Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘accelerations

Get June Started Right with June Links

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* CFP for the first issue of Fantastika Journal.

* David Higgins reviews Paradoxa 27: The Futures Industry.

Ending Their Wars: On Memorial Day, socialists honor the victims of war and struggle for a world free of it.

* This Is What Extinction Sounds Like.

* “Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian.”

* So here’s my question: if this is all so “common sense” and “modest” then why do you have to lie so much about process and intentions? Why are people who drone on about “accountability” for others allowed to act without any accountability to the institutions they are supposed to represent?

* The Life Cycle of Genres.

Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgments made by particular historical observers. For instance, adjectives of size (“huge,” “gigantic,” but also “tiny”) are among the most reliable textual clues that a book will be called science fiction. Few people would define science fiction as a meditation on size, but it turns out that works categorized as science fiction (by certain sources) do spend a lot of time talking about the topic.

[whispers] Well, my dissertation and book-when-I-finally-get-around-to-massively-revising-it does define science fiction as a meditation on size…

* Bonus Ted Underwood content! The Real Problem with Distant Reading.

* In response to McGurl’s call we intend to create a digital database along with a visualization tool that can be used to map the professional itineraries and social networks of everyone who ever studied or taught creative writing at Iowa since the Workshop’s inception to the present date.

Duke University enters hotel business with $62 million project. You know, nonprofit for educational purposes.

University Of Akron President Resigns After Financial Controversies.

Is It Time for Universities to Get Out of the Hospital Business?

* …if you take up these old positions about what a higher education in the humanities should involve, you end up dancing with some very conservative people. I found myself in very strange company when I began to hold out for education, not as a credentialising process, but what I think of as encouragement for the revolutionary force of individual curiosity–pursued without limit.

* On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.

* Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape.

Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel.

* Which City Has the Most Unpredictable Weather? Of course Milwaukee makes the top-ten for major metropolitan areas.

* It’s 2016. Why is anyone still keeping elephants in circuses?

* How rich does a black criminal have to be to get treated like a white one?

* Vindicated! A new meta analysis in Perspectives in Psychological Science looked at 33 studies on the relationship between deliberate practice and athletic achievement, and found that practice just doesn’t matter that much.

* 11 History Books You Should Read Before Writing Your Military SF Novel.

* On Early Science Fiction and the Medieval.

* Literature and prestige.

* Careerism and totalitarianism.

 Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.

* Trump and the university.

* On Progressive Racism.

Progressive racism is how racism is enacted by being denied: how racism is heard as a blow to the reputation of an organisation as being progressive. We can detect the same mechanism happening in political movements: when anti-racism becomes part of an identity for progressive whites, racism is either re-located in a body over there (the racist) or understood as a blow to self-reputation of individuals for being progressive. This term “progressive whites” comes from Ruth Frankenberg important work on whiteness studies. She argues that focusing on whiteness purely in negative terms can  “leaves progressive whites apparently without any genealogy” (1993, 232).  Kincheloe and Steinberg in their work on whiteness studies write of “the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive antiracist white identity” (1998, 34). Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this list of adjectives (positive, proud, attractive, antiracist) is that antiracism then becomes just another white attribute in a chain: indeed, anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.

When we peel back its progressive pedagogical covering, the teaching-tool defense is embodied in unequal reasoning. It is embodied in racist logic: our national inability to value the same, to reason the same, to think the same for different racial groups.

What effects has “ban the box” had so far? Two new working papers suggest that, as economic theory predicts, “ban the box” policies increase racial disparities in employment outcomes. So disheartening.

Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth. No! I won’t believe it!

What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.

* Well, the establishment’s also pretty bored by literary work that deals with our treatment of the rest of being — you know, other animals, the rest of life on Earth, the creatures beyond the man-apes. Like the tragedy of how our men treat our women, the tragic way humans treat nonhumans is still, to many U.S. fiction arbiters, also irrelevant as a conversation, often dismissed as a boutique topic that’s the fodder of cranks and tree huggers. Women and the rest of species in existence: two flaming badges of uncool.

* Harambe launches a thousand thinkpieces.

The Black Film Canon: The 50 greatest movies by black directors.

Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object.’

* How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges.

Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school. All told, over that same 14-year stretch, Chicago’s black population decreased by an estimated 200,000 residents, or nearly 19 percent. Illinois now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.

If you were designing the worst place to be poor in decades ahead, you’d come up with a low-density, auto-dependent, aging and declining suburb.

* AP FACT CHECK: Clinton misstates key facts in email episode. Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States.

After Being Called Out, Trump Hastily Donates the Veterans’ Aid Money He Said He’d Already Donated. Meet David French: the random dude off the street Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump.

* This is good fun but pretty seriously slanders Magneto and the Joker.

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The Republicans’ Military Budget Could Make Every Homeless Person In America A Millionaire.

The Male Gaze in a Math Book.

* Coming from Pixar, 2022: Swarm of bees follows woman’s car for two days to rescue their queen.

* The paralogisms of pure dismissal.

* Fandom Is Broken. A Retort. I’m mostly just impressed with how hard I nailed it.

* Baby abandoned at SF State now one of its grads.

Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit.

* Timeline maps.

* Hyperattention and hyperdistraction.

* Not a Review of Neoreaction a Basilisk. I for one welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted writer and educator, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground zinc caves.

* Make Bayesianism Work for You.

A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf.

“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”

A Fascinating Video Essay Explores the Key Reason Why Calvin and Hobbes Remains So Beloved Today.

* This is a little old, but DC has basically gone ahead and made it real, so…

David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.

Algorithms: The Future That Already Happened.

Judith Butler on the Value of the Humanities and Why We Read.

* Time to panic about Rogue One.

* I still can’t believe The Cursed Child is a real thing. Even photographs can’t convince me.

[somberly drags FerrisBueller.privilege.Salon.docx to the trash can]

Business Of Disaster: Insurance Firms Profited $400 Million After Sandy.

* Over a third of coral is dead in parts of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.

* And to imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever.

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Written by gerrycanavan

June 1, 2016 at 8:31 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Tuesday Links! Too Many of Them! Send Help!

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* Don’t forget! Just two weeks until the “Global Weirding” deadline!

* And tomorrow night in Missouri! Marquette Professor to Present ‘After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction.’

* CFP: Radical Future and Accelerationism.

* Evergreen headlines: The Shrinking Ph.D. Job Market.

* Last year’s Pioneer Award winner: “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.”

The Anthropological Unconscious, or How Not to Talk About African Fiction.

* AfroSF Now: A Snapshot, Seven Novels and a Film.

* Africa Has Always Been Sci-Fi.

Cost Control Is a Progressive Value.

Grade Inflation, Forever and Ever Amen.

* Dueling letters: President Lovell. Professor McAdams.

Cheating Incidents Blemish NCAA’s Marquee Event.

Honors Colleges Promise Prestige, But They Don’t All Deliver.

* The Humanities in the Anthropocene.

Extinction: A Radical History.

Art in the Age of Economic Inequality.

* Manifesto of a Future University.

30 Cities Where America’s Poor Are Concentrated. You know where this is going.

It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention. And a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Jeffrey Dahmer’s House Is Up for Rent During the Republican National Convention.

* More politics watch! The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election. Sanders +2.6! Trump -4.1! Go vote Wisconsin!

It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates.

My analysis of the latest federal data shows that, on average, these families’ income — including tax credits and all sources of welfare — is about $9,000 below the poverty line. That means ensuring no children grow up in poor households would cost $57 billion a year. (To put that in perspective, that’s how much money we’d get if Apple brought back the $200 billion it has stashed overseas, and paid just 29 percent tax on it – it’s a big problem, but it’s small compared to the wealth of our society.)

Students begin sit-in at Allen Building, demand resignation of Executive Vice President Tallman Trask.

Unionizing Pays Big Dividend for Professors at Regional Public Universities. What Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges Made in 2015-16.

The villain gap: Why Soviet movies rarely had American bad guys. Risk time in the gulag by reading about Soviet-era underground media. Cold War board games explore the conflict’s history, spycraft, and humor. Soviet sci-fi: The future that never came.

This Genius Twitter Feed Is Turning Classic Kids’ Books Into Nightmares.

Superman And The Damage Done: A requiem for an American icon. An oral history of Superman. A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Death to All Superheroes. Yes, chum, there’s more links below the picture.

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* The Antonin Scalia School of Law, or…

Retirees Are Handing Wall Street Billions For No Good Reason.

* All politics is local: I grew up being compared to my overachieving cousin. Now he’s a Supreme Court nominee.

* Laughter doesn’t scale.

Imagine living in a cell that’s smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate.

Up to half of people killed by US police are disabled.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore.

Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. But I say that’s not thinking big enough! 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.

This Is How We Could Hide Our Planet From Bloodthirsty Aliens.

* Dibs on the screenplay: Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Just Reappeared and Nobody Knows What Happened to It. 

Researchers Just Discovered a New State of Matter.

* Hot take watch: Aaron Burr, Not So Bad? I wish I knew the Hamilton soundtrack well enough to make a proper joke here.

Statistical Analysis Has Revealed Game of Thrones‘ True ‘Main’ Character.

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* Data suggests a mere 94% of Tor data is malicious.

It is now 100 years since the war on drugs began in the United States and was then gradually imposed on the rest of the world.

* Indigenous video games you should download.

* Scientists bemoan SeaWorld decision to stop breeding orcas.

Researchers who have recently ventured into this region say the once-vibrant ecosystem is now a ghastly tableau, filled with pale-white corals that are at risk of dying off.

* Dark, gritty ad absurdum: The Tick in 2016.

* Durham and gentrification.

* Trumpism in everything, Wal-Mart edition.

NFL Sends Threatening Letter To New York Times, Demands Retraction Of Concussion Investigation.

The Ultimate List of Weapons Astronauts Have Carried Into Orbit.

Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly. The end of Florida. These Maps Show What Washington Will Look Like When Antarctica Melts.

* Ambiguous utopias: In Pod-Based Community Living, Rent Is Cheap, But Sex Is Banned.

* Can an outsider become Amish?

* The strange case of Jennifer Null.

Whatever happened to utopian architecture?

* Miracles and wonders: Treating Huntington’s With Gene Knockout Might Be Safe For Adults.

* Terry Gilliam tempts fate, again.

* The best Star Wars character you’ve never heard of.

* And the arc of history is long, but the MLA has changed its style guide again.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 5, 2016 at 8:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,