Posts Tagged ‘academia’
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j
— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."
— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.
Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm
— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT
— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
Written by gerrycanavan
November 26, 2019 at 12:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23 and me, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, Africa, airplanes, airships, Alan Moore, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Appalachia, Australia, autism, backlash effect, bananas, Barack Obama, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, Big Calculator, Bowie, Brainiac, Brazil, centrism, CFPs, changelings, Charlie Stross, child abuse, childhood, climate change, college closures, colleges, comics, conspiracy theorists, cybertruck, David Bowie, David Graeber, death, decolonization, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, Disney, DNA, Dungeons and Dragons, earthquakes, ecology, economics, Egypt, Elon Musk, emotional labor, English majors, equality, EVE Online, Facebook, fandom, fans, fantasy, fascism, film, Florida, free speech, Frozen, Frozen II, futurity, games, gay rights, Greta Thunberg, grief, Harriet Tubman, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, hopepunk, hot takes, How Did This Get Played?, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice, Illinois, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana University, indigenous peoples, internationalism, isolation rooms, Joe Biden, Joker, Joker 2, Julia Roberts, justice, Keystone Pipeline, kids today, labor, lawyers, liberalism, lithium, Lord of the Rings, marriage equality, Marvel, mass shooters, medicine, Milwaukee River, MLA, mortality, Mr. Rogers, mugshots, Nate Silver, Native American issues, Nazis, Netflix, New York, nostalgia, OK Boomer, pensions, Pete Buttigieg, physics, pipelines, Pokémon, police brutality, police corruption, police state, postdocs, poverty, prison-industrial complex, punkpunk, pyramids, race, rape, rape culture, recession, rent loans, reparations, Republicans, rich people, rising sea levels, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, saving money, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Scott Warren, SFRA, Siberia, solar power, solarpunk, speculation, spoilers, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, strikes, student evaluations, stuttering, superheroes, swastikas, tenure, Terminator, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, The Mandalorian, The Price Is Right, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, TI-85s, time, Title IX, tokenism, Tolkien, Tony Evers, transgender issues, true crime, turning 40, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccinations, Watchmen, web comics, WeWork, whale watching, whale-hunting, whales, whistleblowers, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, woolly mammoths, Yoda, zeppelins
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
wishing I could make content this sublime pic.twitter.com/UYPNVI2m1C
— Slavoj “Claire’s Trophy Wife” Vibecheck (@zizekthottie) November 15, 2019
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
Venn diagram of people saying “the state is too technically incompetent to install a broadband connection” and people who say “the state should build and maintain a thermonuclear arsenal”
— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) November 15, 2019
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
— mugrimm 🦃 (@unabanned) November 14, 2019
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
"This wonderful economic system [in which] all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least."
— Iain M. Banks, describing capitalism in "The State of the Art"
— Michael Oman-Reagan (@OmanReagan) November 10, 2019
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
Peter Pan has a song called “What Makes the Red Man Red?” where what makes them “red” is being super horny. It’s absolutely astounding that this has not been memory-holed. https://t.co/Rewnfj59JL
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 13, 2019
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
You've heard of "Garfield Minus Garfield."
You've seen "Garfield minus the last panel,"
You liked "Garfield but the last panel is him smoking,"
Now prepare your ass for…
"GARFIELD BUT THE MIDDLE PANEL IS CENSORED!" pic.twitter.com/RK6OsmGhhk— Connor 64 (@Superbconnor64) November 10, 2019
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 16, 2019 at 5:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, ableism, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, autotheory, Baby Boomers, banks, baseball, California, cancel culture, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, cheating, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, climate realism, comics, common core, deportation, digital feudalism, Disney, divorce, Donald Trump, electric cars, English majors, environmentalism, fascism, floods, games, Garfield, Google, Greta Thunberg, health insurance, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, ice, immigration, impeachment, Italy, Jameson, John M. Ford, kids today, labor, literature, lunch debt, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, medical debt, Mexico, migrants, Milwaukee, minimum wage, Minnesota, mortgages, Naomi Klein, NASA, Netflix, New Jersey, Nickelodeon, Nobel Prize, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, OK Boomer, online advertising, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Oz, paradise, pardons, Peter Pan, plastic straws, podcasts, politics, prosecutors, race, racism, Republicans, Return to Oz, Rorschach, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, slavery, sniff, social media, Sonic, Stephen Miler, streaming, surveillance, taxes, the Anthropocene, the archive, the courts, The Culture, the debt, the deficit, the law, the Midwest, the university in ruins, trans* issues, true crime, Uber, Ukraine, University of Wisconsin, vaginas, Venice, war crimes, war on education, Watchmen, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, Žižek
Friday Links!
* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.
* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.
* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.
* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.
* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.
* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.
* Halloween and Stranger Danger.
Here is my most humorless opinion: The concept of ghosts is an example of how we stigmatize victims of violence as much as perpetrators, and perceive them as a threat to our peaceful lives. The desired outcome is to make them go away, shut up, and let us forget about them again.
— Sandra Newman is objectively frightening (@sannewman) October 31, 2019
Xennials are called Calvinistas now https://t.co/8vhCm4X8vU
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right
* 😬😬😬😬😬.
* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.
* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?
Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.
This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.
* Bernie finds religion on immigration.
* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.
* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.
* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!
* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’
* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season. Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.
I am sure you will be surprised to hear that in less than 48 hours a gigantic corporation has superseded Twitter’s PR-grabbing “no political ads” rule because Twitter really likes money https://t.co/rTyNE6xC3X
— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) November 5, 2019
* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.
* Behind the scenes at Disney U.
* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!
* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.
* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.
* The Williams English Boycott.
The narrative about totalitarian political correctness on college campuses HAS to be true, because otherwise the greatest political dangers would be coming almost exclusively from the right, and every smart pundit knows that's impossible.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) November 6, 2019
* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.
* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!
* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.
A lot of people on my timeline like this proposal but my reaction is just pure dread on every level, from the thought of kids trapped at school literally all day to the inevitable revenue-neutral strategies to somehow wring an extra three hours of care out of the existing budgets https://t.co/2Q89HE4iTb
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019
* The culture of policing is deeply sick.
* The only election result I need.
* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.
* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?
* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.
* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.
the liberatory potential of fandom lies in dispensing with any loyalty to the 'original' and the structure of media conglomerates that exploit it for profit. the most visible kind of fandom now is the opposite, astroturfed by disney
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 5, 2019
pitch: THE GOODFELLAS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019
* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.
* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.
* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.
NTSB docs: Uber's radar detected Elaine Herzberg nearly 6 seconds before she was fatally struck, but “the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians” so it didn't react as if she were a person. https://t.co/M2B38i2Bq2 via @mikelaris
— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) November 6, 2019
* Friends? I’ll give you friends!
* Scenes from the class struggle in America.
* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.
* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.
* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.
* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.
* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.
* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”
* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.
* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.
* I can never resist brutalist ruins.
* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.
* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?
* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.
* Some things are forbidden for a reason.
* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 8, 2019 at 10:23 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", a whole host of promising academic careers strangled in the cradle, academia, Adorno, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, Alexa, algorithmic culture, ALS, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, Bernie Sanders, Big Apocalypse, billionaires, birds, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Bloody Sunday, books, boycotts, brands, Brazil, Brutalism, burnout, California, Calvin and Hobbes, child abuse, children, class struggle, climate change, comics, computers, concussions, cults, dark side of the digital, Deadpan, deforestation, delicious ice cream, disability, Disney, DNA, Donald Trump, Durham, e resistance, ecology, economists, Exxon, fandom, fascism, film, forbidden knowledge, fossils, free marks, free speech, Frozen, futurity, games, general election 2020, Generation X, George Washington, ghosts, Goodfellas, Grand Theft Auto, Green New Deal, Halloween, Hamilton, hate crimes, health care, health insurance, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, homelessness, How the University Works, immigration, insects, Into the Spiderverse, Into the Spiderverse 2, iPads, John W. Campbell, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lean In, Let It Go, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, mass extinction, McDonald's, MCU, Medicare, Medicare for All, Michael Bloomberg, millennials, Milwaukee, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, money, monopolies, Mr. Rogers, my media empire, neoliberalism, North Carolina, Octavia Butler, OK Boomer, Oregon Trail, pasta, police, police state, politics, printers, quantum mechanics, race, racism, Satan, school, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, scooters, Scorsese, screen time, Should I go to grad school?, Siri, social media, SpaghettiOs, speculation, sports, Stanford, Stanford University Press, Star Trek, struggle, superheroes, Superman, surveillance society, survival, teachers, television, texts, The Affair, the Amazon, the courts, the economy, the humanities, the law, Tolkien, trauma, true crime, Uber, unions, Utopia, victims, Watchmen, white supremacy, whiteness, wildfires, Williams College, winter, Wisconsin, Wonder Years, work, Yugoslavia
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W
— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019
the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.
This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk
— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019
that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019
“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2019 at 10:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Afrofuturism, algorithms, America, apocalypse, assassinations, Barack Obama, books, Brett Kavanaugh, California, capitalism, CFPs, Charlton Heston, Children of Ruin, Children of Time, China Miéville, class struggle, David Bowie, Deadspin, death, Democrats, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, environmentalism, Equal Rights Amendment, Fahrenheit 451, franchise fiction, futurity, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2020, gig economy, Gloomhaven, Greta Thunberg, Halloween, health care, health insurance, How the University Works, income inequality, journalism, Juul, kids today, Kurt Vonnegut, loneliness, Mars, Marx, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, moral nuance, mortality, my life as a nerd, neoliberalism, New York, nuclearity, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, photography, police state, police violence, politics, precarity, prequels, presidential libraries, privacy, race, racism, Ray Bradbury, Ronald Reagan, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, seasons, solar punk, Supreme Court, technical debt, the Anthropocene, The Doors of Eden, the Internet, The Matrix, the tuition is too damn high, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, University of Chicago, Utopia, vaping, Virginia, WeWork, wildfires, Wisconsin, writing
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
“deenergization” https://t.co/bynSavKFBx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot, and passed a paradise preservation act for the remaining unpaved areas of paradise, then legalized heavy logging and oil exploration in paradise
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
There's a point in every serious conversation about California's wildfire problem where you have to entertain the thought that literally every major policy decision of the twentieth century related to any aspect of the problem was wrong
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 27, 2019
The story of fire in California is:
10,000 years of native people using low-grade fire to manage forests
100 years of settlers repressing ALL fire as much as possible, causing forests to go haywire
50 years of wild, overbuilding settlement, climate change, and PG&E falling apart— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 28, 2019
“We’re not so different, you and I” https://t.co/iNqtZGzUkE
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019
"we've got it stopped…"
the final words of the 1958 cult classic THE BLOB, meant to be matter of fact, read rather ominous fifty years later
"yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"
— kai a. bosworth (@kaibosworth) October 27, 2019
"Science-fiction is the dying breath of old ways of living."
— Nick Axel (@alucidwake) October 27, 2019
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
Yeah that’s kind of the point https://t.co/Dl2ZAFyPDe
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 29, 2019
Oh you love the 90s huh. Name every short-sighted decision elites made that we are only now beginning to pay for.
— Ed Booooo-mila (@gin_and_tacos) October 26, 2019
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
I taught a class on cultural criticism in the digital age last year, & it was stunning the number of essays I assigned from shuttered sites or written by fired writers. I pitched it as a class abt contemporary discourse but slowly realized it was a class abt an historical period.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
I imagined that class five years ago imagining it'd be a class about life and energy but had to eventually teach it as a class about loss and decline. That all these disavowed words are so fucking funny and smart and humane makes it all that much worse.
— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
OK, I think I figured it out: pic.twitter.com/GtpEpjH54T
— eve peyser (@evepeyser) October 22, 2019
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
You beat Trump by getting people who don’t normally vote to vote, not by beating your head against the wall trying to convince rich white men to change their minds about hurting people
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 18, 2019
True of basically everywhere in the US honestly. https://t.co/3AHHChEcFS
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019
I forget who said it, but respecting the powerful is called "civility" and should be held sacred, while respecting the powerless is called "political correctness" and should be the object of ridiculehttps://t.co/HmG4EYYUw7
— Seva (@SevaUT) October 25, 2019
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
OMG. This. pic.twitter.com/lPpud7dtSE
— Lou Anders needs to pick a book and stick with it (@LouAnders) October 20, 2019
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
Media and Social Class: A Guide https://t.co/eTztXfj1qB This is at least two years of grad school in literature for free. pic.twitter.com/j56AnoCJ0x
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2019
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
advance directive, colorize
backslash, commoditize
compact disc
fragile x
Lyme disease
de-stress
adjustable rate, identity
canola oil, therapy
neocon, pepper spray
WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY https://t.co/Pg1ADY7cpU— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2019
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 29, 2019 at 4:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 11' 8", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, alt-right, America, apocalypse, assassination, autism, Baby Boomers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Black Panther, blackouts, Booker Prize, Brexit, California, CBP, CFPs, Chile, China, Chuck E. Cheese, civility, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, coal, Coca-Cola, college sports, color, comics, culture, CUNY, cussing, data breaches, debt, deenergization, deportation, digital culture, disability, Disney, Do you hear the people sing?, Donald Trump, dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, Durham, eco-horror, ecology, Edward Snowden, Elizabeth Warren, Emmett Till, empire, English majors, Evil Dead, Exxon, fantasy, fifty-state strategy, film, Florida, Fox, Foxconn, fraternities, Fredric Jameson, Game of Thrones, games, general strike, Generation X, Generation Z, genocide, genre, Greta Thunberg, Handmaid's Tale, His Dark Materials, hitmen, Homestuck, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Iceland, immigration, impeachment, India, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John Roberts, Kashmir, Kentucky, kids today, Kirby, lead paint, Lord of the Rings, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Review of Books, lunch debt, maps, Margaret Atwood, Massachusetts, memorials, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, MOOCs, Mordor, my media empire, NCAA, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Newsweek, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, oil, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, orcs, Pakistan, Pantone, parenting, Philip Pullman, politics, pollution, poverty, President Supervillain, prestige TV, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, radicalization, recession, remember the 90s?, resistance, revolution, San Francisco, Santa Ana, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schools, science fiction, scooters, screen time, sea level rise, Silicon Valley, small liberal arts colleges, socialism, Star Wars, student debt, Supernova Era, surveillance, Swarthmore, Tarantino, television, tenure, the 2010s, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Blob, the Internet, The Testaments, The Wandering Earth, they paved paradise, Three-Body Problem, time travel, Tolkien, transgender issues, typing, United Kingdom, University of Maryland, Untitled Goose Game, UWM, villains, voting, Wakanda, war on education, water, we're not so different, WeWork, wildfire, Wisconsin, words, worst financial crisis since the last one, xkcd, YouTube
Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!
* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.
* Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.
* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.
* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.
Call for papers: @UCRiverside Symposium on speculative futures and education: pic.twitter.com/4NSN0WqSnu
— Nalo Hopkinson (@Nalo_Hopkinson) October 3, 2019
* Get ready for the next recession.
* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.
The looting of higher ed https://t.co/crh0sNJpTx
— Kevin Modestino (@kevin_modestino) October 8, 2019
* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.
* Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.
* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.
* You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.
* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.
One year ago, Greta Thunberg began a one-person school strike.
This week, she will likely win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Her message to world leaders is really a message to all of us: "Change is coming whether you like it or not." https://t.co/UaP72pdIwE
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 7, 2019
* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.
it's clarifying to watch liberals who have spent three years bemoaning the ruin of US society yet again show that what they really mean by "norms" is the ability of celebrities to have telegenic feel-good moments of Being Normal with ghouls who have killed millions of people
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 8, 2019
* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.
* The Concern Troll in Everyone.
I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.
* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.
* Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.
* “every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”
every time i think about this poem i need to lie down pic.twitter.com/mQBBqqbNGY
— ava wolf (@wownicebuttdude) October 7, 2019
* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.
* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.
* Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.
* What can’t we remember our earliest years?
* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.
Every “gender reveal” is a fail https://t.co/5aL66brUok
— rhea butcher (@RheaButcher) October 7, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
October 8, 2019 at 4:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Ad Astra, administrative blight, Alan Moore, America, apocalypse, authoritarianism, automation, Barack Obama, billionaires, Bush, call for papers, capitalism, CFPs, change, China, class struggle, climate change, comics, corruption, Democratic primary 2020, disability, Donald Trump, Drexel University, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, Ellen DeGeneres, Facebook, gender, Greta Thunberg, guns, Hong Kong, How the University Works, human resources, ice, impeachment, indigenous issues, Interstellar, John Roberts, Joker, kids today, liberalism, Lyft, Marquette, mass shootings, memory, Mitt Romney, Nalo Hopkinson, NBA, neoliberalism, Nobel Prize, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, outer space, parenting, pedagogy, poetry, politics, protest, recession, resistance, revolution, robots, Romney eats shit, sad dads, science fiction, social media, South Park, Supreme Court, the courts, the economy, the law, the Odyssey, the subway, the university in ruins, trolls, Uber, UC Riverside, Utopia