If You Want a Vision of the Future: Weekend Links

* CFP: Literature and Social Justice Graduate Conference.

* Dan Harmon’s advice for career happiness — imagine a job you could stand doing and then invent it — is more or less exactly how I describe what I do. I’m definitely getting away with something.

* Explains a lot: Long-Term Couples Develop Interconnected Memory Systems.

* Deafness and Hawkeye #19. How Hawkeye #19 Portrays The World Of A Deaf Superhero To A Hearing Audience, For Next Year’s Eisner Awards. I’m pretty sure this seals the deal on me using Fraction’s Hawkeye run the next time I do my comics class.

* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.

KSR: I think we can make it through this current, calamitous time period. I envision a two-part process. First, we need to learn what to do in ecological terms. That sounds tricky, but the biosphere is robust and we know a lot about it, so really it’s a matter of refining our parameters; i.e. deciding how many of us constitutes a carrying capacity given our consumption, and then figuring out the technologies and lifestyles that would allow for that carrying capacity while also allowing ecosystems to thrive. We have a rough sense of these parameters now.

The second step is the political question: It’s a matter of self-governance. We’d need to act globally, and that’s obviously problematic. But the challenge is not really one of intellect. It’s the ability to enforce a set of laws that the majority would have to agree on and live by, and those who don’t agree would have to follow.

So this isn’t a question of reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics, or perceiving the strings of string theory. Instead it involves other aspects of intelligence, like sociability, long-range planning, law, and politics. Maybe these kinds of intelligence are even more difficult to develop, but in any case, they are well within our adaptive powers.

* Everyone knows the mass extinction of Earth’s animal life is an almost unfathomable evil. What this blog post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t?

* Fiction and climate change.

* The Pre-History of Firefly.

* The Pre-History of Halbig. Senate documents and interviews undercut ‘bombshell’ lawsuit against Obamacare. Wheeeeeee!

* Same-sex marriage in the 19th century.

In 1807, Charity and Sylvia moved in together in Vermont. A historian uncovers their story.

* Show your support! Agamben and empty political gestures.

* Wisconsin Supreme Court bumming everyone out today.

* Adjuncts Would Qualify for Loan Forgiveness Under Proposed Bill.

* Under the terms of the proposed legislation, whose exact language has not been made public, colleges that don’t comply with its rules could face fines of up to 1 percent of their operating budgets.

* Postdocs as glass ceiling.

* The open data movement might address some of these challenges but its greatest success to date has been getting governments to release data that is mostly of economic and social utility. The thorny political data is still closely guarded. There’s no “social physics” for the likes of Goldman Sachs or HSBC: we don’t know the connections between their subsidiaries and shell companies registered in tax havens. Nobody is running RCTs to see what would happen if we had fewer lobbyists. Who will nudge the US military to spend less money on drones and donate the savings to the poor?

* God, Democrats can’t even make Republicans eat their own shit right.

* The researchers concluded that there was a great advantage to having a white-sounding name, so much so that having a white-sounding name is worth about eight years of work experience.

* The Kids Who Beat Autism.

* The Long, Sad Fall of Richard Dawkins.

* John Oliver vs. America’s Nuclear Command.

* The Catholic Church Makes A Fortune In The German Porn Business.

* US’s Oldest Private Black University Is in Trouble.

* One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton.

* Prisoners are getting paid $2 a day to fight California wildfires.

* The youngest prisoner at Guantánamo.

* Why Bad New York Cops Can Get Away With Abuse.

* Green groups too white and too male compared to other sectors – report.

* Death threats for MedievalPOC at Tumblr because Reddit is a cesspool.

* David Frum’s Apology for His Nutty Theory Links to More Nutty Theories. Of course his credibility is now shot forever and we’ll never hear anything from him again…

* CIA Pisses on Rule of Law, Separation of Powers, No One Cares.

* The Case Against Cards Against Humanity.

* Scientists Have Measured 16-Foot Waves In The Arctic Ocean.

* The world risks an “insurmountable” water crisis by 2040 without an immediate and significant overhaul of energy consumption and demand, a research team reported on Wednesday.

* How Much Energy Would You Need To Replicate Elsa’s Powers In Frozen?

* Marvel might be doing something with Squirrel Girl.

* South Korean Robots Stand In For Real Baseball Fans.

* A Map Of The U.S., If There Had Never Been A Mexican-American War.

* The six-hour miniseries just greenlit by HBO is based on the book by Lisa Belkin and will be co-scripted by writer-producer David Simon okay I’ll watch.

* Abolish the MPAA.

* Postmodernism is the only explanation for black licorice.

* Tumblr of the minute: Michelle Foucault.

* A rare bit of good news: researchers whose last names begin with A, B, or C who are listed first as authors in articles in a variety of science journals receive, on average, one to two more citations than their peers whose names start with X, Y, or Z.

* Blogger fired from language school over ‘homophonia.”

* When parachutes fail.

* This kid gets it.

* And I don’t care how this goes down: I will always consider it Marnie starring as Peter Pan.

Some Weekend Links

* In this future, if MOOCs are the route to a credential, they may initially retain some of the popularity that traditional higher education currently holds. But as people realize that the real opportunities continue to accrue to those who are able to attend whatever traditional colleges and universities that remain, they will go to even greater lengths than today to secure those spots. Meanwhile, those for whom access to this opportunity is impossible will be left even further behind.

* Tampering with powers mankind was never meant to know: The U.S. military has developed a pizza that stays edible for years.

* Socialism is not a flight from the human condition; it’s a direct and unsentimental confrontation with that condition.

* Anyway, the point is this: maybe the exhaust port wasn’t the problem.

* Faculty on Strike.

* Reclamations Special Issue: Securitization and the University.

* Can The Government Stop The Comcast/TWC Monstrosity? Comcast must be stopped. Preach.

* A Florida town is attempting to repeal its ban on homeless people using blankets and other means of shelter and comfort. That’s good, I gue–wait, you banned what?

* Not only does the state’s proposed law allow private businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples; it permits state employees to deny them basic services. WHAT?

* Another NFL cheerleader files suit against her team. This one details the copious amounts of clothing and body discipling for a job that pays $90 a game.

* Noam Chomsky, stealing my bit.

* Now playable! Sesame Street Fighter.

* Ellen Page comes out.

* Is the AA system of addiction recovery too unscientific to work?

* The Blum Center Takeover Manifesto.

* Why not cast Chiwetel Ejiofor as Doctor Strange? I’m on board.

* Because somebody had to: Debunking Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld.

The problem with the thesis is that in setting out their claim, the authors ignore the more obvious explanation for differences in group success: history. To be specific, in their quest to make it all about culture, the authors either ignore or strongly discount the particular circumstances of a group’s first arrival, and the advantages enjoyed by that first wave.

* Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

* But Truman’s famously crisp sentence did encapsulate a recurrent American attitude toward the fearsome weapons the United States developed: they came to us almost accidentally, inadvertently, “found” in that cornucopia which modern science and technology provided.

* Leaks benefit the government, the author argues, in many ways. They are a safety valve, a covert messaging system, a perception management tool, and more.  Even when a particular disclosure is unwelcome or damaging, it serves to validate the system as a whole.

* The Word You Are Searching for Is Rape.

* Wendy Davis Is Pretty Much Fine With the Abortion Ban She Filibustered.

* Another Day, Another Train Derails In Pennsylvania, Spilling Up To 4,000 Gallons Of Oil.

A recent analysis found that rail cars spilled more than 1.15 million gallons of oil in 2013, more than was spilled in the previous four decades combined. Still, some companies are looking to expand their oil-by-rail transport: expansion plans for oil-by-rail projects on the West Coast could mean that as many as 11 fully loaded oil trains would travel each day through Spokane, Washington. A Senate subcommittee was scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on rail safety, but it had to be rescheduled due to bad weather that forced the closure of the federal government.

* STAMOS! Remembering The LEGO Movie Directors’ Wonderful TV Show, Clone High.

* The (almost) entire run of Gargoyles is streaming legally on YouTube.

* Say I’m the Only Bee in Your Bonnet: A People’s History of “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”

* Facebook has added fifty alternative gender options.

* Texas Appeals Court: State Must Recognize Transgender Identities In Marriage.

* And in breaking news: Internet trolls are seriously bad news. The more you know…

Scattered Labor Day Links

* A Functional Form Has Its Own Beauty: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. I liked Redshirts and all, but 2312 really should have won the Hugo.

* Florida International extracted more than $18 million of its $25 million in 2011-12 revenues in the form of student fees. College Football’s Grid of Shame.

* Radiation levels spike at Fukushima nuclear plant. But the lede is buried a bit here:

TEPCO had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour. However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could read only measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.

* Which Syrian Chemical Attack Account Is More Credible?

* The only memory of the bee is painting by a dying flower.

* This Labor Day, Thank a Teacher.

* How many times must we witness the collapse of good intentions into horror and failure before we no longer allow the “Decent Left” to wear those good intentions like a mark of courage?

Better even than a real conflict, though, is a hypothetical conflict. Why bother with the effort of forgetting, when you can merely invent? Those are the very best wars, the ones that are dreamt of in the American imagination. No conflict has ever been as noble, no war as good, as our hypothetical war for Rwanda.

* Bedbug reports skyrocket in Milwaukee area, nationally. Ugh.

* Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s. Ugh.

* And the news just gets worse: Legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki announces his retirement.

T Minus 300 Years

Congratulations to my friend Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of a 2012 Nebula for 2312! I reviewed it for Los Angeles Review of Books last summer.

Tuesday Night Links

* A Scholarship of Resistance: Bravery, Contingency, and Higher Education.

* Dear Professor James, #YOLO :). Riffing on this story, though this one is also in the background somewhere.

* Fat profits at NCAA while athletes play for free.

* Against creative writing.

* David Simon on America’s war on drugs and The House I Live In. Introduction to TNI‘s marijuana issue.

* Open Casting Call for History Based Reality TV Show.

* Plot to rig the mayor’s race in New York City.

* The headline reads, “Pope’s foot-wash a final straw for traditionalists.” Elsewhere on the Catholic beat: A suspended Roman Catholic priest in Connecticut accused of making more than $300,000 in sales of methamphetamines is expected to plead guilty to one of the charges.

* So that’s why they act that way: Refusing to apologize can have psychological benefits.

* Did Pacific Islanders reach South America before Columbus?

* As Canada scrambles to dig up some of the world’s dirtiest oil, a bush doctor tracks mysterious diseases, poisoned rivers, and shattered lives. From 2008. I’m sure we’ve sorted it all out by now.

* The Atlantic interviews Kim Stanley Robinson.

KSR: With capitalism, we can say that it has very strong residual elements of feudalism. It’s as if feudalism liquefied and the basis of power moved from land to money, but with the injustice of the huge hierarchical feudal differences between rich and poor still intact. What is emergent in capitalism is harder to identify, but there may be something to the idea of the global village, also the education of the entire world population, so that everyone knows the world situation and wants justice, that may be leading the way to a more just global society. Seeing and exaggerating these emergent elements is something utopian science fiction tries to do. So the dichotomy is a sort of x/y graph in a thought experiment.

* One night in the life of a Boston cabbie.

* Game of Thrones renewed for fourth of eighty planned seasons.

* Drawing the impossible? Fully dressed Superheroines.

* Wake up, sheeple! Only 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power.

* Presenting Adam Kotsko’s grading lexicon.

* Feminism for women who can’t cry at work.

* And your headline of the day: Why I Study Duck Genitalia.

Just a Few for Sunday Morning

* The 2013 Hugo award nominees have been announced.

* Tar Sands Pipeline Ruptures, Spreading Oil Across Arkansas Town.

* Class-divided cities. The link is to Boston, but they’ve also done New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, and Philadelphia. Would love to see Milwaukee.

* Course Load: The Growing Burden of College Fees.

* In fact, Doctor Who is so British that Brits tend to disbelieve that it has become popular in the US. Their reaction at being told that one of their quirky national traditions attracts an audience unfamiliar with tea towels and gap years is a bit like an American being told that the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest is being livestreamed unironically across France. Really? That’s what you’re watching? But only we watch that.

* Let the Rose Tyler speculation begin.

Tuesday Links Quickly

* A refreshingly honest business model: For-Profit College Recruiters Taught To Use ‘Pain,’ ‘Fear,’ Internal Documents Show.

* The new Journal of American Studies issue on Oil Culture is free to read. Looks great.

* UWM’s C21 has announced its fellows for next year.

* Cracked suggests all contemporary science fiction descends from a bad unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

* Another KSR interview.

* Snoop the Dogg is no more. I am Snoop the Lion, and I come to you now at the turn of the tide.

* Rest in peace, Dominar.

* And the Democrats figure out how to get the magic of malicious bullshitting working for them for a change.

Thursday Night Links

* I just about lost my mind over this George Packer endorsement of Obama’s foreign policy on Twitter this morning.

Foreign policy exactly suits Obama’s strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment. Often, foreign policy—which by definition is largely out of American control—is simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing, the unwise thing. On that count, I trust Obama more than any politician in my lifetime.

I mean really.

* Then I just about lost my mind over this article in the afternoon: No money for forced sterilization victims in NC. 1974? That was ages ago! We have to look forward, not backward, etc, etc…

* In the official view of the Obama administration, it’s totally possible that the drone that killed Anwar al-Awlaki was owned and operated by the Yemen government.

* Romney to Republican governors: Don’t mention the recovery. Josh Marshall and TPM try to game this out. I like Ed Kilgore’s take: Scott’s taking credit for a trend he’s had almost nothing to do with, and Romney wants him to shut up about the trend itself. It’s an attempted lie chasing the tail of an actual lie.

* [Christie] looks at me like I’m from France. “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”

* Why NASA Should Nab an Asteroid.

* Sad White Babies With Mean Feminist Mommies.

* Colorado Marijuana Legalization Amendment 64 Leads 46% to 42%.

* Viral marketing for 2312? Mickey Mouse on Mercury.

* Scientists are hard at work trying to figure out some way to make football remotely safe.

* And because it’s summertime: Bricking Bad, A Breaking Bad LEGO Meth Lab.

Taking the Long View

Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312: “Alex often said that Chinese dominance is the default norm throughout history, except for the brief period of subjugation to Europe.”

The Atlantic, 2012: The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph. Via @mims.

More 2312

If my review of 2312 wasn’t enough for you, here’s Kim Stanley Robinson talking about the novel to Wired.

UPDATE: Two more interviews from the comments: 1, 2.

Earth, Planet of Sadness

The Los Angeles Review of Books has my review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, the fantastic 2312.

But at the same time, 2312 could be Robinson’s least utopian novel — beginning, as it does, from the rejection of the “Mars Trilogy”’s happier historical trajectory in favor of a world(s)-system in which the ongoing historical struggle between the residual (feudalism), the dominant (capitalism), and the emergent (none dare call it communism) never crests, but just goes horribly on and on and on. Indeed, there is a suggestion late in the novel as pessimistic and unhappy as any I can recall Robinson making: that perhaps some people are just bad, that (worse still) perhaps true evil will only exist after scarcity.

“Before [post-scarcity], it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, altruistic, cooperative, a lover of all. … However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”

A suggestion that the last thousand years of human history could be best described as “the late feudal period” is immediately countered by an even worse possibility: “What makes you think it’s late?” Another of Robinson’s interstitial chapters is simply a list of all the reasons that utopia can’t happen, from original sin to greed to “because it probably wouldn’t work” to “because we can get away with it.” Maybe things are bad, and people are bad, and maybe both will always stay that way…

Tuesday Night

* kimstanleyrobinson.info has your 2312 interviews and reviews. I’ll have a review of this in the Los Angeles Review of Books next month.

* John Scalzi and Jonathan Coulton talk “Still Alive.”

* Lindsey Thomas rounds up the season’s bleak articles on the state of graduate education in the humanities with a focus on the issue that nearly everyone overlooks: “Graduate students, especially in the humanities, are not just students, endlessly toiling away in our foxholes/ivory towers (depending on which side of the “debate” you’re on) in our lurching quests for new knowledge. No; we are also instructors, and along with the ever-growing numbers of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty, we  constitute over 70% of the postsecondary instructional workforce nationwide.”

* Erik Loomis reviews If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.

* And Facebook may have botched its IPO in much more dramatic fashion than originally thought.

Tuesday!

* Grad student guide to interpreting advisor feedback. It’s supposedly keyed to the UK and Ireland, but it seems pretty universal to me.

* Kim Stanley Robinson talks 2312 and saving the planet.

Finally, what on earth happened with AMC’s Red Mars adaptation? I gather that some people are still working on it, but it’s no longer AMC – are you still involved in that?

Red Mars is not at AMC any more, but yes, there are people still working on it, led by my wonderful media agent Vince Gerardis, so eventually something may happen. I think it would be wise not to hold your breath on that one, unless you can hold your breath for years.

[DEEP BREATH IN]

* Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback.

* The bizarre case of Paige Sultzbach — and the all-boys team that forfeited a championship rather than play against her.

* Shock Doctrine Comes to Philly Schools.

* Emmet Bondurant thinks the filibuster is unconstitutional. And, alongside Common Cause, where he serves on the board of directors, he’s suing to have the Supreme Court abolish it.

* And let’s have debt ceiling fights forever. FFS.

KSR on CSP

I think I already recommended this on Twitter, but here it is again: Kim Stanley Robinson talking 2312 and the rest of his career with Gary K. Wolfe on the Coode Street Podcast. Great listen.

Friday Morning Links

* Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 has a cover and a description.

The year is 2313. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

I know just a little bit about this and I’m really looking forward to it.

* Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed in a drone attack. Is the war over yet?

* The headline reads, “Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf.”

* The Many Successes of Occupy Wall Street.

* The plan is working! First Vermont, now Montana: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) announced yesterday that he will be seeking a waiver to set up his own universal health care system in his state modeled after the single payer Canadian health care system that began in the province of Saskatchewan.

* Krugman on the obsessive search for some reason not to fight mass unemployment:

Just to reiterate a point I’ve made before, none of this reflects actual economic theory. Throughout this crisis, people like Adam Posen and yours truly have been basing our arguments on standard textbook macroeconomics, whereas the Very Serious People have been making up stories on the fly to justify their calls for pain. As Wolf, who really seems to have eaten his Wheetabix, puts it,

The waste is more than unnecessary; it is cruel. Sadists seem to revel in that cruelty. Sane people should reject it. It is wrong, intellectually and morally.

And this cruelty rules our world.

* And the New York Times games Obama 2012, saying the new threshold states are not Ohio and Florida but Colorado and Virginia.