Posts Tagged ‘Adam Kotsko’
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* When an algorithm cuts your health care.
* How the American economy conspires to keep wages down.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* 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.
* The definitive explanation of why Bitcoin is stupid.
* 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.
* Stan Lee needs a hero. Sounds like the sooner the better.
* Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age.
* 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Oconomowoc schools impose limits on ‘privilege’ discussions after parents complain.
* America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.
* The YouTube Kids app has been suggesting a load of conspiracy videos to children.
* What America looked like before the EPA.
* Supreme Court Can’t Wait to Kill Youth Climate Lawsuit.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Pew pew.
* Huge, if true: Studying for a humanities PhD can make you feel cut off from humanity.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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.
* 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.
* Coming soon: Muppet Guys Talking.
* Disney’s Frozen musical opens on Broadway: ‘More nudity than expected.’
* Greenwald v. Risen re: Russia.
* 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.
* 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.
* Let’s see what else is in the news. Wisconsin exceptionalism. Mister Sun, why do you wear sunglasses?
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?
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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.
* 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.
* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.
* ‘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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 is no such thing as western civilisation.
* 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?
* In the wake of the Game of Thrones finale, indulge in the nostalgia of Dragonlance. Are you listening, TruTV?
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…
* 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.
* Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral.’ Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences.
* 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.
* Also it’s weird how we don’t have a State department anymore and no one cares.
* Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Reminder that Kurt Russell probably wrote the IMDB trivia section for Escape from L.A.
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* * 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Same.
* The new issue of the SFRA Review is up.
* The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock.
* 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.
* How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee.
* 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.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* 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.
* 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.
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?
* 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.
* “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.
* Star Trek explained by epic poetry.
* The four types of board games.
* Golden Girls Action Figures Are Here.
* I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t.
* 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.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Raymond Chandler and Totality.
* Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde.
* 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.
* The Night Of and the Problem of Chandra.
* The Book of Springsteen. Relatedly: Bruce Springsteen’s Reading List.
* New research suggests that humans have a sixth basic taste in addition to sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. It’s starchiness.
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.
* Wisconsin appeals Brendan Dassey’s overturned conviction.
* Abolish the iPhone. How Apple Killed the Cyberpunk Dream. It’s not much better over there.
* 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.
* Corporal Punishment in American Schools.
* I say jail’s too good for ’em: US library to enforce jail sentences for overdue books.
* Bugs Bunny, the Novel, and Transnationalism.
* 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.
* 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.
* The Subtle Design Features That Make Cities Feel More Hostile.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 pure knowledge of the sciences.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.”
* Real talk: should I be more worried about snails?
* 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.
Monday Morning Links!
* Coming soon: Adam Kotsko’s long-awaited book on the devil, The Prince of This World. And from Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
* Important White House petition: “Include Adjuncts in Loan Forgiveness Program.”
* But here’s the rub: I am able to afford this faux middle-class life on $40,000 a year because I live around poverty. I didn’t write this, but basically anyone with a job like mine in a city like Milwaukee could have.
* Marquette University John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty announced Monday that they have filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for what the plaintiffs describe as “illegally suspending” McAdams more than a year ago.
* Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.
* Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs.
* Clinton is the second-most disliked general election candidate in modern history. Guess who is #1. Using this approach, the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%, and the probability that Clinton will remain ahead of Trump is 91%.
* Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year.
* “Uber for MBAs Is a Worrying Sign.”
* How Gender Confirmation Surgery Actually Works.
* But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
* Suing? What for? The coffee was too cold. It’s supposed to be cold. Not THAT cold.
* Pop culture moment: we’ve been watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson and have been completely floored by how good it is. Thanks Lili Loofbourow for the rec!
* This month is also the Comedy Bang Bang live tour — with each date appearing on howl.fm the next day — so my pop culture dance card is kind of filled right now.
* I can’t decide if the White House Correspondents Dinner becomes more or less obscene when Obama is so good at it.
* Monkey bars alert: Playground concussions are on the rise. I’m really surprised parental use of cell phones isn’t suggested as a possible aggravating cause.
* Understanding epigenetic. Forgotten lessons of the American Eugenics movement.
* Andrew Sullivan is back, and he says your precious democracy is doomed. Doomed!
* And tell my kids I’m sorry: Scientists find more reasons that Greenland will melt faster. World on catastrophic path to run out of fresh water. And in case you’ve forgotten.
Spring Break Forever Links
* Hey look! LARoB reviewed Green Planets.
* Another science fiction studies research opportunity: The 2016-2017 Le Guin Fellowship.
* Notes from ICFA roundtable on The Force Awakens, on cast, nostalgia, and franchise. This was a great panel; I’m so glad we did it.
* Will we ever learn George Lucas’s original Plan for Star Wars Episode 7?
* What a Funding Fracas Could Mean for the Future of CUNY.
* They’ve finally diagnosed my unusual condition.
* Snubbed again! Here Are 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts.
* What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman. Meanwhile:
* In other words, bad food becomes linked to good memories, and to our sense of who we are and where we come from. To give up that food would be to give up not only a piece of our childhood, but of ourselves. “When we hear someone suggesting that we stop eating our favorite brand of ice cream or potato chips or sliced white bread, we feel a knee-jerk hostility,” Wilson writes. “It’s hard to let go of these foods and find a better way of eating without a sense of loss.”
* In this formula, the president implies that with hard work everyone can get a good job. This is the premise for a lot of public education rhetoric, and it is 100 percent false. It may be technically true that in the American system anyone can get a good job, but that doesn’t mean most people aren’t out of luck. Anyone can win the lottery, but everyone certainly can’t. America is still a class system, and by design, most people—no matter the average level of education or job skill—will have to sell their labor to property owners in order to feed and house themselves. Those property owners are the same people that have spent the past hundred years shaping the education system and scientifically reducing labor costs.
* What a weird coincidence, ten straight record warm months in a row.
* Appalachia in the Anthropocene: When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years. Ice in the Anthropocene. Oil in the Anthropocene. Boulder-Hurling Megawaves in the Anthropocene. Cli-Fi in the Anthropocene.
* “There are no plausible scenarios in which climate stabilization is compatible with a pace of capital accumulation required for economic and political stability under a capitalist system.” Capitalism, Climate Change and the Transition to Sustainability: Alternative Scenarios for the US, China and the World.
* How are the political effects of “terrorism” produced?
* #altac
* A Video Game About Changing What Happens In Shakespeare’s Hamlet Using Time Travel. Sold!
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* The Christians, the Soviets, and the Bible.
* It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
* Game theory and the GOP nomination. Can’t #StopTrump? Third parties: a beginner’s guide. Of course, there’s always Plan B. Or Plan C.
* I, Cthulhu, endorse Donald Trump.
* BART Social Media Intern ’16.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
* A Brief History of Sabotage.
* Twilight of Gawker: Hulk Hogan Awarded $115 Million in Privacy Suit.
* Sea World Promises to Acquire No New Orcas. Why SeaWorld is ending its killer whale program, in one brutal chart.
* Why We’re Opting Out of Testing.
* Junot Díaz on time travel and colonialism.
* A book length history of abolition.
* More from the death of psychology.
* Well, he tried: the Obama legacy.
* The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana.
* The stock market is a sucker’s bet.
* What we talk about when we talk about jobs.
* These measures seem harsh, but if Trump really is a sui generis evil, then unprecedented and difficult measures are called for. If we’re not willing to make and carry through with such threats, does that mean that we don’t really view him as a sui generis evil? That this is just the latest thing we’re willing to humor for the sake of family peace and avoiding social awkwardness?
* Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings. I’m currently in the process of filing a request with the chalk administration office so I can respond to this with the detail and attention it deserves.
* What if physical activity doesn’t help people lose weight?
* Duke’s non-tenure-track faculty have unionized.
* They found Himmler’s occult book stash.
* “Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms.”
* Inside the Crazy Back-Channel Negotiations That Revolutionized Our Relationship With Cuba.
* Hackers ‘could take over your dildo and make it go berserk’, expert warns.
* Reading Calvin and Hobbes in Korea.
* I’ll be 100% honest, you had me at hello.
* And the best fantasy series you’ve never heard of is getting a second chance at a film franchise. This time it will work for sure!
Wherein a Former Academic Blogger Emerges from Book Jail, Weary and Bleary-Eyed, to Discover He Has 300 Open Tabs
* I had a short interview with the writing center journal Praxis go up this week: “Working Out What’s True and What Isn’t.”
* Can Faculty Deal with Policy Drift? A List of Options.
We know what happened next. After 2008, this paradigm has made it easier for governors and legislatures to cut and not restore, since it established a “new normal” that defined down the limits of reasonable budget requests. The results have been predictable. A recent report concluded that “forty-seven states — all except Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming — are spending less per student in the 2014-15 school year than they did at the start of the recession.”
* University Bureaucracy as Organized Crime. An addendum.
* Academic Freedom among the Very Serious People.
* If Colonialism Was The Apocalypse, What Comes Next?
* Digitizing the fanzine collection at the University of Iowa’s science fiction collection.
* Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.
* An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on China Miéville’s latest.
* “City of Ash,” by Paolo Bacigalupi. Part of a “cli-fi” series at Medium alongside this essay from Atwood: “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.”
* Modernist — really, brutalist — sandcastles.
* Early reports are calling Fantastic Four the worst superhero hero movie of all time. Grantland elegizes. Josh Trank points the finger.
* Steven Salaita has won a major victory against UIUC, on the same day that Chancellor Phyllis Rise resigns (to a $400K resignation bonus) amid the revelation that she misused her private email to secure his firing.
* Fired University of Akron painter spills the details of president’s $951,824 house remodel. Meanwhile, on the other side of town…
* Bullying, I propose, represents a kind of elementary structure of human domination. If we want to understand how everything goes wrong, this is where we should begin.
* The Problem We All Live With.
* This is the sort of adjunct-issue reporting that always frustrates me: it seems to me that it is engaging with the issue entirely on an emotional, rather than structural, basis, in the process more or less accepting entirely the think-like-an-administrator logic of forced choices that paints every laborer as the enemy of every other.
* Why Your Rent Is So High and Your Pay Is So Low.
* The art of the rejection letter. Personally I think the only thing that is ever going to approach “universally acceptable” here is a very short “We’re sorry, but the position has now been filled.”
* Shoutouts to my particular demographic: A paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research identifies a segment of customers, dubbed the “harbingers of failure,” with an uncanny knack for buying new products that were likely to flop.
* India’s Auroville was envisioned as an international community free of government, money, religion, and strife. It hasn’t exactly worked out quite as planned.
* Students under surveillance.
* Instead of a multiple-choice test, try ending the semester with one last, memorable learning experience.
* Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years—all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert.
* The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here.
* Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?
* California Has Lost the Equivalent of an Entire Year’s Worth of Rain.
* Ghost Town Emerges As Drought Makes Nevada’s Lake Mead Disappear.
* The Bureaucrats Who Singled Out Hiroshima for Destruction.
* Going to give this effort a C-: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.
* Jimmy Carter: The U.S. Is an “Oligarchy With Unlimited Political Bribery.”
* Here Are the Internal Documents that Prove Uber Is a Money Loser. How Uber hides behind its algorithm.
* “You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.”
* There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far.
* Vermont Struggles With Renewables.
* Elsewhere on the legal beat: Lawyer seeks trial by combat to resolve lawsuit.
* No Charges For Two Officers Who Backed False Version Of University Of Cincinnati Shooting. Alabama officer kept job after proposal to murder black man and hide evidence. How a philosophy professor with ‘monklike tendencies’ became a radical advocate for prison reform. Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.
* Instapundit is terrible, but I think he’s right about jury nullification. More here.
* Campus police, off campus. How the 1960s created campus cops.
* The Milwaukee Bucks boondoggle makes Last Week Tonight.
* Transportation research group discovers 46% of Milwaukee’s roads are in poor condition. I hope it studies the other 54% next.
* The Milwaukee Lion could be an escaped exotic pet rather than a wandering cougar.
* Milwaukee cops are going to GPS-tag cars rather than engage in high-speed pursuit.
* Milverine: Behind the Brawn.
* Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom: “I Am Not Well.”
* Good kids make more money. Bad kids make more money. Losers make more money. So that should clear it up.
* Game of the weekend: Ennuigi.
* Vox interviews Bernie Sanders.
* Two centuries of Chicago’s rivers being super gross.
* On Clinton and Cosby. Speaking of which, my hiatus also covered the amazing New York Magazine spread of the accusers.
* On the other side of things, there’s this from Freddie deBoer, on sexual assault accusations and the left.
* Gambling! In a casino! Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.
* What could explain it? Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common.
* At 12 years and 9 months, she remains the youngest girl ever executed in the United States.
* I shared What Happens One Hour After Drinking A Can Of Coke last week, now I’m duly shamed.
* Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns: When Researchers State Goals for Clinical Trials in Advance, Success Rates Plunge.
* What on Earth is Fake Cream Made Out Of?
* Man born with “virtually no brain” has advanced math degree.
* Chaos on the Bridge: When Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek.
* A fucking interesting history of swearing on television.
* The prisoner’s dilemma as pedagogy.
* Dystopic stories are attractive. They appeal to a readership that feels threatened — economically in an age of downward mobility, and politically in an age of terror. But we need to be asking what kinds of stories about living and working with media these influential narratives offer. How do the stories orient young peoples to the potential power and danger of media use? What kinds of literacy practices are sponsored in them?
* Kids in the Aftermath: Katrina in Young Adult Fiction.
* The Cherry’s on Top: Celibacies and Surface Reading.
* …there is a profound link between literature and evil.
* A brief history of Tijuana Bibles.
* Man Creating Women’s-History Museum Decides Last Minute to Make It Serial-Killer Museum Instead.
* Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders.
* The cutthroat world of competitive bagpiping.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards degoogleplusification.
* The long, repressed history of black leftism.
* Clickhole has the series bible for Breaking Bad. Amazing how much the series changed from its original conception.
* Also at Clickhole: 7 Words That Have No English Translation.
* A dark, gritty Little Women reboot.
* Another scene from the dark, gritty Subway reboot.
* A delightful pitch for a Matrix prequel.
* There is hope — plenty of hope, infinite hope — but not for us.
* The future looks great: Facebook patents technology to help lenders discriminate against borrowers based on social connections.
* Woody Allen finally found a way to characterize his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn that’s even more sickening than “the heart wants what it wants.”
* Twitter Asks: What if Hogwarts Were an HBCU?
* Do people start off crazy, or just end up that way?
* What’s it like to be a top Magic: The Gathering player?
* How do you plan on spending the $1 tax cut WI Republicans gave you?
* Review is back. Life is sweet again. Four and a half stars.
* PS: Andy Daly and Paul F. Tompkins interview each other in honor of the occasion.
* When your self-driving car crashes, you could still be the one who gets sued.
* And don’t even get me started on what happens if your robot umpire crashes.
* The latest in Twitter’s executives working overtime to destroy it.
* Decadence watch: KFC’s new chicken bucket is also a Bluetooth photo printer.
* Decadence watch: Solitaire now has in-app purchases.
* statementofteachingphilosophy.pdf.
* Say goodbye to Jon Stewart the Adam Kotsko way.
* Because you demanded it! Soviet-era erotic alphabet book from 1931.
* And you don’t have to take my word for it! That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.
