Posts Tagged ‘academic publishing’
After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!
* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…
* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!
* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”
* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…
* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.
* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.
* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.
* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.
* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.
* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.
* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.
* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.
* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.
* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.
* Read it and weep, my friend.
* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”
* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.
* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.
* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.
* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.
* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.
* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.
* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.
* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.
* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.
* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.
* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.
* The best COVID-19 response in the world.
* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.
* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.
* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.
* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.
* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.
* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.
* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.
* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”
* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.
* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.
* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.
* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.
* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.
* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.
* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.
* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.
* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.
* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.
* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.
* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.
* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.
* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!
* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.
* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.
* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”
* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.
* Racism and the porn industry.
* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.
* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.
* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.
* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.
* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”
* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.
* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.
* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.
* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?
* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’
* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.
* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.
* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.
* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.
* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.
* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.
* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).
* I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.
* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.
* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.
* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.
* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”
* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.
* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.
* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.
* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”
* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.
At Long Last: Links!
* CFP: Paradoxa 31: Climate Fiction. CFP: Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. CFP: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene. CFP: Radical Perspectives on Horror Cinema. CFP: New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction. CFP: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. CFP: The David Foster Wallace Society Annual Meeting. CFP: Poverty and Literature.
* Applications for The Roddenberry Fellowship are now open. $50,000 will be awarded to up to 20 Fellows in the areas of civil rights, immigration, environmental protection, LGBTQIA & women’s rights. Are you or someone you know a future Fellow?
* University of Pittsburgh Acquires Romero Collection, To Found Horror Studies Center.
* What Milwaukee Can Teach the Democrats about Socialism.
* A Union Fight at Marquette University. Spadework. Letter from a Graduate Instructor: Why We Need a Union @ Marquette University.
* Microsyllabus: Critical University Studies.
* What Really Happened at Stanford University Press: An Insider’s Account.
* Ex-Players Sue UCLA, Coaches, NCAA For Injuries, Abuse.
* Enrollment Shortfalls Spread to More Colleges.
* Want to save the humanities? Make college free.
* The Humanities Without Nostalgia.
* The Party of Utopia: A Report from the 43rd Annual Society for Utopian Studies Conference.
* As the Hungarian prime minister systematically undermined his own country’s education system, one institution stood defiant: a university in the heart of Budapest, founded by George Soros.
* This Is What It Sounds Like Hiding In A Dark Classroom During A School Shooting.
* It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning. And speaking of which: read Ted’s new book! Really!
* Profiles of young Americans who entered voluntary exile rather than paying their student loans.
* What’s Scarier Than Student Loans? Welcome to the World of Subprime Children.
* It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
* How golf explains Donald Trump.
* The deaths of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were preventable, according to internal agency documents obtained by The Young Turks. One ICE official told TYT the problem is “systemic.” She Stopped to Help Migrants on a Texas Highway. Moments Later, She Was Arrested. “I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes.” What doctors found US officials have done to caged kids. DHS watchdog finds 900 people at border facility with maximum capacity for 125. Pretty grim.
* A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants.
* ‘So much land under so much water’: extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest. Extreme Heat Wave Forces South Carolina Bridge to Close for Several Hours. Levees Won’t Save Louisiana from a Climate “Existential Crisis.” Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems. This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice. Flooding leaves Houston area students stranded at school. The U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open. This map shows millions of acres of lost Amazon rainforest. Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End. What remains of Paradise. Jay Inslee promised serious climate policy and he is delivering. Ireland becomes second country to declare climate emergency. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing. Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns. 2050 or bust. No Happy Ending.
* Studies in the Novel 50.1: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction.
* What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis?
* Of course you had me at hello: The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less.
* One Year Off, Every Seven Years.
* After 4 Years Of Not Throwing Away His Trash This Photographer Created A Powerful Photo Series.
* Why Are Americans Ignoring the Most Important Movie of Their Times, China’s The Wandering Earth?
* The average lifetime of a civilization is 336 years.
* A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism.
* Stalling on Climate Change Action May Cost Investors Over $1 Trillion.
* After Standing Rock, protesting pipelines can get you a decade in prison and $100K in fines.
* The end of the Grand Canyon.
* Koalas declared functionally extinct.
* The other side of climate grief is climate fury.
* America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
* America’s educational system is an ‘aristocracy posing as a meritocracy.’
* Hell is a YouTube algorithm.
* Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off. How the U.S. health-care system puts people with diabetes in danger.
* American kids are 70 percent more likely to die before adulthood than kids in other rich countries.
* Angry Birds and the End of Privacy.
* 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos.
* Boeing Built Deadly Assumptions Into 737 Max, Blind to a Late Design Change.
* Amazon’s Size Is Becoming a Problem—for Amazon. Cofounder of Facebook calls for breakup of Facebook. Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images. Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
* Of course it’s even worse than all that.
* ‘I Did My Best to Stop American Foreign Policy’: Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
* The kids won’t save us. Teenage Pricks: Trumpism’s Boy Power.
* The Birth-Tissue Profiteers.
* The $3.5 billion shaving industry is secretive and litigious — and disrupting itself silly.
* Parents who raise children as vegans should be prosecuted, say Belgian doctors.
* Uber rang in its IPO with champagne and mimosas. Then the hangover began. The Ride-Hail Strike Got Just Enough Attention to Terrify Uber. Lyft’s First Results After I.P.O. Show $1.14 Billion Quarterly Loss. How Corporate Delusions of Automation Fuel the Cruelty of Uber and Lyft. Uber, Lyft account for two-thirds of traffic increase in SF over six years, study shows.
* This Bird Went Extinct and Then Evolved Into Existence Again.
* Weird science: Jeanette Winterson talks writing, teaching and queer visions of the future.
* There is no depression gene. Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
* NASA Accidentally Destroys NYC in Attempt to Save Denver.
* No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime.
* Buffoonery, or laying the groundwork for heads-we-win-tails-you-lose impeachment proceedings? Or both? Probably both.
* Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.
* My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
* Twenty-five years later, The Bell Curve’s analysis of race and intelligence refuses to die. Reckoning with its legacy may help redirect the conversation in urgently needed ways.
* What I’m saying here is that the Georgia law is NOT an overturn of “Roe v. Wade.” We’re not headed back to pre-“Roe” days. We’re headed for something much worse.
* Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Democrats need a power agenda, not just a policy agenda.
* How A Black Psychiatrist Shaped ‘Sesame Street’ Into A Tool To Fight Against Racism. “Sesame Street” was a radical experiment in challenging institutional racism.
* What Would Happen to Earth If the Avengers Undid Thanos’ Snap?
* In perhaps the richest city in the richest country in human history. And again.
* Suicide rates in girls are rising, study finds, especially in those age 10 to 14. For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers. Over the past year, a spate of suicides has revealed a financial crisis in New York’s cab industry. Officials have blamed Uber, but much of the crisis can be traced to a handful of taxi tycoons. As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage.
* Life, Liberty, and Advanced Placement for All.
* Susan Sontag was true author of ex-husband’s book, biography claims.
* Autoreply. Real college. Revenge. Love. Winning. Nausea. Brains. Aliens. Vegetarianism. The real climate change was the friends we made along the way.
* Of course I’d want $150,000. Please go away — I’m reading! There’s only one rule I know of. It could work.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Alternate history, 500 levels in.
* The Martian Base in the Gobi Desert.
* The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects version 2.00.
* “Here follows my ongoing thread of Game of Thrones characters as Dril tweets.”
* Physicists Discover Our Universe Is Fictional Setting Of Cop Show Called ‘Hard Case.’
* Take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
* Trump’s hasty plan to get Americans back on the moon by 2024, explained.
* And okay FINE I’ll get excited about all these UFO reports.
Wednesday Lunchtime Links!
* Sean Guynes has your deep dive into Fall 2019 university press catalogues. Kim Stanley Robinson and Joanna Russ both coming from Modern Masters of Science Fiction, which couldn’t make me happier.
* Strike at Uber and Lyft today. Call a cab instead!
* A 9-Year Quest for Carbon Neutrality Took Middlebury to Forests and a Dairy Farm.
* The psychology of inequality.
* But one thing that struck me while reading the valiant efforts of journalists attempting to convey the gravity of the scale of the U.N. report (a 1,500-page document that its authors distilled into a 40-page summary, which reporters had to distill into a normal-size news story), is the sheer impossibility of that task. “Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded,” Brad Plumer’s Times story begins. Where do you even go from there?
* Superheroes Starring in Children’s Books.
* Johns Hopkins Calls in the Police to Arrest Protesters, Ending Student Occupation.
* Facial recognition wrongly identifies public as potential criminals 96% of time, figures reveal.
* CBS Censors a ‘Good Fight’ Segment. Its Topic Was Chinese Censorship.
* In the Era of Teen$ploitation.
It’s worth remembering that young people online are supposed to be shielded by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which puts limits on what can be done with the data of kids aged twelve and under. Websites directed at children, and websites that are popular with children, are required to take special precautions with children’s data—in fact, parental permission is required before that data can be collected at all. Corporations like YouTube and Facebook, however, knowingly evade these regulations by claiming that their products are meant for users aged thirteen and over.
* One imagines that, with time, the intricate web linking the movies will get more frayed and insubstantial, and the new films will seem increasingly inessential. And yet, after a certain point, following a story for a long time becomes a story in itself. After watching nearly thirty hours of Marvel adventures, Alex McLevy, the A.V. Club writer, concluded that “the experience overtakes the nature of the content.” This is true of the M.C.U. more generally. When watching any individual movie, a kind of pattern recognition—an intellectual interest in how each new story evokes or departs from the others—replaces narrative pleasure. The narrative worth caring about becomes the story of one’s own interaction with the M.C.U. Just as people ask, about historical events, “Where were you when it happened?,” so fans ask where they were when “Iron Man” came out, when the Avengers first assembled, when heroes and villains battled in Wakanda. This is the story that’s truly limitless.
* Impossibly, Far from Home really is going to try to get into the minutiae of the post-Snap MCU.
That was one of the most fun things — just talking through what the most mundane implications would be. Like, your birthday on your driver’s license or passport would say that you are five years older than you technically are. Those sorts of questions are just so fascinating to me, and I really wanted to get into the minutiae of it and really explore that.
* Could it be true? The Real Monster in “Game of Thrones” Is Its Hidden Reactionary Ideology.
* In its final episodes, the series has resorted to making excuses for its own bad choices.
* Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses. 5 Takeaways From 10 Years of Trump Tax Figures.
* The muddled message from Pelosi—Trump is obstructing justice every day, but we’ll show him by not impeaching—is a byproduct of the corner she’s occupying: Impeach the president and risk a catastrophic backfire that secures him another term, or don’t impeach him, and allow Donald Trump to operate in a space where the credible threat of impeachment is off the table. The 2020 Election’s Approach Is No Reason to Avoid Impeachment.
* Meanwhile, Trump continues to use his pardons to send the message that if you kill for him there will be no consequences.
* Today in the richest country in the human history.
* Walt Disney and the Space Race.
* Milwaukee Noir. Read the introduction!
Above all, podcasts make us feel less lonely. We tell ourselves offer codes in order to live. They simulate intimacy just enough to make us feel like we’re in a room with other people, or at least near the room . . . definitely in the same city as the room. But these people with podcasts are so much sharper than us, so at home in their corners of the world, with easy command of their respective bodies of pop-culture knowledge. The appropriate response is fandom. Coughing up $5 on Patreon feels like paying the cover at a dive for our local band, and we’re pleased to be part of something. Some podcasts even do live appearances, for which we might buy tickets. Listening to our heroes’ once intimate voices on a booming sound system, though, surrounded by a thousand fanboys, feels like a betrayal. We thought we had something special, with their voices so close to our ears. Podcasts were the first medium designed to be listened to primarily on headphones, by a single person. Hell is other listeners.
* Is Science Broken? Major New Report Outlines Problems in Research.
* On knotweed, the invasive plant that drives homeowners to madness.
* And the kids are all right: Tucson high school students walk out after Border Patrol detains classmate.
In a Dark Time, The Blog Begins to Linkpost
* My chances have never been better.
* One of the highlights of my trip to ICFA this year was my exposure to some truly bonkers viral digital horror texts, like Doki Doki Literature Club! and Normal Porn for Normal People.
* Grooming Style: A conversation on how the Alt Lit scene’s documentation of sexual violence became a style of supposed sincerity. Infinite Jest isn’t mentioned but the critique seems potentially valid here as well.
* How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction. How Imagination Will Save Our Cities. When Science Fiction Comes True. Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed.
* Climate Fiction: A Special Issue of Guernica.
* Sci-fi literature university seeks degree granting authority.
* Terrific video essay from Dan Golding on Hollywood franchises, nostalgia, and climate change. I’ve already been using it in presentations!
* The Pattern Podcast, from the masters of the OEB Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox.
* Fantasy’s Widow: The Fight Over The Legacy Of Dungeons & Dragons.
* U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy. Phew, that’s a relief.
* Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst. Robot Workers Can’t Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in Flames.
* Twilight of the elites, college admissions edition. The College Admissions Ring Tells Us How Much Schoolwork Is Worth.
* How UT-Austin’s Innovation Boondoggle Went Belly Up.
* Seemingly deeply flawed study suggests trigger warnings have little effect.
* A bigger scandal at colleges — underpaid professors.
* Colleges gave their students’ work to TurnItIn and now it’s worth $1.75B. Why a Plagiarism-Detection Company Is Now a Billion-Dollar Business.
* I can’t wait to explore all the exciting exceptions to this free-speech proclamation.
* The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
* The group described training exercises in which “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles — resulting in injuries.”
The “terrified” teachers, ISTA added, were then instructed to not tell their colleagues what was in store for them. “Teachers waiting outside that heard the screaming were brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” We rehearse the coming trauma because we cannot stop it.
* Rutgers faculty members authorize union to call a strike.
* ‘Change Is Closer Than We Think.’ Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise.
* On Star Trek: Voyager and Trumpism.
* The neo-Nazi plot against America is much bigger than we realize. There’s No Such Thing as Nationalism Without Ethnic Cleansing. The Making of the Fox News White House. It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever. Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.
* How a black man says he ‘outsmarted’ a neo-Nazi group and became their new leader.
* Why Donald Trump could win again, by Dave Eggers. I’ve gathered that some people don’t like this piece for various reasons but if you don’t think Donald Trump is a very strong threat for reelection I think you are very wrong. He has a floor of 40% and seems utterly immune to negative press, plus a ton of Republicans who sat it out or got squeamish will come home. He “looks like a president” now, and will be completely unprincipled in abusing his position. It’s not a gimme. How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide. Or, if you prefer: Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College.
* Meanwhile, he gets to poison all our water.
* In this, the best of all possible countries, in this, the best of all possible worlds.
* Among NYC Students, 1 In 8 Is Homeless Before 5th Grade: Study.
* Leaked Documents Show the U.S. Government Tracking Journalists and Immigration Advocates Through a Secret Database. 4 women fined, sentenced to probation for leaving water for migrants crossing US-Mexico border. 12 detained babies have been released from ICE custody in Dilley, Texas. Immigrant Miscarriages in ICE Detention Have Nearly Doubled Under Trump. ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High.Young US Citizen Detained at Border Gave ‘Inconsistent Info,’ CBP Says. US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, you can hold an immigrant indefinitely for jaywalking.
* The demobilization of the resistance is a dangerous mistake. If Trump is a national emergency, it’s time for Democrats to act like it. The Cowardice of the Cover-Your-Ass Memo. Understanding Ilhan Omar. The Obama Boys.
* Activists will never design good strategy on the basis of bad history. The reality is that the Good Sixties civil rights movement was most successful when it operated with a de facto diversity of tactics. Francis Fox Piven has noted that civil rights progress only really occurred when self-defense against white incursions escalated into black aggression against the symbols and agents of white domination—notably the white police, merchants, and landlords.
* Activism and the Catholic tradition.
* Nihilist in chief: On Mitch McConnell.
* Children of the Industrocene. Students share motivations ahead of Youth Climate Strike. The Hip New Teen Trend Is Leading the Climate Movement to Save the World. Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War. Study shows IPCC is underselling climate change. The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy. The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable. Non-survivable humid heatwaves for over 500 million people. It’s raining on Greenland’s ice sheet. That’s a big problem. Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea. The Arctic’s ticking ‘carbon bomb’ could blow up the Paris Agreement. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature.’ The Other Kind of Climate Denial. Climate Change Is Here—and It Looks Like Starvation. California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions. Nebraska floods have broken records in 17 places across the state. A Light Installation in a Scottish Coastal Town Vividly Shows Future Sea Level Rise. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News for Cities. Climate change scientists look to Māori and other indigenous people for answers. Indigenous knowledge has been warning us about climate change for centuries. Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse. Here’s How Much Climate Change Could Cost the U.S. Bill To Keep Coal Plants Open Nears Finish Line.
* Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.
* The WWF’s secret war: The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.
* Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
* We Know How to Cut Child Poverty in Half. Will We Do It? Oh, honey.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* Life in Prison for Selling $20 of Weed.
* The rich are different! Massive study finds strong correlation between “early affluence” and “faster cognitive drop” in old age.
* Only 7 Black Students Got Into Stuyvesant, N.Y.’s Most Selective High School, Out of 895 Spots.
* Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.
* Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.
* Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.
* Understanding privilege: a thread.
* In 1998, I helped convict two men of murder. I’ve regretted it ever since.
* On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post.
* A room of one’s own white colleagues.
* The Max-8 chronicles: The world pulls the Andon cord on the 737 Max. Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras. Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash. Essentially, this plane could try to crash itself because of a single faulty sensor. Aviation Experts Have Predicted Automation Will Lead to Disasters Like the Boeing Max Crashes for 15 Years.
* US citizens will need to register to visit parts of Europe starting in 2021.
* How The Very Hungry Caterpillar Became a Classic.
* Suicide contagion and the MPAA.
* More from the Michael Jackson revision beat: Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
* Netflix’s Bright Future Looks A Lot Like Television’s Dim Past.
As a professional television critic, I am living there already. Netflix is now effectively my whole field of coverage. It’s increasingly difficult for me to place coverage of non-Netflix shows; all but the biggest “event” shows on other networks are passed over for regular reviews, and those on rival streaming services are afterthoughts at best. This is true even of Amazon Prime, the TV and film branch of the mind-bogglingly lucrative corporation after which New York Governor Amazon Cuomo was named. (Don’t feel too bad for Amazon, though: “Netflix Delivers Billions of Content Globally by Running on Amazon Web Services.”)
If you write about television the way I mostly do, which is through reviews—recaps, if you insist—of individual episodes, even Netflix is difficult to write about. Netflix’s own business model ensures this. Weekly shotgun blasts of full seasons of half a dozen different shows are just how it operates, but it makes deciding what will hit and how and when to cover it absolutely maddening for every TV editor I’ve talked to. By design, Netflix shows are consumed in one or two sittings, within 72 hours of their small-hours Friday release. They are to be discussed intensely on Monday and Tuesday, and then swept aside by the next torrent of programming to come down the Netflix Original Sluice by the end of the week.
* Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Marvel corner! Who’s the Baddie? Captain Marvel in the Age of American Empire. You’re blowing my mind, dude. Like so many characters in the MCU, Fury’s coolness only makes sense if you limit your perspective. And the arc of history is long, but.
As a result, the movie poses questions it can’t answer. When we see her show up in the present — played by the same actor who is the same age — do we ask what Captain Marvel has been doing for the last twenty-four years? What she has done and learned? How she has grown and changed? If she approves of Nick Fury’s “Avengers Initiative,” and of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Did she watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier where an American super-soldier with the name “Captain” discovered that the good guys had been secretly infiltrated by the bad guys since the beginning? There are obvious and inescapable political allegories here, but what is her position on the two-state solution, the right of return, and does she have any thoughts on Ilhan Omar? Who, precisely, are the Skrulls and the Kree meant to be?
If these are ridiculous questions, it’s because this is a Marvel movie, whose episodes always gesture at resolutions that the big team-up movies will cannibalize. Thor: Ragnarak ended with the population of Asgard become a rootless diaspora searching for a new home — an extremely resonant image — but when Avengers: Infinity War began, five minutes later, Thanos had already killed half of them, offscreen, and the MCU seemed to have completely lost interest in that story, as comprehensively as it does when Black Panther’s triumphantly concluding Afrocentrism becomes Infinity War’s “sure, we’ll sacrifice Wakanda, why not.” The ending of Captain Marvel gives us the same feeling of closure — she has stopped being a soldier who kills civilians and become the kind of soldier who saves them — but the MCU’s narrative engine will never sustain this transition; the real amnesia of this franchise is how single-character episodes discover things about their protagonists that have to be forgotten.
* What happens once Uber and Lyft kill off public transit.
* Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online.
* Well, when you’re right, you’re right: “If someone is the enemy, it’s okay to kill endless numbers of them,” he continued. “Lord of the Rings is like that. If it’s the enemy, there’s killing without separation between civilians and soldiers. That falls within collateral damage. How many people are being killed in attacks in Afghanistan? The Lord of the Ringsis a movie that has no problem doing that [not separating civilians from enemies, apparently]. If you read the original work, you’ll understand, but in reality, the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans. Those who don’t know that, yet say they love fantasy are idiots.” Hayao Miyazaki Seems To Hate Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones And Hollywood Movies.
* Counterpoint: I love playing pretend with my kids and the knowledge that someday they won’t want to do it anymore breaks my soul.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know.
* When r/DaystromInstitute just nails it.
* What we call a win-win: People in states where marijuana is legal are eating more cookies and ice cream.
* Automated reception kiosks are a security dumpster fire.
* Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information.
* Amazon and YouTube Are Making Money From the Dangerous QAnon Conspiracy Theory.
* Wisconsin’s nightmare roads cost drivers $6.8 billion each year, study says.
* An oral history of the greatest episode in television comedy history.
* J.K. Rowling was always this terrible.
* Lolita, My Love, the Musical Too Dark to Live.
* Finally, a job worth applying for.
* Could Walmart Be a Model for a Socialist Future?
* Singularity watch: Harvard University uncovers DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration.
* H.I.V. Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic.
* Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Can’t see any harm there.
* Even catching up on lost sleep is bad for you!
* On the value of education. On heartbreak. On friendship. On the value of never clicking.
* Just in time for my fall class: Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and will adapt it into a series.
* The Suffering Game (for 3+ players).
* Race, Asia, and Dungeons and Dragons.
* And Lord, make me outgrow Quentin Tarantino, but not yet.
Friday Train Ride Links!
* I accidentally said something that went viral and now Twitter is absolutely useless to me.
* Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies of dehydration after being arrested by US Border Patrol. ICE Arrests 170 Immigrants Trying To Save Babies From Baby Jails. Trump is pushing Vietnam to accept deportees who have lived in the US for over 20 years.
* The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women.
* Is a Green New Deal Possible Without a Revolution?
* ‘Carbon removal is now a thing’: Radical fixes get a boost at climate talks. Earth on course to match climate from 3 million years ago by 2030, UW study says. You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change. 40 million Americans depend on the Colorado River. It’s drying up. Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards—and the Water Underneath. Urban Flooding Is Worryingly Widespread in the U.S., But Under-Studied. Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps. ”You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.”
* Can the liberal arts survive neoliberalism? Serving at Cross’s Purposes.
* We can’t pull down statues of slaveowners, while out there they’re pulling down statues of Gandhi.
* Got to have some mixed feelings.
* Nice work if you can get it: insider trading is legal when you’re in Congress.
* Elsewhere in hyperexploitation: Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (one-year term).
* How The US Left Failed Brasil. You’re not going to pin this on me!
* Teach the controversy: It’s ridiculous that it’s unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president.
* Why women have better sex under socialism, according to an anthropologist.
* There’s some wild shit going on in the far corners of the Game Of Thrones map.
* Fossils of the 21st century.
* Union solutions / management solutions.
* And it was 20 years ago (yesterday).
Monday Morning Links!
* If you only read one Star Trek: Discovery postmortem this week, it’s got to be Abigail Nussbaum’s. But if you read too, here’s mine at LARB! No Follow-Through.
* Then this one #3: In Its First Season, Star Trek: Discovery Asked Hard Questions It Never Really Wanted the Answers to.
* Original pitch for Star Trek: The Next Generation had a hologram captain. Fake Research Paper Based on Star Trek: Voyager‘s Worst Episode Was Published by a Scientific Journal.
* Science Fiction Film and Television 11.1 now available! With a special section on the science fiction of Scarlett Johansson, essays on District 9 and dating simulators, and a review essay on Get Out!
* Meanwhile, the 2019 CFP for the MLA’s speculative fiction discussion group, of which I am now the immediate past chair:
Activist Speculation and Visionary Fiction
How “visionary fiction” (Walidah Imarisha’s term for stories imagining “newer, freer worlds”) contributes to speculative fiction theory, pedagogy, practice. 200-word abstract, CV by 16 March 2018 to Alexis Lothian (alothian@umd.edu).
* I got the chance to watch this documentary on Flannery O’Connor last week as part of a Marquette English event. It was great! Can’t wait for it to find a home.
* Nothing but respect for my president.
* Horrified Florida students beg the adults: Please, do something about guns.
* I have a thing to say about growing up after tragedy.
* On the imperative of content. No one knows.
* The goal was to create “products,” which could then be monetized, but according to Leslie, who took over oversight of the institute in 2015, “There was not the foundation of a business plan” at the institute’s inception. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the “Framework for Excellence” which midwifed the Institute was literally dreamed up in two days by Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa and his advisors and passed by the regents “without asking a single question.”
* We should just create “incentive” / punishment structures that force college presidents to retire at 64 1/2, just like they all did to faculty.
* When the White Supremacists Come to Campus.
* When the suits killed Barnes and Noble.
* The august sport of (checks notes) curling may never be the same.
* Male privilege is having never thought about this possibility.
* Ban The United States From The Olympics.
* Cleaning products as bad for lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day, scientists warn.
* How banks block people of color from homeownership.
* ICE really doubling down. Man who called 911 about suspected burglary detained by ICE. He can’t get proper HIV treatment in Venezuela. But he’s being deported anyway. ICE Arrests in the Pacific Northwest Increased 25 Percent in 2017. Washington officials gave activist’s info to ICE. Refusing an interpreter to a deaf detainee. How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans. ICE Arrests Man at a Green Card Interview. Tearing families apart.
* Like Uber but for human trafficking.
* Westchester School Leaves Behind Disabled Students in Fire Evacuation.
* This List of Every Reason Banner Hulks Out in the Classic Hulk TV Series Is Hilarious.
- Receiving a lethal injection, and then having the person say, “Oh. I just gave you a lethal injection. Sorry, David.”
- Wandering around in the service ducts of a hotel (predating Bruce Willis) only to accidentally yank several of the pipes loose and get a full blast of hot steam
- Being tied up and fed soup by an elderly Japanese woman who doesn’t
understand words like “You’ve GOT to cut me loose!” - Being thrown under a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade float by a mean guy in a gorilla suit who gives David a few kicks for good measure
- Receiving a speeding ticket
- Wandering around inside a carnival funhouse, only to have someone turn on the machinery so that David is somehow caught in a rolling tumbler and flipped over a few times and then thrown down a convenient slide
* ‘Minecraft’ Data Mining Reveals Players’ Darkest Secrets.
* How should we talk about Trump’s brain?
* The Security Clearance Situation in the White House Is Bonkers.
* The case for impeaching Clarence Thomas.
* Here’s What Critics Are Saying About Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.
* New York Federal judge rules that embedding tweets can violate copyright law.
* Black Panther killed it. Black Panther and the Invention of Africa. Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve. The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool.
* Winners of the 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
* The Donkey Kong Timeline Is Truly Disturbing.
* Let kids have a sense of control over their own lives. The research is clear, let’s ban homework. In Defense of Picky Eating.
* First ship crosses Arctic in winter without an icebreaker as global warming causes ice sheets to melt. Miami could be underwater in your kid’s lifetime as sea level rise accelerates.
* A History of the United American Socialist Republics.
* Here’s All 290 Star Wars Movies Officially in Production Right Now.
* I loved this read of “The Voice of the Dolphins” at LARB, but it’s odd that the piece never notes the very strong suggestion in the story that the entire dolphin project was a hoax.
* What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
* And in a time without heroes: Cow escapes on way to slaughterhouse, smashes through metal fence, breaks arm of man trying to catch her then swims to safety on island in lake.
Sunday Night Links!
* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.
* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.
* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.
* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.
* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
* Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.
* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.
* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.
* Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.
* “Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
* We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.
* Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.
* We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed. In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.
* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.
* America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’
* It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.
* Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.
* The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.
* Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.
* six months tops
* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.
* What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
* “Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.
* Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.
* A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.
* The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.
* Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.
* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.
* Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.
* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.
* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.
* Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.
* The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.
* How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.
* 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.
* Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.
* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.
* Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.
* Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.
* The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.
* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.
* “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.
* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.
* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.
* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.
* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.
* New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.
* Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.
* Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.
* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?
* I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.
* Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.
* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.
* The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.
* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.
* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.
* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.
2016 Links!
* This Man Is Claiming To Be Able To Bring The Dead Back To Life By 2045. That’s good news, because Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Perhaps relatedly.
* So tragic: These parents cryonically froze their toddler in the hope she might live again.
* More bad news for my particular demographic.
* I’m at MLA this week, giving a paper on Saturday evening on Richard McGuire’s fantastic graphic novel Here for a panel on “The Anthropocene and Deep Time in Literary Studies.”
* The Year of the Imaginary College Student.
* Facebook ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back.’
* Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 24: Sullen. Also, here’s John Pat’s current syllabus on Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept.
* I think this one is old, but maybe it’s not old to you: Soc 710: Social Theory through Complaining.
* This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick.
* That’s when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed an amended lawsuit against the two companies, this time asking for them to give back all the money they made in New York State, to give it back to those who lost money and to pay a fine of up to $5,000 per case.
* I Studied Oregon’s Militia Movement. Here’s 5 Things You Need to Know.
* What Writing Shared World Fiction Taught Erin M. Evans About Worldbuilding.
* 12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system.
* Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels.
* David Harvey on Consolidating Power.
* No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape.
* Some Last Words on Pessimism.
* New Heights (Lows?) in Philosophy Job Application Requirements.
* The Far-Out Sci-Fi Costume Parties of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
* When a prison closes, what happens to the prison town?
* Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits againstUber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws.
* Tufts in the news! Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans.
* The novelistic sublime: Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline for Catch-22.
* If Google is a school official, I wonder if it’s a mandatory reporter.
* Tom Lutz and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* Through the looking glass: Game of Thrones author George RR Martin misses last TV deadline for new book.
* On reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On reading Ten Little Indians.
* Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes.
* Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?
* The Sherlock special “The Abominable Bride” was terrible. Has this show completely lost its way? My DVR, in a noble effort to save my sanity, opted not to record it.
* It’s all happening again: Infinite Winter. A flashback.
* What I learned not drinking for two years.
* Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection.
* Harvard’s Find of a Colonial Map of New Jersey Is a Reminder of Border Wars.
* What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word?
* U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List From The Cold War Declassified For The First Time.
* This Asian Time Travel Thriller Could Be Next Year’s Breakout Action Movie.
* An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday.
* When Gene Roddenberry’s computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. Here’s how this tech mystery was solved.
* Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added.
* The rising academic field of David Bowie Studies.
* A Brief History of Farting for Money. (via)
* Hybrids. Uncanny Valley. And then there’s the weirdest, most unbelievable SF short film I’ve ever seen.
* Barbasol presents Disney’s James Cameron’s Avatarland.
* And of course there’s always more Star Wars links: The Feminist Frequency Review. Editing The Force Awakens. Listening to Star Wars. The Original Star Wars Concept Art Is Amazing. A Not-So-Brief History of George Lucas Talking Shit About Disney’s Star Wars. Is Han Solo Force-Sensitive? The Bigger Luke Hypothesis. Cross Sections of TFA Spaceships and Vehicles. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate. Are droids slaves? Rey & BB8. Reading Anakin Skywalker after Jessica Jones. If you want a vision of the future.
Star Wars Day! Yay! Episode III Procrastination of the Procrastination
(episode one, the procrastination menace) (episode two, attack of the procrastination)
* Secrets of a lonely childhood revealed!
* A Brief Visual History of People Waiting in Line for Star Wars.
* The Tides of Lust: Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977. In the Butler archives there’s a ton of her thoughts on the Star Wars franchise, including her class notes for the Clarion classes where she discussed it. Really interesting stuff.
* And speaking of which: a CFP for a Butler essay collection.
* Evacuate? In my moment of triumph? J.J. Abrams also apologizes for Star Trek Into Darkness.
* Apropos of this New Yorker cartoon, this profile of Ahmed Best is one of the best things I’ve read about Phantom Menace.
* People are still arguing in the mentions of this Tumblr post on jury nullification, over two years later.
* There’s No College P.C. Crisis: In Defense of Student Protesters.
* Rewind: How the U.S. Military Turned Santa Claus Into a Cold War Icon.
* Out today: Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself.
* Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight Of The Adjunct Professor.
* I expected to find at least a couple prisons within a mile of a toxic site — after all 89 percent of all New Jersey residents live within a mile of a toxic site. What I didn’t expect is that over half of New Jersey’s state prisons would be toxic sites. The WNYC map, using information from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection website, identifies seven out of the 13 New Jersey state prisons as toxic sites. Plus, these toxic prison sites are often surrounded by more contaminated sites.
* In US, poverty dampens genetic influence on IQ.
* The Silent Collapse Of The Death Penalty In The United States.
* The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing.
* The Disaster Most Likely to Cause Global Famine Is Not an Earthquake, Storm, Tsunami, or Flood. I knew it, it’s capitali–oh, no, drought, it’s drought.
* And Streaming TV Isn’t Just a New Way to Watch. It’s a New Genre.
Wednesday Links!
* As yet unmade series of Star Trek is shit, say Trekkies. I’m excited but trepidatious — and I think the anthology model might really be the way to go.
* As yet unmade Greatest American Hero reboot is shit.
* All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online.
* Accelerationism Without Accelerationism.
* The Man Who Brought Zombies to America.
* John Boehner: ‘God told me’ Paul Ryan becoming Speaker was part of his divine plan. Truly, he moves in mysterious ways.
* Entering the “living parody” stage of the campus culture debate: Amid controversy, ‘Stonewall’ screening postponed.
* I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well: Man finds his doppelganger sitting in his seat on a flight.
* This one either: The Melting Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Heading Towards Irreversible Collapse.
* Why does Facebook want the machines to win at Go?
* The Idea of a “Male Brain” and a “Female Brain” Is Likely a Myth.
* The arc of history is long, but Disney May Be Officially Retiring Slave Leia From All ‘Star Wars’ Merchandise.
* And you had me at hello: famous statues reimagined as action figures.
Ain’t No Sunday Like an MLA Sunday Links
* In case you missed them: the syllabi for my spring classes, which start tomorrow.
* Meanwhile MLA saves its best panel for last: 759. Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre. Today at 1:45!
* On March 11-12, 2015, the Humanities Division at Essex County College will host its Spring 2015 Conference, “Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism.” This two-day conference offers space for writers, musicians, artists, and academicians to explore, expand upon, and rethink the implications of speculative humanities. This year’s conference will feature a special emphasis on the life, work, and influence of Octavia E. Butler.
* #MLA: An Economist’s Critique of Job Market for English Ph.D.s.
* The MLA should give Jonathan Goodwin a Lifetime Achievement Award for this post about midcentury MLA job ads. Check out his Twitter feed for more.
* Really, though, huge shoutout to all the literary critics heading home today.
* #FreeCommunityCollege. Did Obama Just Introduce a ‘Public Option’ for Higher Education? Angus is happy. Who Has a Stake in Obama’s Free Community-College Plan? Of course, it’s a Republican plan. And there’s a catch. Or two.
* Contingent Faculty and #FreeCommunityCollege.
* $18 billion in job training = lots of trained unemployed people.
Sometimes you don’t get a sales pitch. It’s none of your business, it’s reactionary to even ask the question, it’s an assertion of privilege, something’s got to be done and what have you been doing that’s better? Sometimes you get a sales pitch and it’s all about will and not about intellect: everybody has to believe in fairies or Tinkerbell will die. The increments sometimes make no sense. This leads to that leads to what? And what? And then? Why? Or perhaps most frustrating of all, each increment features its own underlying and incommensurable theories about why things happen in the world: in this step, people are motivated by self-interest; in the next step, people are motivated by basic decency; in the next step, people are motivated by fear of punishment. Every increment can’t have its own social theory. That’s when you know that the only purpose is the action itself, not the thing it’s trying to accomplish.
* Securitization, risk management, and the new university.
* Administrators, Authority, and Accountability.
* Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University.
As leverage, Silvia Federici outlines the two-part process of demanding a wage for previously uncompensated labor. The first step is recognition, but the ultimate goal is refusal. “To say that we want money for housework” she says, “is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity” (Wages Against Housework). Another way to say this is: it is only with the option of refusal that not-publishing is meaningful.
It is clear that “publish or perish” is undergoing a speedup like all other capitalist work. We must all struggle for a re-valorization of living labor. And in the first step against publication’s command over living labor, we agree with Federici, who demands that “From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it” (Wages Against Housework).
* Exclusive: Prosecutor in Serial Goes On the Record.
* The U.S. has more jails than colleges. Here’s a map of where those prisoners live.
* Scenes from the class struggle inside the National Radio Quiet Zone.
* Debt collection as autoimmune disease.
* Male Senators Banned Women From Senate Pool So They Could Swim Naked. Until 2008.
* Wow. F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Said to Seek Charges for Petraeus.
* “It’s clear he hasn’t been very lucky with the ladies the last few months,” West said of his client.
* Nightmare terror attacks in Nigeria using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.
* Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don’t Know What to Do About It).
* Great moments in matte paintings, at io9. I had no idea the warehouse from Raiders was a matte either, though in retrospect of course it was.
* New research is first to identify which reserves must not be burned to keep global temperature rise under 2C, including over 90% of US and Australian coal and almost all Canadian tar sands.
* Rave drug shows great promise in treating depression once thought resistant to drug therapy. I hope they found some way to control for the curative effects of glowsticks.
* How Wes Anderson’s Cinematographer Shot These 9 Great Scenes.
* Here comes Wet Hot American Summer: The Prequel Series.
* The kids aren’t all right: Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think.
* “Men, what would you be willing to give up to live a couple decades longer?”
* Dad creates drawings based off of quotes from his toddler daughter.
* How LEGO became the Apple of toys.
* We Wish These Retrofuturistic Versions Of American Cities Had Come True.
* Every episode of Friends at the same time.
* And exciting loopholes I think we can all believe in: “He was doing research for a film,” said Sherrard. “It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual.”
I Just Can’t Believe It’s December Links
* Over the weekend, of course, we celebrated the first Star Wars Trailer Day in a decade. Your shot-for-shot dissection. A deeper look. Digging deeper still. The George Lucas Special Edition. Elsewhere on the Star Wars beat: Physicist Proves That R2D2 Is Lighter Than Styrofoam.
* English and foreign language jobs are down nearly 10% again, down almost 40% since 2007.
* New NEH Grants Will Promote Popular Scholarly Books.
* Call for Papers: Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor.
* Why colleges haven’t stopped binge drinking.
* Donors getting bold in Illinois: U. of Illinois Could Lose Big Gift by Rehiring Adjunct.
* A long, interesting piece on an anti-bullying measure passed by Madison faculty.
* When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths. Black Friday, Or the Circulation of Commodities.
* In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.
* Afrofuturism: The Sonic Companion.
* Putting The Sidekick In The Suit: Black Captain America, Female Thor, And The Illusion Of Progress.
* Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question.
* But where does it come from? My new answer: nobody builds a megadungeon. Megadungeons build themselves. They are the guilty conscience of rulership; the truth commission against power. Great power corrupts, and absolute power does what we’ve been told. Even those who want to rule well feel the attraction of expedient murder and petulant torture, the convenience of imprisoning one’s enemies without trial, buying off the priesthood and covering it all in a glaze of ceremony and pretty words. On this world, this eventually provokes its own reaction. Beneath the seats of power – castle; trading house; senate building – the accumulated sins happening above begin to literally undo the foundations. Dungeons grow. It might not be so tidy as: 60 starved prisoners in the last few decades means 60 skeletons, with hallways for them to roam through; 20 goblins and some rooms for them to squat in appear as a direct result of last year’s punitive expedition against the recalcitrant border villages; one ghoul for each speech in which you cloak your appetites in the honeyed words of dead philosophers, etc.
* How many people are locked up in the United States?
* Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid. The video that caught the cops lying about Tamir Rice. White Cops File Suit, Claim They Are Punished Too Much For Shooting People.
* Grand Jury Won’t Indict Officers In Ohio Wal-Mart Shooting, Either.
* Missouri almost out of money to attack Ferguson with. St. Louis police officers’ group demands Rams players be disciplined for ‘hands up, don’t shoot. Ferguson: Message from the Grassroots. No healing.
* Why Every Struggle Is Now a Struggle Against the Police.
* Similar cases yield very different results in Wisconsin prison system.
* Georgia’s Top Court Reins In Private Probation Firms For Illegally Extending Sentences. Reined in! The arc of history is long, but!
* Full Nihilism: “Six Reasons I’m Thankful for a Republican Congress.” Two of the six were “I’m bored.” Media professionals!
* One of the worst “errors” of the Obama presidency was the pivot to deficit reduction, when literally no one cares about deficit reduction.
* Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. Amway Journalism.
* Officials with a Northern California school district expelled a live-in nanny’s 9-year-old daughter after hiring a private investigator to ascertain where she lived, the Contra Costa Times reported. Having been caught, the school district has now reversed itself.
* Life after people: Someone Flew a Drone Through Chernobyl and the Result Is Haunting.
* Science proves people who still read fiction really are just better.
* How Often Do “Disruptive” Business Practices Actually Mean “Illegal” Business Practices? The Uberiest thing Uber’s done yet.
* Philanthropic Poverty: Bono and other philanthropic capitalists push charity to defend property.
* When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.
* The Super Mario 64 Goomba Nobody Has Ever Killed. The Coin That Took 18 Years to Collect.
* The real roots of midlife crisis, or, the second decade of this blog is going to be a shame. At least we have Charlie Stross’s thought experiments to comfort us.
* How Not to Get Away with Murder.
* My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK.
* An Open Letter to the Administration of Vassar College.
* This TNR piece on the Rolling Stone UVA exposé actually raises some relevant journalism questions, but my sense is this happens entirely by accident in the course of a kneejerk attempt to discredit the story.
* The false rape accusation as witchcraft.
. CTRL-F revenue, CTRL-F income, CTRL-F profit: Vox Media Valued at Nearly $400 Million After Investment.
* The 22-year-old appeared to have killed himself, police said. A handgun was found near his body inside the dumpster. The text he sent said he was sorry, “if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all f—ed up.”
* Even a single season of high school football might have harmful impacts on the brain.
* Your panel-by-panel breakdown of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Watchmen pastiche Pax Americana #1, this year’s instant-classic comic book.
* You don’t have to beg, borrow, or steal anymore: Black Mirror is finally on Netflix.
* Wanderers. Time Trap. Five Minutes.
* And finally, we get to the meat: Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him.
Gerry Canavan 