Posts Tagged ‘adjunctification’
Not CoronavirME — CoronavirUS
* The new SFFTV is out, a special issue on Blade Runner and its legacies. It’s a really good one — check it out! Elsewhere on the SFFTV beat: Congratulations to Joseph Jenner, whose ‘Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect’ (from #12.1) has just been shortlisted for the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies’ Award for best Doctoral Student Article/Chapter!
* This week’s must-read: The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes.
* Apocalypse camp at the dawn of the Great Extinction.
* “Oh My God, It’s Milton Friedman for Kids”: A historian of capitalism exposes how Choose Your Own Adventure books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”
* UC Santa Cruz Fires 54 Graduate Student Workers. UCSC cancels classes, shutters services as demonstrators block roadways. I Believe in the Strike. UCSC, The Fate of Graduate Education, and the Future of the University. After Announcing Firing of Grad Assistants, UC-Santa Cruz Is in Turmoil. “So far UCSC has spent $5.1 million dollars on police rather than meet with striking graduate students; this is nearly 25% of the cost of an annual COLA for all graduate students.” MLA Statement. Donate to the strike fund.
* The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s. The New School of Labor Rights.
* Critical theory represents the power, not the corruption, of the humanities.
* Debtors of the World, Unite!
* First Covid-19 outbreak in a U.S. nursing home raises concerns. The ominous days leading up to the coronavirus outbreak at Life Care Center in Kirkland. ‘We’re gearing up for something extremely significant’: Top hospitals across the US told us how they’re preparing for the coronavirus outbreak. Cronyism and Conflicts of Interest in Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. ‘To hell and back’: my three weeks suffering from coronavirus. The new normal. To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China. Coronavirus Will Test Our New Way of Life. WHO says coronavirus death rate is 3.4% globally, higher than previously thought. Another senior politician has died of coronavirus in Iran, where 8% of the parliament is infected. State by state, we’ve still barely tested anyone. When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain Coronavirus? New CDC guidance says older adults should ‘stay at home as much as possible’ due to coronavirus. AIPAC. CPAC. Get ready for live-streamed funerals. Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus. Port of Los Angeles Sees Coronavirus Impact Sharply Reducing Imports. As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP. CoronaCoin: A coronavirus speculative deathwatch cryptocurrency. ‘If We Don’t Work, We Don’t Get Paid.’ How the Coronavirus Is Exposing Inequality Among America’s Workers. America Is About to Get a Godawful Lesson in Why Health Care Should Never Be a For-Profit Business. The Invisible Hand Wants You Dead. We’re in trouble.
* SXSW Cancelled, Unbelievably. The effect on Austin will be massive. Event Admits It Has No Insurance for Coronavirus Cancellation.
* First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow. UW, Seattle University classes moving online starting Monday. Stanford too. As Coronavirus Spreads, the Decision to Move Classes Online Is the First Step. What Comes Next? Coronavirus Looms Over March Madness.
* Graphic Novels Your Kid (Probably) Hasn’t Read Yet.
* What to Say to Your Daughter About Campus Sexual Assault.
To bring the spirit of these lessons into a child’s home, parents can focus on building a relationship with their daughter that teaches her that she is equal to men and has the right to set her own boundaries and see them respected. For dads, a simple thing to try is letting your daughter brush you off sometimes. Let her question your authority, talk back, and leave the room in the middle of an argument. These changes could be especially important if the greatest risk to your daughter comes from an authority figure, but they will apply to her peers too.
* Is Miscarriage Is So Normal, Why Doesn’t Anybody Talk About It? The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go.
* The race to save Polesia, Europe’s secret Amazon.
* We Re-Ordered The Entire Democratic Primary Calendar To Better Represent The Party’s Voters. Twilight of Chris Matthews. Daily Caller gets one I can’t help but pass along. Bring in the boss? ‘This Was a Grift’: Bloomberg Staffers Explain Campaign’s Demise. America’s black billionaires have no place in a Bernie Sanders world! The Liberal-Conservative-Socialist Case for Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren: A Populist for the Professional Class. Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race. ‘Bailey’ vs. ‘blood and teeth’: The inside story of Elizabeth Warren’s collapse. How Elizabeth Warren Lost. It Will Be Hard to Get Over What Happened to Elizabeth Warren. Capitalism Is Rallying Behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden Has a Long History of Giving Republicans What They Want. Democrats Rallying Around Joe Biden Could Alienate Generations of the Party’s Youth Support. Biden can finish Bernie off in Michigan. Who Said It: Trump or Biden? Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s 2020 Campaign Makes Me Sick with Fear for Our Future. I just remembered Joe Biden is fine. Electability in the time of coronavirus. What if there’s no hope? Sanders campaign hatches comeback plan.
* Lots of my political thoughts have been going viral on Twitter lately, from the proper level of identification with a candidate to the ego protection of despising Bernie Sanders to just straight up rants to a pretty solid sitcom pilot. But nothing approaches a random repost of a meme I saw on Facebook.
* This seems fine: Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups.
* The head of CIS was illegally appointed and it barely even registers.
* The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread gets to The Dispossessed. And from the archives: Sexual Violence in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Towards an Interpretation.
* I don’t want to shock you: Why algorithms can be racist and sexist.
* Larry Nassar victims want accountability. Olympic officials offered cash and veiled threats.
* Woody Allen Memoir Dropped by Hachette After Staff Walkout.
* Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?
* In a lot of office environments, “bad energy” might be code for “old” or “overweight” or “knows too much about labor law,” but one veteran WeWork employee said Rebekah’s firings were seemingly random and without obvious prejudice. “She was just a spoiled baby,” the employee said.
* Hideo Kojima’s Strange, Unforgettable Video-Game Worlds.
* Susana Polo writes for Polygon about her Twitter account, which, year-round, tweets out events in Lord of the Rings on the day that they happened. (via MeFi)
* Now I know you’re just making these up: “the snow firehose.”
* And Shell is now She’ll. Namaste.
End of February Mega-Links!
* I had a little deleted scene on a recent episode of The Gribcast, cut out from the earlier episode I was on where I talked about Parable of the Talents.
* The Cambridge History of Science Fiction made Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2019. Thanks to all who voted!
* Behold! SFRA Review 50.1!
* CFP: SFRA 2020: Forms of Fabulation. CFP: PopMeC. CFP: Transnational Equivalences and Inequalities. CFP: 20/20 Vision: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada. CFP: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire. CFP: “The Infrastructure of Emergency.” CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures. CFP: OEB Third Biennial Conference September 11-13, 2020. CFP: ‘Walls and Barriers: Science Fiction in the age of Brexit.’ CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 10th Anniversary Conference (CRSF 2020). CFP: The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities. CFP: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. CFP: Write about Bojack Horseman for @AtPost45!
* Three Californias, Infinite Futures.
Utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. What kind of art comes out of that? Sometimes I’ve experienced this as intensely stressful. In the domestic realist tradition of the English novel, what you value is, This is what real life is like. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—in theory I would aspire to write a novel like that. Yet here I am trying these utopian efforts time after time. So at a certain point along the way I got over it and just regarded it as a literary problem and an opportunity. My books are unusual, but so what? That’s a nice thing to be.
* A Sci-Fi Author’s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It.
* The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias.
* This is relatable content: Did Tolkien Write The Lord of the Rings Because He Was Avoiding His Academic Work?
* Watch a Haunting Teaser for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
* Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower.”
* The Shell Game: From “Get Out” to “Parasite.” Reading Colonialism in “Parasite.” Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in ‘Parasite.’
* All eyes on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Amid coronavirus scare, US colleges cancel study abroad programs. Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics.
* Bernie and #MUnion. Bernie Sanders’s Multiracial, Working-Class Base Was On Display In Iowa. How Bernie’s Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time. The Delegate Math Now Favors Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump in polls, even when you remind people he’s a socialist. Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage. The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition. An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter. The Millennial/Gen-Z Strategy. Bernie Sanders and the climate.
* Wisconsin, Swing State. How Milwaukee Could Decide the Next President.
* Heard but Not Seen: Black music in white spaces.
* Joanna Russ, The Science Fiction Writer Who Said No.
* What Happened to Science Fiction? Something is broken in our science fiction.
* Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) children’s books in the 1980s.
* The Tulsa Massacre will now be part of the Oklahoma standard curriculum.
* The Transformation of Adam Johnson. A shooting happened in his classroom. Could his expertise help him make sense of it?
* Striking UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Hold Picket Lines After Police Arrest 17. UCSC Grad Students Are on Strike for a Living Wage. UC Santa Cruz Strikers to Lose TA Jobs. The UCSC Strike Is Working. The UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike and the Shape of What’s To Come.
* Off-The-Record Advice for Graduate Students.
* The Job Market Is Killing Me.
* NFM: Ensuring that Adjunct Faculty Have Access to Unemployment Insurance.
* The part I was born to play!
* Today, upon request of the division chair, I’m giving a short, data-based presentation to the faculty in the Humanities division meeting. The subject is career prospects for our majors. Here are the key points…
* Pedagogy corner: Against Cop Shit.
* Their findings suggest college closings won’t be as frequent as some soothsayers have predicted. No more than one out of 10 of the country’s colleges and universities face “substantial market risk,” and closings are likely to affect “relatively few students.” Six in 10 institutions face little to no risk.
* In graduate school I wrote a paper on Heaven’s Gate and it remains one of the most upsetting thing I’ve ever worked on. Haunted by Cybersects.
* Obsessing over the environmental impacts of food gone unconsumed eclipses more interesting questions we might ask of food production that don’t take for granted the ecological devastation seemingly inherent to contemporary U.S. agriculture. Wasting less food in a shitty food system won’t make that system any less shitty, and yet rarely does that realization rear its head. Like the out-of-fashion concept of food miles that launched a locavore movement, taking stock of food waste’s supposed environmental impacts appears to be more rhetorically useful than it is a reliable reflection of where and how those harms come about and who is culpable for them.
* Can we have prosperity without growth? The toxic legacy of old oil wells: California’s multibillion-dollar problem. Florida Climate Outlook 2020. Climate emergency declared in Barcelona. ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off. Measuring the Carbon-Dioxide Cost of Last Year’s Worldwide Wildfires. Greta and Anti-Greta. These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Never tell me the odds!
* The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene.
* Actually existing media bias.
* British Photographer Remodels World Famous Architecture Using Paper Cutouts and Forced Perspective.
* The search for new words to make us care about the climate crisis.
* The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. How $98 trillion of household wealth in America is distributed: “It’s very depressing.”
* Is there any scam like health insurance? Just so many angles.
* Adrienne Miller’s memoir of her relationship with David Foster Wallace is part of an emerging genre of women coming of age via an older, powerful man. This one actually lets DFW off easy.
* Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
* In contrast, the judge has exhibited antipathy for Donziger, according to his former lawyer, John Keker, who saw the case as a “Dickensian farce,” in which “Chevron is using its limitless resources to crush defendants and win this case through might rather than merit.” Keker withdrew from the case in 2013 after noting that “Chevron will file any motion, however meritless, in the hope that the court will use it to hurt Donziger.”
* Truly, depravity in everything.
* Hmong Leaders Say Reported Trump Deportation Plans Would Put People At Risk. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. How the Border Patrol’s New Powers and Old Carelessness Separated a Family. The Department of Justice Creates Section Dedicated to Denaturalization Cases. Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE. Federal Judge Reverses Conviction of Border Volunteers, Challenging Government’s “Gruesome Logic.” How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump.
* What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World.
* Why the Left Can’t Stand The New York Times.
* #MeToo and the Post-Traumatic Novel.
* Mr. Peanut Devouring His Son.
* Michael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism. When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out. The degree to which Michael Bloomberg is using his fortune to fundamentally alter & manipulate U.S. politics to his personal advantage extends way beyond ads. I’ve worked against him, covered him as a journalist & worked with his top aides. Here’s their playbook… Bloomberg and Trump: alike in dignity and almost everything else.
* Toba catastrophe watch: Stone Tools Suggest Supervolcano Eruption Didn’t Decimate Humanity 74,000 Years Ago.
* The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President. Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear. Donald Trump ads will take over YouTube for Election Day. How Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk. ‘Every Single Person Is Losing Money’: Shipt Is the Latest Gig Platform to Screw Its Workers. Cost Cutting Algorithms Are Making Your Job Search a Living Hell. The Future of Housing May Be $2,000 Dorm Rooms for Grownups. Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide. Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace: study. Hackers stuck a 2-inch strip of tape on a 35-mph speed sign and successfully tricked 2 Teslas into accelerating to 85 mph. Self-driving car dataset missing labels for pedestrians, cyclists. Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers. Health Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal. Pornhub doesn’t care.
* But it’s not all bad news: Kickstarter has unionized.
* Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet.
* you: trauma me, an intellectual:
* Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.
* Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees.
* ‘The Scream’ Is Fading. New Research Reveals Why.
* Dungeons & Dragons & Therapy.
* Animal Crossing and Needing Therapy.
* A brief history of orcs in video games. A history of farts in video games. He gave us so many lives, but he had only one.
* Behind the scenes at Rotten Tomatoes.
* The best $500 I ever spent: My autism diagnosis.
* How libel law is being turned against MeToo accusers.
* How The Good Place taught moral philosophy to its characters — and its creators.
* The Quest for the Best Amusement Park Is Ever-Changing and Never-Ending.
* Next year, in Jerusalem: Star Wars Will ‘Absolutely’ Have a Future Film Directed by a Woman, Kathleen Kennedy Says.
* He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?
* Here comes Star Wars: The High Republic.
* Disney Didn’t Just Buy ‘Hamilton’ for $75 Million; It Bought a Potential Franchise.
* Could it be that capitalism is… bad?
* Free speech and eating meat.
* Science corner! People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia. Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth. How Lifesaving Organs For Transplant Go Missing In Transit. The Hope And Hype Of Diabetic Alert Dogs. Most BMW drivers are jerks, according to science. Here are a couple of ways of starting a fire in the wilderness using found materials.
* The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist.
* Crypto Ponzi scheme took Major League Baseball players and their families for millions.
* Of course you had me at “literary Ponzi scheme.”
* Basketball in North Korea is absolute chaos.
* A whatchamacallit by any other name.
* Map of Europe: Agario Style.
* How to Make Billions in E-Sports. ‘Nobody talks about it because everyone is on it’: Adderall presents esports with an enigma.
* The arc of history is long, but…
* And The French Dispatch has a trailer for me to get very nervous about. Wes Anderson, I’m begging you to get a new gimmick.
Happy Captain Picard Day Links!
* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.
* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.
* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).
* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.
* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.
* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.
* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.
* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.
* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.
* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.
* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.
* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.
* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?
* It would sell! It would sell.
* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.
* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.
* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.
* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.
* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.
Happy Star Wars Eve, One… Last… Time
* Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place. A dismal farewell to the trilogy. Even Solo got a better reception. The Rise of Skywalker—and the Fall of Fun. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up. ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is A Convoluted And Clumsy End To The Star Wars Saga. The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse. The Most Incoherent Star Wars Movie Ever Made. watching the rise of skywalker is like telling an acquaintance you ate potato salad once and enjoyed it, and then having that acquaintance break into your home in the middle of the night, tie you to a chair, and mash potato salad into your face and eyes for 2+ hours
* Of course the real content of Episode 9 discourse is The Last Jedi nostalgia.
* How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.
* Don’t Hold Your Breath for That Quentin Tarantino Star Trek Movie. “In a strange way, it seems like [‘Hollywood’] would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement,” Tarantino told Consequence of Sound. “I mean to such a degree there was a moment when I was writing and went, ‘Should I do this now? Should I do something else? Is this the 10th one?’ No, no don’t stop the planets from aligning, what are you, Galactus? If the Earth is saying do it, do it…But in a weird way, it actually kind of freed me up. I mean, I have no idea what the story of the next one’s going to be. I don’t even have a clue.” Kill Bill 3 confirmed.
* Netflix and the monoculture.
* Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets.
* Living through the era of school shootings, one drill at a time.
* Why did my sweet 5-year-old become so stormy when she started kindergarten? The Miseducation of the American Boy.
* A New (Jesuit) Model for Community Colleges.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Be Good at Your Job.
* The World The Economist Made.
* Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.
* The Oil Age Is Coming to a Close.
* A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health.
Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks.
* The 2010s Killed Off the Polite Climate Change Conversation.
* Trump’s Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape. Police officer admits he told homeless man to lick public urinal to avoid arrest.
* How Families Cope with the Hidden Costs of Incarceration for the Holidays.
* Devin Nunes lives on a congressman’s salary. How is he funding so many lawsuits?
* Memo: the Senate is an irredeemable institution.
* Insulin prices double since 2012.
* Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver. For an extra $50,000 it’ll kill a poor person every time you turn it on just because.
* 15 major cities around the world that are starting to ban cars.
* America is still innovating.
* An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad.
* John Mulaney Made a Kids’ Special. We Sent a 10-Year-Old to Interview Him About It.
* ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress Delusion: How strategy games have held on to one of colonialism’s most toxic narratives, and how they might finally be letting it go.
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Children’s Literature and Climate Change, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn. CFP: Special Issue of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts: Expanding the Archive. CFP: Call for Papers: ASAP/Journal Special Issue, “Autotheory.”
* I wanted to learn why a beloved science fiction writer fell into obscurity after his death. I didn’t expect that I would help bring his books back to life. The Disappearance of John M. Ford.
* The Nobel committee has epically beclowned itself, even by Nobel standards.
* Venice mayor declares state of emergency after ‘apocalyptic’ floods. Venice Underwater. Venice is sinking and this time it may go under. Italian council is flooded immediately after rejecting measures on climate change. These photos may be some of the most Anthropocene photos ever taken.
* Teaching us to “close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave,” Thunberg stands in for a new kind of climate realism. It’s a realism that prioritizes the demands of social and environmental well-being over the artificial constraints of the national budget, which always has cash for Guantánamo, but never for greenspace.
* How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong.
* Naomi Klein on Climate Chaos: “I Don’t Think Baby Boomers Did This. I Think Capitalism Did.”
* Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.
* Climate change could end mortgages as we know them. But not in the good way you’re thinking!
* Climate Change Is Breaking Open America’s Nuclear Tomb. (Elsewhere on the nuclear beat: You Can Own This Former ICBM Silo in the Arizona Desert.)
* Environmentalism has a serious ableism problem.
* Paradise one year later. Fire in Paradise.
* The “smart city” makes infrastructure and surveillance indistinguishable. Digital feudalism and the new epic. The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. The everything town in the middle of nowhere.
* The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls: Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary.
* PhDs: the tortuous truth. From Low Wage to No Wage.
* The university and nuclear weapons research.
* Headlines for the contemporary university.
* Professional activity means something quite different when, since there are no more tenure files, the theoretical commitment that matters most to your teaching is how little you’re willing to get paid to do it.
* Who could have possibly predicted this would go bad? “Academics have been criticised as ‘shameful’ for holding a slave auction re-enactment during a university conference dinner.”
* The Midwestern Black Professor Teaching MAGA Babies Is Not Alright.
* What can you do with an English major?
* Breaking precedent, UW System presidential search panel has no faculty, academic staff.
* Minnesota school district apologizes after video shows workers throwing away hot lunches for students with outstanding debt. Apology accepted, of course!
* From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
* Pardoning warcrimes *specifically against the wishes of the Pentagon* is some incredibly dark shit.
* The fact that a WH official *has been coordinating messaging and presumably policy with a primary organ of the White Power movement* is a big fucking deal. It is not simply the same thing as his (obviously! always!) having been racist! This elision helps him and them!
* Wild what we just accept as normal now.
* Republicans focus testing a let’s-just-bankrupt-the-country-now tax act.
* The U.S. has held a record 69,550 migrant children in government custody in 2019. Washington Cops Are Taking a Cue From ‘Fight Club’ for a Secret Facial Recognition Group.
* Huge, if true: Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds.
* Welcome to Molar City, Mexico, The Dental Mecca America’s Health Care Costs Built.
* Millions in U.S. Lost Someone Who Couldn’t Afford Treatment.
* With Medical Bills Skyrocketing, More Hospitals Are Suing for Payment.
* If Corporations Are Being Run to Maximize Returns to Shareholders, Why are Returns So Low? For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard. Wage hikes help everyone.
* New Jersey v. Uber. New NTSB Reports On Uber Fatality Reveal Major Errors By Uber.
* Trans kids and divorce. What the battle over a 7-year-old trans girl could mean for families nationwide.
* Cheating and baseball. He told a kid to slide. Then he got sued.
* Thanks to Disney+, people are noticing all of the racist stuff in Disney’s vault. ‘Return To Oz’ Is The Most Fascinatingly Imperfect Film Available On Disney+.
* When Marvel TV makes a good decision for once.
* Even nobodies have fans now.
* Bestselling Authors Band Together to Dunk on a College Student.
* I’ve heard enough, it’s aliens.
* And this city is afraid of me, I have seen its true face-lift.
Surprise! Thursday Links!
* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.
* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.
* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.
Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”
(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)
* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.
* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.
* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.
* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.
* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.
* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.
* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.
* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.
* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.
* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.
* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.
* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.
* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.
* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.
* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.
* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.
His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”
* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.
* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.
* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.
* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.
Tuesday Night Links!
* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!
Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.
* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?
* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!
* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.
* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.
* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.
* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”
* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.
* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?
* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.
Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.
* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.
* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.
* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.
* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.
* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.
* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.
* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.
* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.
* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.
* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.
* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.
* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.
* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.
* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.
* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.
* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.
* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”
* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.
* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.
* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!
* Being President Supervillain.
* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.
* Taking the fight to every state.
* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!
* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.
* In the richest country in human history.
* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.
* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.
* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.
* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.
* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.
* Fantasy literature alignment chart.
* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.
* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!
* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.
* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’
Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”
I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.
* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.
* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?
* How YouTube radicalization works.
* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.
* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.
* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.
* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).
* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.
* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.
* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?
* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.
* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.
* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.
* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.
* And imagine going back in time.
