Weekend Links!
* I’m heading to Zurich later tonight for the From Human to Posthuman? Ethical Inquiry workshop to be held at the Collegium Helveticum. I’ll be talking about the Anthropocene and various versions of The Time Machine, jumping off my Paradoxa “Global Weirding” essay and a loooong forthcoming piece for a Ralahine Utopian Studies collection on “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene.”
* Faculty Favorites: Books to Add to Your Shelf This Spring. With a book recommendation from me, among others!
* Analyzing Elections Since Trump Won the Presidency. Here’s everything Republicans could be doing to stop Trump. Are you a Saturday Night Massacre or a Saturday Night Massacan’t? Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses. Trump’s Friends and Advisers Are Terrified of What He Might Say to Mueller. Elite opposition to Trump is collapsing.
* More great Le Guin remembrances from Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, adrienne maree brown, Jo Walton, Jacob Brogan, Matthew Cheney, and many others…
did anyone predict how the mid-century-and-onward increase in number of celebrities would lead to decades of constant mourning?
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) January 24, 2018
* And in a rather Le Guin mode: Read the Into the Black Contest’s Winning Story, Set in a Future Where Economics Are Also Humane.
* I hadn’t realized the Aronofsky adaptation for HBO was cancelled, but MaddAddam is coming to TV, again.
* For many years now, tuition-dependent institutions — notably small private colleges and regional public universities — have grappled with such existential questions. Many find themselves in a difficult, complex market, with rising costs in operations, pressure to keep tuition down, increasing competition, an insufficient supply of traditional-age students, and national doubts over the value of college. Naturally, those factors have prompted many observers to take a dour view of the institutions’ future. Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded higher education’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” noting that demographic challenges, weak revenue growth, and rising labor costs will bedevil colleges in the near term.
* Life transformed into data is life permanently mobilized for capital.
* We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now.
* As ICE Targets Immigrant Rights Activists for Deportation, Suspicious Vehicles Outside Churches Stoke Surveillance Fears. ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US.
* Research has identified embedded racism in IQ tests. Now, prosecutors in at least eight states are using that research—to legalize more executions.
* Prisons, as the journalist Tom Wicker once wrote, “have a dual function: to keep us out as well as them in.”
Authoritarianism is already here, it’s just unevenly targeted.
— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) January 26, 2018
Defund ICE, put its leaders on trial.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 24, 2018
* The female price of male pleasure.
* The gig economy and sexual harassment.
* Post-Presidency Benefits at Michigan State. NCAA president Mark Emmert was alerted to Michigan State sexual assault reports in 2010.
* Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die.
[2020 Election]
Donald Trump Jr. (R): I am going to build a giant John Deere lawnmower and use it to run over poor people and minorities
John Johnson (D): Woah, woah, woah. That sounds expensive
— Jules (@Julian_Epp) January 26, 2018
* Some monkey news: First Primate Clones Produced Using the “Dolly” Method. 10 Monkeys and a Beetle: Inside VW’s Campaign for ‘Clean Diesel.’ Paris zoo evacuated after 52 baboons escape enclosure.
* Trump vs. migratory birds. Trump vs. the air itself.
* Oh no.
* Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell.
* State of the climate: how the world warmed in 2017.
* A world without Holocaust survivors.
* There’s only one story and we tell it over and over.
* The Short-Lived Normalization of Breastfeeding on Television.
* On the greatness of Swastika Night.
* California doing its best to prove the libertarians right.
* And are Dungeons & Dragons Players in a Cult? These Hilarious Warning Signs From 1989 Prove It.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 27, 2018 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23andMe, academia, all animals vs. all humans, animals, apes, artificial intelligence, authoritarianism, billionaires, biocapital, birds, Bob Dylan, books, breastfeeding, capitalism, Center for the Advancement, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, climate change, clones, cloning, college presidents, concussions, cults, death penalty, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, elections, EPA, fake porn, FBI, football, genetics, gig economy, global weirding, grief, gymnastics, H. G. Wells, Hitler, How the University Works, ice, immigration, IQ tests, Karen Joy Fowler, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Larry Nassar, libertarians, London, Maddaddam, Margaret Atwood, Marquette, Michigan State, Mirror Universe, misogyny, monkey news, mourning, museums, my scholarly empire, Nazis, NCAA, obituary, obstruction of justice, oh no, Oryx and Crake, Paradoxa, politics, pollution, pornography, posthumanism, poverty, prison-industrial complex, prisons, racism, Republicans, Robert Mueller, science fiction, sex, short stories, small colleges, sports, Star Trek: Discovery, supermax prisons, Swastika Night, Switzerland, television, the Anthropocene, the courts, the Holocaust, the law, The Time Machine, totalitarianism, true crime, Trump, tuition, unions, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Volkswagen, voting, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, web comics, zoos, Zurich
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