretapping, women, work, Worldcon, writing
Thursday Noontime Links!
* CFP for the Conference on the Global Status of Women and Girls: Intersectionality: Understanding Women's Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present.
* Recruiting Diverse and Excellent New Faculty.
* UNC Coach: If Football Goes Down, 'Country Will Go Down, Too.' Obviously.
* The arc of history is long, about 250 years longer than we said, actually.
* Migrants Allege They Were Subjected To Dirty Detention Facilities, Bad Food And Water. Drinking Toilet Water, Widespread Abuse: Report Details 'Torture' For Child Detainees. Senators remain frustrated over family reunification efforts after briefing. Cory Booker: I went to the US-Mexico border. What I saw there horrified me.
* Right on schedule: "Citizenship shouldn't be a birthright."
The @washingtonpost opinion staff should be ashamed of themselves for letting Michael Anton run this garbage op-ed. This, for example, is one of the most misleadingly edited quotes I've ever seen: pic.twitter.com/gARKf2OL1B
— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 19, 2018
Adding the extra "or" completely changes the meaning of the sentence, and IDK if editors actually look up quotes provided in op-eds or not, but maybe you should when the writer was a comms guy for a notoriously dishonest admin & wrote the Flight 93 election piece?
[really getting into it] We need new, disruptive models of citizenship for a challenging new era. Instead of where you're born or where you live, why not base citizenship on relevant factors, like tax bracket, Amazon Prime membership status, or your credit rating?
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 19, 2018
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* Deported for doing journalism.
* If it's peculiar that we drink poison, as a society, then there are one of two choices: either it's a strange and inexplicable practice, or it's what makes us who we are. It might also, like the word peculiar itself, be a strange and particular combination of both.
* Maria Butina, NRA-linked Russian, pleads not guilty to being Kremlin foreign agent. And from April: Inside the Decade-Long Russian Campaign to Infiltrate the NRA and Help Elect Trump. From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle. Don't worry, Fox is on it.
yes, the pee tape is real, but what's even realer is that sense of existential desolation that tells you, with total certainty, that it doesn't matter
* On Monday night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders hosted a live-streamed town hall with five low-wage workers — one each from Amazon, American Airlines, Disney, McDonald's, and Walmart. The workers sat on one side of the stage, while on the other idled five empty chairs, each emblazoned with the name of an absent CEO. Sanders had invited the executives to participate in the discussion, but none had agreed.
* Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior.
* The "do what you want" theory of politics: Why embracing "Abolish ICE" and Medicare-for-all won't doom the Democrats.
* America Can Never Sort Out Whether 'Socialism' Is Marginal or Rising.
* Amazon Warehouse Strike in Spain Reportedly Results in Police Clashes, Arrests.
* Meanwhile, in the UK: Why do black male graduates earn £7,000 less per year than their white peers?
* I went to try to find some answers about Lane. I discovered that his life leading up to the killing — isolated, dependent, resentful, and ruled by the perverse incentives of internet content production — has much to tell us about the kind of man for whom the new fringes of American life are most dangerous. In his room, online, as a combatant in an endless culture war, Lane found what had eluded him everywhere else in life: a sense of purpose. And then something happened that threatened to take it all away.
* Snikt!
* Watching the Best Episodes of Star Trek Makes It Feel as Dark as Black Mirror. I think this is an interesting phenomenon that might have some real explanatory power as to why Star Trek reception/fandom is so screwed up, especially when you factor in the various way(s) Trek is rewatched by its most devoted fans. It extends to other fandoms as well of course: Star Wars fandom has been roiled for decades by the question of whether Empire is paradigmatic of what Star Wars is, or an exception to it…
* Money is speech. It's better actually.
* What Climate Change Looks Like In 2018. And in remedial science news: What's Really Warming the World?
* Narwhals Are Real, and They Could Be in Real Trouble.
* But the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease published a study Tuesday that helps broaden the understanding of who is potentially affected by CTE to include military personnel. And, perhaps more significantly, the study represents a step forward in developing a test for the disease in the living.
* Humans Show Racial Bias Towards Robots of Different Colors: Study.
* America's racism is (still) making basic democracy impossible.
* Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
* Putting the "crow" in necrophilia.
* At age 25, kids in the longest-running study of same-sex parenting are doing just fine.
* I'd watch it.
A reboot called My So-Called Mid-Life Crisis where Angela Chase is 40? I'm willing to write the pilot 😜📺
— Curtis Sittenfeld (@csittenfeld) July 18, 2018
* How Policing in the U.S. and Security in Israel Are Connected.
* To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon's algorithm.
* Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster. What if That's Actually True?
* Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Want to Ban Holocaust Deniers or Sandy Hook Truthers.
* 'Springsteen on Broadway' Heading to Netflix.
* For the HST fans: Gonzo Socialism.
* And you really could teach a screenwriting class with this gif. Truly, there is just one story, and we tell it over and over.
You could teach a screenwriting class with this gif-
pic.twitter.com/NWIBVKi8LI
— David Yazbek (@DavidYazbek) July 14, 2018
Tagged with abolition, academia, actually existing media bias, alt right, Amazon, America, animal extinction, AP exams, apocalypse, Avengers, Bernie Sanders, birthright citizenship, Black Mirror, celebrities, CEOs, CFPs, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, concussions, crows, democracy, denialism, deportation, Disney, diversity, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, equality, Facebook, fake news, football, Fox, Fox News, free speech, gay rights, girls, gonzo journalism, head injury, history, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice, immigration, intersectionality, Israel, journalism, Kindle, labor, lead, Mariia Butina, Mark Zuckerberg, Marvel, MCU, Medicare for All, migrants, money, monopolies, My So-Called Life, narwhals, Nazis, necrophilia, neoliberalism, Netflix, Nike, NRA, police, politics, Putin, race, racism, refugees, robots, running, Russia, search committees, snikt, socialism, Springsteen, Star Trek, Star Wars, story, television, the arc of history is long but, the Constitution, the courts, the law, the military, there's just one story and we tell it over and over, UNC, United Kingdom, water, weird science, Wisconsin, Wolverine, Wonder Woman
Just Another Tuesday in the Wrong Timeline Links
* Local Restauranteur Refuses to Service Senior White House Official. From the archives: Against Civility. The Necessity of Political Vulgarity.
If Democrats won't support Red Hen — completely calmly, politely asking her to take her business elsewhere — they won't support anything.
Anger won't stop fascism. The only thing that will stop fascism is *checks notes* complicity with fascism
— popular comedy account "the pixelated boat" (@pixelatedboat) June 25, 2018
This is like having a conversation about the best wallpaper for your bathroom while your house is enveloped in flames.
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 24, 2018
Shame is one of the only weapons the poor can wield against the strong, so of course they don't want us to use it. We're supposed to just die quietly.
* None of these people can be rehabilitated, ever.
* Where Is Barack Obama?
* "These images were shot surreptitiously by a woman who worked at the facility until last week," Maddow explained. "This footage was shot late last week. The worker who took these images and took the footage I'm about to show you has since quit her job at this facility." Immigration by the numbers. Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don't know where they are. Detained migrants say they were told they could get kids back on way out of U.S. Trump will reunite separated families — but only if they agree to deportation. New York Wants to Know: How Many Separated Children Are Here? What's Next? "Just toured Port Isabel ICE Detention Center in TX. It was horrifying, shocking & very eye-opening." Portland Protesters Who Have Shut Down the ICE Building Ordered to Leave Federal Property or Face Arrest. Occupy Protests Freeze ICE Operations From Oregon to Manhattan. Talking Shit: Notes from the Portland ICE Occupation. Migrants 'lucky we aren't executing them,' National Guardsman writes on social media. 1,224 Complaints Reveal a Staggering Pattern of Sexual Abuse in Immigration Detention. Half of Those Accused Worked for ICE. Catch the Fever: Abolish ICE. He was a refugee, too.
Why isn't every editorial board, every media head, every member of Congress demanding the regime give access to where girls, toddlers and babies are being held? It's over a week now. What is Trump hiding?!
— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) June 25, 2018
so go then 💁♂ pic.twitter.com/fRcaf2tTnN
— SOB x CRY (@dazedinheaven) June 25, 2018
* In a proposal that could bring the uproar over President Trump's controversial "zero tolerance" immigration policy to the Bay Area, the Navy is considering converting a shuttered Concord naval base into a detention facility to hold up to 47,000 immigrants apprehended at the southern border, according to a draft memo obtained Friday by TIME.
* When It's Too Late to Stop Fascism.
* You'd Probably Like a Dictator If You Met One.
* The first bit of practical, useful information I've seen online in months.
First, you're never going to win a head on battle with an adversary that's got you outgunned. That's not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.
— Tor Ekeland (@TorEkelandPC) June 24, 2018
Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My Dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren't so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.
* The reimportation of violence: MVM, Inc. went from guarding the U.S. spies in Iraq to hauling children away from the Mexico border on commercial airline flights.
* From the archives: The Case for Getting Rid of Borders—Completely.
* Send more people!
* Trump: We must 'immediately' return undocumented immigrants 'with no judges or court cases.'
Managing to get people to think of them as the law-and-order party AND the party of "cutting the red tape and getting things done!" has been quite a coup for the GOP
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2018
* Stolen Supreme Court once again rules that cheating is okay when Republicans do it.
* The smart house and domestic abuse.
* Equity.
* Statement of teaching philosophy.
* Nostalgia.
* How Serious Are You About Diversity Hiring?
* Settlement in major NCAA concussions case pushes the moment of reckoning off, but for how long?
* Junot Díaz and the Problem of the Male Self-Pardon.
When the Gremlins take over Clamp Tower, they provoke a state of emergency. In this situation, a sovereign is allowed by law to violate the law, it is "legal illegality". In these moments the true nature of the law is revealed – we see the CEO, Clamp, leading a SWAT team.
— Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies (@G2Institute) June 26, 2018
Interviewer: Do you think Brazil's 1970 team can beat today's Argentina?
Pelé: Yes.
Interviewer: By how much?
Pelé: 1:0
Interviewer: That's it?
Pelé: Well, most of us are over 75 now.
— Mr. Drinks On Me #FRA🇫🇷 (@Mr_DrinksOnMe) June 24, 2018
* A Prophet of Doom Was Right About the Climate.
* It's a little after nine o'clock. Hal's sons stop sipping their lattes and the oceanographic scientist behind me puts down his handful of M&M's. If Hal Wanless is right, every single object I have seen over the past 72 hours – the periodic table of elements hanging above his left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs – will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future.
* A new model of civilization, arrived by taking the Drake equation and plugging in models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, predicts that humanity is the only advanced one in observable space.
* When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong.
* And the arc of history is long, but WeRateDogs Twitter Account Promises to Never Rename Dogs Again.
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, academic jobs, apocalpyse, asylum, authoritarianism, Barack Obama, books, Borders, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, civility, class struggle, climate change, college football, college sports, concussions, deportation, dictators, dictatorship, diversity, dogs, domestic abuse, Donald Trump, Drake equation, ecology, equity, fascism, Fermi paradox, Florida, gerrymandering, Gremlins 2, Hannah Arendt, ice, immigration, Iraq, James Hansen, Junot Díaz, Mars, moral panic, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, nostalgia, open borders, outer space, politics, protest, Red Hen, red tape, resistance, sea level rise, simulations, smart homes, soccer, statement of teaching philosophy, Superman, Supreme Court, teaching, Texas, the arc of history is long but, the courts, the internet of things, the law, the reimportation of violence, totalitarianism, Twitter, vulgarity, where are they?, writing
Sunday Morning Links!
Because Saturday Night Links just weren't enough.
* Catching Up With the Next Generation of Sci-Fi Writers at the Village Voice.
* My name is Wil Wheaton. I Live With Chronic Depression and Generalized Anxiety. I Am Not Ashamed.
* Diversify your workforce the Marvel way!
"We're 100 percent committed to diversity…Marvel is the world outside your window and we want not only our characters but our creative talent to reflect that world and it hasn't been an easy road to be honest with you. Going back to the 60s when Marvel were created it was created by a number of white men here in New York City who were working in our studio… But now, we do not have any artists that work in Marvel. All our writers and artists work — are freelancers that live around the world so our talent base has diversified almost more quickly than our character base has."
* Accountancy used to be boring – and safe. But today it's neither. Have the 'big four' firms become too cosy with the system they're supposed to be keeping in check? The financial scandal no one is talking about.
* The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation. Meanwhile, they keep openly admitting obstruction, and nothing matters.
* During one December 2013 hearing, still available online, Scott questioned an applicant about illegally voting after his release from prison. When the man replied he voted for Scott, the governor chuckled and, seconds later, granted his voting rights.
we talk a lot about fascism on here, but a system where a small group of rich media personalities faint over the insults one member of the ruling class calls another while thousands of people in a colony die of deliberate neglect is just straight-up, like, Bourbon France
— dr. robert "west" world, phd (@JayHClay) May 31, 2018
* I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.
* Families of Four of Eight Students Killed in Santa Fe Shooting Are Suing Gunman's Parents.
* Hacking the mosquito.
* "The most common complaint I receive from students and faculty members is that we don't have enough administrators."
All of the essential admin at universities are engaged in some form of instructional work (student/faculty services, technology, libraries, etc.), or skilled technical and infrastructure work (cleaning, communication, maintenance). It's the presidents like this guy no one needs.
— M.P. (@OmanReagan) June 3, 2018
* "All of the theoretical work that's been done since the 1970s has not produced a single successful prediction," says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. "That's a very shocking state of affairs." Say what you will about critical theory in the humanities, it's predicted just about everything that's happened since…
* The one thing that we can I think be sure of is that if we get a signal, we will know it's an artificial signal [and not from an astronomical source]. And then we'll know that we are not alone. Will we ever be able to understand it? I don't know. The researchers who study alien linguistics.
* The Soviets' secret map of Seattle tells a lot about us.
* Itsa me!
* And I'd at least give it a watch.
Dan: "Your mother is dead, Darleen."
Darleen: "No dad. I can bring her back. As a Robotic Online Synthetic Empathic Android Neural Network Entity."
Dan: "You mean a—"
[opening titles]
R.O.S.E.A.N.N.E.
— Daniel Kibblesmith ☃ (@kibblesmith) June 2, 2018
Tagged with academia, accounting, adjunctification, administrative blight, aliens, anime, anxiety, critical theory, democracy, depression, diversity, Donald Trump, fascism, finance capital, Florida, freelancing, gig economy, Godzilla, guns, How the University Works, impeachment, Ingmar Bergman, King Kong, linguistics, maps, Mario Kart, Marvel, mass shootings, massacres, Nintendo, NRA, obstruction of justice, physics, police, politics, race, racism, Rick Scott, Robert Mueller, Roseanne, science, science fiction, Seattle, SETI, Soviet Union, Super Mario, the courts, the humanities, the law, theory, TNG, USSR, voting suppression, Wil Wheaton, worst financial crisis since the last one, xenolinguistics
Tuesday Morning Links
* A new documentary will explore the life and legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Janelle Monáe on Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism at Spotify.
* How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston's new book from the public.
* But now, a humanities education—designed to inculcate intellectual curiosity and humanistic empathy—serves no purpose, especially beside such plainly better-compensated and culturally respectable real-world pursuits as vocational and managerial training. In other words today's neoliberal order is fine with revised canons, and with more inclusive, multicultural understandings of the world—but not with public money supporting something so seemingly useless as the humanities. In the age of neoliberalism, conservatives have briskly abandoned their traditionalist defense of the Western canon in favor of no canon at all. Culture warriors on both sides have been overtaken by events. A bipartisan neoliberal consensus that emphasizes job training as education's sine qua non now dominates the landscape. The Culture Wars Are Dead! Long Live the Culture Wars.
* Among the Hottest Job Markets on Campus: Police Officer.
* Call for papers: Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University.
* Massacre in Gaza.
To be a member in good standing of the establishment, in either party, for any length of time, requires you to utterly sell your soul. It's forbidden to even accurately describe the violence America and its allies perpetuate on the world stage, much less oppose it. https://t.co/u9cUhV3fAc
poo-tee-weet
Everything about most Dems' and MSM's response to Gaza yesterday suggests that if Trump wants to start WWIII over Iran, no one is prepared to stop him, and no one has the moral credibility to rally the public against him. Nothing about the world in 2018 feels any safer than 1914.
— David Klion (@DavidKlion) May 15, 2018
The future is resource wars and climate refugees; it will only get worse, and it's already so bad. Our current course points somewhere very frightening. Our leaders are morons and sociopaths who cannot be reasoned with, almost without exception.
* A mother and child fled Congo fearing death. ICE has held them separately for months, lawsuit says.
* A DACA Recipient Graduates Amid Deportation Fears.
* The drug war is (still) a race war.
* Black Panther and the Black Panthers, at NYRoB.
* Sweet Briar Milkshake Ducked awfully fast.
* Social media has come under increasing scrutiny for reinforcing people's pre-existing viewpoints which, it is argued, can create information "echo chambers." We investigate whether social media motivates real-life action, with a focus on hate crimes in the United States. We show that the rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes since Donald Trump's presidential campaign has been concentrated in counties with high Twitter usage. Consistent with a role for social media, Trump's Tweets on Islam-related topics are highly correlated with anti-Muslim hate crime after, but not before the start of his presidential campaign, and are uncorrelated with other types of hate crimes. These patterns stand out in historical comparison: counties with many Twitter users today did not consistently experience more anti-Muslim hate crimes during previous presidencies.
* Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang.
* Indigenous Canadians sue the Canadian government over decades of secret, involuntary, inhumane medical experiments.
* If people on food stamps made Jared Kushner's paperwork mistakes, they might starve.
* Not even 18 months in and they've completely dropped all pretense.
* There could be life on Europa, and they only have water cannons.
* Video games as archive.
* Cobbled together in America by Americans, and inspired by contractual obligations and market demands, nothing about the Hey Jude album was "authentic."
* Two X-Men fan letters from 1976, one who thinks Chris Claremont's new run can only be saved by jettisoning the diverse cast, the other from a woman of color glad to see herself represented in the pages of her favorite comic. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
* Jim Starlin vs. Marvel.
* Westworld against libertarianism.
* Workfare for the Private Equity Crew.
* In Praise of Alien3. I heard from a lot of these folks when I compared Infinity War to Alien3 the other week.
* The misassigned voters lived in a predominantly African American precinct that heavily favored Democrats in the fall, raising the possibility that they would have delivered the district to Simonds had they voted in the proper race.
* A Jury Acquitted The First Group To Stand Trial On Inauguration Rioting Charges. Prosecutors Are Trying Again.
* So inspiring: Disgraced congressman gets a second chance.
* For Peterson, the purpose of our politics and books and films and TV is to protect us from the feminine, which is a crazy and destabilizing energy. Certain culture is good for the brain and certain culture is bad, making you antisocial and destructive. Peterson loves both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, stories in which men save sleeping women with a kiss, and hates Frozen, a film in which Prince Hans turns out to be the bad guy. Frozen has "no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics," he explained in Time this year. We must tell the same ancient story over and over, Peterson says, or we will all go insane.
* Literally no one could have predicted: Arrested Development's Season 4 "Remix" Is an Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
* There's nothing the human race can't achieve.
* Retirement policy is basically alchemy.
What I'm basically saying is that most "retirement experts" have data that is derived from, at most, one full generation, tops, from a unique moment in US economic history, whose economic climate has changed dramatically in the last fifty years.
— ted, always tired (@teioh) May 15, 2018
* Self-driving cars are human experimentation.
* Defending the indefensible: What Isle of Dogs Gets Right About Japan.
* How you're gonna die, by the numbers.
* The past isn't over, it isn't even past.
* Spoiler alert.
* And nothing gold can stay: goodbye, Peppa Pig.
Tagged with #J20, #MeToo, 1978, 2001, 401Ks, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, Afrofuturism, Alien3, Arrested Development, Beatles, Black Panther, Black Panther Party, bureaucracy, Canada, capitalism, car accidents, CFPs, China, civilization, class struggle, comics, Congo, copyright, corruption, culture wars, DACA, David Lee Roth, death, democracy, deportation, diversity, documentary, Donald Trump, Dreamers, Europa, food stamps, Frozen, games, Gaza, Hey Jude, history, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, inclusion, indigenous peoples, Infinity War, Isle of Dogs, Israel, Janelle Monae, Jared Kushner, Jordan Peterson, kids today, libertarianism, lobbying, Marvel, massacres, McDonald's, MCU, Milkshake Duck, music, myth, neoliberalism, Netflix, never tell me the odds, Octavia Butler, outer space, Palestine, parenting, Peppa Pig, plastic bags, police state, politics, pollution, prison, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, refugees, retirement, rich people, science fiction, security state, self-driving cars, sexual harassment, social media, Spongebob Squarepants, stochastic terrorism, surveillance society, Sweet Briar, television, the courts, the everyday cruelty of the culture, the humanities, the law, the rich are different, there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, trash, Ursula K. Le Guin, Van Halen, video games, Virginia, voting, war on drugs, Wes Anderson, Westworld, workfare, X-Men, xkcd, Zora Neale Hurston
* On Saturday night the SFRA announced its award winners. Congrats to all! And here's a Storify of the weekend's #SFRA2017 tweets.
* Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction. And at the New Yorker Radio Hour: The Cultural Revolution and the Alien Invasion.
* The Jobless Utopia of La Zarzuela.
* SF, Pulp & Grit.
* 'Seat 14C' short stories imagine a 20-year time warp – and now you can hop on board.
* As one of the four finalists for the Edward Said Chair, I returned from the campus interview to experience a prolonged waiting period. When the news was finally delivered, I did not learn whether I had gotten the position or not. Rather, the email informed me that the position had been cancelled altogether, due to unforeseen administrative issues.
* Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy.
* President Trump appears to have sourced his CNN wrestling tweet from a racist troll on Reddit.
* Let us instead critique liberal multiculturalism and liberal feminism, while advancing a socialist-feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist vision. And let us try to leave behind the sectarian divisions that have hampered us and seize the opportunity to build a new left.
During the election, CNN hired hacks just to shout on screen. You turn politics into pro wrestling, and a pro will wrestle it away from you.
— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) July 2, 2017
This is truly the worst case scenario of teaching an old person how to use the Internet
— Aparna Nancherla (@aparnapkin) July 2, 2017
not sure how anyone thinks a president with content this fire could fail to be reelected
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) July 2, 2017
* Proponents insist that the emails, as deranged as they might seem, work. Critics argue that the tactic has a short shelf life and is deceptive. But Their Emails.
* D.C. police are investigating whether patrol officers struck an 11-year-old bicyclist with their cruiser Thursday night in Northwest Washington's Park View neighborhood and drove away without reporting the incident.
* Did Trump break the law over alleged Morning Joe National Enquirer blackmail threat? Oh honey. The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians. Trump's CNN Tweet Linked To Reddit User HanAssholeSolo.
* Democrats completely around the bend.
* How handsome is Mike Pence? We asked the experts.
* Once we dispense with the pragmatic-compromise explanation for the MSPRA, it's much easier to understand what CAP is doing. They are proposing a "bipartisan" patch on Obamacare, not because they think they can win through compromise, but because they largely agree with what Republicans want to do. They are promoting market-based healthcare instead of embracing popular support for single payer because they do not want to see single payer succeed. There's no counter-intuitive chess game going on here; liberals are telling the left exactly what they want, and we would do well to take them at their word.
* Generation Catalano rebrands again, again.
University of Melbourne Associate Professor of Sociology Dan Woodman—who, probably not coincidentally, was born in 1980—says the "Xennial" label applies to those born between 1977 and 1983. It's a unique demographic group, he argues, because Xennials spent a significant chunk of their childhoods without access to computers—and indeed, will someday be among the last people on Earth to remember a time before the internet—but experienced the internet revolution early enough to still become early adopters of new technologies. People who were actually college aged when Facebook came out, in other words.
* Another one: Generation Space.
Xennial (noun): a person who identifies this woman as Xena. pic.twitter.com/ZU89SFJdfr
— Eric Hittinger (@ElephantEating) July 2, 2017
* The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game.
* Okja and translation.
* Iran's temperature hit 127 degrees yesterday.
* Being James Thomas Hodgkinson's widow.
* Methadone for social media addiction.
* As Cost Of Opioid Epidemic Rises, One City May Consider Not Reviving Addicts Who Repeatedly Overdose.
* How valuable is Stephen Curry?
How valuable is Stephen Curry? In 2010 Lacob bought Warriors for $450 million. Now worth $2.6 billion.
— Ann Killion (@annkillion) July 1, 2017
* Phone Sex Operators Say They Are Making Less Than Minimum Wage.
* Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood.
* Ancestry.com presents: Descendents of the Founding Fathers.
* disappointedspringsteen.gif. I mean really.
* Debt and the future.
* McConnell's nearing a deal. Don't sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
* A Muslim doctor in Trump country.
* New Florida law lets any resident challenge what's taught in science classes.
* 'Terrorism' misspelled on bench at Indiana war memorial.
* Mass Grave Of Dozens Of Tortured Black Men Found In Deceased KKK Leaders Estate. UPDATE: This was a fake story.
* Personally, I think teaching is improv.
* Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch. Against Gorsuch.
* Fascinating analysis: The newspaper offered no definitive answer, but the question itself points to a broader issue that tends to be underexplored in the context of wrongful convictions: what typically happens with respect to the underlying crime—and, by implication, the cause of justice and of public safety—when the person found legally responsible for committing it later is determined not to be.
* A Brutal Intelligence: AI, Chess, and the Human Mind.
* Privilege and responsibility are the words we call on when the dream of a society organized by individual merit runs up against the hard world of systematic and intractable inequality.
* In Honoring Enslaved Laborers, Colleges Seek to Blunt the Force of Their Pro-Slavery Icons.
* Wikipedia as Text Adventure.
* The Hardest Job in the World. I'm like an X-Man with psychic attack powers. Time Management: A Guide for Busy Moms.
* Factionalism / small talk. All things carry yin and embrace yang. Look for the helpers.
* Horror is the only film genre where women appear and speak as often as men.
* Never meet your heroes.
* And I consider this a canonical part of Zefram Cochrane's backstory.
Tagged with academia, academic departments, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, addiction, AHCA, artificial intelligence, automation, basketball, bipartisanship is bunk, blackmail, body cameras, chess, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Christie, circuses, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, CNN, conferences, Congress, cultural preservation, debt, Democrats, diversity, drugs, ecology, Edward Said, elephants, espionage, exotic animals, First Amendment, Florida, Founding Fathers, games, Generation X, genre, Golden State Warriors, graduate school, guns, health care, horror, improv, Indiana, inequality, Iran, Iraq, Islamophobia, James Cromwell, Jersey, Joe Scarborough, Ken Liu, KKK, Korea, labor, Lenny and Carl, liberalism, look for the helpers, masculinity, mass shooting, men, meritocracy, Mika Brzezinski, Mike Pence, millennials, minimum wage, misogyny, Mitch McConnell, national greatness liberalism, NBA, Neil Gorsuch, Neuromancer, never met your heroes, Okja, opioids, parenting, pedagogy, police, police violence, politics, privilege, protest, Pulp Fiction, Putin, race, racism, rape culture, Reddit, religion, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sex work, SFRA, slavery, social media, Springsteen, Star Trek, Stephen Curry, student debt, Supreme Court, takin' 'bout my generation, teaching, terrorism, text adventures, the courts, the Internet, the law, The Three-Body Problem, time management, time travel, trolling Donald Trump, true crime, Twitter, Utopia, Venn diagrams, war memorials, Wikipedia, William Gibson, Wisconsin, women, work, X-Men, Xena, yin and yang, Zefram Cochrane, Zork
Friday Morning!
* Trump White House finding a new bottom, day after day after… whoa. Turning Point? They're not even pretending. The Biggest Political Story in Decades. In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry. Inside Trump's anger and impatience. Another inside story. Time to shut everything down. And then on the third day he threatened to blackmail Comey with secret White House tapes. Only the Rock can save us now.
* The primary takeaway of the last 18 months is that no one should ever use email for any reason.
* Though this chart from the New York Times seems pretty definitive that the Comey letter didn't determine the 2016 election.
DID YOU KNOW when Trump finally goes down in flames and brings half the country down with him your dad will say it was all Obama's fault
A person who still supports Trump after this week probably can't be reached. Sorry.
COMEY (2041)
COMEY, PART TWO (2043)
COMEY: THE COMPLETE SAGA (chronological re-edit for TV, 2044)
COMEY, PART THREE (2057; regrettable)
* Huge relief after only 11 million people vote for a fascist.
* Trump's attacking the Census.
* Journalist arrested for trying to ask HHS Secretary Tom Price a question.
* What if populism is not the problem, but the solution?
* Alcohol and academia.
* Twitter and academia.
* By refusing to negotiate with recently unionized graduate workers, Yale president Peter Salovey has announced in writing that the university will defy US labor law.
* Meanwhile, at the greatest public university in the world: Also included in the itemized spending was a dinner tab worth more than a year of tuition.
[concert]
SINGER: hows everyone doin tonight
CROWD: woo
ME (from the back in a normal speaking voice): it's actually been a tough few months
— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) May 9, 2017
* Locked Up for Being Poor. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county. All the money's gone, nowhere to go.
* Kristen Gillibrand, for and against. All this for someone who already ruled it out!
* Despite the confidence that the backlash to the healthcare bill will benefit Democrats, this doesn't seem like good politics to be gleefully cheering on something you think is going to literally kill people. Especially, when you're just singing over the supposed political benefits.
* History Will Remember These 217 House Republicans for Their Inhumanity.
* The Democratic Party Is a Ghost. Losing West Virginia. Priorities in Delaware. The Resistance, but not just as a joke. Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.
* Trumpism is coming from the suburbs. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.
* A study at Demos says voter suppression flipped Wisconsin. Some Words of Caution.
* I'm sure no one could find this objectionable: A top government official overseeing detentions and deportations is heading to a private prison company at the end of the month, according to a source with firsthand knowledge.
* The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.
* On Black English.
* Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused.
* How a Utah county silenced Native American voters — and how Navajos are fighting back.
* The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis.
* How Marquette Is Becoming More Diverse.
* Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong.
* This is how SETI plans to find alien life by 2037.
* Chicago Approves Plan To Block Trump's Name on His Tower With Giant, Flying Pigs.
* A Defense of the Tuvel Open Letter, at the Chronicle. And on the other side.
'In the XKCDification of political protest the demand has been replaced by the in joke, the threat to power by the witty signal to peers'
— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) April 22, 2017
* How many Death Row prisoners are disabled? All of them.
* The length schools will go to cover up for bullies never ceases to amaze me.
* District: The Game of Gerrymandering for the Whole Family.
* Secret military space shuttle rattles Florida.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.
* HIV life expectancy 'near normal' thanks to new drugs.
* Another neurological disease unexpectedly linked to gut bacteria.
* U.S. to Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe, Officials Say.
* Six individuals who learned that they descended from slaves sold by Georgetown University over 175 years ago reflect on family and life.
* Private schools have a plan to kill the high school transcript that will be totally fair and not offer their students an unfair advantage in any way.
* Stephen Fry is being investigated for blasphemy. Amazing.
* That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox.
* The Girls' Soccer Team That Joined a Boys' League, and Won It.
* Winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.
* Write the book you needed to read when you were a child. Troubled Wisconsin man goes on 50 state killing spree. Guns and Roses tones it down. Our future in space. They fucking killed him. Top ten book rebrands, all-time. I hacked into Mike Pence's email. Maybe I should give the Yankees another look. A new favorite metaphor. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
* And I don't care how pretty or enigmatic it is, nothing will ever make Blade Runner 2049 a good idea.
Tagged with #TheResistance, 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, actually existing media bias, aestivation, air travel, airport security, alcohol, alcoholism, aliens, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, bail, Big Brother, Black English, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, blasphemy, books, bullies, Chicago, class struggle, college admissions, Comeygate, comics, conspiracy theories, copyright, cultural preservation, death penalty, death row, Delaware, delicious Girl Scout cookies, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, diversity, email, fair use, fascism, FBI, Fermi paradox, film, Florida, France, freedom of the press, games, general election 2016, general election 2020, Georgetown, gerrymandering, girls' sports, graduate student movements, Guns and Roses, Haiti, health, health care, Hillary Clinton, HIV, How the University Works, ice, immigration, inequality, Ireland, James Comey, Jefferson Davis, Judy Blume, Kristen Gillibrand, laptops, life expectancy, M&Ms, Marquette, medicine, Mike Pence, millennials, mortgage interest deduction, NASA, Native American issues, neurology, New Orleans, New York, Nixon, normalcy, nuclear holocaust, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, Paul Ryan, pigs, politics, polls, populism, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, real wages, Rebecca Tuvel, Russia, salt, science fiction, segregation, SETI, slavery, slaves, soccer, statues, Stephen Fry, suburbs, the Census, the Confederacy, the courts, the law, the Left, The Rock, Tom Price, trans* issues, true crime, Trump, TSA, Twitter, unions, University of California, Utah, Watergate, Welcome to the Jungle, West Virginia, White House, white people, Wisconsin, writing, xkcd, Yale, Yankee
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Three!
(here's part one and part two)
* An interview with Chana Porter, text witch, co-founder of The Octavia Project, and actual, real-life nerd.
* The Changing Faces of Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
* 2,864,974.
* I wonder if there is a line connecting nostalgia and the condition of our country. Stranger Things is really, after all, Reassuring Familiar Things, and nostalgia for a thing that never was is, apparently, good product.
* Isn't it funny how the same investment firm always shows up at the White House?
* The Third Reconstruction.
* A Student Has Created A Gripping And NSFW Photo Series With Trump's Quotes About Women.
* The very hottest Rogue One take of all: How 'Rogue One' Backs Up The Founders' Approach To Slavery. Scorching.
* When Star Wars Killed a Universe to Save the Galaxy.
* The Politics of Nature in a Time of Political Fear.
* Self-driving cars turn in a way that will kill bicyclists.
* The surveillance state and racism.
* Welcome to the petrostate.
* "Clinton Campaign May Have Been Too Smart to Win." Sure, that's one way to put it.
* Liberals' belief in their superior ability to govern has never had the facts on its side. The Weimar Analogy.
* Why Are Detroit Cops Killing So Many Dogs?
* Three state lawmakers call for Sheriff Clarke's removal or resignation.
* Alcohol-related problems are on the rise among older Americans.
* Cover Design in Dangerous Times: An Interview with Peter Mendelsund.
* Passengers sounds awful. I can't believe this movie has been getting such good buzz for so long.
* Critical Inquiry's special issue on comedy.
* These Utopian City Maps Have Influenced Urban Planners for Over a Century.
* The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became the Standard For Typesetters Everywhere.
* Why is medical training so insane?
* Robert Jensen has spent his career restoring order after mass fatalities: identifying remains, caring for families, and recovering personal effects. Here's how he became the best at the worst job in the world.
* And after a whole day spent closing 300 tabs, don't even try to cheer me up.
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcoholism, America, asteroids, authoritarianism, autocracy, bicycles, books, Chana Porter, Cicero, city planning, class struggle, cleaning up, comedy, Critical Inquiry, death, deep state, Detroit, diversity, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Electoral College, Expanded Universe, fascism, fear, Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton, Hitler, lorem ipsum, medicine, Milwaukee, mortality, NASA, nature, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, Passengers, petrostates, politics, popular vote, post-truth, racism, rape, rape culture, Rogue One, science fiction, self-driving cars, Sheriff Clarke, slavery, Star Wars, Stranger Things, surveillance society, surveillance state, the Anthropocene, the elderly, The Octavia Project, the Third Reconstruction, typesetting, Utopia, Weimar, Wisconsin
Tuesday Links! Just for You
* My review won't appear in The New Inquiry for a couple weeks, but Liu Cixin's Death's End is finally out today. I read it this summer and it's great. Go get it!
* A local talk I'll be giving this Saturday afternoon at the Milwaukee Public Library: 150 Years of H.G. Wells in Milwaukee.
* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee Public Library beat! Milwaukee Public Library to forgive fines for patrons who visit the library.
* CFP: Flannery O'Connor and Popular Culture. CFP: Modern Fiction Studies: The Anthropocene: Fiction and the End(s) of Human Ecologies. CFP: Essays on the Evil Dead Anthology. CFP: ICFA 2017.
* Star Trek: Discovery Has Been Delayed Until May 2017. I never saw how they'd make January, even before it was nearly October and they didn't have a cast yet.
* 'It's like hitting a painting with a fish': can computer analysis tell us anything new about literature?
* Good News Liberal-Arts Majors: Your Peers Probably Won't Outearn You Forever.
* Professor Cottom's Graduate School Guidance.docx
* How to Do a Better Job of Searching for Diversity.
* Too Much and Too Little: A History of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.
* With outcomes so uneven, it is no wonder that MFAs are the bastard children of English departments.
* Victory at LIU.
* Saint Louis University must pay $367,000 in damages to a former professor who alleged she was denied tenure because of her gender. That's what a Missouri court decided late last week following a trial by jury. The university says it's "disappointed" in the verdict and is reviewing its options.
* Dozens of higher education institutions in New York state will stop asking applicants whether they have past criminal convictions.
* What does it cost to run a department at UCLA for a year? or, who will pay the salary of the English department?
* This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program's criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament.
* New York's Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump's Charity.
* Haitian-American Roxane Gay Becomes First Black Woman Writer for Marvel Comics.
* From 2014: The Future According to Stanisław Lem.
* Parenting and moral panic, 2016.
* If You Change a Baby's Diaper in Arizona, You Can Now Be Convicted of Child Molestation.
* "Very pessimistic." The idea that they could actually somehow manage to blow the lead they'd built up over the summer is horrifying.
this is fine https://t.co/zGp0PVwqX6
* It Sure Seems Like Hillary Clinton's Tech Guy Asked Reddit for Email Advice.
* The law, in its majestic equality: Defendants who can't afford bail more likely to plead guilty as a way out, studies show.
* Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester. After court threat, state of Michigan removed Flint's power to sue. WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer). 37 Years in Solitary Confinement and Even the State Can't Explain Why. Nation's largest police union endorses Trump. And right here in Milwaukee: An Inmate Died Of Thirst In A Jail Run By A Loudly Pro-Trump Sheriff.
* A Prison Literature Syllabus.
* The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University's Watson Institute. That's the highest estimate yet.
* How the failed politics of "humanitarian intervention" were born in 1980s Afghanistan.
* Neither Zuckerberg nor the Pope, but international digital socialism.
* Twilight for C.M. Punk.
* The Fall of Chyna.
* Romeo and Juliet in Wisconsin.
* The strange story of how internet superfans reclaimed the insult 'trash.'
This is the most important news of the year. https://t.co/D7o4PddWH0
— Gabriel Baumgaertner (@gbaumgaertner) September 19, 2016
* "I await an apology from Chancellor Dirks, and Dean Hesse," explained Hadweh. "The university threw me under the bus, and publicly blamed me, without ever even contacting me. It seems that because I'm Palestinian studying Palestine, I'm guilty until proven innocent. To defend the course, we had to mobilize an international outcry of scholars and students to stand up for academic freedom. This never should have happened."
* I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim—and Then I Promptly Went Broke.
* The Woman Who Is Allergic to Water.
* Feral Cats and Ecological Disaster.
* Never talk to journalists.
* The name of the character in the excerpt, GBW Ponce, comes actually from the Ponzi scheme, among other things. There's a Thomas Frank piece that I once read somewhere (I think it was Harper's), where he said that civilization is basically a gigantic ponzi scheme. With our obsession with data and with predicting the future, it's as if we were trying to cancel the future and its uncertainties, in order to make the present feel safer. The IMF has projections for the growth of EVERY economy on the planet which stretch to two-three-four and even more years: why let reality run its course when we can model it and predict it, right? So, the idea behind that character was that by "scientifically" predicting every inch of life, it's as if we borrowed against our unknown future to live the present with fewer uncertainties and anxieties. But that's precisely what causes more anxiety, this idea of a life that could fit entirely in an Excel spreadsheet.
* Moderator Announces Topics for First Presidential Debate.
America's Direction
Achieving Prosperity
Securing America
America's Prosperity
Securing Direction
Securing Prosperity
America's America
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 20, 2016
* Definitely, definitely, definitely aliens.
* All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. Shame to get all the way through 312 and then swap #1 and #2…
* Elsewhere in the numerical sublime: Every He-Man and the Masters of the Universe action figure, ranked.
* Teach the controversy! "Peter Thiel Would Make A Great Supreme Court Justice."
* Booze against pot.
* The Bonkers Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe.
* Someone Removed The Music From 'Dancing In The Street' And I Can't Stop Laughing.
* Run it like a sandwich: After Texas high school builds $60-million stadium, rival district plans one for nearly $70 million.
moreover, wealthier school districts are reducing taxes (that have to be shared) and spending more via bond-funded projects (that don't).
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 19, 2016
* The luxury suites in modern stadiums are reminders that capitalist society values elite consumption over public enjoyment.
* Class size matters a lot, research shows.
* Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?
* Page B13: Arctic death spiral: Icebreakers reach North Pole as sea ice disintegrates.
* Don't tweet your heroes.
* And never forget that the Monkees are DCU canon.
Tagged with academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, actuarial science as politics, alcohol, aliens, allergy, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, austerity, ban the box, Berkeley, Big Data, Black Panther, boondoggles, Bowie, C.M. Punk, canon, cats, CFPs, charity, charts, Chyna, Cixin Liu, class size, class struggle, climate change, college budgets, college majors, comics, D.C. Comics, Dancing in the Streets, David Foster Wallace, David Simon, Death's End, debates, digital humanities, digitality, distant reading, diversity, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Snowden, emails, English departments, English majors, Evil Dead, fandom, fans, Flannery O'Connor, Flint, football, futurity, gender, general election 2016, graduate school, H. G. Wells, He-Man, high school football, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, invasive species, Israel, Jesuits, journalism, journamalism, kids today, library fines, literature, lobbying, lockouts, Long Island University, luxury boxes, marijuana, Marvel Comics, MFAs, Michigan, Mick Jagger, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Library, misogyny, moral panic, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, New York, novels, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, Philip K. Dick, Pluto, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, polls, popular culture, pot, prison, prison literature, prison-industrial complex, professional wrestling, race, racism, Reddit, rich people, rising sea levels, Rolling Stones, Romeo and Juliet, Roxanne Gay, scams, science fiction, sexism, sexting, Should I go to grad school?, socialism, solitary confinement, spreadsheets, Springsteen, St. Louis University, stadiums, Stanislaw Lem, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, strikes, superheroes, Supreme Court, syllabi, teaching, tenure, the Anthropocene, the courts, The Dark Forest, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, the Mediterranean, the Monkees, The Pale King, The Three-Body Problem, The Wire, Thunder Road, torture, toys, Tressie McMillan Cottom, unions, USSR, Wakanda, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, Washington Post, water, Who is going to pay the salary of the English department?, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, writing, x-rays
Tuesday Afternoon Links!
* Public showings of the Tolkien Manuscripts at Marquette, 2016-2017.
* Don't Panic, But There's An Asteroid Right Over There.
* Why is the keynote speech such a train wreck at most academic conferences?
* Because it's that time of year again: my two-part piece from Inside Higher Ed from a few years back on entering the academic job market as an ABD, 1, 2. But of course:
Trivia: this year on the digital #MLAJIL, there are more checkboxes to narrow your search than there are British Literature postings.
— T. S. Miller (@TheFishInPrison) September 12, 2016
* How could anyone think graduate students shouldn't have a Plan B?
* Great teaching document: Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question about Theory That Will Provoke Conversation and Further Discussion from Your Colleagues.
* And more: Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion.
* Trump: graft :: Clinton : paranoia.
lot of people *still* complaining that clinton's body doubles are built to run down & collapse after 72 hours. but imagine if one escaped
— Felix Gilman (@felixgilman) September 12, 2016
* Disability and utopia.
* And marrying the last two links: One in Six Eligible Voters Has a Disability.
* "Debate" and the end of the public sphere.
* Let history be our judge: Pepe the Frog, an explainer.
* If Hillary Had to Drop Out, Here's How a New Democratic Candidate Would be Chosen. Former DNC chairman calls for Clinton contingency plan.
* Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, called Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.
* Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology.
* A librarian donated $4 million to his alma mater. $100,000 is being given to the library. $1 million is being used to buy A SCOREBOARD.
* NCAA vs. NC.
* Getting Restless At The Head Of The Class.
* CFP: this xkcd.
* Demystifying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
* Going viral this week: extinction illusions.
* In search of the universal language.
* Reported Concussions in Youth Soccer Soar a Mere 1,600 Percent in 25 Years, According to Study.
* Nice work if you can get it: Wells Fargo won't claw back $125m retirement bonus from exec who oversaw 2m frauds.
* Sexting in the seventh grade.
* Colin Kaepernick's Protest Is Working.
* How the sugar industry has distorted health science for more than 50 years.
* Stories that should be more exciting than they are: We Were Wrong About Where the Moon Came From!
* I read Jason Shiga's Demon as a crowdfunder — it's great. Check out the first volume when it comes to print next month.
* Special providence: Catfish Falls From The Sky, Hits Woman In The Face.
* The organizing economic metaphor of all of Against Everything is artificial scarcity. The concept usually refers to the way that monopolistic sellers exploit their excessive market power to restrict supply so they can raise prices. Greif's view is more capacious and idiosyncratic: He describes a culture where the affluent, at sea in a world of abundance, engage in the elaborate restriction of their own demand (to kitsch diners, ethnic food, inappropriately youthful sexual partners). This turns what could be unfussy gratification into resource-intensive performance. On one level, this is about making a technically meaningless life more diverting, but it also gives our atomized selves the comfort of belonging. It serves to differentiate "people like me" from those other, worse people—those without access to the most current information, say, or simply the economic means to act on it. What gives n+1's economistic turn its authority and novelty is the way Greif and his colleagues show that the market is not, as someone like Gary Becker had it, a bazaar untainted by sinister, irrational notions (discrimination, exploitation, class prejudice), but a site where those things are given free play under cover of neutral utility-maximizing exchange. They have taught us to speak the softer insights of theory (with its sensitivity to symbolic difference and its hermeneutics of suspicion) in the hardheaded but incantatory vernacular of the powerful.
* Millions of containers, thousands of ships, hundreds of scientists, 30 laws, 15 federal agencies, and we still can't prevent the next foodborne illness outbreak.
* The New Yorker remembers the Wilmington coup of 1898.
* And I'm catching up late, but man oh man, Bojack Horseman is a good show.
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, academia, academic jobs, alt-right, animal personhood, animals, asteroids, banking, Bojack Horseman, cartoons, Catfish, charts, class discussion, class struggle, climate change, Colin Kaepernick, college sports, comics, concussions, conferences, contagion, coups, debate, debates, Demons, disability, diversity, dolphins, Donald Trump, ecology, economics, economism, endowments, football, fraud, general election, gifted and talented, gifted kids, graduate student life, graft, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, illness, Islam, Jason Shiga, keynotes, kids today, language, library, lingustics, Mark Greif, Marquette, n+1, NASA, National Anthem, NCAA, Netflix, Noam Chomsky, North Carolina, outer space, paranoia, parenting, pedagogy, Pepe the Frog, Plans B, pneumonia, politics, pollution, public sphere, race, racism, replicants, scarcity, science, science fiction, sexting, soccer, special providence in the fall of a sparrow, sports, sugar, teaching, television, the Moon, theory, Tolkien, true crime, universal language, Utopia, voting, Wells Fargo, white supremacy, Wilmington, Won't somebody think of the children?, xkcd