A Whole Summer’s Worth of Links Crammed into a Two-Weeks-Sized Bag

• Some of my own stuff that’s gone up lately: Grad School Achebe #3: No Longer at Ease, my review of Lynell George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” from American Literature 93.2, and my scorching hot take on Loki and Black Widow.
• (There’s a mini-scorching-hot-take on Loki and The Suicide Squad in this Twitter thread if you’re needing more.)
• I also have a harder-to-get piece in this handbook to comics and graphic narratives about why Jimmy Corrigan is (hear me out) just a really great comic. Cancel me if you must!
• The current issue of SFFTV, on sf and games, was really great — read the interview section for free!
• The current issue of Extrapolation is great too — but no freebies there.

this but for all of science fiction #SFRA21 https://t.co/lSf60ivJxP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2021

• I have a nice little cameo in this great Butler story at LARB: Octavia Butler and the Pimply, Pompous Publisher. And I was interviewed for this piece on quantum mechanics and science fiction at The Quantum Daily.
• Hit me up Hollywood! Adaptations coming of Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Fledgling, joining Wild Seed and Dawn.
• In addition to having a ton of great stuff in it, SFRA Review 51.3 is a very important issue of SFRA Review, including candidate statements for the fall election and proposed revision of the bylaws.
• CFP – Strange Novel Worlds? Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture, 31 Aug 2021. Call for submissions: Just Utopias. CFP: Tabletop Teaching: Board Games and Social Justice. CFP: Dissenting Beliefs: Heresy and Heterodoxy in Fantasy. CFP: Religious Futurisms. CFP: Extrapolation: Special Issue on Speculative Fiction’s Intersections with Posthumanism and New Materialism. CFP: SFFTV, “Oversights.” New book series: Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Culture.
• A messy utopia is all we get. The Novel Solutions of Utopian Fiction. From the depths of the pandemic towards an ecosocialist utopia.
• Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded. MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. Dangerous Heat Wave Is Literally Melting Critical Infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest. 72% of the western US is currently in “severe” drought or worse. This is now the most extensive severe drought in recorded history. Six of California’s seven largest wildfires have erupted in the past year. Ground Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle. Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse. The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. Drought deeps in Minnesota. By the mid-2030s even the moon won’t save us from regular floods as sea levels rise, says NASA. The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’. Joe Biden Is Already Failing on Climate Policy. There’s no going back, so what can be saved?

"Today, the combination of truly dangerous heat and humidity is rare. But by 2050, parts of the Midwest and Louisiana could see conditions that make it difficult for the human body to cool itself for nearly one out of every 20 days in the year."https://t.co/C41QGnwWCi

— ProPublica (@propublica) June 29, 2021

"According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, tells the @latimes. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling." https://t.co/IbpzNgQrgB

— Michael Hawthorne (@scribeguy) July 12, 2021

Lots going on but for me the big story is the environment on which all human society depends is undergoing a collapse so staggeringly rapid there are now multiple climate disasters across the US every week and you still can’t get representative democracy to even pretend to care.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2021

do you ever think about how the proposition that the Earth should remain inhabitable is an absolutely fringe position in US politics, without representation in either political party and routinely mocked by essentially all mass media of any sort

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 24, 2021

"The Climate Change Review of Books" has a nice ring to it https://t.co/Ry4SkA8ElH

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) June 25, 2021

As meteorologist @EricHolthaus described the record heat: “We’ve left the era of fucking around, and we’re now entering the era of finding out.”

— Tim Dickinson (@7im) June 29, 2021

• The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.
• I Am Supposed To Be Writing.
• DC11 becomes a site of acute thermodynamics, as server heat multiplies server heat. If anything, the true threat comes from within, not without, as unchecked servers would overheat themselves into oblivion. Put bluntly: the tech industry makes our planet hot in the service of keeping its computers cool. This, I suggest, is what makes DC11 a specifically atmospheric media object. DC11’s reliance on and manipulation of air contributes to the cloud’s formal tendencies toward displacement and (re)centralization. Air expedites the transformation of data centers into climate bunkers. Furthermore, the air’s perceived insubstantiability, compared with other subjects of environmental media study, such as rare earth metals or wastewater, makes its pollution that much more challenging to account. Faced with these atmospheric operations, media studies must develop analytical techniques that pierce through the data center’s security veil to reveal how the cloud now programs the atmosphere against itself.
• The humanities are shrinking, except at community colleges.
• IHE profiles my Greensboro pal Jillian Weise. And another Greensboro friend is hitting the big time with a great new memoir.
• Trees as more-than-human collectives.
• Let’s Rank Every Ted Chiang Story Ever Published.
• How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.
• A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment.
• Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.
• You can now listen to “The Three Body Problem” as a serialized podcast.
• The Futuristic Stink of Amazon’s Science Fiction.
• 75 New and Upcoming Sci-Fi and Fantasy from African Authors.
• Doctor Who is Anglofuturism.
• The Anarres Project.
• Very cool things happening at ASU.

Time travel is always developed as society crumbles, prompting the rich to flee into the past. There they assume positions of power, which makes the timeline even worse, while also speeding up the development of time travel. Each loop is shorter and nastier than the one before.

— Micro Flash Fiction📖 (@MicroFlashFic) July 4, 2021

• Remembering Climate Change: A Message from the Year 2071.
• How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.
• Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents. Future Lord of the Rings films should acknowledge the book’s queer leanings.

It’s very easy to imagine asking a room full of students “How is Frodo’s story like that of Beren?”, filling a white board with correspondences, asking, “Wait, if Frodo is like Beren, then who is his Luthien?” And then everyone’s eyes go wide as they realize the implications. 6/7

— Jason Tondro (@doctorcomics) July 1, 2021

• Study finds that few major AI research papers consider negative impacts.
• The Economic Recovery Is Here. It’s Unlike Anything You’ve Seen.
• Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear.
• The Clintons Had Slaves.
• California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter? How We’ll Know It’s Finally Time to Stop Masking.

Pretty damn impressive
Thanks Darren Lu @Reddit pic.twitter.com/ST6ueaaoY1

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) July 31, 2021

Every piece of data from real-life shows the vaccines work very, very well— yes, even against Delta. Just checked US vaccine breakthrough hospitalizations. It's 6,587 people among the ~163,000,000 vaccinated: or 0.004%. Three fourths are elderly— as happens with other diseases. https://t.co/TmZkxRlETk pic.twitter.com/fUaTyXprey

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2021

• What this implies is that, while liberal democracy witnessed a struggle for recognition, neoliberalism converts this into a struggle for reputation. The cultural achievement of commercial society, according to Honneth, drawing on Hegel, was that it enabled individuals to confront one another on the principle of equality via exchange. The rise of criticism in the bourgeois public sphere saw artworks judged on a principle of aesthetic autonomy—that is, independent of status. The ideal critic resembled the ideal consumer in the spot market, determining the value of each product on its intrinsic merits. But if, as Feher argues, neoliberal capitalism reconfigures social relations around the template of financial investment, the public sphere becomes governed by a very different temporality. Value becomes established not in exchange, but as a speculation on the future, calculated on the basis of data from the past—that is, in terms of reputation. Every artefact, identity, moral action and political demand becomes viewed as an addition to an archive of prior behaviour, revealing a pattern to be projected into the future. The present is only ever a new data point. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media.
• Luxury Surveillance.
• Things of Beauty: The Politics of Postmillennial Nostalgia for Mid-century Design.
• Utopia of Quirk: Mystery Men (1999) and the Fate of the Nerd.
• Our World, Our People: Nationalism and Sovereign Power in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”
• Regulation as near-mystical abstraction.
• The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism. Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists.
• “Cat Person” and Me.
• Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn.’
• How Marvel conquered culture.
• WandaVision Not Television: Franchise on the Small Screen.
• The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk.”
• Time For The End Of The Teen Gymnast.

The decentring of the He-Man/Skeletor binary paves the way for the universalist ecological struggle to save Eternia’s magic; or the cultural logic of Mattel in the age of disaster capitalism… https://t.co/dht0sd9Wv6

— Historicizing Matt is Negating the Negation ⵄ ⭕️ (@MattFlisfeder) July 26, 2021

• Strange Plaque Piques Interest On North Farwell In Milwaukee.
• Still thinking about this tweet from Juneteeth.
• How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire. The Miseducation of White Children.
• Catholic colleges ignored faculty handbook provisions in layoffs, report alleges. Unlivable faculty wages put Catholic higher education in existential crisis.
• The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020-21. The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas.
• Academentia: the Organization Insanity of the Modern University. The Work of Culture: Of Barons, Dark Academia, and the Corruption of Language in the Neoliberal University.
• For College Finances, There’s No ‘Return to Normal.’
• The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did.
• What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money?
• Antiracism in the contemporary university.
• Betrayed by the Dream Factory. The Master’s Trap: What makes a graduate program predatory? ‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off.
• The end of the NCAA.
• The other freshman class.

Before the new academic job season starts, here’s the numbers for 2020-21, as gleaned from jobs listed on the Academic Jobs Wiki under “English literature” or “Ethnic studies” during that and previous academic years. Overall, like every year since 2017, it was the worst year yet. pic.twitter.com/1lHiCfT8Vk

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) August 7, 2021

• So, most people are unaware that One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the novel, has a bonkers sequel called The Starlight Barking.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What the NBA Championship Means to Me.
• Amanda Knox: Who Owns My Name?
• The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick.
• The Green Imagination in Board Game Landscapes. Mother Lands is a tabletop role-playing game free of slavery and colonialism. Board games have a colonialism problem.
• One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets.
• 12 Insane Facts About He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe.
• Who will police Mars?

Every Gen Xer loves The Goonies, because we really wanted to believe there was some treasure or redemption or some kind of meaning in our abandonment

— The Actual, Real Cormac McCarthy (@_Shan_Martinez_) June 21, 2021

• Adjunct hell: the rise of the new campus novel.
• Generational politics is a socialism of fools.
• He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence.
• There will be blood: women on the shocking truth about periods and perimenopause.
• ​The 20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons.
• The beauty of Earth from orbit.
• Aliens could have spotted Earth cross the sun from more than 1,700 star systems. A Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The new American religion of UFOs. What if the truth isn’t out there?
• With UFO report making headlines, Wisconsin has its own history with the paranormal.
• Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams.
• And don’t cry for me, I’m already dead.

pic.twitter.com/j2NWCkNdoy

— Against late capitalism ☭ Ⓐ (@Inhumansoflate1) June 26, 2021

Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

• My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
• Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
• Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
  
  With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’
  
• Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
• And the obvious Plan B.
• CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
• Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
• ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
• Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
• In praise of The Life Aquatic.
• Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”

As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”⁴⁶ As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”⁴⁷ In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.

In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.

• “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
• Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
• What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
• LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
• War by Other Means.
• Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
• Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
• Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
• 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

• Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
• ‘The Agile College.’
• How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
• The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

• We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
• Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
• The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

• Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
• How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
• The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
• An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
• The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
• Frozen and Queer Coding.
• California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
• Who really created the Marvel Universe?
• Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
• Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
• How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
• Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
• Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
• The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
• Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

• The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
• From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
• A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
• Behold: the megacycle!
• Okay this just seems mean.
• And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.

Tuesday Links!

* Something I wrote a few years back about Black Panther has finally popped up at Mayday: “Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda.”

* And Grad School Vonnegut #10 is up, on “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and Watchmen with Adam Kotsko. I’m proud of the tweet hyping it.

Tomorrow on Grad School Vonnegut: @adamkotsko, @gerrycanavan, and @zunguzungu discuss “Report on the Barnhouse Effect”! And maybe talk about Watchmen a bit more than we ought. pic.twitter.com/wTGUrRg6ZH

— gradschoolvonnegut (@gradschoolvonn) August 3, 2020

* SFRA is seeking a web director. The Huntington has a new Octavia E. Butler research fellowship. World Science Fiction Studies is still seeking proposals for the 2021 book prize.

* CFP: Us in Flux: Community, Collaboration, and the Collective Imaginations of SF. Call for Papers: Serious Play. CFP: “Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future?”

* This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!

* For the second year in a row, George R.R. Martin has managed to make the Hugos all about him.

* The Coronavirus Pandemic, Science Fiction, and the Contingent Nature of Roads. Last and First Men review – eerie sounds and unearthly images from a posthuman world. Apocalypse Then, Now—and Future? “Nostalgia for the Future”: Projecting a Post-Disability Image through Retro-Futuristic Aesthetics in Viktoria Modesta’s “Prototype.” The Name of This Feeling Is Revolution: On David Mitchell’s “Utopia Avenue.”

* CDC predicts up to 11,000 people will die every week this month from coronavirus. CDC Predicts Grim Future. Young people are infecting older family members with coronavirus in multigenerational homes. Survivors of Covid-19 show increased rate of psychiatric disorders, study finds. One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren’t hospitalized have long-term illness. Lasting heart damage could be COVID-19’s legacy for some non-hospitalized survivors. How the Pandemic Defeated America. Vermont, History, and the Coronavirus. After Plummeting, the Virus Soars Back in the Midwest. We Just Have to Assume the Monster Is Everywhere. Every Decision Is A Risk. Every Risk Is A Decision. We Need to Talk about Ventilation. Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine.

* In late July academia changed its mind about the fall term. Covid Tests and Quarantines: Colleges Brace for an Uncertain Fall. The Risk That Students Could Arrive at School With the Coronavirus. ‘The virus beat us’: Colleges are increasingly going online for fall 2020 semester as COVID-19 cases rise. Email From Columbia Admin Requests That Graduate Students And Faculty Reconsider Teaching Solely Online, Gives Three Days To Decide. UO is reopening dorms at full capacity *and* keeping their on-campus housing requirement. North Carolina colleges and universities reported COVID-19 cases on campus. More Than 6,600 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges. The largest school district in Georgia reported Sunday that 260 employees have tested positive for the coronavirus or are in quarantine because of possible exposure as they prepare for the new school year. Staff in a district in Arizona is already 11% positive. Officials say the student attended part of the first day of school Thursday. Outbreak at Fraternity Row. UNC Tenured Faculty Tell Students to Stay Home Amid COVID Concerns: ‘It Is Not Safe for You to Come to Campus.’ Colleges Seek Waivers From Risk-Taking Students. “This is the worst, biggest crisis we have ever gone through UWM.” Let’s Look at the Numbers. Teachers Are Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction Too. Will Kids Follow the New Pandemic Rules at School? ‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail.’ 9 ways America is having the wrong conversation about ‘reopening’ schools. How to Stop Magical Thinking in School Reopening Plans. Think school kids won’t be hurt by COVID-19? Experiences from the 1918–19 flu say otherwise. Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic.

* And on the homefront: Whitefish Bay school board approves plan to start school year with in-person and virtual learning. Marquette Wire: MU must offer remote learning, teaching options for fall semester.

* Against vocational awe.

* Essential or Expendable? Working in Higher Education during COVID-19.

* Acquiescent no more.

* ‘We are being gaslit’: College football and Covid-19 are imperiling athletes. On a call with SEC leaders, worried football players pushed back: ‘Not good enough.’ Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX. Colorado universities are increasingly losing money on sports as coaches’ pay, recruitment costs rise.

* Wild @Sciencing_Bi hoax ends in absolutely wild fashion.

* U.S. Economy Drops 32.9% In Worst GDP Report Ever. At least someone’s getting rich. NYC small businesses now closing for good. The Virus Turns Midtown Into a Ghost Town, Causing an Economic Crisis. These Businesses Lasted Decades. The Virus Closed Them for Good. Beach towns fear they won’t survive a summer of COVID-19. No football in Green Bay would be economic, emotional blow. America needs a bar and restaurant bailout. Self-employed Wisconsinites wait for word on unemployment payments. ‘Coronavirus has stolen our future’: young people’s despair as jobs evaporate. America.jpg. United States May Lose One-third of All Museums, New Survey Shows. Dunkin’s as Bellweather. Activism against evictions in New Orleans. As Pandemic Rages, the United States Slashes an Economic Lifeline. The incompetent criminals ruling the U.S. are about to push millions of Americans off a terrifying financial cliff. How the eviction crisis across the U.S. will look. The Pandemic Makes the Case for Sweeping Reform.

* Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All.

* Americans Aren’t Making Babies, and That’s Bad for the Economy. I guess the “baby boom or divorce boom” folks have their answer…

* How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air.” Kushner’s COVID-19 Team Ended Plan For Nationwide Testing Because They Didn’t Want To Help Blue States.

* Study: Men More Likely Than Women to Back COVID Conspiracies.

* Disgusting effort from the Manhattan DA office to drag the Trump name through the mud. Know Your Enemy. Nearly everyone believes that Trump can be reelected in November but almost no one believes he’ll do so with the support of a majority of the voting public. DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents. Census Door Knocking Cut A Month Short Amid Pressure To Finish Count. Destroying the Postal Service for Fun and Profit. As Trump leans into attacks on mail voting, GOP officials confront signs of Republican turnout crisis. Pregaming the Coming November Trainwreck. How Trump Could Steal the Election. Warning Statement on the Potential for Mass Atrocities in the United States.

* Because it never stops being relevant: Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism.

* Harper’s v. Kenosha, WI.

* This TikTok thing is just nuts.

* Counterfactual Criticism: Watchmen, Witch Armies, and Asking TV for More.

* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.

* Neo-Nazis Infilitrate the Police in Germany.

* Genocide in China.

* The gender-neutral b’nai mitzvah.

* U.S. Missionary With No Medical Training Settles Suit Over Child Deaths At Her Center.

* Pewaukee priest once accused of sexual assault of a minor free to return to church.

that's right pic.twitter.com/oeMOiEUhNp

— Atheist Memes But Unironically (@UnironicAtheism) August 3, 2020

* Miracles and wonders: uniQure Begins First-in-Human Gene Therapy Trials for Huntington’s Disease.

* Zelda recipe appears in serious novel by serious author after rushed Google search. This really hits home — my dissertation had an entire chapter on Zelda Fitzgerald I had to take out at the very last minute.

* As transgender rights debate spills into sports, one runner finds herself at the center of a pivotal case.

* On the local beat: What happened at Comet Cafe?

* What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? The World’s Largest Tropical Wetland Is on Fire. It’s at least double.

* What sort of weird late-period William Gibson bullshit is this?

* Is This the End of Writing in Cafés?

* Did a Goblin King write this?

* Remember when Google was useful?

* Former Deadspin staffers launch Defector, a new worker-owned media company.

* SWAT Mafia.

* The DA’s Office Is Reviewing Hundreds of Cases Linked to (Just) 3 LAPD Officers.

* Michigan Today profiles Saladin Ahmed and his Dearborn-based superhero Starling.

* The headline reads, “Human sperm roll like ‘playful otters’ as they swim, study finds, contradicting centuries-old beliefs.”

* This is Katie Ledecky swimming the length of a pool without spilling a single drop of the chocolate milk balanced on her head.

* The X2 Cast Allegedly Almost Quit the Marvel Film Over Bryan Singer.

* The ‘Star Trek’ Saga: How the Starship Enterprise Almost Landed in Las Vegas.

* When Black People Appear on Seinfeld.

* And Forrest MacNeil reviews living through a pandemic.

2020 Links for 2020

* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”

* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!

* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.

* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.

FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

* Public Domain Day 2020.

* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?

* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’

* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.

* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.

* The Subterranean Press edition of Unexpected Stories will be its first print edition, with a newly-commissioned introduction by Nisi Shawl, and an afterword by Butler’s longtime agent and literary executor, Merrilee Heifetz.

* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources​ in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.

* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.

Thinking about @adamkotsko’s TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.

* The problem with bringing back blogs is.

* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.

* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.

300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020

* Meet the Obamog(ho)uls.

* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.

* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.

* …one of the strongest cases for Bernie isn’t just what he’ll be able to achieve, it’s what he’ll refuse to do (cannot imagine him signing a grand bargain weakening Social Security, for instance).

* One Year in Washington.

* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.

* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.

* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.

* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.

* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.

* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.

* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.

* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.

* The MLA Started Publishing Job-Searching Advice More Than 50 Years Ago. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.

* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.

* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.

* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.

* Being black at UW.

they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020

* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.

* The rise of the permanent protest.

* This is probably dumb — though maybe 1919 had a lot of bonus fraud in it, would be cool to study — but I have immediately and permanently internalized its lessons nonetheless.

* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.

* When your abuser is a cop.

* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.

* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.

* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?

Star Wars’ insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will

— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020

* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.

* When AI runs the entertainment industry.

* When business people run the Olympics.

* DC and Marvel vs politics.

* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).

* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.

* Being Larry David.

* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.

OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s

— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020

* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.

* Asimov, groper.

* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!

* The decolonization of Miles Morales.

* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.

* ‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.

* @ me next time

* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.

* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.

* And Christopher Tolkien departs for the Grey Havens.

The Terrible Serenity of a Browser with Every Tab Closed

* What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today.

* We Reversed Our Declining English Enrollments. Here’s How.

* CFP: Exhaustion: Tired Bodies, Tired Worlds. Graduate conference at the Department of English, University of Chicago, this November.

* When machine learning is astonishing – I collected some highlights from a paper on algorithmic creativity. Great Twitter thread.

* Butler Mons honours Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, and whose Xenogenesis trilogy describes humankind’s departure from Earth and subsequent return. And on the second season finale of Levar Burton reads: “Childfinder.”

* ‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages.

* The Prequel Boom.

* Climate Change, Revolution And ‘New York 2140.’

* Dic Lit.

* Dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.

* Post-Soviet science fiction and the war in Ukraine.

* Eighty Years of the Futurians’ Vision.

* A Radical Idea about Adjuncting.

* I didn’t really understand how unjust the academic system was for career advancement for women until I had children. What It’s Like to Be a Woman in the Academy.

* The 2018 Hugo Finalists.

* Teach the controversy, Hell edition.

* What It’s Like to Watch Isle of Dogs As a Japanese Speaker. Orientalism Is Alive And Well In American Cinema.

* Junot Díaz on the legacy of childhood trauma.

* The Breakfast Club in the age of #MeToo.

* Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is not a video-game-centered dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.

* Milwaukee students of color say it’s time to talk about the school-to-prison pipeline.

* A Syrian man has been trapped in a Malaysian airport for 37 days.

* The Fog of War and the Case for Knee-jerk Anti-Interventionism.

* 15 Years. More Than 1 Million Dead. No One Held Responsible.

* America should just stop all bombing.

* ‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence.

* Justice Dept. to halt legal-advice program for immigrants in detention. Amid deportations, those in U.S. without authorization shy away from medical care. ICE Won’t Deport the Last Nazi War Criminal in America.

* This proposal, requiring worker seats on corporate boards, is commonly referred to as “codetermination.” A number of European countries require worker representatives to be included in corporate boards, or for councils of workers to be consulted in appointing board members. The emerging plan to save the American labor movement.

* Liberals and the strike.

* Eviction in America.

* There is no humane border regime, just as there is no humane abortion ban. The border will always tear parents from children, carers from charges, longtime residents from the only communities they’ve ever known. It may do it faster or slower, with ostentatious brutality or bureaucratic drag, but it will always do it. Trump is gambling that Americans will embrace the brutal version, as they’ve done so many times in the past. If they do, will we be enough to stop them? Liberals constantly rediscover the violence at the heart of their politics, but can never learn a thing from it.

* Zombie liberalism.

* When an algorithm cuts your health care.

* How the American economy conspires to keep wages down.

* Nice work if you can get it.

* Uncle Sam’s largest asset.

* Universities Use the Specter of ICE to Try to Scare Foreign Grad Students Away From Unionizing.

* Why Your Advice for Ph.D.s Leaving Academe Might Be Making Things Worse.

* King Of Kong’s Billy Mitchell has been stripped of all his high scores, banned from competitive gaming.

* The definitive explanation of why Bitcoin is stupid.

* The new debt colonies.

* Faces of Auschwitz.

* Wisconsin in the news: Suspected White Supremacist Died Building ISIS-Style Bombs.

* I predicted this: Apple orders its most ambitious TV series yet: An adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation.

* More than half your body is not human.

* Learning styles as a myth.

* Stan Lee needs a hero. Sounds like the sooner the better.

* Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age.

* Star Wars is RUINED.

* The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news. Dangerous climate tipping point is ‘about a century ahead of schedule’ warns scientist. Greenland Ice Sheet is Melting at its Fastest Rate in 400 years.

* The greatest environmentalist of postwar America wasn’t a scientist or a wonk. He didn’t even finish high school.

* Atheism and the alt-right.

* Amazon and/against Tolkien.

* Tony Gilroy on ‘Rogue One’ Reshoots: They Were in “Terrible Trouble.”

* Catholic Colleges and Basketball.

* A people’s history of the Undertaker.

* John Carpenter: The First Fifteen Years.

* Only young people do revolutionary mathematics.

* Political correctness strikes again! MIT cuts ties with company promising to provide digital immortality after killing you.

* The Working Person’s Guide to the Industry That Might Kill Your Company.

* I was going to watch it anyway, but: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2 Casts Tig Notaro.

* A Jar, a Blouse, a Letter: The story of Julia Kristeva.

* Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement. Mark Zuckerberg’s 15-year apology tour.

* Why several trainloads of New Yorkers’ poop has been stranded for months in Alabama.

* Unusual forms of ‘nightmare’ antibiotic-resistant bacteria detected in 27 states.

* The best news I’ve heard in years: Fireball Island is coming back.

* That’s a relief! Don’t worry, the US would win a nuclear war with Russia.

* And no one’s hands are clean.

Sunday Morning After ICFA Links!

* Two poems from the great Jaimee Hills: “Frosted Palm” and “The Books in the Bushes.”

* ICYMI: My #ICFA39 talk, “Star Trek after Discovery.” Building on my AUFS post from last week, and it’s already inspired an expansion at r/DaystromInstitute.

* Have you played this new gritty realistic fantasy game?

* How does Neil Gaiman work?

* How vulture capitalists ate Toys R Us.

* The constitutional crisis is always arriving and never arrived. It’s been here at least twenty years.

* The market can’t solve a massacre.

And so in schools across the country, Americans make their children participate in Active Shooter drills. These drills, which can involve children as young as kindergartners hiding in closets and toilet stalls, and can even include simulated shootings, are not just traumatic and of dubious value. They are also an educational enterprise in their own right, a sort of pedagogical initiation into what is normal and to be expected. Very literally, Americans teach their children to understand the intrusion of rampaging killers with assault rifles as a random force of nature analogous to a fire or an earthquake. This seems designed to foster in children a consciousness that is at once hypervigilant and desperate, but also morbid and resigned—in other words, to mold them into perfectly docile citizen-consumers. And if children reject this position and try to take action, some educational authorities will attempt to discipline their resistance out of them, as in Texas, where one school district has threatened to penalize students who walk out in anti-gun violence actions, weaponizing the language of “choices” and “consequences” to literally quash “any type of protest or awareness.”

* All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth.

* Rethinking dehumanization.

* There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia.

* On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.

* ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration.

* The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo.

* James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.

* Amazing that Trump’s personal aide was fired by the White House while being investigated and then immediately rehired by the campaign and it’s like a C story at best.

* The A story.

Rex Tillerson taught me it was ok to be weird. :(

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 13, 2018

One key lesson people will hopefully take from the Trump administration is that rule of law does not apply to powerful people and what is referred to as the "justice system" is solely a means of perpetuating white supremacy. America is fundamentally a lawless nation.

— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) March 18, 2018

* How America’s prisons are fueling the opioid epidemic.

* The rise of the prison state.

* Trump administration studies seeking the death penalty for drug dealers.

* Former Black Panther Herman Wallace dies days after judge overturns murder conviction that saw him serve 41 years in solitary confinement.

* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.

* With a tightening labor market, CEOs are chasing after the same workers they once derided as unemployable.

* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.

* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.

* The missing Obama millions.

* What America looked like before the EPA.

pic.twitter.com/XtYgXVxeBs

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) March 17, 2018

* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.

* Rapid Arctic warming and melting ice are increasing the frequency of blizzards in the Northeast, study finds.

* YouTube mini-lecture from Adam Kotsko: Trump as mutation, or parody, of neoliberalism. And some more Kotsko content: Superheroes, Science Fiction, and Social Transformation.

* The Rise of Dismal Science Fiction.

* The Science Fiction of Roe v. Wade.

* Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. A response.

* Against popular culture.

* David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience.

* Neither utopia nor apocalypse? Somedays I feel like both is the most likely outcome of all, a heaven for them and a hell for the rest of us.

* Who Owns the Robots? Automation and Class Struggle in the 21st Century.

* Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking. His last goodbye.

Stephen Hawking was an atheist so the correct benediction is “See you again when the Omega Point aliens resurrect all sentient beings at the end of time.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 14, 2018

* Facing Disaster: The Great Challenges Framework.

* ‘Picked Apart by Vultures’: The Last Days of Stan Lee.

* For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.

* Why museum professionals need to talk about Black Panther.

* PSA: Marvel’s Black Panther Animated Series is Streaming for Free on YouTube.

* Hate spree killings in Austin.

* Wakanda Forever.

* Thus Spake Black Bolt.

Too Many Cooks (2018)pic.twitter.com/5qhKLwqBum

— Alice Knows Karate (@KeikoTakamura) March 16, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
(dir. Joe & Anthony Russo) pic.twitter.com/g81KAPyRaw

— Simpsons Films (@simpsonsfilms) March 16, 2018

* To Catch a Predator. You know it’s a bleak story when the NYPD are the good guys.

* The radical vision of Wages for Housework.

* Happy International Women’s Day.

* Hundreds of Missouri’s 15-year-old brides may have married their rapists.

* If NYT printed the *actual, real-life* sentiments of today’s conservative masses, it would print a bunch of paranoid, Fox-generated fairy tales and belligerent expressions of xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and proud, anti-intellectual ignorance. 

* Surveillance in everything: A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts.

* Dialectics of the superhero: 1, 2.

* #MAaEEoOGFwNCBA.

Gulf of Maine Books has vision pic.twitter.com/8mVd2Z6PPb

— Parkivist (@Parkivist) March 11, 2018

* Pew pew.

* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.

don't do it bitch pic.twitter.com/H2ji9B6nmV

— Bitchcoin (@SubMedina) March 17, 2018

* From the archives: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports.

* Podcast minute: Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about Spider-Man and The Beatles. The first is new and the second is old but both are worth checking out.

* Goodbye, cruel world.

* And I’m not a lazy home owner. I’m a goddamn hero.

Time Travel Will NEVER Be Canon on gerrycanavan.wordpress.com, and Other Tuesday Links

* Dialectics of Black Panther: By sliding between the real and unreal, Black Panther frees us to imagine the possibilities — and the limitations — of an Africa that does not yet exist. Ultimately, “Black Panther” does what all superhero movies do: It asks us to place faith in the goodness of individuals rather than embracing revolutionary structural change. In effect, the Wakandan Kingdom is caught between two bleak visions of America: walling itself off, or potentially imposing on other nations. The Afrofuturistic Designs of Black Panther. ‘Black Panther’ offers a regressive, neocolonial vision of Africa. Africa is a country in Wakanda. What to Watch After Black Panther: An Afrofuturism Primer. I was asked to write a short piece for Frieze building on my blog post from the weekend, so look for that as early as tomorrow…

* Adam Kotsko’s talk on Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman is now streaming from mu.edu.

* Major nerd news: Star Wars: Rebels just introduced time travel into the main canon for the first time. There were minor, often debatable incidents before, but never in the “main plot,” and never as a key incident in the life of a character this important to fans. I’m surprised: I used to use “no time travel in Star Wars” as an example of how franchises police themselves — though as I was saying on Twitter this morning the recent introduction of true time travel to both Star Wars and Harry Potter suggests it may in fact be what happens to long-running fantasy franchises when they grow decadent. Now Tolkien stands alone as the only major no-time-travel SF/F franchises, unless I’m forgetting something — and Tolkien considered a time travel plot for a long time, and actually promised CS Lewis he would write one, but abandoned it…

* Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.

* Half of world’s oceans now fished industrially, maps reveal. North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists. What Land Will Be Underwater in 20 Years? Figuring It Out Could Be Lucrative. Scott Pruitt’s EPA.

* In order to do this I propose a test. A favorite trope among the administrative castes is accountability. People must be held accountable, they tell us, particularly professors. Well, let’s take them at their word and hold themaccountable. How have they done with the public trust since having assumed control of the university?

* Lecturers on Strike.

* Disaster Capitalism Hits Higher Education in Wisconsin.

* Anonymous faculty group threatens to take down Silent Sam.

* West Virginia Teachers Walk Out.

* Markelle Fultz — along with a slew of huge names and top college basketball programs — have been named in a bombshell report into NCAA hoops corruption involving illegal payouts to players. The Real Lesson of the Weekend’s NCAA Scandals Is That College Basketball Coaches Should Be Dumped in the Ocean.

* Meanwhile.

* What directional school is the most directionally correct? A case study.

* The Yale student who secretly lived in a ventilation shaft.

* How the Activists Who Tore Down Durham’s Confederate Statue Got Away With It.

* The teenagers from Stoneman Douglas are fearlessly reimagining how to effect change in the Trump era.

* Coming soon: Muppet Guys Talking.

* Disney’s Frozen musical opens on Broadway: ‘More nudity than expected.’

* Greenwald v. Risen re: Russia.

* “What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?” technologist Aviv Ovadya warns.

The year is 2020. All news is now just media outlets shouting “FAKE NEWS!!!” about every other news outlet. Meanwhile, working people have been enslaved by the sentient computer that now owns and runs Disney

— In-yer-face, DIY disco riposte (@The_Swole_Nerd) February 20, 2018

* Despite the NPR’s handwringing about threats and vulnerability, the United States already possesses the most responsive, versatile, and deadly nuclear strike forces on the planet. In essence, the Pentagon now proposes to embark upon an arms race, largely with itself, in order to preserve that status.

* Simulating nuclear war.

* The case against tipping culture.

* The Tipped Minimum Wage Is Fueling Sexual Harassment in Restaurants.

* Monica Lewinsky in the Age of #MeToo.

* Life Without Retirement Savings.

* Americans’ reliance on household debt ─ and poor people’s struggles to pay it off ─ has fueled a collection industry that forces many of them into jail, a practice that critics call a misuse of the criminal justice system.

* Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection.

* Gerrymandering a 28-0 New York.

* On Being a Woman in the Late-Night Boys’ Club.

* In the article, Sally Payne, a pediatric occupational therapist, explains that the nature of play has changed over the past decade. Instead of giving kids things to play with that build up their hand muscles, such as building blocks, or toys that need to be pushed or pulled along, parents have been handing them tablets and smartphones. Because of this, by the time they’re old enough to go to school, many children lack the hand strength and fine motor control required to correctly hold a pencil and write.

* Understand your user feedback.

* Switzerland makes it illegal to boil a live lobster.

* The U.S. Border Patrol’s violent, racist, and ineffectual policies have come to a head under Trump. What can be done? Mother and daughter are now at detention facilities 2,000 miles apart. Warning of ICE action, Oakland mayor takes Trump resistance to new level.

* The City & The City coming to TV in 2018 (again).

* BoJack Horseman and modern art.

* Legitimately teared up.

* The future sucks.

* Let’s see what else is in the news. Wisconsin exceptionalism. Mister Sun, why do you wear sunglasses?

I think about this segment from Mister Rogers’ final show all the time. What a message. What a legacy. pic.twitter.com/X6SyM8AevY

— Erin Ruberry (@erinruberry) February 19, 2018

Happy Valentine’s Day Links!

* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”

* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.

* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.

* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”

* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?

* A science-fiction narrative imagining an alternate universe in which Donald Trump never became President: he’s just a regular guy in New York City.

* The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.

* Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.

KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’

The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.

* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.

Star Wars in the 1980s: laser swords and magic powers and what a cool ship

Star Wars in the 2010s: loving your kids will not protect them from the world or from themselves, and their talents will destroy their lives in the same way your talents destroyed yours, if not worse

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 5, 2018

* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.

* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.

* Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.

* White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’

* The Olympic hero for our time.

* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.

deporting a veteran who started using drugs to cope with untreated PTSD after being induced to serve in a war we shouldn’t be fighting by a promise of citizenship the country didn’t deliver on, to serve the racist whims of a universally loathed fascist the country didn’t vote for

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 2, 2018

* Know your police rape loopholes.

* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.

* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.

science fiction novel where an incredibly advanced society invents extreme life prolongation, which results in a now-immortal class of ultrawealthy perverts voting in fascists who appeal to their dim memories of the way the world worked when they were children

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 9, 2018

* In the richest country in human history.

* FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.

* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?

* A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!

* An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.

* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.

* The African Anthropocene.

* Floods and pollution.

* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.

* Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.

* I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.

* Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.

Reading an unpublished @GerryCanavan paper on the contradictions of Black Panther: pic.twitter.com/HKjUmGAyVl

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) February 7, 2018

* Monopoly: Cheaters Edition.

* Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.

* Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.

* Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?

My favorite weird found-poetry I’ve discovered on this trip: in Switzerland and Germany first-person shooters are called “ego shooters.”

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2018

* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.

* Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.

* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.

* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.

* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.

* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.

* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.

* The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.

* #NeverTweet.

* Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.

* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.

* Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.

* Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.

* Case Western in the news!

* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.

* Pets allowed.

* ‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.

* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.

* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.

First Week of School Links!

* Harvey. Hell and High Water. Houston has been hit with a 100-year flood — a rainstorm that, going by previous records, has a 1 percent chance of happening in one year — in 2015 and in 2016. Now in 2017 it’s enduring what will probably be the worst flood in the city’s history. Hurricane Harvey Probably Isn’t a 500-Year Event Anymore. The trouble with living in a swamp: Houston floods explained. 9 Trillion Tons. ProPublica’s report on how zoning made this even worse. “No one could have predicted.” Why Houston wasn’t ready for Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Harvey Could Also Be a Major Pollution Disaster. FIRST-UG 102: Critical Disaster Studies. Here’s how to help.

* CFP: “200 Years of the Fantastic: Celebrating Frankenstein and Mary Shelley,” ICFA 39, March 14-18, 2018.

* “Teaching first-years today? Here are some things my son, starting college today, was never taught.” And from the archives: Shadow Syllabus.

* Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, Or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit.

* Announcing the Brittle Paper Literary Awards: The Shortlists.

* I hope someone is optioning “That 70s Suitcase” for a film trilogy. Here’s the creator’s answer. Via MeFi.

* The university in ruins.

* William Gibson on living in the retrofuture.

* Gene Roddenberry, megalomaniac.

Alexander: Are there any subjects that you haven’t tackled on The Next Generation that you would like to?

Roddenberry: There are subjects, yes, but I will keep them secret, because you have to wait until a certain level of thinking permits these things to be thought about openly and in writing. I have many thoughts which, if I were to voice them now, would turn many people against me. People would think, “My God, behind this is such inequity!” [Laughter.]

Alexander: People would be surprised at how big a revolutionary you really are? [Laughter.]

* Fan fiction in the New Yorker.

* When you come at the young-adult-literature community, you best not miss.

* Because you demanded it: a Tolkien biopic.

* Try to imagine a society with no need for confinement, with no one being locked up after a brutal act, and it is difficult not to feel one has lapsed into utopianism. Yet, try to determine what socially useful purpose prisons have fulfilled, sift through the wreckage looking for a residual ‘good’ prison system, and it is hard not to feel you’re wasting your time on a pointless abstraction. For and against abolitionism.

* Well, this barely lasted a week: Why I’m glad the generals are in control in the Trump administration.

* It’s Time: Congress Needs to Open a Formal Impeachment Inquiry.

* We’ve been covering Joe Arpaio for more than 20 years. Here’s a couple of things you should know about him… Another Arpaio thread. The Joe Arpaio I knew. The year I spent in Joe Arpaio’s tent jail was hell. He should never walk free. Trump has realized that he can use his pardon power to bypass the lawyers and judges and investigators he so despises. Arpaio was a test run. Now he will know it works. Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is an Impeachable Offense. President Trump Should Be Impeached for Pardoning Joe Arpaio.

* Leaked Chats Show Charlottesville Marchers Were Planning for Violence. University officials say white supremacists are recruiting their students. Brandeis U. Is Closed After Receiving Email Threats. We’re Tracking Confederate Monuments. Tell Us What’s on Your Campus.

* Fearing Trump Administration Crackdown, Immigrants May Stay in Hurricane Harvey Zone. ICE Left 50 Immigrant Women And Kids Stranded At A Bus Station Before Hurricane Harvey Struck. ICE detains DACA-protected immigrant trying to post bail for someone else. ABQ woman jailed after ATF informant lured her into drug deals. Salvadoran asylum seeker with brain tumor seized from Texas hospital. After ICE arrests in Saratoga Springs, some migrant workers fear showing up for racing season. I’m a DACA Student and I’m Praying ICE Doesn’t Pick Up My Parents.

* After all this mere tax gimmicks seems almost innocent.

* Yes, Icahn.

* Trump Tower Moscow.

* The End of the Goldwater Rule.

* White House Sets Rules for Military Transgender Ban. All but promising to end DACA.

* Stories that already seem a thousand years ago and a million miles away: Special Counsel Examines Possible Role Flynn Played in Seeking Clinton Emails From Hackers. How are we ever going to find time to be angry about Mnuchin misusing public funds to get a better view of the eclipse? I’d forgotten this one even happened and it was last week.

* They’re not even pretending they think he’s competent.

* A whole lot of people with absolutely nothing to hide.

* Law and protest in Durham.

* Trump order could give immigration agents a foothold in US schools.

* An intimate history of antifa.

* Can Anyone Stop Trump From Launching Nuclear Weapons?

* In the richest country that has ever existed in human history: “She eats out of dumpsters so she can afford long-term care for her husband.”

* Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

* Fired for unexpected periods.

* The Upper Midwest is terrible for racial inequality, and Wisconsin tops the list.

* A solid B-. Not bad.

* Boomers are news-illiterate couch vegetables stuck in front of their yelling, ad-saturated TVs.

* There’s a reason you won’t find many monuments in the South to one of Robert E. Lee’s most able deputies.

* 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths – and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry.

* There is no such thing as western civilisation.

* Understanding abiogenesis.

* The Monsanto of marijuana.

* WHAT YEAR IS IT

* Instagram Africa.

* Given the enormous amount of data to support these findings, and given the field in question, one might think male scientists would use these outcomes to create a more level playing field. But a recent paper showed that in fact, male STEM faculty assessed the quality of real research that demonstrated bias against women in STEM as being low; instead the male faculty favored fake research, designed for the purposes of the study in question, which purported to demonstrate that no such bias exists.

* Stories like this one were why I thought supporters of Title IX (like myself) needed to get ahead of the problem and reform it while we still could. Almost certainly too late now.

* The water you just drank was filled with self-replicating nanobots. Understanding Noah’s Ark. Be careful what you wish for.

* We talk about broad-strokes when assessing the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but what if — alongside the racism and toxic nostalgia — there is a more intimate way people are hearing it: make my children love and respect me again, make my community a place where people don’t automatically want to leave and never come back again, make America a place where getting ahead in life isn’t synonymous with dissociating yourself from me. Right-wing media — and here I am thinking of Trump fundamentally as a media phenomenon, which is how our parents experience him — has exploited this situation in a despicable and probably unfixable way, but they didn’t create the underlying dynamic. In other words, ultimately Fox News isn’t what’s tearing families apart, but it’s profiting from the fact that they’re already being torn apart by the geographic concentration of wealth and opportunity.

* Why no one can say Trump lost the election. Democrats’ 2018 gerrymandering problem is really bad.

* Nuclear missiles were once ready to launch from Milwaukee’s suburbs.

* Profiles in courage getting out ahead of the story.

* Your mandatory Game of Thrones wrap-ups: Why Game of Thrones has become so incoherent. Every city in the world is built on wildfire. 27 questions (about last week’s episode). Game of Thrones’ Drive to the Finish Line Is Crippling Its Ability to Tell a Story. Game of Rewrites. Maps and fantasy. I’d watch at least a few episodes of a George R.R. Martin-helmed Star Trek series. And sure to be squashed fan theories we can believe in: Is Bran Stark the Night King?

what made Gygax D+D subversive is that one never had to interpellate as noble. Hence Stranger Things is more rad than GOT! mic drop

— Stephen Shapiro (@shapirostephen) August 23, 2017

* In the wake of the Game of Thrones finale, indulge in the nostalgia of Dragonlance. Are you listening, TruTV?

* And this is the only prestige TV I need.

An important component of dramatic tragedy is a brutal plot twist pic.twitter.com/iU5rw5fZHE

— Alan White (@aljwhite) August 25, 2017

Tuesday Links!

* I put up my Fall syllabi yesterday, if you missed it! Courses on Tolkien, Hamilton, and “Utopia in America” this time out.

* Jaimee has two new poems out in Mezzo Cammin: “Good Women” and “Perseveration.”

* SFRA Review 321 is out, with a interview with Cory Doctorow.

* Octavia Butler, remembered by her friend Shirlee Smith.

* A bar joke. Simulationism. Dadproof. Honestly, how did you miss this?

* A nice interview with Adam Kotsko about his book on the devil.

Somewhat surprisingly, in the early centuries of Christianity, there was a durable minority position to the effect that the devil would be saved. Ultimately that view was condemned as heretical, and what interests me is how vehemently theologians rejected it—the emotional gut reaction always seemed out of proportion to me. And the argument, such as it is, always boils down to the same thing: if the devil can be saved, that misses the whole point of having the devil in the first place. It is as though Christian theology gradually came to need a hard core of eternal, unredeemable blameworthiness, a permanent scapegoat who can never escape.

* CFP: Utopia and Apocalypse (SUS 2017, Memphis). And there’s still time jump on our “After Suvin” roundtable at SUS, if you get something in to us ASAP…

* CFP: ExRe(y) 2018. Exhaustion and Regeneration in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture.

* Gender Issues in Video Games.

* Tenure track job in carceral studies.

* Professional romance novelists can write 3,000 words a day. Here’s how they do it.

* Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.

* The backfire effect failed to replicate, so it’s safe to be a know-it-all again.

* The grad school horror story of the moment: Why I Left Academia.

* http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com.

* Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.

* “Grade Inflation” as a Path to Ungrading.

* The idea of white victimhood is increasingly central to the debate over affirmative action.

* UCI has reversed itself on rescinding admissions. Good!

* “The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe”: As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.

* A Trip To The Men’s Room Turned Jeff Kessler Into The NCAA’s Worst Nightmare.

* Race and reaction gifs. Race and speeding tickets. Race and dystopia. Race and police dogs.

* Privilege and video games.

* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.

There’s way more empirical evidence that men can’t be trusted with power than that women are bad at math. [gestures broadly, to everything]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 5, 2017

* You Are the Product.

* The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.

* We have a political problem no one wants to talk about: very old politicians.

* No One Should Have Sole Authority to Launch a Nuclear Attack. No one should have that authority, period.

* Rules don’t matter anymore, stupids. What the Trump-Russia grand jury means. The very thing that liberals think is imperiled by Trump will be the most potent source of his long-term power and effects. If you want a vision of the future.

* 2018 won’t save you. Really. And obviously the Democrats won’t. Obviously.

* But sure I guess everything is fine now.

* Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Shut these guys down too.

* Fired/Rehired: Police departments are often forced to put officers fired for misconduct back on the streets.

* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.

* After #TheResistance.

* When Trump trumps love.

* Can the subaltern vote?

* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.

* How Trump’s FCC aided Sinclair’s expansion: Use of a regulatory loophole will allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations.

* Y’all ready for debt ceiling? Democrats should do exactly what is described here.

* Hey Marvel, please don’t take away female Thor’s hammer. Don’t give Confederacy the benefit of the doubt.

* For the dinosaurs, ten minutes separated survival and extinction.

* On names.

* Neurolinguistic programming: how to win an argument edition.

* More on Amazon and anti-trust.

* A short film about Chris Ware.

* “Karate Kid but the bully is the hero” has been a go-to joke for years, but only Netflix could make it real.

* Disconnect your Internet-connected fish tank now.

* “Adversarial perturbations” and AI.

* How close are we to a Constitutional Convention?

* The Only Place in the World Where Sea Level Is Falling, Not Rising. American Trees Are Moving West, and No One Knows Why. Wildfires in Greenland. Coming Attractions. The Atlas for the End of the World.

* Yes, we’re angry. Why shouldn’t we be? Why aren’t you? Why Does Being a Woman Put You at Greater Risk of Having Anxiety? Suicides in teen girls hit 40 year high.

* Your labor in the process of being replaced. Your opinion is increasingly irrelevant. Your presence on Earth will soon no longer be required. Thank you for your service; the robots are here.

* Jeff Goldblum is The Doctor in Doctor Who (dir. John Carpenter, 1983).

* The question of Klingon head ridges has officially become pathological.

* Agricultural civilization may be 30,000 years older than we thought.

* A People’s History of the Gray Force.

* A People’s History of Time Lord Regenerations.

* A People’s History of Westeros.

* The Dark Tower: What The Hell Happened?

* Pitching Battlestar Galactica.

* Littlefinger for New Jersey is tough to argue.

* When Will Humanity Finally Die Out? There’s always death to look forward to.

* Smartphones and The Kids Today.

* Zero at Rotten Tomatoes.

* Twitter is bad, YA edition.

* Time for some game theory.

* More scenes from the collapse of the New York City subway system.

* Africa has entered the space race, with Ghana’s first satellite now orbiting earth.

* Are you ready to LAUGH?

* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.

* I knew it.

* Same.

* And please consider this my resignation.

#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!

* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.

* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.

* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.

* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).

* Emma Watson has been hiding copies of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale around Paris, with a handwritten note inside each one.

* The City University of New York picked the worst time to raise the salaries of its top administrators to as much as $402,700 — the same day it cut the operating budgets of its four-year colleges and raised tuition.

* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.

* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.

* This seems normal and fine.

* Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.

* GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.

* Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.

* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.

* The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.

any remaining pieties of respectability inhering in the institution/office/process really shouldn't survive this term. but it will, OC

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 29, 2017

C
R
A
Z
Y
M
Is anybody going to do anything about this situation
K
A

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 29, 2017

my problem with Trump is just my outdated belief that the President of the United States shouldn't be dumber than the dumbest person I know

— maura quint (@behindyourback) June 29, 2017

* Hell yes, Rep. Barbara Lee.

* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.

* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.

* On desistance and detransition.

* Global warming will intensify regional inequality in the United States, according to a revolutionary new economic assessment of the phenomenon.

* Two brothers, two deaths.

* Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.

* US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.

* SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.

* Just what is happening at Disney?

* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.

* And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.

Trumpsday Reading

* Trump is targeting up to 8 million people for deportation. Making America Cruel Again. The triumph of cruelty. Inside the White House-Cabinet battle over Trump’s immigration order. 24 Hours at JFK. ‘Breathtaking violation of rights.’ Constitutional crisis. Hero Lawyers. Stop that plane: The frantic race to halt a deportation. A Q&A With the ACLU. Our New Itinerary. Travel ban causes high anxiety for Milwaukee’s international students. The little-noticed bombshell in Trump’s immigration order. Half Of World’s Refugees Are Running From U.S. Wars. Trump’s First Weeks Leave Washington— and the White House Staff—Panting. The leaks coming out of the Trump White House right now are totally bananas. Yes, all this happened. Gasp! Trust Records Show Trump Is Still Closely Tied to His Empire. Ivanka lied about the leaving the Trump organization too. Make War with Mexico Great Again. Trainwreck in Yemen. Even Australia. Onward to Iran! 14 Versions Of Trump’s Presidency, From #MAGA To Impeachment. Trump and the Republicans Are on a Suicide Mission Together. Editing Trump. Authoritarian Government Watch. We just let this one go without even making a big deal about it. And this one was crazy too! A Series of Unfortunate Events. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. Seems legit. This is not normal. #TheResistance. A Reader for Trumplandia. Trump: A Resister’s Guide. SNL 1, 2, 3. Oh man. The law, in its majestic equality. 4 in 10. A whole year? Jesus. The numbers. A 3,900 percent increase. It takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships. Here’s how much the anti-Trump protests cost, at Trump paid-turnout rates. Disobey.

* I had a very brief segment on Wisconsin Public Radio last week discussing 1984 and the Trump administration.

* The worst, most terrible things that the United States has done have almost never happened through an assault on American institutions; they’ve always happened through American institutions and practices. These are the elements of the American polity that have offered especially potent tools and instruments of intimidation and coercion: federalism, the separation of powers, social pluralism, and the rule of law. All the elements of the American experience that liberals and conservatives have so cherished as bulwarks of American freedom have also been sources and instruments of political fear. In all the cases I looked at, coercion, intimidation, repression, and violence were leveraged through these mechanisms, not in spite of them.

* There is a style of political reasoning which the Trump moment lends itself to, which can be called conspiracism. Against omniscience.

* Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable.

* V-Milwaukee!

* Vaughn Prison Uprising.

* Screaming about Trump into a Well: A Text Adventure.

* The Democratic Response to Gorsuch Is Easy: Just Say No. Why Democrats Should Oppose Neil Gorsuch. Make Republicans Nuke the Filibuster to Confirm Neil Gorsuch.

* Football players at private institutions in college sports’ most competitive level are employees, the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel stated this week, and will be treated as such if they seek protection against unfair labor practices.

* Chris Ware on George Herriman. A rebuttal.

* The African Speculative Fiction lecture series at the University of London.

* Inside the Disney Vault.

* The Hot New Brand of Higher Education.

* Riot at Berkeley. #Milosexual and the Aesthetics of Fascism.

* After-the-Horse-Has-Left-the-Barn Department. Well at least you’re sorry.

* Who Cares If the Dow Jones Hit 20,000?

* Under A New System, Clinton Could Have Won The Popular Vote By 5 Points And Still Lost.

* The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.

* Academics boycotting the U.S.

* The end of Locked-In Syndrome… in the Twilight Zone.

Okay so this really *is* like a news story straight out of Black Mirror – right down to the ending. pic.twitter.com/RrFaQ4SH3W

— Charlie Brooker (@charltonbrooker) February 1, 2017

* Same.

* The new issue of the SFRA Review is up.

* The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock.

* Poker and the machines.

* Guns, hostile lawmakers, and professional bigots are more dangerous to academic freedom than left-wing activists are.

* Other Space, the best SF series no one but me watched.

* Against the Constitution. Against the Supreme Court.

* Video Game Voice Actor Strike Now Second-Longest In SAG History.

* Zelda map size comparisons.

* How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee.

* How to Kellyanne Conway.

* Why the voting age should be lowered to 16.

* February 17 is the next time the general strike isn’t actually going to happen.

* In the Trump International Penal Colony and Golf Resort.

* Marquette in the ne — come on, again?

* Also they enslaved and tortured generations of animals, but that’s not important right now.

* no no no no no no no no

* If you want a vision of the future.

* …and now it’s canon.

* Decolonizing Science Fiction.

* How an Interstellar Starship Could Actually Explore Alpha Centauri.

* How Astronauts’ Brains Are Changed By Spaceflight.

* In the future, everyone will be hated by thousands of strangers for 15 minutes.

* The Milwaukee Bucks Century.

* The war comes to Whitefish Bay.

* Pension giant TIAA is leading a global wave of deforestation and the destruction of small farmers’ livelihoods.

* The richest society in human history.

* And like Nietzsche said: it is forgetting, not remembering, that makes life possible.

Catching Up on My Open Tabs After an Incredibly Slow News Week in Which Nothing World-Historically Bonkers Happened

* CFP: And Now for Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python.

* CFP: The Films of Wes Anderson.

* Three on Dylan, Nobel Laureate. The Guardian reports.

breaking news Nobel Prize goes to prize committee's sense that literature is over

— Sarah Brouillette (@brouillettese) October 13, 2016

They're gonna give the Nobel to Pixar by 2030, don't kid yourself.

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 13, 2016

After much consideration my position on this event is that I’m formally opposed, but nonetheless personally delighted.

* Barack Obama for first president of the Federation.

* Le Guin in the Post, the Nation, and the New Yorker.

* PKD and the Problem of 2-3-74.

* An adjuncting career, by the numbers.

* Idiots Who Run Harvard Let Their Low-Wage Workers Go On Strike.

* 4 Professors Involved in Philosophy Brawl Find Feces in Their Mail.

* With Campus Carry in Place, Some Texas Grad Students Make Bars Their Offices.

* Why a Controversial Palestinian History Class at Berkeley Was Cancelled, Then Reinstated.

* I make a brief appearance at the end of this CBS58 story on Marquette’s incredible Tolkien collection. I also pop up in this review of the first few episodes of Westworld.

* The Trouble with Thanksgiving.

This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.

* Arrested Development Season Five (not really). Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. All of Donald Trump’s Accusers: A Timeline of Every Alleged Grope and Assault. Gerrymandering helped Republicans take control of Congress, but now it’s tearing them apart over Trump. A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House. Here’s the math. Inside the Bunker. Inside the Meltdown. How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall. Let’s never forget what a terrifying thing we almost did. Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat. I guess I need a new surgeon. If professors made $500k/year, would they be Republicans? U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections. The Evan McMullin Century. A GOP strategist explains why the Republican Party is about to break in two. Even the Humane Society. Teach the controversy. Thank you for your idea about a political thriller but unfortunately we find the plot preposterous. Michelle Obama for President. And because we’re all still asking: What Happens If Trump Drops Out?

Here's what the map would look line if only women voted: https://t.co/sjVY67qouE pic.twitter.com/rrc3GuXmGl

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 11, 2016

Trump igniting national consensus that presidential candidates can’t be prosecuted seems like the first genuinely strategic thing he’s done.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2016

* Citizens United, all class.

* Eugenics in America.

* As a national prison strike enters its second month, the Department of Justice says it will investigate conditions in Alabama prisons. And some corrections officers are expressing support.

* Louisiana isn’t letting immigrants get married.

* New Jersey Transit, a Cautionary Tale of Neglect.

* “We’d at least like to have it said of us that we tried”: Marvel and the civil rights movement.

* How Rock and Roll Became White.

* Atlanta’s lost Afrofuture.

* Brutalism is back.

* “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”

* Department of Precrime, CIA edition.

* The search for a true blue M&M.

* Whatever this is for, I am so completely in.

Now that's how you do a movie poster. pic.twitter.com/js6lYRVK46

— Fanton (@FantonEsquire) October 5, 2016

* Meanwhile, the Fantastic Beasts expansion of the Harry Potter franchise will top out at an economical and reasonable five films.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
2 Fantastic 2 Find
Fantastic Beasts: Rising
Fantastic Beasts: The Finding
Fantastic Five

— Erin Strecker (@ErinStrecker) October 13, 2016

* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.

* The four types of board games.

* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.

* Life with migraines.

* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.

* Generation Adderall.

* Poet at work.

* The end of Devin Faraci and the end of The Canon podcast (for now). There’s more at the Mary Sue.

* Huge, if true: Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it.

“Billy Bush” was ridiculous enough, but now there’s a “Lauren Bush Lauren.” The simulation is obviously crashing.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2016

And on the subject of deranged tech madmen: Simpsons did it.

* Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad.

* The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever.

* The coming fight over “nonlethal neuroweapons.”

* What’s the Longest Humans Can Live? 115 Years, New Study Says. Challenge accepted.

* Now, I may have to move first.

Sometimes, a graph is so eloquent that commentary is superfluous:https://t.co/IYPqRkkWZx pic.twitter.com/QVsYrooDd7

— Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) October 10, 2016

* The kids are all right: Only 1 in 5 Millennials Have Ever Tried a Big Mac.

* On Delany’s Dark Reflections.

* App of the week: Really Bad Chess.

* The Perils of Becoming a Meme.

* The LEGO Yellow Submarine.

* Finally my condition has a name.

* And I told you, Mom: Science Says the First Born Child Is the Most Intelligent.

Seven Pounds of Sunday Links in a Three-Pound Bag

* If you missed it, my contribution to the thriving “Star Trek at 50″ thinkpiece industry: “We Have Never Been Star Trek.” And some followup commentary on First Contact and the Rebootverse from Adam Kotsko.

* Elsewhere: To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek‘s Half Century. 13 science fiction authors on how Star Trek influenced their lives. 50 Years of Trekkies. Women who love Star Trek are the reason that modern fandom exists. What If Star Trek Never Existed? In a World without Star Trek… The Star Trek You Didn’t See. How Every Single Star Trek Novel Fits Together. What Deep Space Nine does that no other Star Trek series can. Fighter Planes vs. Navies. Fifty years of Star Trek – a socialist perspective. Star Trek in the Age of Trump. Star Trek Is Brilliantly Political. Well, It Used To Be. Sounds of Spock. A Counterpoint. Catching Up with Star Trek IV’s Real Hero. The Workday on the Edge of Forever. A few of the best images I gathered up this week: 1, 2. And of course they did: CBS and Paramount Royally Screwed Up Star Trek‘s 50th Anniversary.

Happy birthday #StarTrek50, celebrating fifty years of unforgettable fashion for men. pic.twitter.com/LpWHv39ozU

— RedScharlach (@redfacts) September 8, 2016

* And some more Star Trek: Discovery teasing: Time to rewatch “Balance of Terror.” And Majel might even voice the computer.

* Deadline Extended for the 2016 Tiptree Fellowship. The Foundation Essay Prize 2017.

* CFP: Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction. Editors David M. Higgins and Hugh Charles O’Connell. Call for Chapters: Transmedia Star Wars. Editors Sean A. Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest.

* Not a CFP, but I’m glad to see this is coming soon: None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.

* Polygraph #25, on sound and the modes of production, is now available.

* Tolkien once said that fantasy can’t work on stage. Katy Armstrong argues that The Cursed Child only works on stage. Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.

* On Utopia and Reaction.

* Poetry and Class Struggle.

* This LARB essay on scholars fighting about King Lear is as spellbinding as everyone said.

* Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance. An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel.

* Concerns Over Future of UMass Labor Center.

* Lockout at LIU. The Nuclear Option. Unprecedented. This is the first time that higher-ed faculty have ever been locked out. Lockout Lessons. Students Walkout. As Lockout Continues at Long Island U., Students Report Meager Classroom Instruction. This has been, to say the least, an amazing story.

7. Otherwise, what Middle States is saying is that all a university is is a bunch of buildings, a bank account, and administrators.

— Jacob Remes (@jacremes) September 10, 2016

* Decline of Tenure for Higher Education Faculty: An Introduction.

* Salaita’s Departure and the Gutting of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.

* Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History. ‘Incarcerated Workers’ stage nationwide prison labor strike 45 years after 1971 Attica riot. Your Refresher on the 13th Amendment.

* The long, steady decline of literary reading. History Enrollments Drop. Werner Herzog Narrates My Life as a Graduate Student. My dirty little secret: I’ve been writing erotic novels to fund my PhD.

* Quebec’s massive student strikes emerged from an organizing model that constantly trains new generations of activists.

* Retirement Plan Roulette.

* The First Trans*Studies Conference.

* Donna Haraway: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.”

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

A bit more here.

* Elsewhere in the Anthropocene: Montana declares state of emergency over pipeline spill, oily drinking water. The Gradual Atlantis (and see Dr. K.S. Robinson for more). Fast Fashion and Environmental Crisis. The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says. The Oceans Are Heating Up. A Monument to Outlast Humanity. New genus of bacteria found living inside hydraulic fracturing wells. And from the archives: Louisiana Doesn’t Exist.

* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. What Should a Four-Year-Old Know? How to Raise a Genius.

* Michael R. Page on the greatness of The Space Merchants. Bonus content from University of Illinois Press: Five Quotes from Frederik Pohl.

* The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t.

* How Unions Change Universities. Scabbing on Our Future Selves.

* Of Moral Panics, Education, Culture Wars, and Unanswerable Holes.

* The Death of ITT Tech, Part One: What Happened?

* Audrey Watters on the (credit) score.

* Clemson’s John C. Calhoun Problem. And Jack Daniels’s.

* Welcome to Our University! We’re Delighted to Have You, But If You Think We’re Going to Cancel the Ku Klux Klan Rally, You’ve Got Another Think Coming. Cashing in on the Culture Wars: U Chicago.

* The things English speakers know, but don’t know they know.

Things native English speakers know, but don't know we know: pic.twitter.com/Ex0Ui9oBSL

— Matthew Anderson (@MattAndersonBBC) September 3, 2016

* Raymond Chandler and Totality.

* Writing Like a State.

* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.

* Capitalist Saboteurs.

* Why ‘The Stranger’ Almost Didn’t Get Published.

* It’s Getting Harder and Harder to Deny That Football Is Doomed.

* After Richmond Student Writes Viral Essay About Her Rape Case, the University Calls Her a Liar.

* Milwaukee vs. Pikachu. The World’s Most Dangerous Game: Pokémon’s Strange History with Moral Panics.

* Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives.

* British artist Rebecca Moss went aboard the Hanjin Geneva container ship for a “23 Days at Sea Residency.” But the company that owns the ship went bankrupt on August 31, and ports all over the world have barred Hanjin’s ships because the shipping line is unable to pay the port and service fees. Artist-in-residence stuck on bankrupt container ship that no port will accept.

* Christopher Newfield talks his new book on the collapse of the public university, The Great Mistake.

* Bill de Blasio’s Pre-K Crusade.

* The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee.

* FiveThirtyEight: What Went Wrong?

* The Lasting Impact of Mispronouncing Students’ Names.

* The law, in its majestic equality: Black Defendants Punished Harsher After A Judge’s Favorite Football Team Loses.

* Fred Moten on academic freedom, Palestine, BDS, and BLM.

* Being Nadja Spiegelman.

* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.

* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.

* Defining Unarmed.

* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.

* Against Theory.

Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the “reader,” a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read.

* The largest strike in world history?

* The Walrus has an absolutely wrenching piece on stillbirth.

* How to Tell a Mother Her Child Is Dead.

* “Science thought there was one species and now genetics show there are four species,” Dr. Janke said. “All zoos across the world that have giraffes will have to change their labels.”

* The Mysterious Ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing May Finally Have an Answer.

* Teach the controversy: No Forests on Flat Earth.

* The clash of eschatologies.

* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.

* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.

Fuck it, let's do a planned economy pic.twitter.com/KYwvQ3wPeM

— Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) September 9, 2016

* Atwood and comics.

* The NEH’s chairman, Bro Adams, tries to make a case for the humanities. Is anyone listening?

* Britain isn’t doing a super great job with Brexit.

* No other image has better captured the struggle that is simply living every day: Drunk Soviet worker tries to ride on hippo (Novokuznetsk, in Kemerovo, 1982). Yes, there’s still more links below.

* The DEA vs. Kratom. Why Banning the Controversial Painkiller Kratom Could Be Bad News for America’s Heroin Addicts.

*Never-Ending Election Watch: How Donald Trump Retooled His Charity to Spend Other People’s Money. Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general. A Tale of Two Scandals. That Clinton Foundation Scandal the Press Wants Exists, But they Won’t Report it Because it’s Actually About the Trump Foundation. Inside Bill Clinton’s nearly $18 million job as ‘honorary chancellor’ of a for-profit college. No More Lesser-Evilism. And Vox, you know, explaining the news.

* Dominance politics, deplorables edition.

* And put this notion in your basket of deplorables: Darkwing Duck and DuckTales Are in Separate Universes and This Is Not Okay.

* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.

* Yes, Here Comes Trump TV.

* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.

* Black Teachers Matter.

* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.

* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.

* Understanding Hellboy.

* The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.

* What’s the Matter with Liberals?

* Alan Moore Confirms Retirement from Comic Books. An interview in the New York Times where, lucky for me, he talks a lot about David Foster Wallace.

* The Need For Believable Non-White Characters — Sidekicks, Included.

* What Your Literature Professor Knows That Your Doctor Might Not.

* Geologic Evidence May Support Chinese Flood Legend.

* Fully Autonomous Cars Are Unlikely, Says America’s Top Transportation Safety Official.

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal roundup: The Clockmaker. Science Journalism. I Am No Longer a Child. Teach a Man to Fish. How Stress Works. On Parenting. You haven’t hit bottom yet. Keep scrolling!

* Today in unnecessary sequels: Mel Gibson confirms Passion Of The Christ sequel. And elsewhere on the unnecessary sequel beat: We Finally Know What the Avatar Sequels Will Be About.

* At least they won’t let Zack Snyder ruin Booster Gold.

* Poe’s Law, but for the left? Inside the Misunderstood World of Adult Breastfeeding.

* The Revolution as America’s First Civil War.

* Mike Konczal on Eviction.

* What Happens When We Decide Everyone Else Is a Narcissist.

* 45,000 Pounds of Would-Be Pennies Coat Highway After Delaware Crash.

* ‘Illegal’ Immigration as Speech.

* Second Thoughts of an Animal Researcher.

* Conspiracy Corner: Obama and the Jesuits.

* On Sept. 16 the opera “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” based on Vonnegut’s play, will have its world premiere in Indianapolis. A dayslong celebration of, and reflection on, the best-selling author’s works called Vonnegut World will precede it.

* The Unseen Drawings of Kurt Vonnegut.

* The Science of Loneliness. Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive.

* Once more, with feeling: On the greatness of John Brunner.

* Let us now praise Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

* Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: Man Dies, Leaving Behind a Sea Of Big-Boobed Mannequins. Yes, it’s a Milwaukee story.

* Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Douglas Adams in 1984.

* Taking a Stand at Standing Rock. Life in the Native American oil protest camps.

* Earth First: The Musical.

* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.

* Hitchens wept.

* Rebel propaganda. All the Ewoks are dead.

* Finally.

* Salvador Dali Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

* Where the Monsters Are. The Wonderful World of Westeros.

* And I’ll be bookmarking this for later, just in case: A lively new book investigates the siren call—and annoying logistics—of death fraud.

Weekend Links!

The link post yesterday went up only partially finished by mistake, so here’s the other half and then quite a bit more…

* Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 is out, with articles on First on the Moon, Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Orphan Black/Extant, and even a review of Kingsman: The Secret Service by yours truly.

* The crew of the Enterprise going back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination? Check. Some “mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff”? Check. Time travel that results in Spock being the reason that Vulcans turn to logic? Check! Jesus? Check. Elsewhere on the Star Trek beat: Being Simon Pegg. Sulu Is Gay in Star Trek Beyond and It’s Not a Big Deal, unless you’re George Takei.

* Why is Hollywood ignoring this incredible black science fiction writer? They certainly haven’t had any problem  ripping her off without attribution.

* The Only Good Tarzan Is a Bad Tarzan.

* The Many Faces of Strangelove, or, The Grand Incineration.

* The Night Of will turn your love of Serial against you.

* The Moon Is An Even Harsher CEO.

* Farewell to Pnin: The End of the Comp Lit Era.

* Social Media as Liturgy.

* Dialectics of the Clinton Tuition-Free-College Plan. Meanwhile, I predict this will be framed by the right as an illegitimate direct payout to her constituents, regardless of the merits.

* “Please accept our condolences on your loss,” a letter from that agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said. “After careful consideration of the information you provided, the authority has determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will continue to be sent to you.”

* Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. San Diego. Dallas. A truly terrible few days in America.

* Alongside the tragedy in Dallas, new debates: Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing.

* As professions go, ethnography and espionage are, if not siblings, at least distant cousins with a strong resemblance.

* The Future of Archaeology Is ‘Spacejunk.’

* Nailing it: “Psychologists recommend children be bored in the summer.”

* This Man Keeps Getting Killed in Terrorist Attacks. Dibs on the screenplay but in my version it’s a glitch in the Matrix.

* Clinton’s emails today, Clinton’s emails tomorrow, Clinton’s emails forever.

* George Saunders: Who Are All These Trump Supporters? Inevitably, this nasty but essential explanation of Trump’s appeal will annoy supporters and enemies alike, who insist on ascribing purely economic motives to those who have lifted him so shockingly high in American political life. Sorry, but I don’t think uncontrollable rage at having to “press 1 for English” or say “Happy Holidays” can be explained by displaced anger over wage stagnation or the decline of the American manufacturing sector.

* Syllabus as Terms of Service, Syllabus as Manifesto.

* Ah, the life of the mind.

* Ah, the pure knowledge of the sciences.

* Life on emergency funding.

* The Myth of the English Major Barista?

* When we accept as commonplace the idea that the study of art, especially art that appeals to the masses — television, video games, comics — is less important than the study of much-fetishized STEM subjects, when we claim that the objective and the concrete requires expertise but the subjective and the abstract do not, then we are making a dangerous assumption. We are assuming that because something is made for everyone, and accessible to everyone, that its existence is somehow simple and straightforward — a vehicle for testing out theories without an aura of its own. But, art, especially art that seems to require the least amount of scholarly attention — reality TV, video games, comics — is precisely the art that most needs history, context, and deep study. Media matters and media has consequences.

* What Game of Thrones characters look like in the books. Game of Thrones Season Seven May Be Delayed Due to Inclement Weather.

* Corey Feldman has some bad news about that supposed Goonies sequel.

* Pottermore problems: Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowling’s North American magic.

* Underwritten Female Character: The Movie.

* Return of the Great Lakes Avengers. A 15-Year-Old Black Girl Is Going to Replace Tony Stark As Iron Man.

* The Center for Communal Studies promotes the study of historic and contemporary communal groups, intentional communities and utopias. Established in 1976 at the University of Southern Indiana, the Center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarships, publications, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad.

* The Strange Perils of Running a Novelty Item Empire.

* New legal filings detail reporting of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape story.

* Neoliberalism and the end of roads. Judge Orders Macy’s to Quit Fining, Detaining Suspected Shoplifters in In-Store Jail.

* 400 athletes vie for US Paralympics Team spots.

* African Union launches an all-Africa passport. Against globalization, for internationalism.

* The violence of eviction.

* Here’s How That Wild Lawsuit Accusing Trump of Raping a 13-Year-Old Girl Hit The Headlines. Sounds like most major media outlets are staying away from the story for a reason. When your campaign should share images from social media: A flowchart. Only 75 times. “Trump Campaign Departures Suggest That Perhaps This Is a Highly Dysfunctional Enterprise.” A White, Male Reporter Goes to a Trump Rally.

* So in the short-term, Britain is likely to be an increasingly nasty and hateful place to live, thanks in no small part to Farage’s accomplishments as a politician; in the long-term, Farage was very much a product of his moment, that spasm of backlash on the part of declining socio-demographic layers still steeped in a colonial culture, which is unlikely to be repeated. With Farage at its helm, Ukip operated adroitly on the accumulating dysfunctions and crises of British politics, finally convoking a popular bulwark that pulled Britain further to the right than it has been since the 1970s. And in the next few years, the reactionaries will seek to use their victory to achieve maximum damage, maximum reversal on all fronts. And there will be other sources of reaction in the coming decades. Yet, Farage’s resignation signals the looming end of this end of the pier show. Even if Britain survives as such, this Britain is finished.

* This is a genuinely scary time: The newly elected Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, urged a crowd of about 500 people on Thursday to kill drug addicts, according to the Guardian.

* Hardly Any Former Felons Have Registered to Vote in Virginia Since It Was Made Legal.

* Why 13-year-olds can no longer marry in Virginia.

* Why Title IX Has Failed Everyone On Campus Rape.

* You Shouldn’t Have to Crowdfund Your Wheelchair.

* The marathon-running Luik sisters of Estonia are believed to be the first triplets to have qualified for an Olympics.

* Condoms Don’t Necessarily Help Teen Girls Avoid Pregnancy.

* Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds. Shock finding.

* Great white sharks congregate every year to party in the middle of the Pacific. This new camera tag might help us understand why.

* A new theory seeks two explain childhood disintegrative disorder.

* Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb.

* Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport. As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying the Price. Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People.

* Sometimes the world really can get together and avert a major ecological catastrophe before it’s too late. Case in point: A new study in Science finds evidence that the Earth’s protective ozone layer is finally healing — all thanks to global efforts in the 1980s to phase out CFCs and other destructive chemicals.

* That’s a hell of an act: “As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.”

* “Intelligent robot that ‘remembers and learns’ could be scrapped after escaping a lab for a second time.”

* Requiem for Mrs. White.

* Real talk: should I be more worried about snails?

#SharkWeek
People killed annually by
Sharks 10
Snails 10,000
Snakes 50,000
People 475,000
Mosquitoes 725,000 pic.twitter.com/rkxVLSNaau

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) July 3, 2016

* Nice try, US Navy, but Batman had shark-repellent technology decades ago.

* A watched pot never boils. Self-driving car ethics. Why humanity is doomed.

* Is there life after capitalism?

* The $80M Bomb Detector Scam.

* This answers a lot of questions for me actually.

* And I could watch this GIF forever.