Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links

* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…

* Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality).

* “Speaking of Chip Delany, yesterday on his Facebook page he posted video of this amazing event with Octavia E. Butler. It was held at the Smithsonian in D.C. on November 19, 2004.”

* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery.  It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.

Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020

* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?

* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.

* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.

* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.

* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.

* The One with the Coronavirus.

* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.

* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.

* The sea of blue mats is part of a temporary shelter for the homeless, who will be spaced at least six feet apart.

* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.

* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.

* Ain’t that America?

there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse

— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020

* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.

* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.

* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.

* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.

* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.

* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.

* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.

* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.

It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020

* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.

* Seconded.

* Free Comrade Britney!

* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.

* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.

* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.

* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.

* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.

* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.

City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.

That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020

* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!

* Policing and the English language.

* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”

* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.

* Computer, on screen.

* Being Greta Thunberg.

* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’

* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.

* Nailed it.

* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.

* The return of Rick and Morty.

* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.