Carefully Curated Spring Break Links! Definitely Not Too Many!

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

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

— andrewkarre (@andrewkarre) January 27, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 22, 2022

👀 https://t.co/sXic17MUTM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 4, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

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

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

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) February 3, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 31, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 18, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 28, 2022

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 28, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 15, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2022

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2022

pic.twitter.com/1iZmNEOIWM

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 7, 2022

Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy

this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021

Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...

First, just a few things I’ve been doing:

• I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
• I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
• I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
• We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
• I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
• I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
• My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
• I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
• I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
• And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…

“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973

“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:

Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021

• SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
• Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
• Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
• Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
• CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
• The war on critical race theory.
• The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
• The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
• Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
• Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
• Ground operations.
• Reflections on the Market.

I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.

— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021

• Dark academia.
• How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
• The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
• The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
• Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
• Firsting in Research.
• A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
• “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
• Reagan broke everything.
• The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
• Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
• Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
• All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
• A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
• University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
• The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
• ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
• Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
• Every day a new sadness.
• Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
• How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
• Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
• Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.

Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021

this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ

— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021

if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021

• How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
• Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
• Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
• We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
• Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
• The Airline Safety Revolution.
• Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
• Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
• Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
• It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
• No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
• A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
• Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
• Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
• The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
• The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
• Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
• The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
• How much money does a writer need?
• Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
• The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
• Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
• The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
• It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.

My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."

— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021

• Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
• So you want to acknowledge the land?
• Decolonize Oregon Trail.
• Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
• Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
• Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
• How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
• There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
• Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.

https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC

— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021

• We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
• How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
• Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
• America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
• A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
• What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
• Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
• 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
• The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
• The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
• I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
• How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
• Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
• “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
• ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• Two from Ted Chiang:  “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
• Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
• Sertãopunk.
• The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
• Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
• Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
• The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
• The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
• The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
• Top 20 Irishisms.
• Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
• 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.

it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities

— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Friday Links!

• Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
• CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
• Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
• Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
• In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
• If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
• I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
• Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
• “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
• Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
• $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
• Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
• History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.

The "cone" is an absolutely insane shape. What if a triangle was a circle. A nightmarish vision from the deranged mind of H.P. Lovecraft

— stu (@rinbcage) March 5, 2021

• Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
• The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
• Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
• How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
• I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
• A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
• We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
• Curation is not cancellation.
• This is why we can’t have nice things.

This is why we can't have nice things. pic.twitter.com/8D8lkEij6k

— Amy is rightfully pissed off now ☭ (@Amysaysfuckalot) March 7, 2021

• The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
• Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
• Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
• “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
• Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
• Unions Are Cool Now.
• The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
• ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
• Life after vaccination.
• “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
• The Invention of murder.
• Inside the incel.
• ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
• The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
• We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
• Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
• The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
• Against WandaVision.
• Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
• What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.

Call me Space Ishmael. Some space years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no space money in my space purse, and nothing particular to interest me on space shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the spacey part of the world.

— Space Moby Dick (@space_moby_dick) March 7, 2021

It’s Been a Minute: Links!

• There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
• I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
• Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
• Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

• Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
• Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
• How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
• How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
• Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
• A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
• Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
• Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
• The Proletarian Fantastic.
• Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
• Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
• Generation C.
• National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.

Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020

Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020

• ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
• Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.

Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY

— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020

The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.

(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E

— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020

• The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
• Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
• Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
• A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
• ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
• The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
• Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
• Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
• When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
• And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
• Fandom and the Future of Trek.
• In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
• If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
• Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
• implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war

Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.

— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020

• Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
• Joe Biden should do everything at once.
• Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
• In the Time of Monsters.
• The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
• How To Avoid Another Trump.
• Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
• For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

• How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
• What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
• It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
• Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
• 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
• Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
• We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
• The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.

my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020

• A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
• Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
• The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
• Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
• Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
• Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
• We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
• And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.

goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020

Thursday Morning Links!

* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.

* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.

* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.

* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.

* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.

* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.

To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp

— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020

Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.

— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020

When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020

1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:

With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.

And that’s just the beginning.

— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020

* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.

One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5

— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020

you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire

— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020

* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.

It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu

— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020

I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020

so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020

* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.

* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.

* What could go wrong in formalizing relationships between a multi-billion dollar industry where fortunes change hands in seconds, and a multi-billion dollar enterprise where the actual workers are paid nothing and could lose their entire futures in a single play

* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.

* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.

robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020

* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.

* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.

* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.

* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.

* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.

* The pandemic and UBI.

* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.

* Sometimes you just know.

* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.

* The Whitelash Next Time.

* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.

https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705

TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law

DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020

* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.

"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD

— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020

* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.

* Man obsessed with drinking the blood of the young to stay healthy turns out to have some questionable political beliefs.

* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.

* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

* New York’s homeless students.

* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.

* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.

* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.

* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’

* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!

* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?

* The OAS Accusation of Electoral Fraud Against Evo Morales Is Bullshit — And Now We Have the Data to Prove It.

* When does a model own her own image?

* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.

* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.

Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.

— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020

someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020

* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”

* Imagine the absolute blessing of waking up one morning to find that someone who treated you this way was trending on Twitter.

* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.

* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.

* capitalism.jpg

* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.

* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.

* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.

* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.

Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing

It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?

Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL

Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU

— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019

* We stan.

* Time Travel as White Privilege.

* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.

* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.

* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?

* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.

* Rules & Roberts.

* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.

* And I volunteer.

Thursday Links!

* 15 scenarios for the fall semester. The COVID Caveat. Why We’re Exhausted By Zoom. Better Late Than Zoom. Here’s a thread of all the statements I’ve seen from colleges about what they’re planning for the pandemic’d fall semester. How College Leaders Are Planning for the Fall. Fullerton goes online. A message from President Daniels regarding fall semester: ‘If They Die, They Die.’ Universities are expecting 230,000 fewer students – that’s serious financial pain. Coronavirus pushes colleges and universities to the brink. New report on adjuncts says many make less than $3,500 per course and live in poverty. More College Students May Need Remedial Help This Fall. Can They Get It Online? Admin 101: Our Shift to Remote Fund Raising. For Would-Be Academics, Now Is the Time to Get Serious About Plan B. If you want my advice. And some rare good news: Vermont State Colleges Chancellor Withdraws Plan To Close Three Campuses.

part of my grand unified theory of why colleges are run so terribly is that their leaders are pathetically desperate to signal to the other members of the multi-multi-millionaire class that they are still in the club https://t.co/NNi7IPwo4Y

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020

If it *were* true that Harvard, an institution with both nearly infinite resources and a nearly infinite ability to generate new resources in an emergency, can’t weather an economic downturn without drastic cuts, that would be a massive scandal of truly epic mismanagement!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020

* The NCAA saved money in case of a canceled March Madness. Then it spent it. This is a wild story that gets at the heart of the NCAA: they built a rainy-day slush fund out of fear of the workers they refuse to pay, then dissolved it out of fear that the slush fund might someday find its way into the hands of the workers anyway…

* The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act recognizes that the nonprofit humanities sector is an essential component of America’s economic and civic life. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has received supplemental funding to provide emergency relief to institutions and organizations working in the humanities that have been affected by the coronavirus.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet.

* After the election, Wisconsin reports largest jump in coronavirus cases in at least two weeks. Medical College of Wisconsin model shows hospitals would fill in a month if all social distancing ended May 26. Always an angle. ‘Open the Economy’ Is the New ‘White Lives Matter.’ When working towards the führer goes wrong. Fortress Wisconsin. Republicans ask Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn extension of ‘safer at home’ order; Court could rule to block Wisconsin’s ‘Safer at Home’ order as early as April 30. Milwaukee Common Council votes to mail absentee ballot applications to city’s registered voters.

* Power Up: President Trump wants to return to ‘normal.’ That will be harder than he thinks, say scientists, doctors and Americans. Ex-FDA chief says U.S. not likely to have broad-based coronavirus testing until September. Barr Threatens Legal Action Against States Over Lockdowns. Singapore Seemed to Have Coronavirus Under Control, Until Cases Doubled.

* Very cool: A doctor says he was removed from his federal post after pressing for rigorous vetting of treatments embraced by Trump. CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating. A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity helped spread the coronavirus. Fox News falls out of love with hydroxychloroquine. Why WHO Failed. The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. We Need a New Social Contract for the Coronavirus. We Are Living in a Failed State.

seem to be hitting another instance of that limit where when you simply report what Republicans are doing people won’t accept it’s true because it’s so outrageous and reprehensible https://t.co/Og0fOiUyXH

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 19, 2020

* How to interpret a model.

* During wartime, both financial and material capital is demolished: infrastructures, factories, bridges, ports, stations, airports, buildings. But once the war is over a period of reconstruction begins, and it is this reconstruction that triggers an economic rebound. However, the current epidemic looks more like a neutrino bomb, which kills humans and leaves buildings, roads and factories intact (if empty). So, when the epidemic is over, there will be nothing to rebuild—and no consequent recovery.

absolutely, also in the short term it is an excuse for not doing anything right now to prevent job losses or support people who've lost their jobs https://t.co/FtEnx9m6ep

— flglmn (@flglmn) April 20, 2020

They are not trying to reopen the economy to save it. They know it can't be saved. They want to reopen the economy to save capitalism, because if this government was forced to distribute resources in a way that ensured our survival, they know we would never go back.

— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 23, 2020

* Poll: 43 percent of Americans have lost jobs or wages due to coronavirus outbreak. Second- and third-wave layoffs coming from COVID-19.

* Americans too scared to go to work risk losing unemployment aid, experts say.

* White House, GOP face heat after hotel and restaurant chains helped run small business program dry. The astroturf begins. Opening up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.

* The media is already pushing austerity so hard I finally think Biden might actually win.

* Coronavirus Is Hammering the News Industry. Here’s How to Save It. Twilight of the Subway. Now there’s a silver lining.

* By A 10-to-1 Margin, Americans Support Orders To Stay At Home. Something Big Is Getting Lost In The Debate Over Stay-At-Home Orders. Social distancing as act of love. And whether that can last.

Social distancing without social (communal, preferably) support is hugely miserable for people and unsustainable. /2

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020

The way social distancing has been done in the US has put the entirety of the burden for managing the epidemic on the people who have the least resources. /5

— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020

* Facing the Coronavirus in Queens. Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus.

* 28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis. In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it. A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients. “Human challenge trials,” where healthy volunteers would be exposed to Covid-19, explained. The vaccine realism no one wants.

* Disney may stay closed until 2021.

* And why not: Trump Plans to Suspend Immigration to U.S.

* Let’s see what else is in the news: Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner. After the Flood: Chicago and Climate Change.

* Stay woke, liberals! You have to vote for Joe Biden no matter what Meghan McCain says. By the way, has anyone actually seen the Democrats? Seems like the stuff going on is the sort of thing they might have something to say about…

This is a real ad 100% cannot make this up pic.twitter.com/eBrvJCVXdK

— Wimstom (@KhakiJorts) April 22, 2020

* Trump’s support for right-wing protests just got more ugly and dangerous.

* Don’t put words in my mouth!

* Grandmother Paradox: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler by Nisi Shawl.

* Five Things COVID-19 has taught me about life by Nnedi Okorafor.

* Shaviro reads the Interdependency trilogy.

* The comics industry is in danger. Who can save it?

* Another think piece for my fall Watchmen class, which currently has a waitlist so long I could run a second section: Nothing Ever Ends.

* The Bigamist’s Daughter.

* Whole Foods is quietly tracking its employees with a heat map tool that ranks which stores are most at risk of unionizing.

* Trolley problem.

* And no matter how dark it is, there’s still hope.

Wednesday Night Links!

* I had a thread on comics and accessible teaching on Twitter that I found helpful, especially this last contribution.

* Shoot this post into my veins.

Shoot this post into my veins. pic.twitter.com/YNsOgnRAM3

— Detective Pikajew (@clapifyoulikeme) January 22, 2020

* Introducing the Ursula K. Le Guin reread.

* CFP: Speculative Fiction, Curriculum Studies, and Crisis.

* The (Not-So-)Secret Way to Attract Majors to Your Department.

* How Star Trek’s Canon Expert Helps Picard Revive Characters and Find the Future. Already hyped for Guinan in season two!

* The Untitled Goose Game and Philosophy.

* The real omission from the good-news stories is any honest acknowledgment of Amazon. The company sits comfortably at the peak of its influence, its supply chain built on the back of tax evasion, labor exploitation, corporate lobbying, massive profits from its web-server business, and federal antitrust enforcement that has hovered between lax and corrupt. Amazon’s power has been vast and growing for so long that it’s no longer new or noteworthy in the publishing press, except for the occasional article about its depressing brick-and-mortar bookstores, where endcap displays say things like “Books Most Frequently Highlighted by Kindle Customers.” Amazon’s bookseller origins seem almost quaint now that its blueprint is so vast its delivery vans roaming the streets, piloted by tired and underpaid third-party drivers; its lockers lining the walls of every 7-Eleven; its Echo speakers and touchscreens listening in from your kitchen, your living room, your bedroom, playing songs from Amazon Music and prestige TV from Amazon Prime, placing grocery orders with its recent acquisition Whole Foods. Sadly, publishing will never be as interesting as the complete and total restructuring of society. But with a market share of 45 percent of print books and 83 percent of ebooks, Amazon remains capable of crippling the industry and upending its practices with little more than an algorithmic tweak.

* In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates. “I’ll kill them all but better” didn’t work in 2004 and it won’t work now. This didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work now. We Regret to Inform You that Hillary Clinton Is at It Again. ACP Endorses Single-Payer. Just what it says on the tin.

* Mitt Romney gets a puff piece like this at 3:12 PM and has already proved it wrong before dinner. Fun fact!

* Shocked the Schumer isn’t completely blowing it. Good on Warren for promising to make this all right.

* When rich people can’t get along.

* Glenn Greenwald Charged With Cybercrimes in Brazil.

* Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Plot Was Real After All.

* N.K. Jemisin in the New Yorker.

* Greta Thunberg’s Remarks at the Davos Economic Forum.

* Australia’s Largest Mining Company is Worried Bushfires are Affecting Coal Production.

* Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 (it says).

* …we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.

* The Status Game.

* The Internet of Beefs.

* Houston Is Now Less Affordable Than New York City: A new report finds that, when transportation costs are factored in, Texas’s biggest metros aren’t the bargain they often claim to be.

* The Fight for Mom’s House.

* Today in the Chinese Century: Single-use plastic: China to ban bags and other items.

* Whoever leads in artificial intelligence in 2030 will rule the world until 2100. What happens in 2100!

* Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score.’

* The things you learn on Twitter.

Makes sense. Google used Enron emails to train its autocomplete. The dead ghosts of corporate malfeasance speak through us all now: https://t.co/fSzqQ5HCYO

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 21, 2020

* From the archives: The Millionaire Cop Next Door.

* RIP, the rule of law.

* Wendy’s and Child Labor.

* If Your University Administration Ran a Polar Expedition.

* English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms? What happens if you have no word for ‘dinosaur.’

* Today in the LEGO sublime.

* The truth is somewhen.

* Today in memes.

* And somehow I always knew it would end this way.

2020 Links for 2020

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

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

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

* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.

FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

* Public Domain Day 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020

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

* The problem with bringing back blogs is.

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020

* Meet the Obamog(ho)uls.

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

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

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

* One Year in Washington.

* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.

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

* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.

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

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

* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.

* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.

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

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

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

* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.

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

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

* Being black at UW.

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

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020

* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.

* The rise of the permanent protest.

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

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

* When your abuser is a cop.

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

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

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

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

— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020

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

* When AI runs the entertainment industry.

* When business people run the Olympics.

* DC and Marvel vs politics.

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

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

* Being Larry David.

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

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

— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020

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

* Asimov, groper.

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

* The decolonization of Miles Morales.

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

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

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

* @ me next time

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

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

* And Christopher Tolkien departs for the Grey Havens.

Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!

* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.

* Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.

* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.

* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.

Call for papers: @UCRiverside Symposium on speculative futures and education: pic.twitter.com/4NSN0WqSnu

— Nalo Hopkinson (@Nalo_Hopkinson) October 3, 2019

* On good science fiction.

* Get ready for the next recession.

* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.

* The looting of higher ed.

The looting of higher ed https://t.co/crh0sNJpTx

— Kevin Modestino (@kevin_modestino) October 8, 2019

* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.

* Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.

* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.

* You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.

* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.

One year ago, Greta Thunberg began a one-person school strike.

This week, she will likely win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her message to world leaders is really a message to all of us: "Change is coming whether you like it or not." https://t.co/UaP72pdIwE

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 7, 2019

* Set in 2053, Carbon Ruins inhabits a near-future world where we managed to get our collective shit together, reaching global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions goals in 2050.

* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.

* Cancel billionaires.

* The Obamanauts.

it's clarifying to watch liberals who have spent three years bemoaning the ruin of US society yet again show that what they really mean by "norms" is the ability of celebrities to have telegenic feel-good moments of Being Normal with ghouls who have killed millions of people

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 8, 2019

* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.

* The Concern Troll in Everyone.

I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.

* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.

* Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.

* “every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”

every time i think about this poem i need to lie down pic.twitter.com/mQBBqqbNGY

— ava wolf (@wownicebuttdude) October 7, 2019

* The Supreme Court has told Domino’s they have to stop suing over an accessibility issue that would have cost them $40,000 to fix.

* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.

* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.

* Against automated hiring.

* Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.

* What can’t we remember our earliest years?

* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.

Every “gender reveal” is a fail https://t.co/5aL66brUok

— rhea butcher (@RheaButcher) October 7, 2019

Sunday Morning Links!

* Picard trailer! Disco trailer! Short Trek! It’s truly a Golden Age.

* Some new poems from Jaimee up at her website.

* State DOT orders homeless to leave encampment under I-794 overpass in downtown Milwaukee by Oct. 31. I’m amazed this situation was allowed to go on this long and am worried that it will turn truly ugly now.

* Anyone want to buy a college?

* He Was a Consultant for the Search; Now He’s the Chancellor. And the Faculty Is Furious.

* Now let us proclaim the mystery of speech.

* College Students Just Want Normal Libraries. Fine, but get back to me when you figure out a way to turn that into graft.

* 22-year adjunct (and union leader) denied medical leave by UC Irvine following brain surgery.

* They were never going to land anywhere but “you’re damn right I ordered the code red.” Every Trump scandal follows a playbook. With Ukraine, the playbook finally might not work. If the rule of law meant anything to the American political class, Trump would have been impeached on the first day of his presidency. 2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified.’ CIA General Counsel Thought She Made Criminal Referral Based On Whistleblower Info. Bringing back all the classics. Chris Hayes explains it all. Crucial role of right-wing media missing from impeachment coverage. It’s the Republicans, stupid. Even Chris Cillizza gets it.

“Republicans would be absolutely livid if a Dem president was extorting foreign powers to harm his rivals” is a good point to make but it won’t sway Trumpists because they don’t believe there should be another president from a different party. That’s the point of the extortion.

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 4, 2019

Any method Trump uses to keep himself in power, no matter how unconstitutional or criminal, is legitimate because Dems are illegitimate and cannot be allowed to hold power. This conviction is, ironically, the result of projecting on the prior admin what Trump is actually doing.

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 4, 2019

* I just hope they bring Rick Perry to justice.

* Never Trumpers, man.

* Immigrants will be denied visas if they cannot prove they have health insurance or the ability to pay for medical care, the Trump administration said. The government is simply lawless.

* This Supreme Court Term Will Launch a Conservative Revolution.

*  Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor.

* Pharmaceutical Companies Are Luring Mexicans Across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma.

* “It’s Very Unethical”: Audio Shows Hospital Kept Vegetative Patient on Life Support to Boost Survival Rates.

* Inside TheMaven’s Plan To Turn Sports Illustrated Into A Rickety Content Mill.

* The Four-Day Work Week—Not Just a Daydream.

* Saving the planet without self-loathing.

* Deep dive into the scandal rocking online poker.

* America.jpg.

pic.twitter.com/VDQLjgGA7q

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) October 4, 2019

* 21-year-old oversleeps jury duty, goes to jail for 10 days.

* US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded.

* The billionaire class: “I’m a fiscal conservative, but a cultural nihilist.”

* Cops can do anything they want wherever they want whenever they want.

* Bootleg film shows Florida prison in all its danger, squalor. An inmate shot it on the sly.

* Mosby lists 25 Baltimore police officers as discredited; prosecutors begin wiping out 790 convictions.

* From the archives: During the season 17 premiere of Sesame Street in 1985, after 14 years, the adults see Mr. Snuffleupagus for the first time.

* And from the other archives: Every Single Movie That Jimmy Carter Watched at the White House.

* Top Joker burn. Joker and white resentment. Brogan breaks it down.

* House of X: still really good! I’m really interested to see where Hickman takes the franchise from here.

* DC continuity: still utterly bonkers!

* Still the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal that cuts me the worst.

* And know, even in these dark times, there are still heroes in this world.

I don't remember who posted this on Twitter a few years ago, but whoever you are: you have improved every night I've spent in a hotel since. pic.twitter.com/NpuuumqHV8

— Rick Klau (@rklau) October 4, 2019

Thursday Night Links!

* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.

* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.

* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?

* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.

* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.

* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.

* Here come the esports majors.

* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.

* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.

* My university is dying.

* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.

* The inaugural issue of our journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic is finally live.

* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.

* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.

* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!

* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?

* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.

* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.

* The toll of #MeToo.

* This time they can’t use procedural tricks to stymie the march of progress! *five seconds later* Ah, well, nevertheless.

McConnell added that it would require 67 votes to change Senate rules to prevent a trial from taking place – so the rule change won’t happen. But he can move to dismiss after the trial begins. “How long I’m on it is another matter,” he said of a trial

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2019

The Senate voting along party lines to refuse to hold the trial at all — which is what they would have to do for this to work — is probably the best case scenario for the Democrats short of conviction (which is a fantasy). https://t.co/n3yJ5bXcut

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 28, 2019

* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.

Mitch McConnell's wife is Secretary of Transportation.
Mitt Romney's niece is RNC Chair.
Antonin Scalia's son is up for Secretary of Labor.
etc. https://t.co/TS5ut3ydEb

— Jonathan Dresner (@jondresner) September 29, 2019

This looks like a meeting of the human villains from every Muppets movie. pic.twitter.com/IO64xvFmia

— Devin Field (@thatdevinfield) October 2, 2019

Every worry people have about the way mass media leads people to eliminationist and genocidal thought is present in every form of rightwing media, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News. The foundation is laid.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2019

 

* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.

* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.

* Snowden in the Labyrinth.

* John Kelly, man of honor.

* “shoddy system backed by extremely shoddy research and jackboot instincts should be applied globally”

* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.

* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”

* The Boeing whistleblower.

* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.

* How they teach slavery, then and now.

Here is a page from "Our Virginia: Past and Present" by Joy Masoff (2010). Notice the reference to free blacks expressing loyalty to the Confederacy and of course the black Confederate claim:

"Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks…" pic.twitter.com/outkKpaIS7

— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) October 1, 2019

* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.

* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.

* I suppose this is canon (again).

* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.

* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.

* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.

* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?

* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

* Is it weird that no one can sustain a media operation of any size no matter what the topic or longevity?

* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.

* Absolutely psychotic nation.

* Great country. Truly great.

* Only in America!

* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.

* Superheroes are real.

* get you a man who can do all three

get you a man who can do all three pic.twitter.com/yYOLHQPZNn

— Dickie Greenleaf (@ohgoddickie) September 28, 2019

* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.

* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.

* Don’t vape!

* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!

* america.jpg

* This one is a real america.jpg too.

* america.jpgs all over.

* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.

* He Spent Years Infiltrating White Supremacist Groups. Here’s What He Has to Say About What’s Going on Now.

* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.

* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.

Wednesday Night Links!

* Readers in a frenzy as Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments released early. Why It Matters That Amazon Shipped Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” a Week Early. Look for my review of The Testaments in LARB soon!

Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019

* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.

* The coming death of just about every rock legend.

* CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies.

* The job so nice they posted it twice: Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature.

* Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room. Why I Quit the Writers’ Room.

* The real Dickinson scandal appears only at the margins of Wild Nights with Emily, at the start and at the end. The movie begins with a disclaimer: “The poems and letters of Emily Dickinson are used in this film with permission of Harvard University Press.” But why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.

* As of today there are no longer any children who were alive on 9/11. Never forget the worst comics page in history.

* “The grand neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years has demonstrated that markets in fact do not regulate themselves. Managed markets turn out to be more equitable and more efficient. Yet the theory and practical influence of neoliberalism marches splendidly on, because it is so useful to society’s most powerful people—as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab.”

* Liberalism can’t defend itself.

* Whose Apollo Program?

* Another world is possible.

* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.

* The great enrollment crash.

* California to force NCAA to pay athletes. More at the MetaFilter thread.

* Ronan Farrow exposes MIT. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites. The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab.

It turns out that handing over research universities to a handful of billionaire sociopaths was a bad idea https://t.co/HCTJasWOfO

— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019

The MIT fiasco should underscore how fundamentally toxic the entire philanthropy- & billionaire-reliant funding model is for education & research, period. Should be easy to picture the countless email threads just like the Ito/Epstein chats with Saudi princes, opioid dealers, etc

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019

I know “the ivory tower of leftist academia” is a thing people murmur incessantly, but anyone in a university community knows they’re hidebound institutions that hoover money and prop oligarchies on every level, and if the Epstein MIT news gets us talking more about that: Good

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019

* Her University Publicly Accused Her of Using Meth. Here’s How It Came to That, and Here’s What Happened Next.

* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.

* The WSJ takes aim at the English major, again. Some college major data from the Center on Education and the Workforce.

* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.

I laughed so hard at this pic.twitter.com/wCb8XiUnUZ

— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019

* Another free speech exception.

* Inside Liberty University.

“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”

Ah, they’ve got nothing on Columbia or NYU.

An autocratic president and a hedge fund operating under cover of a university mission isn't what distinguishes Liberty U from other big privates. https://t.co/mczFLujfiP

— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019

* Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity. But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.

* I worked at a website that rated professors for political bias. This is what I learned.

* ‘UVA has ruined us’: Health system sues thousands of patients, seizing paychecks and putting liens on homes. “Johns Hopkins deliberately puts poor people who seek its care into medical debt so they lose their homes so Johns Hopkins can buy the land for its expansion.”

* Congress Promised Student Borrowers A Break. Education Dept. Rejected 99% Of Them.

* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.

* The administrators who handle sexual-misconduct investigations aren’t sticking around for long. That’s because they have one of the toughest jobs on campus.

* Inside the cuts at Marquette. Under the circumstances I feel overly relieved that we’ve moved up in the US News rankings.

* When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect.

again, the *purpose* of these exercises is to traumatize children. this is *the purpose.* it is a social pedagogy. and there is a strong chance that anyone who tells you otherwise is literally invested in or otherwise monetizing that trauma https://t.co/hRN2xl2JZL

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019

* Daughter should have been armed, it’s the only way to prevent these things unfortunately.

* Richest Could Lose Hundreds of Billions Under Warren’s Wealth Tax. They wouldn’t even notice it missing.

* UBI Already Exists, We Just Need to Redistribute It.

* Climate change is here. Climate change isn’t an intangible future risk. It’s here now, and it’s killing us. Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. The heat is on. James Cameron says “people need to wake the fuck up” about climate change. Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt. Climate change also means retreat. In an era of climate change, everything feels strange. Even the places we call home. Mississippi Beaches Have Been Vacant For 2 Months As A Toxic Algae Bloom Lurks Offshore. Tired: The Anthropocene. Wired: The Carnivalocene. The novel in the Anthropocene. Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene.

* Island of 50,000 People in the Bahamas Is 70% Under Water. Hurricane Dorian Survivors Were Turned Away & That’s A Chilling Look At Our Future.

* NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump. I knew he’d slip up eventually!

* Hope in the Midst of Ecological Dystopia: Cli-fi books for the young-adult reader.

* Agribusiness against the Amazon.

* “When I say state’s rights,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

* From the mixed-up files of the top Republican gerrymanderer.

* Today in the wisdom of markets.

* For every grift, a mark: Meet The Hyperloop’s Truest Believers.

* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”

* What’s Missing From “White Fragility”: Robin DiAngelo’s idea changed how white progressives talk about themselves—and little else.

* And speaking of white fragility.

That people expect to have pleasant fun trips to former slave plantations tells you everything you need to know about this country's failure to deal with the legacy of slavery.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019

* Indigenous Women in Canada Are Still Being Sterilized Without Their Consent.

* TWO MONTHS BEFORE my operation, I dreamed I was a character in a video game. As sometimes happens in video games, I died. When I respawned, I had a new face, the face of another woman altogether. Upon discovering this in the dream, I collapsed into my companion’s arms and told her, through tears, that all I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.

* The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained.

* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.

* In Chicago, more than 16,000 students are homeless.

* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.

* Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Harris’s “Criminal Justice” Plan Is Not Progressive.

* Baby Boomers are charmed by his rose-tinted revisionism. Younger Democrats see the past more clearly. The Historical Amnesia of Joe Biden’s Candidacy.

* Joe Biden can’t stop lying. He lies for popularity, he lies to protect billionaires’ profits, and he lies to cover his own misdeeds. If he were to quit lying, Biden would be exposed for who he actually is: a happy stooge of industry trying to squash the rising demand for a better world.

* Imagine if we had a democracy.

* Trump’s already cancelling elections.

* Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas’s theory of race.

* The case for changing the voting age to zero.

* The Fall of the Meritocracy.

* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.

* Rethinking cities, from the ground up. Cars are pushing out bikes and pedestrians to the applause of the influential and powerful.

* Ex-lawyer who stole from clients in part to finance his ‘Excuseman’ character given 3 years in prison.

* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is

* extremely normal very normal

"A 7- or 8-year-old boy was separated from his father, without any explanation… The child was under the delusion
that his father had been killed +
believed that he would also be killed. This child ultimately
required emergency psychiatric care."

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019

* Document reveals the FBI is tracking border protest groups as extremist organizations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has accidentally revealed the whereabouts of a future “urban warfare” training facility that is expected to include “hyper-realistic” simulations of homes, hotels and commercial buildings in Chicago and Arizona. The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants.

* Made In America: For $9.50 An Hour, They Brew Tear Gas For Hong Kong.

* California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees. UPDATE: Uber already refusing to comply.

* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.

* How We Shut Down the Nation’s Largest Child Detention Center.

* The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort. Gee, I hope someone was fired over that blunder!

* TSA PreCheck: It absolutely shouldn’t exist, and is absolutely an incredible value.

* Frenchest news item of all time: man dies having “adulterous relationship with a perfect stranger” on business trip; court rules it was a work accident.

* The struggle to save Day-Glo.

* Whatever happened to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar?

* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.

* A history of Tetris randomizers.

* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.

* 44 African Architectural Styles.

* Where there were more than 2,000 staff cartoonists at work a century ago, and 180 as recently as the 1980s, contemporary estimates are grim: a 2011 survey by The Herb Block Foundation, an educational nonprofit, estimated that fewer than 40 such jobs still exist.

* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.

* Woman Shares 18th Century Student Disciplinary Records In Response To ‘Millennials Are The Worst’ Claim.

* A people’s history of labor history.

* They solved the Geedis mystery.

* The Lost Issue of Grant Morrison and Chas Truog’s Animal Man From 1988 – “Dominion.”

* Maid of honor shows up to wedding in T. rex costume after being told she could wear anything.

* Cheese can’t fake the funk.

* Every culture tells a different story about why it cages animals, which nearly all of them do. The stories evolve, and the cages do too.

* Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks.

* Occupations by frequency as mentioned in the lyrics of David Bowie.

* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.

Lego from the 1997 container loss, a monster in my pocket, bungs and balloon wands, cereal packet toys from the 50s and 60s, pegs and pen tops, Vanish bottle caps from a spill in 2015. All found on Cornish beaches. #oceanplastic #anthropocene #plasticheritage pic.twitter.com/AWZGBT6Ktd

— Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) September 9, 2019

* Disney still innovating ways to ruin the Muppets faster and faster; now the series don’t even need to be made to be bad.

* A thread/sincere plea: if you a member of the mainstream/popular press and are writing an article about fandom, you can officially nix any of the following, as it has already been written in 20+ other “101” style articles about fans/fan culture…

* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.

* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.

July 3 Links! Maybe Our Biggest July 3 Post EVER!!!

* I have a new review up at LARB: We Are Going on an Adventure: On Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin. Read these novels!

* Marquette gets some very good press: it has one of the top ten highest post-graduation employment rates in the country. Also on the Marquette beat: Marquette goes test optional.

* The university in ruins: Alaska edition.

* CFP: University of Nebraska Press is looking for proposals for its new comics studies series.

* When at last the aliens spoke to us, the first thing they did was apologize.

* Another KSR podcast appearance, this time on The Imaginaries. And some more piping hot KSR content: Picturing a Way Forward: Climate change, science fiction, and our collective failure of imagination. The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Kim Stanley Robinson Built a Moon Base in His Mind.

* It’s been a while since we did a good old fashioned Flash game, so please enjoy Magirune.

* In Koopa mythology, Mario is both Satan and a specter of death, and him and Bowser are brothers. Luigi was a later Christian revision. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

Fascinating Lore: Nintendo Revealed That The Reason Mario Always Comes Back To Life After He Dies Is Because Both Heaven And Hell Reject His Soul https://t.co/RR0KBQQnxK pic.twitter.com/6ItMP9lE8M

— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 20, 2019

* Toy Story 4’s Forky Has Haunting Metaphysical Implications for the Toy Story Universe.

* The Grand Cultural Influence of Octavia Butler.

* Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds. Producers Behind The Wandering Earth Want to Bring Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem to TV.

* What Slaughterhouse-Five Tells Us Now.

* The Medea Hypothesis.

* Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

feeling a bit like we shouldn't have built a mass media-news-entertainment complex with openly fascist aesthetics and then elected as president one of its creatures https://t.co/Mua9Qfkwqq

— Max Read (@max_read) July 1, 2019

* Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education. Documents show ties between university, conservative donors. Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa.

* 2008 killed the university, but not in the way most people think.

* How to Chair an Academic Committee.

* How College Professors Are Fighting for Their Lives. Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors.

* Meritocracy’s Discontents. ‘To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.’

* Why can’t everyone get As?

* Another free speech mystery.

* Wild decision at Oberlin.

* When The University Of Wisconsin Persecuted Gay Students.

* ‘Your Heritage Is Taken Away’: The Closing of 3 Historically Black Colleges.

* The Closure.

* The Surreal End of an American College.

* ‘Everything Must Go!’: A Rash of College Closures Keeps This Liquidation Firm Busy.

* Outcomes-based graduate school.

* Nice work if you can get it!

* CSU secretly stashed away $1.5 billion surplus, auditor says.

* When you really mess up the lit review.

* Warren to Introduce Student Debt Cancellation Bill. Bernie doubles it. Something’s coming.

* Rick Snyder’s Harvard Fellowship and the Limits of Civility.

* There would be a cartoon, like for kids. Or it might also have been a prime-time cartoon, actually. The situation was fluid, but consider the growth potential. Honestly, the whole notion was exceedingly hazy and changed a lot, but, as it got pitched among the corps of cold-calling salespeople to potential investors in a company named Premiere Publishing Group, the plan was this: There was going to be a cartoon, on television, that would feature Donald Trump jetting around and solving various problems.


* There Are People in Concentration Camps. Why Aren’t We in the Streets?

One reason I think we’ve been arguing about the name of the camps is that life in the shadow of concentration camps is not supposed to be worth living. “Never again” doesn’t mean “Don’t commit genocide” or even “Oppose ethnic cleansing”; the phrase implies a permanent obligation to resist in the Dale Smith sense—stop the camps—or risk being the equivalent of all those Good Germans. The presence of concentration camps should be intolerable, and yet here we are, tolerating it. Either they aren’t camps or we aren’t who we said we were. There has got to be a better way to reduce our cognitive dissonance than playing with definitions.

* Behold as the New York Times reports on an anti-immigrant movement in St. Cloud, Minnesota, entirely from the perspective of the racists. ‘Guats,’ ‘Tonks’ and ‘Subhuman Shit’: The Shocking Texts of a Border Patrol Agent. Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes. An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border. There are concentration camps in America. They Are Concentration Camps — and They Are Also Prisons. ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System. ‘There Is a Stench.’ ‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry.’ Torture facilities. Ticking time bomb. Report: 1,000 new migrant adults detained at U.S. border weekly, “serious risk of exceeding safety standards on a regular basis.’ Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met.Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay. Mark Morgan, a man who claimed on Fox News to be able to identify “soon-to-be MS-13” gang members by looking child migrants in the eye, will now head an agency that has thousands of child migrants in its care. Lawyer Draws Outrage for Defending Lack of Toothbrushes in Border Detention. In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound.’ 4 Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility. We found the youngest known child separated from his parents at the border under President Trump. He was only 4 months old. Hung jury for Scott Warren. Italy Arrests Captain of Ship That Rescued Dozens of Migrants at Sea. The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody. ICE Stopped Updating Its List of ‘Deaths in ICE Custody.’ No limits. An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The concentration camp next door. Even (some) ICE agents are losing patience (but not for great reasons). And in a darker register: “Bodies and minds are breaking down”: Inside US border agency’s suicide crisis.

You should read this whole New Yorker piece about the conditions at Border Patrol facilities in Texas, but if you can't read the whole thing, at least read this paragraph: https://t.co/xWwHYvIMjb pic.twitter.com/Iujo3Pi2av

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 22, 2019

Homestead is hot and barren, with a completely enclosed fence. I saw children being marched from one building to another in single file lines. No laughing, no playing. These are children who are prisoners. pic.twitter.com/7WB4G8sI5n

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 26, 2019

Just left the first CBP facility. The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined.

15 women in their 50s- 60s sleeping in a small concrete cell, no running water. Weeks without showers. All of them separated from their families.

This is a human rights crisis.

— Congresswoman Madeleine Dean (@RepDean) July 1, 2019

"only four showers were available for 756 immigrants, more than half of the immigrants were being held outside, and immigrants inside were being kept in cells maxed out at more than five times their capacity." https://t.co/r3cHT3Xb3f

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) July 2, 2019

One thing I had never heard, was that in the early days of the Nazi concentration camps, years before the death camps and Final Solution, the Nazi government actually prosecuted guards for abusing and mistreating detainees. Hitler came in and pardoned them all to send a message.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 2, 2019

* The people who are supposed to save us from the fascists don’t have the stomach to fight for longer than a weekend. It’s pathetic.

This Oregon story is a slow-burn “worst news in the country” right now, rivaling both the Iran strike and the camps. The GOP openly making common cause with paramilitary groups and the Dems completely backing down is a very bad sign for the 2020s and beyond.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 23, 2019

* The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future.

* Joe Biden will never give up on the system, because it never gave up on him.

* The 2020 democratic candidates as dril tweets.

Primary debate pic.twitter.com/soyz8tiUft

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) July 1, 2019

* The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them. Focus on Wisconsin in this piece, which is so gerrymandered and voter-suppressed at this point that Democrats may never recover the legislature no matter how big they win.

This is about as clear an encapsulation of the effects of gerrymandering as you’ll find: pic.twitter.com/mrrTIfvNvK

— Aaron Wiener (@aaronwiener) July 1, 2019

by contrast, what if American politics is fundamentally defined by white supremacy, partisan politics are ultimately epiphenomenal to that, and it's the job of people like Yascha to mystify that arrangement into nearly moralizing pap https://t.co/HXLrHKtSYC

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) June 23, 2019

 

* Redlining in Milwaukee.

* The Devastating Oddness of E. Jean Carroll’s Trump Accusation.

* AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.

* Who Owns Tomorrow?

* Ta-Nehisi Coates resists the case for reparations.

* Where does money come from?

* Capitalist Workplaces Set Bosses Up to Be Authoritarian Tyrants.

* Better Schools Won’t Fix America.

* It’s so hot in Spain that manure self-ignited, sparking a 10,000-acre wildfire. It’s 112 degrees in France. 118 in India. Europe has had five 500-year summers in 15 years. Hell is coming. 40 degrees above normal. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice. A city of 9 million people loses water. Mexico Hailstorm Blankets Western Areas Under 3 Feet of Ice. Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore. Wildfires, heat waves foreshadow what could be a perilous summer across the globe. ‘A major punch in the gut’: Midwest rains projected to create near-record dead zone in Gulf. US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries. “We may find ourselves living shortly in a world that even just a few years ago we would’ve found completely unacceptable and not even be disturbed by it.” Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues. The Climate Crisis Is Mind-Boggling. That’s Why We Need Science Fiction. Global warming may reduce fish and other sea life by 17% by the year 2100. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: ‘Hope is contagious.’ “Batshit jobs” – no-one should have to destroy the planet to make a living. In the kids’ climate lawsuit that is slowly progressing, the US Department of Justice argues that there is “no right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.” The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit.

This is why I’ve said that if geoengineering doesn’t work, there’s a real sense in which science fiction as a genre destroyed the world. It gave people a vision of Promethean possibility that was only ever, in China Mieville’s memorable phrase, capitalism’s bullshit about itself.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019

SF is also the only thing that can save us, so you can see how conflicted I am

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 12, 2019

♫ ♪ always look on the bright side of life ♪ ♫ https://t.co/xb0Ex965R7

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2019

 

* Jim Jarmusch’s new movie is an accusation aimed at his audience: As the world plummets toward an ecological catastrophe, we still shamble through our former existences, brainless, as though the end of the world hasn’t already been written.

* The pocket of East Texas that Keilan calls home is among the state’s regions hit hardest by suicide. The most recent federal data show that in Gregg County, which includes Longview, 335 people died by suicide from 1999 to 2017. The county had a suicide rate of 15 deaths per 100,000 people in that time period, compared to the average state rate of 11.4. Several nearby, more rural counties — including Marion and Morris counties, just north of Gregg — have even higher suicide rates.

* Humans Can’t Watch All the Surveillance Cameras Out There, So Computers Are.

* Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why. Inside the most irrational environmental crime of the century.

* Canada’s Parliament has passed legislation banning whales, dolphins and porpoises from being bred or held in captivity — a move that was hailed by animal rights activists.

* Trump administration quietly makes it legal to bring elephant parts to the U.S. as trophies.

* Carbon emissions from energy industry rise at fastest rate since 2011.

* The Six-Year Struggle to Regain Ownership of the ‘This Is Fine’ Dog.

* Ravelry bans Trump support.

* Writing Iceman at Marvel.

* Alanis at 45.

* “I babysit for the one percent.”

lmao at everyone who thought the rich would save a fancy building over saving the homeless or whatever

they won't even save the building https://t.co/0F6oIhLXVD

— donoteat, 'the molson normie' (@donoteat1) June 15, 2019

* You just can’t win: Canada to ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. Plastic Bag Bans Might Do More Harm Than Good. Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.

* Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows.

* Your Business Casual Attire Is Destroying the Planet.

* Americans are terrifyingly supportive of nuking civilians in North Korea. What is the probability of a nuclear war? Why don’t we make movies about nuclear war anymore?

* The Uber delusion. Uber’s path of destruction. Uber Wants Your Next Big Mac to Be Delivered by Drone.

This Uber article is brutal. "Uber's most important innovation has been to produce staggering levels of private wealth without creating any sustainable benefits for consumers, workers, the cities they serve, or anyone else" https://t.co/BVnh8MxSGe pic.twitter.com/RsYYGgWPGJ

— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) June 6, 2019

* Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* How to Speak Silicon Valley.

* The day the music burned.

* The latest study of depression and PTSD in social media moderators.

i'm still convinced that the most underappreciated important story in tech over the last 15 years was the amount of actual human labor that was going into systems sold as "automated" https://t.co/nLx8nuks7H

— Max Read (@max_read) June 19, 2019

* Sunoco in Philly.

* We either buy insulin or we die.

* According to the UN the chance of a 15-year-old boy dying by the age of 50 is now higher in America than in Bangladesh.

* Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.

* The FoxConn scam, one year later.

* Would you like to know more?

* Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State.

* Here’s What It’s Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video.

* A shocking number of women are harassed, ignored, or mistreated during childbirth.

* Phoenix Police Threaten to Shoot a Pregnant Woman After Her Daughter Reportedly Stole a Doll.

* Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free.

* Alabama court forces rape survivor to allow rapist to have visitation with children.

Her serial rapist is HER UNCLE. Started raping her when she was 12. After 4 pregnancies, 3 live births, 1 miscarriage, 1 child deceased from a disease common in cases of incest, & 2 living kids, Alabama is forcing her to allow her rapist visitation w/the kids. Unconscionable https://t.co/KjbBu3JiqV

— BlackFeministThoughtiana (@divafeminist) June 15, 2019

* He Cyberstalked Teen Girls for Years—Then They Fought Back.

* Since January, when Bradley Austin learned that his ex-wife was using chlorine dioxide on their sons, he’s been trying to stop her. (He’s also exploring fighting for guardianship of his sons.) But the local police, the state’s division of adult protective services and a medical doctor treating Jeremy have all declined to intervene. A police spokesman said there wasn’t enough evidence that chlorine dioxide was dangerous; a caseworker with the Kansas Adult Protective Services told police that she didn’t see the situation as serious enough for the state to take action.

* Ali Stroker’s #TonyAwards2019 win marks the first time a wheelchair user has won a Tony Award (she was also the first wheelchair user on Broadway & the first nominated for a Tony). Tonight there was no ramp for her to get to the stage to accept her award.

* Ghost networks of psychiatrists make money for insurance companies but hinder patients’ access to care.

* It sucks to go to the doctor if you’re trans.

* Bad braille plagues buildings across U.S., CBS News Radio investigation finds.

* The war to free science.

* ‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. No they’re not!

* The accreditation of the University of Maryland, College Park, is in jeopardy a year after a football player died following a preseason workout. News outlets report the accrediting Middle States Commission of Higher Education on Friday announced it has placed the school on warning after finding “insufficient evidence” that it is complying with governance, leadership and administration standards.

* The latest MH370 deep dive.

* America Is Stuck With a $400 Billion Stealth Fighter That Can’t Fight.

* What the World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness.

* Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Enslaved Them.

* The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America.

* Do you consume a credit card’s worth of plastic every week?

* If you want a vision of the future: Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy charts the slippery slope from democracy to authoritarian rule.

* wHy DOn’T YOu JuSt SAvE sOMe MOneY

* America’s Collapsing Because it’s the World’s First Poor Rich Country.

* Whoa.

* 63 Up.

* No frills.

* Today in dystopia.

* This one too: A cancer patient from Montgomery, Illinois, has been sentenced to four years in prison for ordering a 42-pound package of chocolate marijuana edibles to self-medicate. The day after he pleaded guilty, the state legalized recreational marijuana.

* They finally found the monolith.

* sold

* my brain hurts a lot

* got another capitalism greatest hit. i will give you one hundred thousand dollars if you can guess the brand by the end

* just another classic canavan viral tweet

* Smash that bridge king.

Seems like a minor concern! https://t.co/sicDlX1p5H pic.twitter.com/e2PtlsL7f9

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) July 2, 2019

* The mindfulness conspiracy. On the other hand: Two-hour ‘dose’ of nature significantly boosts health – study. Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day.

* The Strange World of Sorority Rush Consultants.

* broke: McMansion woke: McTomb bespoke: multi-family housing

* The Empty Storefront Crisis and the End of the American Dream.

* Can the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Survive?

* Tetris forever.

* Mario Royale.

* Games Have Always Tried to Whitewash Nazis as Just ‘German Soldiers.’

* On Jameson and genre.

* Futureshock, turn of the century edition.

* Really though, what would the world be like without the Beatles?

* A team of researchers found a way to make money legally from online bookies. But then their troubles began.

* Whiteness 101: A Reading List to Abolish the Problem.

* Every Post-Credits Scene in the Masters of the Universe Cinematic Universe, Explained.

* Marvel Comics in the 80s: Not Just for Kids Anymore.

* A Brief History of the Movie-Summarizing End-Credits Rap.

* Dark Phoenix and the end of the dream.

* Worlds without Men.

* #cancelculture just #cancelled a very big fish.

* I’ve been reading The Walking Dead since the beginning and am not surprised at all it’s ending with #193, given what happened in #192.

* I’m so depressed I can’t even get worked up about this. No, not even this!

* The long march of artificial intelligence puts Bastani’s timeframe for communist transition in the shade. But there is a further problem with his vision, which strikes at the core of any proposal for full automation and the introduction of universal social services, as commendable as it may be. This is the possibility that capitalism might not be intelligent after all. Indeed, what if capitalism, on whose technological revolution Bastani’s FALC depends, were stupid? What if capitalism were to prove substantially deaf, dumb, and blind to sound appeals to common sense or rational thinking in the face of ongoing climate breakdown and its related miseries? What would communism or any form of “post-capitalism” look like from this perspective?

* Eventual perverts. Teaching. Moms. Parenting. We thought we had mastered passive aggression. The evolution of consciousness. Self-aware.

* And some personal news: Super Mario Maker 2 rules.

A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever

* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.

* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.

* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”

* My entry on Kim Stanley Robinson for the Oxford Research Bibliography in American Literature has gone live.

* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!

* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.

* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.

* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.

* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.

* Thompson said among neighboring states, the condition of Wisconsin highways was rated “not only the worst, but it was worse by a gaping margin.”

* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.

* The End of the Remedial Course.

* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.

* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?

* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.

* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”

You can dance around it all you like, but the simple fact is that we need to curb our emissions and guide the rest of the world in doing so in an amount of time radically shorter than conventional politics and market solutions alone will allow. https://t.co/5u82WDnACF

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 25, 2019

I have a 7 year old daughter & a 9 year old son. They are not going to meekly accept living in hell so that people can write essays laughing at them for The Atlantic. Millions and millions and millions of children won't accept it. Politicians have no idea what's coming for them.

— Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) February 25, 2019

A very small group of rich people have condemned virtually every living thing on Earth to death—genocide on an unprecedented and scarcely imaginable scale—and not only will they get away with it, they’re actually rewarded for it. That’s what capitalism is.

— ☭ sicko modus ponens ☭ (@babadookspinoza) February 25, 2019

* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.

* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.

* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.

One of my students is very cheeky. pic.twitter.com/2CfSRQ77mZ

— Roy Scranton (@RoyScranton) February 26, 2019

* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.

* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.

* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.

The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.

* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.

* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.

* New horizons in cheating to win.

* Really saying the quiet part loud here.

* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.

* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.

* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.

* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”

* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.

* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.

* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.

* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.

* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.

* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?

* Then ruin them!

* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.

* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.

* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.

* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.

* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.

* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.

* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’

* Upsetting subplot.

* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.

* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.

* Late abortion: a love story.

* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?

* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.

* Whoever wins, we lose.

truly *perfect* that the question of "happiness" under capitalism vs marxism will be litigated (& represented!) by two male grifters of questionable charisma & almost infinite perversion in a space that charges a ticket if you bring a stroller. now that's traversing the fantasy!

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) February 28, 2019

* A Brief History of the Grawlix.

* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.

* Still a bit long honestly.

* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.

* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.

612 Frozen Hellscape Links for All Your Frozen Hellscape Needs

* In case you missed it, I posted my syllabi for the spring last week: Classics of Science Fiction, Game Studies, and Methods of Inquiry: The Mind. And just in time for my games course: Marquette announces that esports — competitive video gaming — will be a varsity sport next year.

* Another just-in-case-you-missed-it: I was on the most recent episode of Random Trek talking about Voyager episode 7.18, “Human Error.”

* I was interviewed for this Octavia E. Butler audio documentary at the BBC, though it’s geolocked at the moment and even I can’t listen to it…

* Polygraph 22 (“Ecology and Ideology”), coedited by me, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu in 2010, has been put up in its entirety at the Polygraph site. Some sort of retrospective involving the three of us is coming in Polygraph 25 on Marxism and climate change…

* And you can read our introduction to The Cambridge History of Science Fiction for free at CUP! Put in a purchase order with your institutional library today!

* CFP: Marxism and Pornography.

* CFP: Canadian Science Fiction.

* CFP: After Fantastika.

* Science Fiction and Social Justice: An Overview.

* Special issue: Queerness and Video Games.

* Speculative Anthropologies.

* Absolutely worst week of weather since we moved to Wisconsin. Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. Sea levels could rise by metres amid record Antarctic ice melt, scientists warn. And meanwhile, in Australia.

* For and against hopepunk.

* The hope in dystopia.

* The radical hope of Octavia E. Butler.

* Snowpiercer was a documentary.

* Fantastic Beasts and Muggles: Antihumanism in Rowling’s Wizarding World.

* The next Cixin Liu: Supernova Era.

* Red Moon, Red Earth: the radical science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.

* A year-end (oops) roundup post about great science fiction stories from 2018.

* The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More.

* At its core was an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.

* What’s a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?

* The University in Ruins: Colleges Lose a ‘Stunning’ 651 Foreign-Language Programs in 3 Years. The life and death and life? of the English major. Getting Students to Study Literature.

* Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor. Landmark controversy could determine once and for all whether journal editors are people.

* The MSU autopsy.

* Being Poor in America’s Most Prestigious M.F.A. Program.

* The median salary for a full-time writer in America is $20,300.

* When you kill the humanities, you kill the sciences’ revenue stream.

* 4. The real analogy to make here is how many monuments do you see to, say the “genocidal regime” in Germany? Are there statues of Hitler at the University of Berlin? Of course not. There are “historical remnants” across Germany. But that is different than erecting monuments.

* Racism and the Wisconsin Idea. And while we’re beating up on Wisconsin: Mandela Barnes Is First African-American In Decades To Hold Statewide Office In Wisconsin.

* How Ph.D.s Romanticize the ‘Regular’ Job Market. Okay, y’all, let’s talk quick about what my experience was getting an #altac job. And from the archives: Alt-Ac Isn’t Always the Answer.

* Federal judge allows to proceed a suit in which white student says an admissions officer told her she might improve her odds of getting into medical school by discovering Native American or African American lineage.

* Baby Boomers to steal college from their grandchildren, again.

* Hampshire College struggles to stay afloat.

* College of Theseus.

* The university at the end of the world.

* How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Generation Layoff.

* A $21,000 Cosmetology School Debt, and a $9-an-Hour Job.

* Not lazy, not faking: teaching and learning experiences of university students with disabilities.

* In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again.And yet…

* The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants. Chinese schools are using ‘smart uniforms’ to track their students’ locations.

* Journalism in ruins. What will Google and Facebook do when they’ve killed off every industry they’re parasitic on? BuzzFeed’s Unpaid 19-Year-Old Quiz Genius on Her Tricks, the Layoffs, and Jonah Peretti. Do You Still Have A Job At BuzzFeed?

* How to build a Medicare-for-all plan, explained by somebody who’s thought about it for 20 years.

* The Foxconn deal just gets worse and worse.

* Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame, and it is this: to divest itself from the shame of its power, while working to revive the fear it needs in which to thrive.

* In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies? Call me crazy but the horse may have left the barn on this one.

* Our national amnesia and insouciance is so advanced (sort of like those of our president) that we have already forgotten that Malibu burned down this fall and the celebrities had to flee, many losing their multimillion-dollar mansions. Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds. Billionaire Miami Beach Developer Dismisses Rising Sea Levels as ‘Paranoia.’ Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven’t Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. The Democrats are climate deniers. What It’s Like to Be a High School Senior and Lose Everything in the Worst Fire in California History. Managed retreat. This is what extinction feels like from the inside. Everything is not going to be okay.

Another way to think about this: all existing political problems must now be inflected through climate crisis, and many solutions to our most intractable problems (wealth concentration, racial and gender prejudice, democratic rather than neofeudal govt) are climate solutions too. https://t.co/oth4SfmLFq

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 29, 2018

I don’t see how anyone over thirty could deny that things have changed. We have multiple Katrina-level infrastructure failures every year now. We’re losing so many people to climate disasters the media has stopped reporting on it. https://t.co/25OOeHJagG

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 27, 2019

climate dystopias aren't scary bc of how societies will cease to exist. they're scary bc of how they'll carry onhttps://t.co/ERPQlakh2Q pic.twitter.com/Xiq2hWClRy

— Sarah Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) January 22, 2019

* Consider de-extinction.

* Soy boom devours Brazil’s tropical savanna.

* The end of the monarch butterfly.

* Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have to pay $4.1 billion in the first year under U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, based on his current net worth of $137.1 billion. Article never quite gets around to mentioning that that’s about three weeks of Bezos’s earnings.

A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the work done by the people at the bottom. Whereas a regular business is where…uh, well you see the shareholders, they create jobs. They spurn grown, so they should get the money from…the work done by…

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 31, 2018

* Meanwhile: Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money. The wallet biopsy.

* Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say.

* Joe Manchin’s Daughter Was Responsible For Increasing EpiPen Prices By 400%.

* “If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History”: The head of Harvard’s astronomy department says what others are afraid to say about a peculiar object that entered the solar system.

* Mysterious radio signals from deep space detected.

by far the best subplot of the Trump administration is that we keep getting hints of extraterrestrial activity and everybody’s too busy to care https://t.co/jfwT5BLSkg

— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) January 13, 2019

* Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman.

* Surviving R. Kelly.

* The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180.

* J’Accuse…! Why Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake.

* CBS All Access playing with fire with my precious baby wants to create the next generation of Trekkies with multiple animated Star Trek series. “On the plus side, Michelle Yeoh is good. On the down side, she will be playing a fascist, and the show will be poorly lit.” Star Trek 4.

standard complement of a Starfleet vessel:

7 elite special-forces operatives / top-level diplomats / PhD-level specialists in multiple academic fields / ingenious engineers capable of jury-rigging unheard-of technology perfectly on the fly

200-1000 absolutely useless losers

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 18, 2019

* Trump scandal watch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

* What even is Fox News?

All of the talk about Blade Runner overlooks how Running Man proved to be far more prescient about 2019. It is not a good film by any stretch, but it grasped that weaponized game shows would be the ruling ideology.

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) January 2, 2019

* The ACLU made the Border Patrol reveal its terrifying legal theories.

* Face it, tiger, you just need a new Constitution.

* Twilight of the UCB.

* Bandersnatch stats. The Illusion of Free Will: On “Bandersnatch” and Interactive Fiction. The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games. Paging the Reddit detectives.

* Ainehi Edoro on the New Image of Africa in Black Panther.

* I have a problem with Black Panther: Anyone committed to an expansive concept of Pan-African liberation must regard ‘Black Panther’ as a counterrevolutionary film.

* Was Jane Jetson a Child Bride?

* Dozens of college-age men dead from ‘accidental’ drownings—but a team of retired detectives say the boys were drugged and killed by a shadowy gang with a sinister symbol.

* The year was 2005. That same year, National Book Award-winning author George Saunders traveled to Kathmandu to meet Bomjon, or “Buddha Boy” as the Western press had dubbed him. Saunders trekked deep into the unruly jungle that’s shadowed by the distant Himalayas and recalled his adventure for GQ, reporting back that he felt as though he’d experienced a miracle. A divine presence. Dark Secrets of Nepal’s Famous Buddha Boy.

* ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You.’ How is Bryan Singer still working?

* Sex after Chernobyl.

* Winners of the 2018 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest. There’s more posts after the links, I just liked a bunch of these.

* Uber and Lyft singlehandedly wipe out US transit gains.

* AAVE and court stenography.

* General Strike: Fierce Urgency of Now.

* Research shows that encouraging all women to breastfeed comes with serious risks. Will our perception of it ever catch up?

* The end of forever: what happens when an adoption fails?

* When Isaac Asimov predicted 2019.

* The United States of Rage.

* Facebook knowingly duped game-playing kids and their parents out of money.

* How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever.

* Maybe fixing schools isn’t actually about cutting budgets down to nothing and calling it a day.

* Automation at Amazon. Automation everywhere.

* The future is here, it just isn’t very evenly distributed: Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars.

* The Fascinating ’80s Public Access Films Produced by a California UFO Cult.

* “Black babies in the United States die at just over two times the rate of white babies in the first year of their life,” says Arthur James, an OB-GYN at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus. When my daughter died, she and I became statistics.

* How Sears Was Gutted By Its Own CEO. Sears bankruptcy court OKs $25 million in bonuses for top execs.

* Math against crimes against humanity: Using rigorous statistics to prove genocide when the dead cannot speak for themselves.

* The Future of the Great Lakes.

* The Owner of One of the Biggest Comedy Clubs in the Country Tells Us Why She Said No to Booking Louis CK. Walking away from Louis C.K.The end.

* Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target.’

* I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.

* 2018: The Year In Ideas: A Review Of Ideas. What Will History Books Say About 2018?

* The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

* 538 really covering its bases: How Kamala Harris Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary. How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.

* This Is What Happens When You Try to Sue Your Boss.

* Tesla chief Elon Musk’s corporate jet flew more than 150,000 miles last year, or more than six times around the Earth, as he raced between the outposts of his futuristic empire during what he has called “the most difficult and painful year” of his career, according to flight records obtained by The Washington Post.

* In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools — nearly a third of the entire district — a comprehensive new tally by WBEZ finds. Boston’s economy is booming, but schools seem cash poor. Why? Hidden crisis: D.C.-area students owe nearly half a million in K-12 school lunch debt.

* Yes, there are online preschools. And early childhood experts say they stink.

* Gym Class Is So Bad Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It.

* The end of tag.

* The generation gap in the age of blogs.

* Why a Medieval Woman Had Lapis Lazuli Hidden in Her Teeth.

* AI Algorithm Can Detect Alzheimer’s Earlier Than Doctors.

* The secret of my success: A small literature demonstrates that names are economically relevant. However, this is the first paper to examine the relationship between surname initial rank and male life outcomes, including human capital investments and labor market experiences. Surnames with initials farther from the beginning of the alphabet were associated with less distinction and satisfaction in high school, lower educational attainment, more military service and less attractive first jobs. These effects were concentrated among men who were undistinguished by cognitive ability or appearance, and, for them, may have persisted into middle age. They suggest that ordering is important and that over-reliance on alphabetical orderings can be harmful.

* Waukesha college helps answer ‘What’s next?’ for people with autism.

* Today in dark, dark headlines: Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers.

* We’re Working Nurses to Death.

* Grifts in everything: GoFundMe Provides Refunds To Donors Duped By Viral Campaign.

* The DNA grift.

* “Look, a lot of Twitter is bad. No question. But only Twitter can take you on a journey like this. What a website.”

* It is one of the neoliberal commandments that innovation in markets can always rectify any perceived problems thrown up by markets in the first place. Thus, whenever opponents on the nominal left have sought to ameliorate some perceived political problem through direct regulation or taxation, the Russian doll of the [neoliberal] thought collective quickly roused itself, mobilized to invent and promote some new market device to supposedly achieve the ‘same’ result. But what has often been overlooked is that, once the stipulated market solution becomes established as a live policy option, the very same Russian doll then also rapidly produces a harsh critique of that specific market device, usually along the lines that it insufficiently respects full market efficiency. This seemingly irrational trashing of neoliberal policy device that had earlier been emitted from the bowls of the [neoliberal thought collective] is not evidence of an unfortunate propensity for self-subversion or unfocused rage against government, but instead an amazingly effective tactic for shifting the universe of political possibility further to the right.

* And a tiny fraction of the genius Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been laying down day after day after day while I’ve been gone: When sociologists make movies. Pickup lines. I couldn’t live without you. Domestication. Can video games be art? Honestly, Frank, that sounds like conspiracy theory territory. On Framing. I come from the future. Econ 101. Do you think humans are capable of suffering? Machine ethics.