Weekend Links

* Because you demanded it! The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction is now available in Kindle format as well for just $9.99.

* SFRA CFP: “The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.” June 25-27 at Stony Brook.

* Mark Bould on African Science Fiction 101.

* The Moral Hazard of Big Data.

* Racism, monuments, and historical memory.

* The Anthropocene Project. An Encyclopedia (2014–).

* The Crusades: Teach the controversy!

* Friendship Is Complicated: Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony.

* “In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names.”

* Now, a union that’s been rapidly organizing adjuncts around the country thinks that number should quintuple. Last night, on a conference call with organizers across the country, the SEIU decided to extend the franchise with a similar aspirational benchmark: A “new minimum compensation standard” of $15,000. Per course. Including benefits. To put this in perspective, a tenure-track professor earning $50,000 on a 4/4 (100% teaching, no research, no service) is paid $6250 a course — so this is definitely a realistic target.

* 12 Tech Fads in Higher Ed.

* Auburn Approves $14-Million Scoreboard, College Football’s Largest.

* Scott Walker thinks my university has fat to trim. Yet my department is barely scraping by.

* Scott Walker amends the Girl Scout Oath. From otherscottwalkeredits.tumblr.com.

* The disjuncture then comes when I consider how we are encouraged to carry ourselves in the academy. I feel a lot of pressure to professionalize, and the prescriptions for professionalization often run counter to my way of being in the world. I also struggle with the directive that I am supposed to professionalize my students. I don’t hold with the idea that I should train students to be better workers, because the content of “better” — more obedient, more efficient, whatever — runs counter to what I want to teach. In my feminist theories courses, I say, “Yeah, I  just gave you assignments with deadlines! But I also want to say to you, what’s so great about work? Why do we believe work is supposed to be edifying? Should we always have to be productive? Why do we imagine work as something that gives us dignity? What if it’s just wearing us down?” My history in punk totally informs these attempts to practice other ways of being in a classroom, and other ways of being a professor.

* Jury Awards $400,000 to Professor Laid Off by Clark Atlanta U. This is an amazing result especially considering that there are 53 other people eligible for a payout.

* Thousands Of Dominicans Woke Up This Week Without Citizenship In Any Country.

* How Science Fiction Will Help Us Go to Mars.

* Paging J. Walter Weatherman: Family arrested in fake kidnapping plot to teach 6-year-old stranger danger, police say.

* And here is where we see the true malignant force that drives the Internet: It is the purest mechanism yet through which everyone can express every idiot opinion they have about everything to everyone else.

* Ableism, neurotypicality, and the vaccine debate.

* Mississippi, #1 in vaccination. The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works.

* Rufus King named one of the most challenging high schools in America.

* We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That’s a Very, Very Bad Idea. I say teach the controversy!

* Dibs on the screenplay: Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism.

* Science is magic: Engineers Developing a Retainer That Could Let the Hearing Impaired Experience Sound With Their Tongue.

* Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results.

* The Beginning of Mein Kampf, as Told by Coca-Cola. Alas, nothing gold can stay.

* Why every member of the crew should have been courtmartialed after Generations.

* Parents who raise their kids without religion are doing just fine, studies say, possibly even better. Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly. And their kids care less about what’s cool, which—say it with me—only makes them cooler.

* Teen mom sends breast milk to baby she gave up for adoption. Dad Refuses to Give Up Newborn Son With Down Syndrome. Armenia, we need to talk.

* How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being A Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement.

* DC Comics will rebrand, again. More details.

* Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America. I’ve seen a lot of celebration of this fact that seems not to see the improving economy as a factor.

* Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews: This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender.

* Canada’s Highest Court Affirms The Right To Doctor-Assisted Suicide.

* We Are Watching Brian Williams’ Entire Career Implode.

* And it’s a little unbelievable that it’s taken this long: Netflix reportedly developing new live-action series based on Legend of Zelda.

All the Weekend Links!

* A lengthy update from IHE on the outrageous attacks on Marquette University graduate student Cheryl Abbate.

* Ursula Le Guin gave a great speech at the National Book Awards this week.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

* It’s quite a bit better than the other thing that happened that night, though Handler is trying to making amends.

* Kirkus Reviews on the radical Joanna Russ.

* A Sokal hoax we can all believe in.

* Dialectics of Serial.

* Roofs are caving in in Buffalo after a week of truly insane November storms. The temperature is projected to be 60 degrees on Monday, which means this could all melt in one day and cause a whole new set of problems.

* CFP: Hostile Intelligences and The General Antagonism.

The purpose of this conference is to organize and proliferate the material heresies that are the basis for what Matteo Pasquinelli has called “hostile intelligences” and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as “the general antagonism.” Pasquinelli writes, in “The Labour of Abstraction,” “Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to find eventually its epistemic twin.” For him, forms of knowledge and subjectivity play a prominent role in his theory of anti-capitalist revolution. Hostile intelligence is one imaginary in which the recently formed Accelerationists conceive such an epistemic twin. Moten and Harney’s category, “the general antagonism,” is no doubt the epistemic twin of “the general intellect”, and powerfully indicates a generalized disidentification with white-supremacist, capitalist culture that is an extant part of the fugitive practices of what they eloquently call “The Undercommons.”

* Program of the 2015 MLA Subconference.

* While the Regents claim to negotiate on behalf of those who use the university–students, staff and faculty–their new gambit instead shows the difference between the Regents and higher Administration, on one hand, and “those who use” the university on the other. UCOP’s Failed Funding Model.

* A Communiqué from the UCSC Occupation of Humanities 2.

* What the students were doing in 2010, and what they’re doing today, is defending art, science and philosophy against a regime that believes none of these things are of any value except as a means to wealth and power. They are quite literally defending the values of civilisation from those who have abandoned them.

* Jacobin: Higher education should be free. But we can’t just copy the flawed European model.

* In Response to Pending Grad Strike at U. Oregon, Administration Urges Faculty to Make Exams Multiple Choice or Allow Students Not to Take Them.

* Do you want to be responsible for something that’s gonna paint UVA in a bad light? Horrifying report in Rolling Stone about a young woman’s experience being attacked at a UVA fraternity and then reporting it. Please note that the description of what happened to her is quite graphic and very disturbing.

* Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women.

* Inside Yucca Mountain, incomprehensibly long time scales clash with human ones—pairing the monumental and the mundane.

The repository would need some kind of physical marker that, foremost, could last 10,000 years, so the task force’s report considers the relative merits of different materials like metal, concrete, and plastic. Yet the marker would also need to repel rather than attract humans—setting it apart from Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, or any other monument that has remained standing for thousands of years. To do that, the marker would need warnings. But how do you warn future humans whose cultures and languages will have evolved in unknown ways?

* Public officials once operated for profit. Now that system has returned with a vengeance. Mike Konczal reviews The Teacher Wars and Rise of the Warrior Cop.

* Academics sometimes seek to make the world a better place, and the Chronicle is ON IT.

* Seven years in, Twitter finally puts in what you’d think would be one of its most basic features.

* Bangkok cinema chain cancels Hunger Games screenings over salute protest.

* 400 Things Cops Know Is the New Bible for Crime Writers. By MU English Alum Plantinga!

* The Singularity Is Here: 5-foot-tall ‘Robocops’ start patrolling Silicon Valley.

* NYPD Officer ‘Accidentally’ Shoots and Kills Unarmed Man in Brooklyn. Why would police officers have their guns drawn as a matter of course? How can that be protocol?

* What To Do About Uber?

* Late capitalism and the viral imagination.

* Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment.

* Exhibit A? U. of Colorado Will Pay Philosophy Professor $185,000 to Resign.

* Mass hysteria at the Department of Education.

* Now we see the violence etc: In a blow to schoolchildren statewide, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 7 the State of Michigan has no legal obligation to provide a quality public education to students in the struggling Highland Park School District. The law, in its majestic equality…

* First Grader Was Told ‘Guess What, You Can’t Have Lunch’ Because His Family Was In Debt.

* Being bullied physically changes kids’ brains.

* The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More.

* When My Mom Was an Astronaut.

* Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. Passwords are the new poetry.

* Accrediting commission says UNC ‘not diligent’ in exposing academic scandal. Let the stern finger-wagging commence!

* Lunatic: Keystone Pipeline Will Teach Men “What it Is to Be a Man.” Literally toxic masculinity.

* It’s one reason we’re poorer than our parents. And Obama could fix it—without Congress. Whatever Happened to Overtime? I’m sure he’ll get right on it.

* ‘Text neck’ is becoming an ‘epidemic’ and could wreck your spine.

* A new analysis by PunditFact found that of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were flat-out false. What’s more, only a measly 8% could be considered completely “true.”

* In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat.

* No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally.

* Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities.

* The enduring legacy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers’ room.

* The Ghostbusters 3 we’ll never see.

* The Empire Strikes Back we’ll never see.

* This One-Page Comic Explains Why Batman Never Seems To Die.

* From this vantage, the efficient society that terrorizes and comforts Codemus, and enfolds him in the straitjacket of a diffused, technologized fascism, resembles the experience of many workers today. Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones.

* Flatland, at last, is truly two-dimensional.

* And this Deceptively Cute Animation Illustrates The Horrors Of My Addiction to Coca-Cola.Won’t you give what you can, please, today? The case for treating sugar like a drug.

Friday Links!

* ‘We Come from the Future': a short piece on African SF.

* Zadie Smith says her next novel is SF.

As for her own next move, she says it will be a total departure: a science-fiction romp. She has been reading a lot of Ursula K Le Guin. ‘It’s a concept novel. It’s the only novel I’ve ever written that has a plot, which is thrilling. I don’t know if I can do it. Those books are incredibly hard to write.’

* Giant, oil-belching sinkhole dooms more than 100 homes in Louisiana.

* Valences of the IRS scandal.

* I believe this is explicitly against the law governing the CIA: Four Central Intelligence Agency officers were embedded with the New York Police Department in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, including one official who helped conduct surveillance operations in the United States, according to a newly disclosed C.I.A. inspector general’s report.

* A nation of temps: 15% of job growth since 2009, 40% or more in many urban areas.

Temp jobs accounted for whopping 116 percent of job growth in Memphis (that means that one sector added more jobs than all other industries together), 66 percent in Birmingham, 65 percent in Cincinnati, 58 percent in Hartford, 51 percent in Milwaukee, 46 percent in Kansas City, and 40 percent or more in Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

* The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed.

* ‘Black Babies Cost Less': The Racial Realities of Adoption in America. Can’t help trying to pair this with the Baby Veronica nightmare still making its way back and forth through the courts.

* More nightmares: Worker Sues Employer For The Death Of Her Baby.

* End of an era at the Met.

* Obama at the door of no return.

* Cleveland State figures out inventive way to punish students it’s already failing.

Cleveland State University undergraduates will see a 2-percent tuition increase this fall but can get it back as a credit on the next year’s tuition through an innovative program approved Wednesday by university trustees.

Beginning in the fall, students who complete 30 course credits in an academic year in good standing can earn the rebate for the following year. Students also will receive $100 per semester in book credits.

Meritocracy! Catch the fever.

* The high cost of autism.

* Land of the God-Men: Inside the Wild Movement to Turn Us All into Immortal Cyborgs. I’m listening…

* “The Lottery” letters.

* And Rick Perry, wow. I mean wow.

During his remarks, the Texas governor also described Davis’ filibuster as “hijacking of the Democratic process” and said of the pro-choice movement, “the louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done.”

Wednesday Links

* Our laws regarding parenthood are in dire need of revision: Louisiana Gay Dad Raises Child, But He’s Powerless as Partner Skips Town With Boy.

But when the men’s relationship fell apart, his partner determined he was the biological father and took the boy out of state to Texas and eventually to Washington State.

Louisiana does not recognize same-sex marriage or second-parent adoption, so Liuzza was left with no legal parental rights.

* The Sound and the Fury, as Faulker absolutely, definitely intended.

* Obama’s Scramble for Africa.

* A secret LEGO vault at LEGO HQ contains all sets ever manufactured. Yes please.

* “If he’s lost National Review, he’s lost the right.” Given how strident Romney has been that he definitely can’t release any more tax returns, it’s a bit odd to me that so many of his fellow travelers are turning on him. Why not take him at his word that the returns are too toxic to see the light of day?

* And Bill Murray almost played Batman? This truly is the darkest timeline.

Ideologies of Citizenship

A child adopted overseas by a U.S. citizen is eligible to become an American, and a baby born in the USA is American even if the parents are not.

But a child born to a U.S. citizen overseas through the increasingly common practice of in vitro fertilization with embryos from donor eggs and sperm is not American, unless an American is one of the donors.

Friday!

* International adoption nightmare. What a mess for everyone involved.

* Here’s something much less horrible: Where’s WALL-E?

* Very cool House of Leaves assignment that gives me hope for the “digital humanities”:

That is, I propose starting the forum from scratch. In our classes we’ll explicitly (and temporarily) forbid students from reading the House of Leave forum. Instead, we create an alternate forum of our own, seeded with a few initial threads that appeared in the original forum. The idea is to recreate the forum, and see how its trajectory would play out ten years later, in the context of a literature class. The 50-60 students from the five classes seems a manageable number to launch a new iteration of the forum; enough to generate a sense of “there” there, but not such an overwhelming number that keeping up with the forum becomes unmanageable (though that would in fact replicate the feel of the original forum).

After three weeks of intensive cross-class use of the renetworked forum, the final step would be to lift the ban on reading the official forum, giving students the opportunity to compare the alternate forum with the original, and draw some conclusions from that comparison.

* A provocative Matt Yglesias post asks what exactly right-wingers are so nostalgic about if not male privilege and white supremacy.

* The coming war on the NLRB. A key figure in all this is the legendary Darryl Issa, who made news this week after the discovery of a former Goldman Sachs VP working incognito for him as a staffer (under an assumed name!).

* And from the “Damn you Krugman!” files: Just 48% of Democrats in a recent national poll said they were “very excited” about voting in 2012.  In 13 previous polls, the average level was 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%. Meanwhile, confidence in both Obama and the economy is cratering. It didn’t have to be this way, but it’s hard to imagine the way back now.

Closing a Few Tabs

Closing a few tabs.

* Scientific American considers the cognitive advantages of depression.

* Marginal Revolution has a nature/nuture post on educational outcomes in adoptees.

* Dark Stores of the American recession. More at MeFi, including the British counterpart.

* The Beatles, remastered in mono. Reviews are positive.

* …last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels. You had me until “Captain Underpants.” (via Vu)

* Smells of New York.