Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!

• SFFTV 15.1! SFRA Review 52.1! And some upcoming projects: a special issue of SFFTV on disability! Uneven Futures!
• Syllabus for Film Theory: Disability & Technology.
• CFP: Anticolonialism as Theory Symposium. CFP: Popular Fiction. The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.
• A great piece from Adam Kotsko on having to come to terms with the unfortunate late work of a great thinker who helped shape his career.
• “Lena” is a true story. You knew it was when you read it.
• 40 useful concepts you should know.
• Drawing blood: notes on Maus. The real reason some people are so afraid of ‘Maus.’ Why Maus Opened the Door to Comics as Literature in Schools.

In light of a Tennessee district banning MAUS, I'm sharing the greatest two pages ever written and drawn about the importance of children's literature and protecting children's access to books, starring Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak. From the New Yorker, September 27, 1997. pic.twitter.com/hC2jyHicPN

— andrewkarre (@andrewkarre) January 27, 2022

• Grant Morrison’s annotations for Superman and the Authority have been fascinating.

Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers? What purpose earthly or unearthly is served by making this character an embittered space tyrant?

… I questioned the desire to attribute the worst aspects of human behaviour to characters whose only useful function, as I see it, aside from simply entertaining young people and anyone else who fancies an uplifting holiday in a storybook world far from the grinding monotony of pessimism and disillusion, is to provide a primary-coloured cartoon taste of how we all might be if we had the wit and the will and the self-sacrifice it takes to privilege our best selves and loftiest aspirations over our base instincts. While that great day is unlikely to happen any time soon in any halfway familiar real world, why not let comic book universes be playgrounds for the kind of utopian impulses that have in the past brought out the best in us?

• Batman Swallowing His Own Cape: The Modern Caped Crusader’s Narrative Autocannibalism.
• Comixology was basically perfect for what it wanted to be, so of course Amazon trashed it.
• Head of security at FSU’s Strozier Library charged with theft of thousands of rare comics.
• Mysteries of free speech: ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill: Florida Senate passes controversial LGBTQ school measure. Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns. Wisconsin Republicans advance bills that would let 18-year-olds carry concealed weapons at school. Wisconsin GOP votes to limit race theory at UW schools. Republican lawmakers plan legislation to break up MPS, expand vouchers to all students in a proposal to overhaul K-12 education. North Carolina superintendent abruptly removes MLK-themed novel from 10th grade class. Idaho librarians could face jail time for lending “harmful” books.
• This Is the End of Affirmative Action.
• What Happens to Middle School Kids When You Teach Them About Slavery? Here’s a Vivid Example.
• The University Crisis: Does the pandemic mark a breaking point? College Endowments Saw Stellar Returns as the Market Soared. Academic Freedom and Tenure: University System of Georgia. What the heck is going on in Georgia higher ed? Tenure Without Teeth. Grotesque Inequity. Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions.
• The Overbuilt Campus.

I’ve been in college continually since 1998 (now in 36th grade) and I think it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been similarly present to comprehend just how much worse the student experience has gotten since the 90s https://t.co/ZkXX5XXnRf

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2022

👀 https://t.co/sXic17MUTM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2022

• Mold, radon in FSU building tied to eight cancer cases in faculty report.
• Cripping the Neoliberal University – We need a Politics of Care.
• The Academic Conference Will Never Be the Same.
• The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class.
• U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries. What Do Masks Do to Kids? It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading.
• New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump. ‘The Dark, Forgotten Carnival.’ Jan. 6 committee says Trump violated multiple laws in effort to overturn election. Criminal Charges Against Trump Just Became Way More Real. Trump considered blanket pardons for Jan. 6 rioters before he left office.
• Detroit overtaxed homeowners $600M. Years later, advocates still seeking reparations. Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole.’
• ‘Shadow pandemic’: Advocates worry lockdowns have fuelled surge in partner violence.
• The school shooting generation grows up.
• How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood.
• Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development?
• I’ve always wondered about this: Texas trampoline parks aren’t regulated or inspected. We found 494 injuries in DFW region.
• Can Science Fiction Wake Us Up to Climate Reality? In a First, Alaska’s Arctic Waters Appear Poised for Dangerous Algal Blooms. US military faces crisis in Hawaii after leak poisons water. This 1882 surveying error saved a patch of forest from logging. IPCC issues ‘bleakest warning yet’ on impacts of climate breakdown. Carbon dioxide will have to be removed from air to achieve 1.5C, says report. How to Repair the Planet. Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it.

the problem in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/B3zDH15jI3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

I have been exploring the work of Nukina Shunichi, a 19th century Samurai turned scifi writer recommended to me by one of my undergrads.

Why don't we have this writer on more syllabuses? He's completely overturned my view of the development of SFF.https://t.co/eAVuFrlQyk

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022

• Climate Change Lurking Behind Every Corner: Review of Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious.
• From ‘Dune’ to climate change, UChicago scholar draws from unique experiences in new course.
• The Death of Philip K. Dick Brought to Life.
• The Octavia Butler Novel for Our Times. Not that one. Not that one either.
• Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress.
• I should teach this again: The Sci-Fi Crime Novel That’s a Parable of American Society.
• Defamiliarising Capitalism Through Speculative Fiction.
• Disney Censors Same-Sex Affection in Pixar Films, According to Letter From Employees.
• Enough people purchased a chemical on Amazon to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts. Amazon has continued to sell the product.
• Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete.
• PSA: Renting From Hertz May Get You Arrested. For real: If you’ve rented a car from Hertz, there could be a warrant out for your arrest.
• He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return.
• And on the pedestal these words appear: After Burning for Days, a Ship Carrying Thousands of Luxury Cars Sinks.
• Against the Contemporary American Essay.
• What is Love in African Fiction?

I think it’s bad for knowledge production that once a term reaches a certain level of obvious importance (like “Anthropocene”) it suddenly becomes “boring.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2022

• Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned: How a struggling bartender became the face of a resurgent left.
• Biden’s signature legislation expired. Recipients are wondering: WTF happened? The devastating effects of losing the child tax credit.
• Household debt jumped by $1 trillion in 2021, the most since 2007. Inflation rose 7.9% in February, as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years. Rents reach ‘insane’ levels across US with no end in sight. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee Is Helping Workers During COVID. As inflation heats up, 64% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

I think Democrats were more or less certain to get slammed in the midterms no matter what they did — the real problem is that this window was their only opportunity to get anything done for the next decade and (just like in 2009) they blew it

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2022

One US Senator “heard stories” about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit “for drugs” without any evidence or data to back it up.

He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying https://t.co/kOyuFp6ig4

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 18, 2022

• A Rhodes scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks.
• Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: An Explainer. ‘This is a fossil fuel war’: Ukraine’s top climate scientist speaks out. How Ukraine could become a nuclear crisis. Russian bombs. Why It’s Important To Debate Foreign Policy Even In Times Of Conflict.
• You don’t exist. I’ve been saying it for years!

I’ve said it before but I think it’s at least plausible that contemporary history seems so bizarre because there’s only a handful of universes where humanity didn’t go extinct during the Cold War https://t.co/CMjcSFlbEE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 28, 2022

If you’d told me then that the late 90s were just about as good as things were going to get, man, I’d have had a lot of questions

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

• No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years.
• Star Wars: You know, for kids.
• ‘The history of fantasy is racialized’: Lord of the Rings series sparks debate over race.
• Villeneuve’s “Dune”: Blending Spectacle and Cultural Erasure.
• Star Trek 2023 Movie To Reunite Kelvin Crew, Production Set To Start By End Of Year. What Happened to Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Film? Every Detail About His Canceled Pitch. Star Trek: Picard’s narrow tightrope.
• Futurama is back, again, again.
• Five years on, Breath of the Wild’s open world is still unmatched.
• “It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max Feud.
• Back to the Future: The Musical.
• Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China. ‘Fight Club’ Author Chuck Palahniuk Says China’s Censored Ending Is Actually Truer to His Vision.
• The US has plans to patrol the space around the moon. The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say. We’re Not Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds. The quest to avert an asteroid apocalypse is going surprisingly well.

privatizing the Earth didn’t wipe out poverty did it https://t.co/xyWhdvxp1H

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2022

• Garbage Hunters: Deciphering North Korea Through Its Trash.
• ‘I just feel like Rhode Island has failed’: The family of a 12-year-old girl with autism is among those in limbo because of the lack of services for those in crisis.
• Dividing Up the Autism Spectrum Will Not End the Way You Think.
• The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Enough Truck Drivers.
• As intended: The 2020 census had big undercounts of Black people, Latinos and Native Americans.
• Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale. Cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit. Snowpiercer Asks Us to Imagine the End of the World — And the End of Capitalism. The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Marriage Are Wrong.

I have a crypto curious person in my life who explained that it’s because no one knows what happens with crypto when the power goes out for a long time, which is a pretty big problem for something that is supposed to be prepper currency https://t.co/U3fe0kl4KK

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2022

• We need to talk about this Scarlet Witch action figure.
• Mapping the celebrity NFT complex. Web3 is the future, or a scam, or both.
• New Data Shows 61% Rise in U.S. Prison Deaths in 2020. Only One (1) Media Outlet Reported On It.
• The U.S. is limiting compassionate release in plea deals. Many say that’s cruel.
• Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions. Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It’s 100% Preventable.
• Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
• Marquette has changed its university seal. Indigenous Education at Marquette.
• The Dawn of Everything.
• Against longtermism.
• A Henry Darger Dispute: Who Inherits the Rights to a Loner’s Genius?
• In my 35 years as a reporter, I have never seen anything of Afghanistan’s magnitude.
• Rich people, y’all.
• Types of dissertations.
• Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies.
• Giant spiders expected to drop from sky across the East Coast this spring.
• Vegetarians have 14% lower cancer risk than meat-eaters, study finds.
• What I Learned From Recording My Thoughts for an Immortal A.I. I mean…
• And the arc of history is long, but…

which in turns suggests he grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series on TV https://t.co/qo7GK6pvdy

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2022

pic.twitter.com/1iZmNEOIWM

— This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists (@unflicuneballe) January 22, 2022

most of the cast is simply too old https://t.co/qkcc9bTYKW

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2022

Monday Morning Links!

* CFP: Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics, Cappadocia University, Thu, Jan 14, 2021 – Fri, Jan 15, 2021. CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures.

* I have made a table of sixteen general classifications into which it seems to me all science fiction stories written to date can be placed.

* New issue of MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, on Environmental SF.

I have a brief foreword in the new MOSF Journal of Science Fiction special issue on Environmental SF, which talks a bit about eco SF and the pandemic, if you’re interested! https://t.co/SawgwRwukd pic.twitter.com/eXrfFrJzRS

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

* ExoTerra is an online collaborative research role-playing game (RPG) community, in which students from all disciplines, from physics to literature, pool their expertise to design a new world. Participating students play the crew of a space colony ship traveling from Earth to a newly-terraformed exoplanet, and must work together to design the new world they will create: its ocean biosphere, its capital city, its educational system, its power grid, its laws.  Over the three quarters of the 2020/21 school year, students will explore the new solar system, unlock its mysteries, and debate and decide the foundations of their new civilization.  All students at the university can participate as an extracurricular, but each quarter a selection of courses in many fields (Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, STEM) will offer ExoTerra as an integrated course component, guiding the class through researching and producing a design for the new world as part of the class itself.

* Students, faculty, staff raise concerns about Marquette’s reopening plan. Milwaukee County Currently Suppressing COVID-19. ‘I can’t afford tuition’: College students face financial strains, health concerns from pandemic ahead of fall semester. Notre Dame sees spike in COVID-19 cases. Entire OSU sorority house in quarantine after 23 sisters test positive for coronavirus. UNC faculty call special meeting as fourth COVID-19 cluster among students reported.

Marquette has ten days to pivot or ten days before this starts happening here https://t.co/dWb1yGdoPQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

We couldn’t agree more. @MarquetteUnited calls on all tenure-track faculty to stand up for the health and safety of everyone in our campus community. #WeAreMarquette. Sign the petition here: https://t.co/YhTLbceKOY https://t.co/jhftA9gBex

— MarquetteFacultyUnited (@MarquetteUnited) August 16, 2020

this but non-ironically https://t.co/kTfZHH1PRJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

* People Are Struggling To Cope With The Physical Manifestations Of Their COVID Stress.

* Inside the Prison Where California’s Coronavirus Outbreak Exploded.

* “This is the first Fire Tornado Warning we are aware of in history.” In Derecho’s Wake, More Than 250,000 in Midwest Struggle Without Power. California Braces for More Blackouts as Heat Wave Persists. Greenland’s ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, according to new study. Just thinking about how virtually shutting down the entire world economy wasn’t enough to lower carbon emissions by the amount necessary.

* Biden Dems simply cannot wait to screw over their voters. And everybody else.

😬 https://t.co/fK6GGoK6sk

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

This image haunts me. It will come to represent our era. These are Democratic senators giving a standing ovation for Donald Trump, after Trump, reading a speech written by his racist acolyte Stephen Miller, vows that America will never have socialism. Only one senator refuses. pic.twitter.com/MJtTbgPqxM

— Moshik Temkin (@moshik_temkin) August 16, 2020

depoliticize

🔥 fire tornadoes
🦂 scorpions
👻 spooky ghosts
✈️ death from above

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

there's like 5 separate world historic crises happening at the same time and the democratic party platform is aviators, cool old cars & ice cream

— Rob (@robrousseau) August 15, 2020

they were afraid to retweet gerry because he told the truth pic.twitter.com/xESDkDKKkr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020

* Milwaukee’s Lost Mega-Event: ‘It’s the Ghost Convention Now.’

* Truants! Truants!

* The Mayor Is Ready for School to Open. The School Buildings Are Not.

* QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids.

* Get in on the ground floor of this exciting coronavirus cure.

* Congress finally moving on the USPS crisis. Once more with feeling, Sara Nelson for president.

"Save the post office by buying stamps" at this moment might just be the most egregious example of clueless, ineffectual, individualistic, consumerist liberal politics I've ever seen

— Peter Frase (@pefrase) August 16, 2020

We need to subpoena the Postmaster General, and if he fails to appear, we should send the Sgt at Arms to arrest him.

— Jim Cooper (@repjimcooper) August 15, 2020

I think a lot of people still think/assume/fantasize that there will soon be a total back-to-normal reset, rather than this being a defining event for years https://t.co/VqpD5N3md4

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 16, 2020

* Gun Enthusiasts Celebrate Man Who Shot Himself in the Balls as Their King.

* Video games and French fries ftw, again.

* Going viral: NYC Is Dead Forever. Here’s Why.

* Another awesome optical illusion.

* And a chilling vision of things to come.

As @zunguzungu’s enthusiasm for the podcast wanes, the randomizer heroically gives us… JAILBIRD followed by DEADEYE DICK. 😢 #RIP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020