Posts Tagged ‘adoption’
Monday Links!
I’m pretty deep into the procrastination cycle of shame so don’t miss these still-perfectly-fresh Sunday Morning Links.
* Protests and state of emergency declared in Kenosha after a black man is shot seven times in front of his children after breaking up a fight. Despite erroneous social media reports, Jacob Blake remains alive and will hopefully survive this attack.
* The Pandemic Recession Is Approaching a Dire Tipping Point. ‘Not just a low-wage recession’: White-collar workers feel coronavirus squeeze. Goldman Sachs Confirms Roughly 4 Million Employees to Remain Unemployed Into 2022.
It’s Sunday so you should know that if the minimum wage had increased at the rate of productivity since 1960, it would be $22.50. Instead, it’s just $7.25. Meanwhile tens of millions of Americans today head to a second or third job because they can’t afford life’s basic needs.
— Joe Sanberg (@JosephNSanberg) August 23, 2020
* Chinese government releases new guidelines for science fiction.
* How Can We Plan for the Future in California? An extremely dire description of the situation.
1. This year, there will be no way to make even a dent in the fires with our tools. There is no small chance that vast swaths of major cities there will burn. I know, because I've fought wildfires, and everyone on my crew agrees: this month is the beginning of the end.
— Daniel Boguslaw (@DRBoguslaw) August 22, 2020
And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
“We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020
* Zoom Is Down at the Worst Possible Time wheeeeeeeee
* The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into. Blame Game.
* William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt.
* Seven missing Doctor Who episodes identified, in negotiations to be returned to the UK.
* Progressives have gotten all they can out of the election season. After November, they will have to raise a ruckus to secure victory. The Biden Era Will Put the New Left to the Test.
On balance I think things are so messed up that Biden will probably win but if not I want to lay down my marker that I think “Granddad likes ice cream” was the wrong message for four straight days of the DNC convention
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
I think we’ll see the US break up within my lifetime. Just don’t know if I’ll live fifty years or five. https://t.co/oxmSYSKOYq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2020
* 27 GOP ex-lawmakers back Biden on first day of Republican National Convention. No Sitting President Was As Far Behind As Trump Going Into The Conventions. Can Biden’s Center Hold?
* Un-Adopted: YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer shared every step of their parenting journey. Except the last.
* Job insecurity, low pay, working from home: we’re all millennials now.
* Neopets: A True Crime Story.
* 2020’s got my head so turned around Chuck Schumer made me laugh.
* And finally, some is making sense: Could We Force the Universe to Crash?
Written by gerrycanavan
August 24, 2020 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, adoption, America, Are we living in a simulation?, asteroids, California, capitalism, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, college, coronavirus, COVID-19, disability, Doctor Who, epidemic, Faulkner, general election 2020, How the University Works, Jacob Blake, Joe Biden, Kenosha, millennials, minimum wage, neopets, pandemic, parenting, pedagogy, police brutality, police violence, politics, race, racism, Republican National Convention, science fiction, Second Great Depression?, teaching, true crime, unemployment, wildfires, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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
* 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%.
* 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.
* 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
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.
* 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.
* 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?
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 30, 2019 at 12:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2018, 2019, AAVE, ACLU, administrative blight, adoption, Ainehi Edoro, aliens, AlphaZero, altac, Alzheimer's, Amazon, anger, Antarctica, anthropology, apocalypse, Arizona, art, artificial intelligence, Australia, autism, automation, Baby Boomers, baby it's cold outside, Bandersnatch, Black Mirror, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Bolsonaro, Boston, Brazil, breastfeeding, Bryan Singer, burnout, butterflies, California, Cambridge History Science Fiction, Canada, capitalism, CBP, CBS All-Access, CEOs, CFPs, Chernobyl, Chicago, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, cockroaches, college admissions, comedy, Confederate monuments, corpocracy, cosmetology school, cyberpunk, de-extinction, deportation, dinosaurs, disability, diversity, DNA, Donald Trump, dystopia, Ecology and Ideology, education, Elon Musk, English departments, EpiPen, extinction, Facebook, forced arbitration, Fox News, Foxconn, game studies, games, genocide, George Saunders, gig economy, GoFundMe, Great Lakes, grifts, gym class, Hamilton, Hampshire College, Harry Potter, Harvard, health care, Hitler, hoaxes, hope, hopepunk, hospitals, How the University Works, humanism, ice, improv, income inequality, intergenerational warfare, Iowa, IRBs, Isaac Asimov, J.K. Rowling, Jeff Bezos, Joe Manchin, journalism, Kamala Harris, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, language, Larry Nassar, last names, layoffs, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lisa Klarr, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Louis CK, lunch debt, Lyft, Marquette, Marxism, mass extinction, Medcare for All, medievalism, MFAs, Michelle Yeoh, millennials, Milwaukee, MLA, MSU, my media empire, my pedagogical empire, Nazism, neoliberalism, Netflix, nurses, Octavia E. Butler, oh no, online preschools, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, photography, podcasts, polar vortex, politics, Polygraph, pornography, poverty, public transportation, pyramid schemes, queerness, R. Kelly, race, racism, rage, Random Trek, rape, rape culture, rich people, Richard Feynman, Running Man, Ryan Vu, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sea level rise, Sears, self-driving cars, sex, Ship of Theseus, slavery, Snowpiercer, social justice, socialism, Sokal hoax, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Trek: Discovery, statistics, student debt, suicide, Supernova Era, surveillance society, syllabi, tag, taxes, teaching, Tesla, the Arctic, the canon, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, The Jetsons, the law, the secret of my success, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, the Wisconsin Idea, this is why we can't have nice things, Tolkien, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UCB, UFOs, Utopia, veterinarians, Voyager, vulture capitalism, war on education, Washington D.C., Waukesha, weather, webcomicname, whiteness, wildfires, William Gibson, Wisconsin, writing
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
In the process of his SF reading @pefrase throws off the deep key to all post-70s cop shows: “All Cops Are Bastards, Except Us.” That is: they must concede obvious corruption of the system, but posit a fantasy space of exception, of nobility and decency, inside it. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 2, 2018
Echoing Mark Bould’s own Pilgrim speech from two years ago, Freedman notes the irony of science fiction studies becoming “respectable” at the moment the humanities and the academy writ large find themselves under cataclysmic, existential attack. #SFRA18
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 4, 2018
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
#RevisedCourseEvaluationQuestions
Your professor appeared to conceive of the seminar as
1) a psychoanalytic session
2) a Reddit thread
3) an opportunity to talk about themselves
4) a lawsuit waiting to happen— Jan Mieszkowski (@janmpdx) June 25, 2018
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
– waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
– promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
– living five adults to a two room apartment
– being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you
— Anton Troynikov (@atroyn) July 5, 2018
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
I can’t tweet everything I know. Some of it is off-the-record. Some of it is uncorroborated. Some of it is embargoed until we publish.
But I can tweet this: this thing where the government took children from their parents atthe border? It’s more horrific than we have imagined.
— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) July 6, 2018
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
In that spirit, an out-of-the-box solution for desperate times: Trump should name Knicks owner James Dolan to replace Anthony Kennedy as a justice on the Supreme Court, forcing him to sell his ownership of the Knicks. Outlandish? Perhaps. But worse than what we have now? 4/17
— danielbenaim (@danielbenaim) July 5, 2018
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know. pic.twitter.com/NvVnImoJ7N
— Ahmed BEst (@ahmedbest) July 3, 2018
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
Yesterday was Africa’s hottest reliably measured temperature in recorded history: 124.3°F (51.3°C) in Algeria
Africa has 16% of the world's population—and produces just 3.8% of all greenhouse gases.
Climate change is fundamentally a story of injustice.https://t.co/UuNTd0aDGt
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) July 6, 2018
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it's appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie. @uwmaaup stands with @BrigField, @clfs_uw, and @Ebonyteach! pic.twitter.com/g8T9fm1V3R
— UWM AAUP (@uwmaaup) July 4, 2018
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
optimism watch: I think things are going to get so terrible in the next few years, and so quickly, that we will have full blown socialism in the US by the time my kids are grown. We just have to survive and destroy Trumpism.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2018
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
.@Google killed its Reader in 2013 because RSS as a format gives readers agency, doesn't track browsing to sell ads, and lets the user chose what they want to read. As opposed to algorithmic personalisation which siloes us into increasingly homogenous demographics for advertisers https://t.co/YAThAP6bdO
— Luc Lewitanski (@LucLewitanski) July 2, 2018
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 7, 2018 at 11:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #J20, #MeToo, 1968, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adoption, advertising, Ahmed Best, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, algorithmic trading, America, anatomy, animals, Anthony Kennedy, art, asylum, attention economy, Back to the Future, basketball, Batman, Ben Robertson, blackmail, border patrol, Brexit, Brooklyn 99, Bruce Springsteen, California, Carl Freedman, cartooning, Central America, CEOs, CFPs, Chicago, childhood, CIA, civil rights movement, civility, class struggle, climate change, collaborators, comedy, comics, concerts, conference, conferences, copyright, corporate real estate, corruption, country clubs, course evaluations, debt, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Detroit, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Duchamp, Dunbar number, Dungeons and Dragons, economics, Elon Musk, email, embezzlement, EPA, ethnic cleansing, European Union, exotic animals, Facebook, facial recognition, fandom, farmers, fatphobia, felony murder, films, Flint, flood insurance, flooding, franchise fiction, futurity, G. Willow Wilson, gambling, gangs, gay history, general election 2020, geoengineering, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, grading, GRE, happiness, Harlan Ellison, Hawaii, health care, hermits, history, Hitler, HIV/AIDS, Howard Stern, ice, ICFA, immigration, improv, inaugurations, Infinity War, Japan, Jar Jar Binks, John McAdams, Juggalos, kids today, Korea, literacy, loans, Luke Skywalker, Mark Bould, Marquette, Marvel, MCU, medieval studies, medievalism, mere genre, Merrick Garland, Mike Bloomberg, millennials, mobs, monkeys, MS-13, Ms. Marvel, murder, my scholarly empire, NASA, nature, Nazis, NBA, neoliberalism, norms, NSA, obituary, Octavia E. Butler, online harassment, our brains don't work, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, peace, pedagogy, pessimism, Peter Frase, photography, Pixar, places, places to invade next, police, political cartoons, politics, prank calls, protest, Putin, race, racism, rape culture, Rate My Professor, reactionaries, reading, readymades, Reality Winner, refugees, resistance, revolution, rich people, robots, Roe v. Wade, Rosa Parks, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, San Francisco, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science fiction studies, Scott Pruitt, sexual harassment, SFRA, SFRA18, SFRA19, Silicon Valley, soccer, socialism, solar system, Soviet Union, space junk, Spider-Man, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Ditko, stock market, Stone Age, stoppage time, student debt, student movements, Stuttering John, suicide, superheroes, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Thailand, Thanos, the 1970s, the courts, the humanities, The Incredibles, The Incredibles 3, the Knicks, the law, the Left, the past, the Wisconsin Idea, the wisdom of markets, they say time is the fire in which we burn, tigers, Tim Geithner, true crime, Trumpism, truth and reconciliation commissions, Twitter, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USSR, Venezuela, video games, vision, water, wealth, whales, white nationalism, white supremacy, William Shatner, William T. Vollman, Wisconsin, World Cup, writing
June Links — Supplemental
* A New Hope, as it was always meant to be experienced: as infographic.
* Really, actually ideology at its purest: ‘There is a future for Harambe’: Cincinnati zoo reveal sperm was removed from gorilla who was shot dead so he could still become a father.
* Murder-suicide at UCLA. Police are suggesting a student may have murdered a professor.
* Lost Superstitions of the Early-20th-Century United States.
* Airships and Reanimated Corpses from the Pages of Early Science Fiction.
* If Osama bin Laden had not existed, the United States would have had to invent him. Although William V. Spanos never quite puts it that way, this claim nevertheless encapsulates one of the fundamental insights of Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation — namely, that American exceptionalism entails a dense knotting together of the vitality of the nation and targeted killing. The very being of America as a more-than-merely-national nation hinges on its capacity to obliterate its enemies in the most spectacular fashion, while simultaneously arrogating the life-force or resources of its enemies for itself.
* “Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors.”
* “In terms of the labor market, 2016 is a great year to graduate.” The Graduate Opportunity Index. For-Profit College Grads Earn Less Money Than They Did Before College.
* The Trump University Scam seems pretty egregious even by Trump’s standards.
Though gaming this out it seems likely to lead to a worrying backlash against *all* college as fundamentally a scam: https://t.co/GsdEf0Wnz9
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2016
* Trump Has a Conflict-of-Interest Problem No Other White House Candidate Ever Had.
* I’m trying not to get tired of saying this, but just try to imagine what the reaction would be if Hillary Clinton came out to defend herself against some perfectly reasonable questions, and said “The press should be ashamed of themselves” or pointed to a reporter and said, “You’re a sleaze.” She wouldn’t be criticized or questioned, she’d be crucified. Reporters would ask if she had lost her mind and was having a nervous breakdown. There would be demands for her to pull out of the race immediately, since she had shown herself to be so unstable.
* Applications for TFA’s two-year teaching stints have plummeted 35 percent during the past three years, forcing the organization to reexamine and reinvent how it sells itself to prospective corps members. It has been focusing particularly on how to engage students at the nation’s most-selective colleges, where the decline in interest has been among the steepest. The improving economy probably has far more to do with this than any anti-TFA publicity campaign.
* The idea that young workers should cut their teeth by working long hours for low pay, or even for free, is the result of employers holding all the cards in the economy. It’s the same phenomenon that lets businesses get away with lax safety standards, unpredictable schedules, and offering scant benefits. By making it harder for employers to demand extra hours as part of the job, the overtime rule is an important tool to shift the balance of power towards working people.
* “Magic Is Ruining Game of Thrones.“
* Salvage Perspectives #3: Or What’s a Hell For?
* This stunning Korean thriller is the summer’s first great movie.
* But the future has always been several: how could it be otherwise, when it hasn’t happened yet? The millennial or apocalyptic future, the future that abolishes time itself, is not the same as the prophetic future of a possible or desired outcome, which is not the same as speculative future of science fiction, which is not the same as the future envisaged by a calendar or a to-do list, which is not the same as the future of the high-yield bond, which is not the same as the future which will involve you reading the next sentence, or deciding not to. But what all these have in common with the phenomenological future – the one involved in the direct sensation of time passing, the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it – is their slipperiness. Futures can never be touched or experienced, only imagined; this is why they’re as diverse as the human psyche, and why they tend to be so dreamlike: at turns ludic, libidinal, or monstrous.
* Not White, Not Rich, and Seeking Therapy.
* At thirteen, a neglectful foster system tore me from the only woman I ever wanted to call “Mom.” Decades later I tracked her down and finally got my happy ending.
* New Orleans’s New Flood Maps: An Outline for Disaster.
* Jay and Miles Overthink X-Men: Apocalypse.
* The last political compass test you’ll ever need.
* After a Life of Punches, Ex-N.H.L. Enforcer Is a Threat to Himself: Stephen Peat has symptoms — memory loss and headaches — often associated with C.T.E., a brain disease linked to head trauma.
* ‘It’s only working for the white kids’: American soccer’s diversity problem.
* And Another Small Private Closes Its Doors: Dowling College.
Run it like a business, just suddenly slam the doors with no planning or warning https://t.co/5OOPjDkopI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 1, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
June 1, 2016 at 3:39 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with A New Hope, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, adoption, America, American exceptionalism, American Studies, animal breeding, animal personhood, animal rights, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Cincinnati, class struggle, concussions, conflicts of interest, CSU, diversity, Donald Trump, Dowling College, English majors, Episode IV, film, floods, for-profit colleges, Fullerton, futurity, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, gorillas, guns, Harambe, Hell, Herman Melville, Hillary Clinton, hoaxes, hockey, How the University Works, ideology at its purest, infographics, intergenerational struggle, intergenerational warfare, internships, Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, kids today, Korea, liberal arts, magic, murder-suicide, neoliberalism, New Orleans, NHL, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Osama bin Laden, parenting, political compass, politics, pulp magazines, race, racism, reproductive futurity, run it like a sandwich, Salvage, scams, scandals, science fiction, soccer, sports, Star Wars, superstition, targeted killing, Teach for America, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the humanities, The State, the tuition is too damn high, the university in ruins, therapy, thrillers, true crime, Trump University, UCLA, X-Men, X-Men: Apocalypse, zeppelins, zombies, zoos
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.
* 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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 7, 2015 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with ableism, academia, adjuncts, adoption, Africa, Andy Weir, animals, Armenia, Arrested Development, atheism, Auburn, autism, breastfeeding, Brian Williams, CFPs, citizenship, Coca-Cola, college football, college sports, conferences, Connor, Crusades, cultural preservation, DC Comics, deadbeat dads, deafness, disability, divorce, DNA, doctor-assisted suicide, Dominican Republic, Down's Syndrome, drones, euthanasia, Friendship Is Magic, games, gender, Girl Scouts, great parenting, Hitler, Iraq, kids today, Legend of Zelda, LSD, Mark Bould, Mars, math, Mein Kampf, men's rights, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, Mississippi, monuments, My Little Pony, NCAA, Netflix, New 52, New York, outer space, pedagogy, psychedelic drugs, punk, racism, Rate My Professor, reboots, Rufus King, science fiction, science is magic, science is terrifying, Scott Walker, SEIU, sexism, SFRA, Star Trek, stateless persons, student evaluations, subways, suicide, Teach for America, teach the controversy, teaching, technology, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Internet, the kids are all right, The Martian, TNG, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, Zoey
All the Weekend Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* 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.
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?
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 22, 2014 at 10:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic publishing, accreditation, activism, actually existing media bias, addiction, adoption, Afghanistan, algorithms, austerity, Barack Obama, Batman, Berkeley, Bill Cosby, Boulder, Buffalo, Buffy, bullying, capitalism, CFPs, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, cognitive science, comics, conferences, Cops, cultural preservation, David Graeber, debt, delicious Coca-Cola, Department of Education, diversity, Don't mention the war, Ebola, ecology, fascism, feminist science fiction, film, Flatland, flexible accumulation, Fox News, fraud, Fred Moten, freedom, futurity, Ghostbusters 3, grad student nightmares, guns, hoaxes, hostile intelligences, How the University Works, human rights, Hunger Games, Joanna Russ, Keystone XL, kids today, Lemony Snicket, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Michigan, MLA, museums, neoliberalism, neuroscience, nuclear waste, nuclearity, NYPD, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, overtime, podcasts, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, post-Fordism, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, resitance, Robocop, Sand Creek Massacre, science fiction, Serial, Silicon Velley, smartphones, snow, Sokal hoax, Star Wars, Stefano Harney, strikes, student occupations, subconferences, sugar, tech economy, text neck, texting, Thailand, the courts, The Empire Strikes Back, the general antagonism, the humanities, the law, the long now, the Singularity, toxic masculinity, tuition, Twitter, Uber, UNC, undercommons, University of California, University of Colorado, University of Oregon, Ursula K. Le Guin, UVA, viral imagination, war on education, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, Yucca Mountain
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.
* 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.
* Land of the God-Men: Inside the Wild Movement to Turn Us All into Immortal Cyborgs. I’m listening…
* 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.”
Written by gerrycanavan
June 28, 2013 at 8:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, adoption, Africa, Afrofuturism, America, art, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, books, CIA, class struggle, Cleveland State, futurity, Great Recession, How the University Works, immortal robot bodies, immortality, IRS, kids, longevity, Louisiana, meritocracy, misogyny, neoliberalism, New Yorker, oil, politics, race, rape culture, Rick Perry, scandals, science fiction, sexism, Shirley Jackson, sinkholes, slavery, temp jobs, Texas, The Lottery, the Met, the Singularity, tuition, unemployment, war on terror, Wendy Davis, writing, Zadie Smith
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 18, 2012 at 10:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with adoption, Africa, Attorney General, Barack Obama, Batman, Bill Murray, Faulkner, gay rights, House of Leaves, LEGO, marriage equality, Mitt Romney, National Review, neocolonialism, politics, taxes, the darkest timeline, The Sound and the Fury, Won't somebody think of the children?
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 20, 2012 at 1:23 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with adoption, America, children, citizenship, genetics, in vitro, the Presidential DNA, weird loopholes
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 19, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with adoption, Barack Obama, children, Darryl Issa, digital humanities, general election 2012, Goldman Sachs, Guatemala, House of Leaves, Krugman, male privilege, NLRB, nostalgia of a particular sort, polls, ugh, unions, Waldo, Wall-E, white supremacy
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)
Written by gerrycanavan
August 30, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with adoption, Beatles, depression, education, music, neuroscience, New York, pedagogy, photographs, reading, recession, SATs, smells
Progress
A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting. Yes, yes, yes. No moral reason, no practical reason, no good reason, no reason, period.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 25, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with adoption, equality, hope, justice, Won't somebody think of the children?