Posts Tagged ‘admissions’
Saturday Night Links!
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.
- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.
Precisely 10,000 Friday Night Links
* CFP: Call for Papers – Cyberpunk Culture Cyberconference (July 9-10, 2020).
* “In The Ministry for the Future I tried to describe the next thirty years going as well as I could believe it might happen, given where we are now,” Robinson told Newsweek. “That made it one of the blackest utopias ever written, I suppose, because it seems inevitable that we are in for an era of comprehensive and chaotic change.”
* Charles Yu: The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction.
* Submitted for your approval: Adrian Tchaikovsky has some excerpts from the Children of Time series.
* Sad Day For Nation as Nation Experiences Another Sad Day in Endless String of Sad Days. US coronavirus deaths hits record one-day total of 4,591. There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis. Denial and dysfunction. The cold equations. ‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims at Least 6,900 Lives in U.S. Nursing Homes. The Best-Case Scenario for Coronavirus Is That It’s Way More Infectious Than We Think. The True Scale of Excess Mortality in NYC. New York ramps up mass burials amid outbreak. It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers. I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same. Dispatch From A Coronavirus Morgue Truck Worker: “They Write A Check For Your First Day, In Case You Don’t Come Back.” New Yorkers, Once Again at Ground Zero, in Their Own Words. Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter. I am a New York food courier. Right now, it’s worse than you think. The City That Has Flattened the Coronavirus Curve. ‘The Atlantic’ article about San Francisco is a fable. Here’s what’s really happening. U.S. now has 22 million unemployed, wiping out a decade of job gains. 35 million Americans could be left without health insurance as former Fed chair warns ‘depression levels’ of unemployment. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate could reach 27% because of coronavirus pandemic, preliminary analysis suggests. 1 in 4 Americans have either lost their job or had pay cut from coronavirus shutdowns. Nearly a Third of U.S. Apartment Renters Didn’t Pay April Rent. Florida’s unemployment system processed just 4% of 850,000 applications since coronavirus crisis began. Worst-Case Fears of 20%-Plus U.S. Jobless Rate Are Now Realistic. Applying for Unemployment Is My New Full-Time Job. March’s record-breaking collapse in retail sales, explained. The inequality virus: how the pandemic hit America’s poorest. Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury. Wealthy Preppers Are Riding This Out in Multimillion-Dollar Bunkers. Grocery workers are beginning to die of coronavirus. Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate. In Chicago, 70% of COVID-19 Deaths Are Black. The corona crisis is also revealing the US’s racial crisis. COVID-19 Is Turning Prisons Into “Kill-Boxes.” Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty. On the Picket Line for Ventilators.What People Power Looks Like in a Pandemic Democracy. Governance and Social Conflict in a Time of Pandemic. The Unemployment Situation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better. A Second Round of Coronavirus Layoffs Has Begun. Few Are Safe. Corrupting the stimulus. Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption. It took 13 days for the Paycheck Protection Program to run out of money. What comes next? Big restaurant chains take $30M in coronavirus loans meant for small businesses. Stimulus measures should be made automatic now, before Republicans flip-flop on deficits again. I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. I’m not sure they even count as “plans.” Why America is still failing on coronavirus testing. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month. How “Just-in-Time” Capitalism Spread COVID-19. The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Art Laffer! Bring on the disaster capitalism. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future. Work after Quarantine. The Next Recession Is Really Gonna Suck. On fear. Revolutionary times. We Are Probably Only One-Tenth of the Way Through This Pandemic. See you in 2022.
* Good news from the remdesivir studies. But nothing is clear. We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult. Experts urge reality check. Handicapping the most promising of 267 potential coronavirus cures.
* How will humans, by nature social animals, fare when isolated? Prolonged Social Distancing Would Curb Virus, but at a High Cost. Keep the Parks Open.
* I spent six days on a ventilator with covid-19. It saved me, but my life is not the same. I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic? Who Do We Expect to Sacrifice? 27-year-old grocery store clerk kept working because she wanted to help people. Then she died from coronavirus. These medical workers are tackling the coronavirus. They’re also saddled with student debt.
* The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It’s Terrible.
* Money in an event like this is a social fiction. It is a public good, whose use we must immediately and radically and dramatically expand and maximize, so that massive, life-saving, social-scale investment can happen, immediately. The Black Death and interest rates. The Squad Has a Plan to Cancel Your Rent. A liberal congresswoman and a conservative senator want the federal government to pay workers’ salaries. Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income. The future will be socialist or it will not be at all.
* They Were the Last Couple in Paradise. Now They’re Stranded. Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going: More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died. More people are signing up for cruises than before the coronavirus.
* The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week. Less than half of LA County residents still have jobs.
* Fox News Moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch Stockpile Attorneys Against Coronavirus Lawsuits.
* Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs So Far. 52% of Americans under 45 have lost their job, had hours reduced, or been furloughed; 35% of Americans under 35 now say they don’t have health insurance. Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance.
* Democratic Victory in Wisconsin Looms as ‘Clarion Call’ for Trump. ‘Not as Wisconsin Nice as We Used to Be’: The Divisions in Dairyland. Wisconsin Republicans’ Deadly Power Grab. Trump campaign declares war on Dems over voting rules for November. Ten days later. Stop Robin Vos before he kills again.
* The United States is a failed state: five theses. Devolving the US.
* I mean it’s hard not to read a story like this and not think so. Or this one.
* Vegas after the end of the world.
* Truly incredible to see Joe Biden conceding the election without a fight. Biden also said he would consider Republicans for some top level positions within his administration. Democrats are really bummed out they have to fight Trump on substance. Joe Biden Needs to Start Acting Like a Presidential Candidate. Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis. Joe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad. The 11 most logical picks for Joe Biden’s vice president, ranked. 5 Increasingly Hardball Versions of the Next Stimulus.
* I’m a Bernie volunteer. Here’s how Joe Biden can win Bernie voters. Will We Ever Live In Bernie Sanders’ America?
* Political journalism is a field that requires you to believe Mike Pence has principles.
* Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die.
* Cuomo is bad, please remember Cuomo is bad.
* Tired: The Port Huron Statement. Wired: The Cape Cod Statement.
* Exciting new era for the WWE as a wing of state and federal government.
* In a recent survey of 5,000 restaurant operators, the National Restaurant Association found that 44 percent had temporarily closed their businesses, 3 percent had permanently closed, and 11 percent projected that they’d have to close for good within the next month. The association estimates that 3 million restaurant workers were laid off in the first three weeks of March—about one-fifth of the entire U.S. restaurant workforce. April will look even worse.
* David Chang isn’t sure the restaurant industry will survive Covid-19. Experts fear half of Wisconsin restaurants could close because of ‘Safer at Home’ order extension. I’m going to miss movie theaters, too.
* How Will the Pandemic Change Higher Education? How Should Colleges Prepare for a Post-Pandemic World? The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus. Dawn Of The Dead: For Hundreds Of The Nation’s Private Colleges, It’s Merge Or Perish. Vermont State Colleges chancellor to recommend closing three campuses. UC Reeling Under Staggering Coronavirus Costs. UArizona announces pay cuts, furloughs for all faculty, staff. Furloughs at Marquette and the UW system. Graduate Advising in the Time of Covid-19. Canceled and Altered Summer Programs Will Cost Colleges Hundreds of Millions. 6 Steps to Prepare for an Online Fall Semester. The Beloit plan. The Asterisk Semester. The Toll of Not Shutting Down Spring Break Earlier. How to Ensure a Successful Opening This Fall. Missed connection: In-class discussion at odds with remote learning. College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are. Time to go back to the undercommons. Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis. For some colleges, missing the fall semester may be just the tip of the iceberg. “Faculty Members Fear Pandemic Will Weaken Their Ranks.” College Students Demand Coronavirus Refunds. Will students come back? Education in disguise.
* What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis?
* President of Harvard’s Federalist Society Chapter Brought a Gun to Zoom Class.
* Erased from utopia: the hidden history of LA’s black and brown resistance.
* Aliens and Alienation: On extraterrestrial thinking in apocalyptic times.
* On Death and the Finale of Star Trek: Picard. How Ben Sisko Wrestled with American History.
* The case for teaching depressing books.
* Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It’s Falling Apart.
* The secret history of Fraggle Rock.
* AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data. God Machines still a few ways off I guess.
* The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists.
* Can Comic Books Survive the Coronavirus Era?
* Baseball — but not as YOU know it.
* why would her name be doogie too
* Stonehenge was the first LEGO.
* Who had Saved by the Bell down for the next dark, gritty reboot?
* The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds. ‘Megadrought’ emerging in the western US might be worse than any in 1,200 years.
* Hundred-degree temperatures in Miami in April.
* The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution.
* Samuel R. Delany: When the climate changed.
* At least this Hamilton video was fun.
* Earth-Size, Habitable Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data. We’ll probably have to stay away for another couple weeks but maybe we could visit after that.
* Ok, I’m sold, launch me into the backwards universe.
* And even in the time of coronavirus, progress marches on.
Wednesday News Brief, This Is All the News Today
* The US is now on track to have the worst outbreak anywhere. In the end we will have handled this worse than any nation on earth, because our leaders lied to us, said it was under control, said it wasn’t a big deal, said we were doing great, privately sold their stocks, told us to *buy* stock, ignored science, ignored experts, lied.
* Vox has some details on the coronavirus bailout, including how UI will be extended to freelancers and the self-employed and when you’ll get your check. Here’s another read from Forbes. This thread on Twitter seems to have more information on how the UI expansion will work for the self-employed.
* Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19. Reclaim our homes. Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression. European countries are writing blank checks to save their economies from coronavirus.
* “Herd Immunity” Is Epidemiological Neoliberalism.
* On Monday afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration granted Gilead Sciences “orphan” drug status for its antiviral drug, remdesivir. The designation allows the pharmaceutical company to profit exclusively for seven years from the product, which is one of dozens being tested as a possible treatment for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
* Reading in a time of coronavirus: download your free ebooks until April 2. From the list let me recommend Four Futures by Peter Frase, which I thought was great.
* We are in a time of wild magical thinking: miracle cures, coronavirus parties, Disney reopening next week, return to work by Easter, life without fear. Meanwhile, as a direct result of Trump administration policy: Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies.
* New York has 5% of Covid-19 cases worldwide as city becomes battlefront. “Our single greatest challenge is ventilators,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. “We have 11,000. We need 30,000.”
* Trump Shrugged Off Repeated Intelligence Warnings About Coronavirus Pandemic. DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck. U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak. Coronavirus and Fox News.
* How the virus got out. How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It). What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus.
* A Day in the Life of an ER Doc. A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients. Nursing Home Worker: “Everything About This Is Designed for Disaster.”
* Higher Education in the Age of COVID-19. How Is Covid-19 Changing Prospective Students’ Plans? Here’s an Early Look. Central Washington University Board of Trustees declares exigency. “To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.” Embrace the Canavan plan for pass/fail.
* Amidst a global health crisis, porn finds a way.
* The Very Specific Reason We Shouldn’t Bail Out the Cruise Industry.
* We Need a Hard Pause, Followed by a Soft Start.
* That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. I Study Prisons and AIDS History. Here’s Why Self-Isolation Really Scares Me.
* It will only get worse: ICE Detainees Are Being Quarantined. DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency. ‘Terrified’ Package Delivery Employees Are Going to Work Sick. Coronavirus hits rural Kansas, Missouri towns. Many don’t have a single hospital bed. U.S. Hospitals Prepare Guidelines For Who Gets Care Amid Coronavirus Surge. White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up.’ Funeral Homes Change Their Practices In Response To Coronavirus. Coronavirus Is Spurring a New Era of Digital Funerals. “This week, it’s going to get bad.”
* Science you can use: the Great Depression and death rates.
* DoE won’t let this crisis go to waste.
* Africa’s mountain gorillas also at risk for coronavirus.
* In some happier dimension, this would be an Onion headline.
* The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.
* Comrade Britney Spears shares post calling for general strike and redistribution of wealth.
* Chess in the time of coronavirus.
* Joe Biden Pivots to Video. ‘There’s no playbook for this’: Biden trapped in campaign limbo. You know it’s bad when the political cartoons start agreeing with you.
* A really exciting new book series: Palgrave SFF: A New Canon.
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!
* 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.
* Shock of shocks: Administration Within UW System Grew While Faculty Numbers Declined.
* 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.
* 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.
* Another free speech exception.
“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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.”
* And speaking of white fragility.
* 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.
* sometimes I just get overwhelmed by how regular and normal our country is
* extremely normal very normal
* 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.
* 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.
* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.
* 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.
* 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.
* We were creating space for ourselves, centering our own positive stories.
* And, once again, Star Trek by the numbers.
Wednesday Morning Links!
* Coming soon! Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. I have a short piece in this one ruminating on Rogue One and the problems of multiple authorship in contemporary franchise production.
* Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never.
* The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
* Not half-light, not dimness, not relative dark: total, pitch darkness. Darkness so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, or even be sure whether your eyes are open or closed. Lost within an ancient cave, the man and woman started off separate and alone, confronting mind-bending isolation that played tricks on their senses and produced ever-more-disorienting hallucinations. Fumbling and crawling, never sure which next step might break their necks or worse, they navigated through an alien environment marked by vermin, severe cold, tight confines, sudden drops, yawning pits, and sharp rocks. Eventually, they found each other deep below the earth, then painstakingly made their way to the surface. And the entire time, circling silently about them in the darkness, intimately near yet incredibly far away, has been a crew of producers and camera operators documenting their every move.
After the trial, Weirich spoke to the local news media. ‘‘It’s a great verdict,’’ she said. Noura was sentenced to a prison term of 20 years and nine months. Weirich’s victory helped start her political career. In January 2011, she was appointed district attorney in Shelby County, after the elected district attorney left to join the administration of Gov. Bill Haslam. Weirich, a Republican, became the first woman to hold that post. She then won election in 2012 and 2014 with 65 percent of the vote, running on a law-and-order message against weak opponents. A friend said her husband, who is also a lawyer, began talking about moving the family into the Governor’s Mansion one day.
* Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment.
* A soccer star from Gaithersburg won a college scholarship. But ICE plans to deport him.
* 18 Texas sheriffs sign up to join forces with federal immigration officers.
* All U.S. Catholics are called to oppose mass deportations under Trump. Here’s why.
* ‘The moment when it really started to feel insane’: An oral history of the Scaramucci era.
* Coast Guard ‘will not break faith’ with transgender members, leader says.
* The chaos, legislative fumbling, and legal jeopardy should not obscure the ways that the administration is remaking federal policy in consequential ways. Evergreen headlines: The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy.
* Trump helping his son draft a misleading statement could be witness tampering.
* Always, always: unreal that it’s still this high.
* America’s former envoy to Afghanistan says the war can’t be won. Is there even a strategic goal at this point?
* The plate tectonics of Middle-Earth.
* White Capital, Black Labor. We don’t need a TV show about the Confederacy winning. In many ways, it did.
* With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals.
Weekend Links Absolutely Positively Guaranteed to Help You Find Love This Valentine’s Day
* Was this a luxury? Sure. But it was also the steppingstone to a more aware, thoughtful existence. College was the quarry where I found it.
* Move over, Wisconsin, North Carolina wants in: Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning.
* Walker aide: UW System cuts are flexible, complaints unwarranted. Oh, okay.
* The UW: Update from the Struggle.
* How is it anything more than laughable that an otherwise reasonable person could believe that this shooting had more to do with a parking space than skin color and religion? How could it be that there is not only silence but active efforts to complicate and explain away something as utterly predictable as white man plays God? Any single instance of white supremacy, whether it is this shooting or the maintenance of de facto segregation in my city, is over-determined. There are dozens of “just so” arguments that stand ready to supplant a direct identification of racial violence at work. White supremacy itself is a coward who hides behind historic contingencies.
* The study, published this week in Science Advances, is based on hand-curated data about placements of 19,000 tenure-line faculty members in history, business and computer science at 461 North American institutions with doctoral programs. Using a computer-aided, network-style analysis, the authors determined that just 25 percent of those institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenure-line professors, depending on discipline. Here’s a link to the full article, which has a definition of “merit” (as/against “prestige”) I can’t make heads or tails of.
* The grievously neglected American poet Winfield Townley Scott, who had once loved Lovecraft’s work and written beautifully about it, eventually came to feel that Lovecraft’s fiction was “finicky,” “childish,” and “antagonistic to reality.” But its very childishness and hatred of reality are central to it. If, as Thornton Wilder once claimed, no true adult is ever really shocked, that being “shocked” is always a pose, then Lovecraft never achieved adult status. But he held on tightly to the truths of adolescence: that the universe does not wish us well; that love is not to be found anywhere; and resurrection, if it ever truly occurs, would be a catastrophe.
* If you aren’t reading Jason Shiga’s Demon, you really should start; chapter 11 just went out to subscribers and it’s great.
* The social network’s ideal model is for ads to make up about one in 20 tweets that the average user sees — the same level that Facebook strives for. “We’re well below that now,” he said. I’m sure if you keep up what you’re doing you’ll get there faster than you think.
* Also on the comics beat: The few that have been able to reach him believe him to be a deity – one who turned the scorched desert into a lush oasis. They say he can bend matter, space, and even time to his will. Earth is about to meet a new god. And he’s a communist.
* Universities are struggling to determine when intoxicated sex becomes sexual assault.
* An undergraduate student was found responsible for sexually assaulting Camila Quarta, CC ’16, in April 2013. Since then, 481 undergraduate students have taken courses in which he has served as a teaching assistant. I have mixed feelings about the desire to use employment as a proxy for justice, but preventing this sort of thing from happening does seem to me to fall well within the requirements of Title IX.
* At LARoB, the deeply unpleasant task of historicizing incest.
* To Restore Academic Integrity in Sports, Hold Head Coaches Accountable. “Restore.” You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…
* Shocked, shocked to find out admissions are being manipulated at a university.
* I’m Brianna Wu, And I’m Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate.
* When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School.
* MetaFilter post on the Coup in Yemen.
* Why Jon Stewart Was Bad for the Liberals Who Loved Him. I’ve come around to the inevitable conclusion that this is all just a very clever viral marketing campaign for Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
* Do humans need air to live? Look, I’m not a scientist.
* Tricknology is the word she used to describe how the AHA got its way. Hightower and her neighbors wanted to see an end to the stigma associated with living in public housing. They wanted the projects to become as they once were: stable family neighborhoods where “you didn’t know you were poor.” But the AHA had other plans. It had chosen to view public housing as unfixable.
* Good Magazine has your guide to the legendary Saved by the Bell Hooks Tumblr.
* Hey, gadgets: stop snitchin’.
* The Weird Specifics Of Marvel And Sony’s Secret Spider-Man Deal.
* The FBI is targeting tar-sands activists.
* By Age 40, Your Income Is Probably as Good as It’s Going to Get. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on Twitter and Facebook in the last few days about the extent to which this applies to (a) academics in general (b) tenure-track academics (c) tenure-track academics in the humanities (d) tenure-track academics in the humanities today as opposed to a generation ago. But I’ve resolved to go ahead and be completely depressed by this fact simply in the interest of precaution and due diligence.
* Uber and Airbnb monetize the desperation of people in the post-crisis economy while sounding generous—and evoke a fantasy of community in an atomized population.
* South Carolina Inmate Receives 37 Years In Solitary Confinement For Updating Facebook.
“If a South Carolina inmate caused a riot, took three hostages, murdered them, stole their clothes, and then escaped, he could still wind up with fewer Level 1 offenses than an inmate who updated Facebook every day for two weeks,” the EFF said in its report.
*Chief backs up officer who shot at suspect, failed to report incident.
The police officer was wearing a body camera during the incident but it was not turned on.
Oh, what terrible luck!
* NYPD Beat the Shit Out of a Brooklyn Street Vendor, Then Lied About It.
* Mother Has Miscarriage After Cop Beats Her Because He Didn’t ‘Appreciate Her Tone.’
* The arc of history is long, but: Putin Banned From ‘Mighty Taco’ Restaurant.
* Also the arc of history is long, etc., Little League Team Stripped of Title.
* Arc of history etc. etc. Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants.
* Oh, I give up: Internet Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Build a White Supremacist Utopia in Namibia.
* All-time classic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals, Hitler edition.
* An oral history of that scene on last week’s The Americans. Standard rules apply, do not click, pretend it never happened.
* The Lincoln Memorial could have been a pyramid. See all the forgotten proposals. Wash that “good Vox” taste out of your mouth with this “bad Vox” chaser: The best hope for federal prison reform: a bill that could disproportionately help white prisoners.
* Amazing Photo Of An Intoxicated Gorilla About To Punch A Photographer. Exactly what it says on the tin.
* Somber news this Valentine’s Day.
* And the premiere for the improbably effective Better Call Saul is up on YouTube, if you missed it and want to hop aboard the think piece train before it leaves the station.
‘Who Says Meritocracy Says Oligarchy’
The Nation excerpts Chris Hayes.
The dynamic Michels identifies applies, in an analogous way, to our own cherished system of meritocracy. In order for it to live up to its ideals, a meritocracy must comply with two principles. The first is the Principle of Difference, which holds that there is vast differentiation among people in their ability and that we should embrace this natural hierarchy and set ourselves the challenge of matching the hardest-working and most talented to the most difficult, important and remunerative tasks.
The second is the Principle of Mobility. Over time, there must be some continuous, competitive selection process that ensures performance is rewarded and failure punished. That is, the delegation of duties cannot simply be made once and then fixed in place over a career or between generations. People must be able to rise and fall along with their accomplishments and failures. When a slugger loses his swing, he should be benched; when a trader loses money, his bonus should be cut. At the broader social level, we hope that the talented children of the poor will ascend to positions of power and prestige while the mediocre sons of the wealthy will not be charged with life-and-death decisions. Over time, in other words, society will have mechanisms that act as a sort of pump, constantly ensuring that the talented and hard-working are propelled upward, while the mediocre trickle downward.
But this ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call the Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.”
Consider, for example, the next “meritocracy” that graduates of Hunter encounter. American universities are the central institution of the modern meritocracy, and yet, as Daniel Golden documents in his devastating book The Price of Admission, atop the ostensibly meritocratic architecture of SATs and high school grades is built an entire tower of preference and subsidy for the privileged:
At least one third of the students at elite universities, and at least half at liberal arts colleges, are flagged for preferential treatment in the admissions process. While minorities make up 10 to 15 percent of a typical student body, affluent whites dominate other preferred groups: recruited athletes (10 to 25 percent of students); alumni children, also known as “legacies” (10 to 25 percent); development cases (2 to 5 percent); children of celebrities and politicians (1 to 2 percent); and children of faculty members (1 to 3 percent).
This doesn’t even count the advantages that wealthy children have in terms of private tutors, test prep, and access to expensive private high schools and college counselors. All together, this layered system of preferences for the children of the privileged amounts to, in Golden’s words, “affirmative action for rich white people.” It is not so much the meritocracy as idealized and celebrated but rather the ancient practice of “elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves.”
A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where they belong.
But the Iron Law of Meritocracy makes a different prediction: that societies ordered around the meritocratic ideal will produce inequality without the attendant mobility. Indeed, over time, a society will become more unequal and less mobile as those who ascend its heights create means of preserving and defending their privilege and find ways to pass it on across generations. And this, as it turns out, is a pretty spot-on description of the trajectory of the American economy since the mid-1970s.
The Real Affirmative Action
The real affirmative action. Via Atrios.
Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes that researchers with access to the college admissions data that many institutions keep a tight guard on found that 15 percent of freshmen at 146 “highly selective” colleges are white students who didn’t meet the school’s minimum admissions standards for high school GPAs and SAT or ACT scores. There are more than twice as many sub-par privileged white kids at highly competitive institutions than there are black and Latino students whose race gave them a boost in competing for a spot, the researchers found. Some of the white kids are athletes, and many others are the children or friends of alumni, politicians, faculty members, donors, and administrators.
Schmidt also notes that these schools spend just 40 percent of the money for financial aid on students with a documented financial need; the bulk of it goes to students they think will enhance the college’s reputation or become big donors later in life. As a result, kids from the wealthiest quarter of the country are 25 times to go to a selective college than the bottom quarter — so, big surprise, everything about college in America today still perpetuates historical privileges.
Gerry Canavan 