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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

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

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

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021

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

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

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

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021

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

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

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021

this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ

— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021

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

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

— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Emergency Tab Closure Post – 2.9.21

• My Butler research has had a little bit of a comeback in recent months with the publication of the first Library of America book; it’s been profiled in both the New York Times and Harper’s recently. I also had a nice conversation with New Rural on “Mutual Symbiosis” I hope you’ll check out!
• Next week I’m giving a talk on 1984. Here’s a preview!https://www.uwstout.edu/about-us/news-center/reading-across-campus-focuses-dystopian-novel-1984
• Even Green Planets is getting surprise reviews!
  
  With the passing of Saint Ursula – I say that with tearful respect – this excellently produced book only reinforces my impression that Kim Stanley Robinson is out there on his own in applying the SF imagination to explore hopeful pathways into the future. We need more writers like him with the guts to step beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopia. As Canavan says, ‘The future has gone bad; we need a new one.’
  
• Amazing job alert: Assistant/Associate Professor of Science Fiction Film Studies.
• And the obvious Plan B.
• CFP: Afro-Gothic: Black Horror and the Relentless Haunting of Traumatic Pasts. CFP: Decolonising Queer Games and Play. CFP: Cults, Cthulus, and Klansmen: The (Hi)stories within Lovecraft Country. CFP: Utopia on the Tabletop.
• Inventing Plausible Utopias: An Interview With Kim Stanley Robinson. Imagining the End of Capitalism With Kim Stanley Robinson. Even This Is Too Good to be True: Review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
• And if you ever need a negative review of Ministry for the Future, here it is.
• ‘If the aliens lay eggs, how does that affect architecture?’: sci-fi writers on how they build their worlds.
• Drexciya: how Afrofuturism is inspiring calls for an ocean memorial to slavery. Wakanda Forever, Again. Solaris Announces New Suns 2 Anthology From Editor Nisi Shawl. Being a leading Black voice in sci-fi writing is a ‘joyful’ responsibility: Nalo Hopkinson. N.K. Jemisin in The Nation. A Black Literary Trailblazer’s Solitary Death: Charles Saunders, 73. Course materials for Black Feminist Speculative Fiction. And from the archives: Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future.
• In praise of The Life Aquatic.
• Making Room for Santa in Tolkien’s Legendarium. And if you need more Tolkien: “Spaces Beyond Borders: The Peripheries of Utopia.”

As Tolkien observed in an essay of the late 1950s, even Sauron’s motive was initially to attain a form of political utopianism: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.”⁴⁶ As many characters are hopeful utopians in their political orientation, any opposition to this standard soon becomes a radical alternative: “It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”⁴⁷ In this scheme, the utopian-political becomes the conventional, while the utopian-ontological becomes the radical; indeed, the latter’s radicality derives not from making different political choices but different personal ones. This is no clearer than in the case of Faramir who, unlike his brother Boromir and father Denethor, will not allow himself to be tempted by the Ring:

I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs.

In these positive characterisations, with their exemplary portrayal of heroic subjective values, we can identify aspects of Levitas’s argument for a utopianism of the wholeness of being and human flourishing. As Levitas suggests, many utopias do their work by advocating better ways of being rather than by illustrating better forms of social organisation.

• “A moment of moral and political nihilism”: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis. And if you need more Kotsko: American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism.
• Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Glitchy Society.
• What Happened in the 80s? On the Rise of Literary Theory in American Academia.
• LARB on Jameson on Benjamin.
• War by Other Means.
• Education is teaching people what Republicans don’t want them to know. Everything else is public relations.
• Not great! Colleges Could Lose $183 Billion During Pandemic. Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year. Catholic schools in US hit by unprecedented enrollment drop. Eliminating tenure in Kansas and Iowa.
• Major Fallout: UVM Scholars Argue That Cuts to the Humanities Would Imperil the University’s Mission.
• 10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms. Anti-racism is part of Catholic identity on these campuses. Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.

this is funny in that “this is an extremely serious problem at American universities” sense https://t.co/jEto0cdSaA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 9, 2021

• Pandemic Leads Dozens of Universities to Pause Ph.D. Admissions.
• ‘The Agile College.’
• How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class.
• The Daily Princetonian has a long, meticulously researched piece on allegations against a popular professor on campus that goes a long way towards explaining just how difficult it is to hold professors accountable for their behavior.

the long-term nuclear waste warning messages becoming a meme is really funny to me because no nuclear semiotician ever thought to consider preserving nuclear waste warning messages for future generations by just getting people to make jokes about them

— ludum tsundare 🌮 (@prophet_goddess) December 24, 2020

• We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?
• Pandemic Mothers and Primal Screams. How COVID-19 Hollowed Out a Generation of Young Black Men. Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism? The Lab-Leak Hypothesis.
• The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning. If Democrats don’t use their trifecta to rebalance America’s electoral playing field – and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent – they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.

Everyone in academia thinks they're in favor of cultivating skepticism and critical thinking until something like QAnon starts to eat people's brains, at which point they realize that actually they're very much in favor of highly institutionalized expert knowledge.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) January 5, 2021

• Inspiring: CIA Rebrands to Attract Diverse Operatives.
• How cars became a deadly anti-protest weapon.
• The Black American Amputation Epidemic.
• An Esports Team Signed An 8 Year Old, But Nobody Is Sure If It’s Legal.
• The Long Plot to Escape From Work.
• Frozen and Queer Coding.
• California and/in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds. Cyberpunk Needs a Reboot.
• Who really created the Marvel Universe?
• Time is a Difference of Pressure: Breath as Environmental Media in Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation.”
• Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
• How to Set Up an Intergalactic Empire Without Really Trying.
• Pour one out for the already forgetton revolutionaries of r/WallStreetBets.
• Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery.
• The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction. Global ice loss accelerating at record rate, study finds.
• Huge, if true: Humans could move to ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ within 15 years. Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth. Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good.

This fantasy about colonising Mars is projection. Imagine dreaming of living on a soulless uninhabitable dead planet where we would be utterly reliant on technology for survival and where most would be in a form of servitude at the behest of a private company.

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) January 22, 2021

• The arc of history is long, but Dragonlance is back, baby.
• From the Grad School Vonnegut mailbag: “Somewhere in Time.”
• A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? Easy money.
• Behold: the megacycle!
• Okay this just seems mean.
• And take heart: America’s best years are still ahead of it.

Surprise Friday Night Links for a Day You’re Probably Surprised Is Actually Friday

* Don’t sleep on Grad School Vonnegut’s Jailbird episode! Next week: Deadeye Dick, (genuinely) my sleeper hit of the summer…

* One of my better citations: “Fitness Fanatics: Exercise as Answer to Pending Zombie Apocalypse in Contemporary America.”

* I’ve got book chapters in two new books: Monsters: A Companion (talking about District 9) and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (talking about Black Panther).

* Also out now: SFRA Review 50.2-3!

* Octavia Butler just made the NY Times Bestseller List for the first time ever — 14 years after her death.

* Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature.

* “The daily blitzkrieg of the news,” bemoans Tom Barnard in leftist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel, Pacific Edge. “Every day everything a little worse.”

* A Message from Future Generations.

* Announcing the Ancillary Review of Books.

* “Can we talk abt the fact that Liu Cixin supports internment camps for minorities?”

* Post45 kicks off the academic year with a stunner: The 7 Neoliberal Arts.

* After emotional gathering, Marquette agrees to Black students’ demand for cultural center, scholarships, other support. This comes after some occupations and street closures last week. Update from president and provost following meeting with Black student leaders.

* Which doesn’t count the die-in.

Here is a statement of support issued by the executive committee of Marquette’s English department yesterday. pic.twitter.com/0fIEiMkdMB

— Devi Shastri (@DeviShastri) September 4, 2020

Anti racism is what would actually save literature departments if people would only get out of the way.

— Kyla Wazana Tompkins (@kwazana) August 31, 2020

* One of the things I’ve had go most viral on Twitter was a simple call to be kind to students.

Speaking as a college professor, the most overawing comment about the American educational system I can make is that students experience schooling as terror. Every semester it takes me a month to convince my students I’m not going to try and hurt them.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 29, 2020

* Elsewhere in my social media empire: On Voting Twice. On the Wisconsin gerrymander. On firing university administrators. On self-dealing boards of trustees. On that same thing. On Duke. On running the government like a glitch-exploiting speed-run. It’s happening here. Private insurance. UI. If you want a vision of the future. And when Kurt Vonnegut tells the future, he simply does not fuck around.

* We are calling for a Scholar strike #Scholarstrike on September 8-9 2020 to protest ongoing police violence and murders in America.

* Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year.

Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up as the worst year ever on the academic history job market; less than half as many TT jobs listed through August 31 than even in 2009, and a quarter what there were last year. pic.twitter.com/4QrG4ndBMQ

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) September 1, 2020

* Tenured GWU professor reveals she has been pretending to be Black her entire career. (It’s GW’s second case of this this year.) Why Did Jessica Krug Create The Jess La Bombera Persona? The view from her students.

* Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld Has Been Suspended for Sexual Harassment.

* CFP: The Journal of Fantasy and Fan Cultures is an annual journal of scholarly work and creative non-fiction by undergraduate and graduate students. Our first issue, on Harry Potter, will be published in Spring 2021. Submissions for this issue are now open until December 2020, but they are limited to UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. CFP: “Race and Science Fiction: The 5th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.”

* Stop them before they kill again! Game of Thrones’ Benioff and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.

If you’ve ever wondered whether white men failing upward really is a thing, observe that Netflix watched these idiots ruin Game of Thrones and then handed them the most conceptual sci fi adaptation of our generation https://t.co/wMu4Otoc4W

— stefanielaine🌹 (@stefanielaine) September 1, 2020

* Sports come to a halt: NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS postpone games as players protest Jacob Blake shooting. The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.

Obama is, mostly quietly and behind the scenes, the single most powerful counter-revolutionary force in 21st-century US politics https://t.co/QjAnCDOKCS

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 28, 2020

* The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. The RNC Makes a Compelling Case for America’s Imminent Collapse. For Election Administrators, Death Threats Have Become Part of the Job.

* Today in the Wisconsin gerrymander. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Wisconsin’s record of brutality against people of color. Wisconsin is a window into how Republicans who once rejected Trump now cheer him on. Nine people arrested by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for allegedly being outside agitators were in town city to distribute food to protesters, a director of the nonprofit kitchen says.

I think people outside the state just can’t fathom that Wisconsin’s gerrymander is real. Republicans take 60%+ majorities in the legislature no matter how many people vote for them. In 2018 they took 64% of the Assembly on 46% of the vote. https://t.co/FExUcedl4Z

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 4, 2020

* A 17-Year-Old Aspiring Cop Has Been Charged With Murder In Kenosha. Kyle Rittenhouse is America’s future. Could A Backlash Against Black Lives Matter Hurt Biden? The Two Don’t Appear Linked So Far. Alleged Kenosha Killer Loved Cops, Guns, Trump, and ‘Triggering the Libs,’ Former Classmates Say.

* Meanwhile: A fascist manifesto is gaining fans on the right, including state Sen. Roger Chamberlain. “When Violence Is Necessary To Defend Civil Society.” Right-wing extremists have killed 329 victims in the last 25 years, while antifa members haven’t killed any, according to a new study. Missouri lawmakers pass bill making it legal to give guns to kids without parents’ permission.

* Teen who held BLM event gets $2500 bill for police overtime. Encounter with Phoenix police leaves teenage girl with permanent burn scars. The Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It. Cops admit vandalizing cars of man who filed complaint against them, prosecutor says. What Can Stop Cops In Cities Like Kenosha From Brutalizing Black People Like Jacob Blake? Precrime in Florida. The Terrible History of the NYPD’s Challenge Coins. The Abolition moment.

Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality — including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred — in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) August 28, 2020

not sure anything has quite gotten to me the way the drive to make rittenhouse a right-wing hero of self-defense has. it is, to me, the single most ominous development of the year.

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020

Pretty explicit in all of this is the extent to which police and their cheerleaders see these right-wing militia types as essentially performing the same work as formal law enforcement, not crime fighting but the maintenance of (racial, gender, class) “order.”

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) August 27, 2020

Looking at what's gone down in Kenosha these few days—the police shooting, the immediate crackdown, the militia shooting—is just staring off a dizzying edge into the abyss, knowing things are about to get so much worse & hoping like hell there's some way we don't take the plunge.

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) August 26, 2020

* QAnon explained. QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on. How QAnon, a fringe online movement, is drawing followers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. with a stew of conspiracies.

* Cases Spike at Universities Nationally. UNC-Chapel Hill Reports 31.3 Percent of Students Tested Have COVID—And There Are Probably More. NC State students ordered to leave university housing after ‘rapid spread’ of COVID-19. In North Carolina and Around the US, Neoliberal Universities Are Sending Students Into Hell. University of Miami Reports Nearly 100 Positive COVID Tests in One-Week Period. Wisconsin Universities Begin Reporting Cases Of COVID-19. Higher Ed’s Hottest Hot Spot? Some Colleges Planned Early for an Online Fall. Here’s What They Learned. JMU shifting to online classes, asking students to leave campus after 500 coronavirus cases. UW-Madison orders 9 sororities, fraternities with positive COVID-19 cases to quarantine. Colleges Lost the Moral Authority to Blame Students. The influencer twins I’m weirdly obsessed with just tested positive for COVID while on campus at Baylor. My college reopened. Now I’ve got COVID-19, along with nearly 500 other students. The University of Alabama reports 566 coronavirus cases after just a week of classes. University of Alabama to Profs: Don’t Tell Students About COVID-Infected Classmates. OU Interim provost instructs professors not to hold in-person classes online, notify classes of students’ positive COVID-19 cases. Frustrated with fall reopening, faculty members consider vote of no confidence in administration. Trump White House Warns Colleges: Don’t Send Your COVID-Infected Students Home! University COVID Model.

* Teaching this fall is not glorified Skype. The University We’re Losing. Between f**ked and a hard place. The Pandemic Is No Excuse to Surveil Students.

* University of Oregon Will Charge Students for a Full Year of Dorm Housing Even if They Can’t Enter the Classroom.

* Why New Jersey’s Plan for In-Person Schooling Is Falling Apart. State report shows hundreds test positive for COVID-19 at Florida schools in August. Here’s what happened when students went to school during the 1918 pandemic.

* Our Faculty Union Exposed the University’s Debt—And Who’s Paying for It.

* Deeply unappreciated fact: the most “impactful” person in science right now is this Kazakhstani hacker queen. She is the one-woman bridge to the largest repository of scientific knowledge ever collected.

* Biden campaign desperate for digital access to students as college campuses remain closed and students don’t know where they’ll be on Election Day.

* Legionnaire’s Disease pathogen found in water at some schools reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns.

* Damn you, Oberlin undergrads! The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason.

* Eugene Debs Believed in Socialism Because He Believed in Democracy. The Young Eugene V. Debs.

* Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War: How he lost and where we go from here.

Liberals hate leftists for the same reason you'd hate someone at a theater who kept yelling "These are all actors, none of this is real." Liberals are trying to enjoy a fictional performance about their side being heroic protagonists, and leftists keep disrupting the illusion.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 27, 2020

* The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie.

* Republicans already boobytrapping 2021. Why a Historic Eviction Wave Is Bearing Down on the U.S. Shhhh, we’re not talking about a government shutdown, are we? ‘We shouldn’t have to beg’: Americans struggle without unemployment aid as Congress stalls on extending benefits. As permanent economic damage piles up, the Covid Crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.

* Jessamyn Ward: Grief in the Time of Coronavirus. How COVID-19 Led To Soaring Divorce Rates In The US, Visualized. Surge in calls from male domestic violence victims during Covid-19. I thought I was a master doomscroller but “pregnant schoolteacher dies of coronavirus three days after surprise baby shower” actually made me wince in pain.

* 55% of coronavirus patients still have neurological problems three months later. New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials. Drug cocktail touted by Trump to treat coronavirus increases chance of death by 27%, study shows. COVID-19 Might Mean Humanity Has Entered An Age Of Pandemics, Tony Fauci Warned.

* Active shooter drills correlate with a 42% increase in anxiety and stress and a 39% increase in depression among those in the school community, new report finds. Teens’ anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds.

* Black men in D.C. are expected to die 17 years earlier than White men. Here’s why. Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals. Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre. Black Former N.F.L. Players Say Racial Bias Skews Concussion Payouts.

* Trials by Whiteness: Definitions of Whiteness and Eurocentrism, and Their Relevance Post-Racefail.

* The Literature of White Liberalism.

* Kentucky Man Accused Of Breaking Canada’s COVID-19 Rules Faces $569,000 Fine.

* Bruce Wayne Gives Up Being Batman After Three Therapy Sessions.

* The Aftermath of Hurricane Laura. Sights, sounds, reactions from historic landfall, recovery across Louisiana.

* Why climate change is a civil rights battle. I do think Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell are the last generation of politicians who are correct in wagering that they can spend the rest of their careers downplaying climate change and not suffer personally from it. A second Trump term would mean severe and irreversible changes in the climate.

* Watchmen director Stephen Williams on uncovering the series’ real American hero story. Watchmen screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Hooded Justice and the privilege of nostalgia.

* Why Uber’s business model is doomed.

* Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season.

* Union-Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends School.

To get a sense for how unhinged our economy is from the real world, consider the fact that pollinators, earthworms, rainforests, clean air, parenting, friendship, sleep and solidarity are considered to be literally valueless according to our dominant metric of economic success.

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) September 1, 2020

* Chadwick Boseman. David Graeber. Charles R. Saunders (back in May).

* Never too early: Disney Grapples With How to Proceed on ‘Black Panther’ Without Chadwick Boseman.

* All roads lead back to All My Children.

* John Boyega vs. Disney, and it’s about time.

* Stan Lee’s American pantheon.

* On Age and Desire and Willy Wonka.

* More from MetaFilter on Go after AI.

* An Instagram Account Is Waging War on Sexual Assault at Case Western Reserve University.

* Today in dystopia: According to Amazon, how you speak is a useful indicator of your wellbeing, both emotionally and physically. Consequently, the Halo Band will monitor your tone to determine if you’re feeling positive enough to get through your day.

* Amazon Is Hiring an Intelligence Analyst to Track ‘Labor Organizing Threats.’

* Understanding Batman.

One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."

— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020

* Understanding Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.

* Attention nerds: Gloomhaven May Be One Of The Best-Selling Comic Books (Or Not).

* Development ceases on Amazon Prime’s CULTURE TV series, at the request of the Iain Banks Estate.

"Money implies poverty." — an adage in The Culture, Iain M. Banks

— Michael (Noble Continuation) (@OmanReagan) April 9, 2020

* Ah dinnae ken this: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots.

I was today years old when I learned that a “buttload” is an actual measue of volume dating back to middle English, equal to two “hogsheads,” or about 126 gallons.

— Benjamin Morris (@skepticalsports) August 20, 2020

* One Community, Burnout, and That One Scene from Deep Space Nine. Star Trek: Discovery’s third season to introduce franchise’s first transgender, non-binary characters.

* Not today, Satan: Expert says invasive ‘jumping’ earthworms with destructive potential appearing in Western New York.

* I said the world would end before New Mutants was a #1 movie — and I was right!

* Fuck The Next Call Of Duty Game.

* And we may live in hell, but Nintendo just announced a whole boatload of Mario games and rereleases.

Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links

* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…

* For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans.  The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.

“ok what happens when someone dies” really seems to be the armor-piercing question for all these plans to reopen schools

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

The one that gets me is that students have ten minutes between classes regardless of modality or location. Starbucks is closed, library is closed, you’re not allowed to congregate in hallways — where do you go for your 10 AM virtual class between your 9 and 11 in-person classes? https://t.co/vSz7t88uHH

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 21, 2020

There’s also going to be a nonzero number of in-person classes where the instructor is the noncompliant party and I haven’t heard anyone explain what is supposed to happen in that situation https://t.co/MkwlX7GM8d

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 24, 2020

Btw your students know what's up. I've seen so many similar tiktoks over the last month pic.twitter.com/7JZzTl9xGq

— dakoda smith (@feelinggorgias) July 19, 2020

* On a Knife’s Edge.

* Rethinking MLA 2021.

* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.  

* Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.

* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.

* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.

* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.

* 8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.

* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.

* Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

* The Last Giraffes on Earth.

* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.

When men use slurs against us it’s *shoulder shrug* but when we defend ourselves it’s because we’re opportunistic. Fuck this https://t.co/nCyMiZdaNK

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 24, 2020

* Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.

* How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?

* There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.

* Once again: against homework.

My lecture on this starts in half an hour lol https://t.co/DmQRYAj95l https://t.co/SlIornNN5q

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) July 24, 2020

* The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.

I’m incredibly cynical and believe the Republican Party is full of world-historical monsters but seeing the entire apparatus of the right attach themselves to Q has really shaken me https://t.co/lSKM65lp3q

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 26, 2020

* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.

This is really bad. There has been a gigantic, sustained shock in areas of the labor market which are not directly exposed to the virus, but instead exposed to plain old economic conditions. https://t.co/zsNuxCiT5L

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 21, 2020

* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell

* Your Predominantly White Academic Organization (Yes, Even Yours) Is Exactly One Live-Tweeted Racist Event Away from Public Disgrace.

* U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

I think people prior to the Gen X/Millennial cohort genuinely have trouble processing what has happened to basically everything they were raised to think of as “careers” https://t.co/BVreP3Wk3S

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

You can’t even really get a job as a lawyer anymore. My younger cousins w/ nursing degrees don’t have stable gigs, but travel between multiple hospitals. Obviously being a professor is over. Aside from the medical cartel that is only just now starting to crack, jobs don’t exist.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 22, 2020

* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.

* How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.

* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.

* A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

* The Racist History of Tipping.

* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.

* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.

they literally cannot stop threatening us with a good time pic.twitter.com/aryQLXpwvI

— accidentally left-wing (@accidental_left) July 22, 2020

* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

* Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.

* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.

* J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.

* The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.

* Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.

* What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.

* The fight against racism starts at home.

Stares at every white person who keeps asking “how to help” or how they can “do better” 🤨🤨 ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/D1puoZQ1Ng

— Tanya, Laird of Glencoe, Chaotic Black Deathbane (@cypheroftyr) July 25, 2020

* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.

* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.

* Don’t tease us Doc.

* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since

* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today

* cat in the furnace, check

* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked

* Two Americas.

Two Americas pic.twitter.com/hKdXwoiWUU

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 24, 2020

* always has been — always has been

* just an update for all you non-biologists out there that biology twitter is currently in meltdown because a journal editor said some worms are overrated

* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.

* I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you fucking deserve

* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.

* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?

* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?

* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.

* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”

* Yet another Watchmen sequel.

* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’

Wednesday Links!

* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.

* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.

* And ICYMI: GSV #8: TBSF! And a little bit of viewer mail: Harrison Bergeron Is Black.

* 2020 Locus Awards Winners.

* Medical Humanities and the Fantastic: A Symposium.

* CFP: American Game Studies (deadline: August 1). How America Understands Poverty (deadline: October 1). Announcing The 11th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award: Call for Emerging Writers. Queer Intersectionalities in Folklore Studies.

* Podcast alert: Marquette University’s COVID Conversations. And it’s a bit more flippant but I’ll never say no to Griffin Newman talking Muppets.

* Regarding Marquette’s Decision to Open for Face to Face Instruction for Fall 2020.

* Elsewhere on the Marquette beat: My terrific colleague Cedric Burrows talks about the racist origins of ordinary phrases.

* A 1997 interview with Octavia Butler. Toward a Waking Maturity: Octavia E. Butler Shapes A Liberated African Future in “The Book of Martha.” Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self.

* Colson Whitehead is the youngest writer to win the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

* El Nuevo Normal: The Coronavirus Crisis and Latin American Apocalyptic Fiction.

* Will Dystopian Times Inspire Utopian Art?

* Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Who will ensure the safety of Black, LGBTQ+, People of Color, and Persons with Disabilities when Campuses reopen? Reopening schools safely can’t happen without racial equity. Black Study, Black Struggle. College football’s leaders are answering the wrong questions. Colleges are flimflamming students and parents about reopening. College Leaders Must Explain Why—Not Just How—to Return to Campus. College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives. What do college students think of their school’s reopening plans? College students fume over having to pay full tuition for dubious online learning. The Summer of Magical Thinking. Lurching Toward Fall, Disaster on the Horizon. A Semester to Die For. CDC documents warned full reopening of schools, colleges would be ‘highest risk’ for spreading coronavirus. The main source of opposition? The faculty. Rush back to campus is sowing distrust at universities. Principles of Academic Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Georgia Tech Professors Revolt Over Reopening, Say Current Plan Threatens Lives Of Students, Staff. Priorities. Boston University Gives PhD Students A Choice: Come Back To Campus Or Lose Your Health Insurance And Salary. Baton Rouge economy faces $50M loss if LSU football season is canceled or fans are excluded.

* The Closure.

* What can the humanities offer in the Covid era?

* ICE Makes International Students Choose Between Risk of Coronavirus and Risk of Deportation. Long thread reading Harvard’s lawsuit. White House Rescinds Rules on Foreign Students Studying Online.

* “Does tenure matter anymore?” University Paid $504,000 to Get Rid of Professor. City University of New York lays off 2,800 adjuncts in wave of austerity.

Happy July, everyone! Unfortunately, I'm convinced that this month will be one of the worst months that American higher education has experienced in a long time. Thread alert. (1/)

— Robert Kelchen (@rkelchen) July 1, 2020

At root, the political economy of colleges and universities in the United States has been rebuilt in a matter of several decades around an understanding of higher education as a service sold to student consumers rather than a public good.

— Aaron Jakes (@aaronjakes) July 3, 2020

Three truths about the upcoming semester:
1. Any F2F class is going to be awkward, weird, and uncomfortable. Stop pretending it won't be.
2. We will all be online at some point whether one wants to admit it or not.
3. There will be illnesses and deaths that were preventable.

— HyFlex Course in Radical Left Indoctrination (@TheTattooedProf) July 14, 2020

I imagine I’d have mixed feelings if it were my workplace knowing that none of us are getting paid and that if the coronavirus that is being inflicted upon us by our millionaire bosses permanently damages our lungs we lose our scholarships https://t.co/taGTpA4ZMk

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020

* In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both. This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents. American Passports Are Worthless Now. The Republican coronavirus meatgrinder. ‘One Of Worst Parties In Power In Entire Democratic World.’ ‘I Can’t Keep Doing This:’ Small Business Owners Are Giving Up. Giant corporations may be the only survivors in the post-pandemic economy. Pay Restaurants to Stay Closed. How Many Have Closed Already? Covid-19 Is Bankrupting American Companies at a Relentless Pace. A Record 5.4 Million Americans Have Lost Health Insurance. 32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments. Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says. Out of Work. The Story Has Gotten Away from Us. COVID-19 sent US into ‘depression’ and economy won’t be fully restored until 2023. Americans Are in Denial. There Is No Plan (For You). Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign? We are in the midst of a world-historic failure of governance. Why isn’t anyone in charge acting like they are responsible for it?

Liberals were right about George W Bush and they’re right about Donald Trump. The Republican Party is a political party incapable of governing the nation without ushering in death, devastation, and national humiliation. Just the facts.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 11, 2020

This is a poem about America. pic.twitter.com/QsaCb3GwVS

— Amanda Guinzburg (@Guinz) July 8, 2020

I would say that the coronavirus period in the US has been characterized by the pathological refusal to prioritize anything over anything else, in accordance with the larger neoliberal tendency to pretend all social outcomes are exclusively the product of autonomous market action https://t.co/bvmSPlt67S

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 27, 2020

Prince literally said two thousand zero zero party OOP it’s out of time and we didn’t listen

— Wʏɴᴛᴇʀ Mɪᴛᴄʜᴇʟʟ (Rᴏʜʀʙᴀᴜɢʜ) (@wyntermitchell) July 13, 2020

* Coronavirus spread threatens to overrun school reopening plans. Israeli Data Show School Openings Were a Disaster That Wiped Out Lockdown Gains. U.S. Pediatricians Call For In-Person School This Fall, Then Take It Back. DeVos blasts school districts that hesitate at reopening. There Is a Way to Reopen Schools This Fall. Do We Have the Will to Make It Happen? Reopening schools safely is going to take much more federal leadership. One in Four. N.Y.C. Schools, Nation’s Largest District, Will Not Fully Reopen in Fall. Los Angeles and San Diego Schools to Go Online-Only in the Fall. Milwaukee Proposing Reopening with No Students in School Buildings. Evers once again gives up in advance. A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention. The Toll That Isolation Takes on Kids During the Coronavirus Era.

* Hospitals full in Houston. Hospitals full in Florida. Texas and Arizona. Young Americans Are Partying Hard and Spreading Covid-19 Quickly. Coronavirus is spreading so fast among Wisconsin 20-somethings that the CDC came to investigate. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. The Hidden Racism of Vaccine Testing. California’s slide from coronavirus success to danger zone began Memorial Day. It takes a special kind of inattention to human suffering to not notice how unfortunate it is that people have been left to face death alone. Is air conditioning helping spread COVID in the South? I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of dads suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Inside the body, the coronavirus is even more sinister than scientists had realized. July and August must be a period of intense preparation for our reasonable worst-case scenario for health in the winter that we set out in this report, including a resurgence of COVID-19, which might be greater than that seen in the spring. One to two months. Five years. Americans Are Sick of the Pandemic. The Pandemic Is Not Sick of Us. U.S. States Graded on Their Covid-19 Response. Zero COVID Deaths in Vietnam. How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus.

* Are We Facing A Post-COVID-19 Suicide Epidemic?

* Generation Z Is Bearing the Economic Brunt of the Virus.

* The end of New York.

* How has Wisconsin screwed up unemployment so completely? Workers are pushed to the brink as they continue to wait for delayed unemployment payments.

* The Meltdown Crisis. The Myopic Fantasy of Returning to “Normal.” Resilience Is the Goal of Governments and Employers Who Expect People to Endure Crisis.

* gimme that stimmie

* Damn, that is an American airline.

* A version of the election-stealing scenario I’ve been bleating on about for months that doesn’t even require state legislatures to do anything actively.

* The Working Dead: Reviving the Crowd as a Protagonist.

* Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley.

* Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong.

* Starship Troopers and American decline.

* Setting Fire to Wet Blankets: Radical Politics and Hollywood Franchises.

* Resistance Is Not Futile: On Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” and Fighting the Good Fight.

* Teaching Shakespeare Under Quarantine.

* Is Unschooling the Way to Decolonize Education?

* Hamilton and Revolution. And Ishmael Reed, from the archives: “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders… and It’s Not Halloween.

* Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise.

* The blog started “innocently enough” and just “got out of hand.”

* Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate. From Thomas Jefferson’s own family, a call to take down his memorial. ‘The Flag is Coming Down’: Lawmakers Vote to Change Mississippi State Flag. Reddit bans r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse as part of a major expansion of its rules. Going too far.

* This was shocking, and I didn’t remember it at all: The Real Mud on Golden Girls.

* The whole point in Wisconsin right now is to make anything but one-party GOP rule essentially illegal.

Wisconsin GOP wins power in 2010, gerrymander the legislature such that they can win a supermajority of seats without a majority of votes, pack the state courts, and raise new barriers and obstacles to voting. When Democrats win nonetheless, they strip power from the offices. https://t.co/yaIC43V7zi

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 9, 2020

* Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Jacobin’s racial justice reading list. Wisconsin Schools’ Racial Inequality Worst in U.S.

* How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed.

* According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites.

* Climate change hasn’t forgotten about you: World could hit 1.5-degree warming threshold by 2024. South Pole warmed three times the global rate in last 30 years. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Climate Realism, Capitalist and Otherwise. Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome.

I've skimmed the Democrats' brand new climate plan and it stinks! https://t.co/jbVdecOUEO

— Mike Pearl (@MikeLeePearl) June 30, 2020

* How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene.

* Took ’em long enough: Washington football team retires racist name.

* This ‘Equity’ picture is actually White Supremacy at work.

* Today in hell world.

* What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell.

* The invention of the police. How Police Abuse the Charge of Resisting Arrest.

A reminder that after he returned from destroying the ring, Frodo temporarily served as Deputy Mayor of the Shire, and his sole act was to defund the police pic.twitter.com/jmEVWzOvmP

— Samuel Miller McDonald (@sjmmcd) June 27, 2020

* She Said Her Husband Hit Her. She Lost Custody of Her Kids.

* Remembering the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit.

* Why Animal Studies Must Be Antiracist: A Conversation with Bénédicte Boisseron.

* ‘You Could Literally See Our Shit From Space’: The Broken Bowels of Beirut.

* Hate to get owned this bad by a tweet.

Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.

— Daphne K. Lee (@daphnekylee) June 28, 2020

* A Ranking of Every Movie with “Night of” in the Title.

* Watching The Next Generation in a Time of Pandemic and Uprising. The Talk Doesn’t Exist in Deep Space Nine. The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe.

* Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the “zone of avoidance.” My sci-fi novel just got a title…

* This Is How Many People You’d Need to Colonize Mars, According to Science.

* How Not to Deal with Murder in Space.

* Harry Potter fan sites decide to stop giving J.K. Rowling attention.

J.K. Rowling, again, is arguably the most successful person of her generation in her field, revered internationally, and a billionaire, and she has nonetheless made herself a miserable pariah through this pathetic, deluded obsession with other people’s genitals. makes you think https://t.co/5eXlQtbyqU

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 28, 2020

1. abolish the suburbs
2. attack and dethrone god
3. taco trucks on every corner
4. hamburgers eat people https://t.co/gRhNWXXFcA

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2020

* A Timeline of Recent Allegations in the Comic Book Industry.

* A Megachurch Reels After Learning Pastor Let His Professed Pedophile Son Work With Kids.

* Gimlet Media Sued for Not Making Podcasts Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

* Kung Fu Nuns Of Kathmandu.

* Yes please.

* A short story about Serena Williams.

if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64

— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020

* Ban cars.

* Second tribal leader calls for removal of Mount Rushmore. Want to tear down a monument to racism? Bulldoze LA’s freeways.

* Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me.

* Big Scrabble’s decision to eliminate offensive words has infuriated players like never before.

* Why Is the Public Corruption Unit Prosecuting Ghislaine Maxwell?

* The Life-Threatening “Ride” That Action Park Actually Decided to Abandon.

* Thanks Obama.

* A Long-Hidden His Dark Materials Short Story Is Now Getting Released.

* Love to learn old stuff about Jim Henson.

* Transporter. Words. Znurg. Two. Satire. Tin Man. Allies. Doctors. Mondays. Elon Musk. Pirates.

* Please scream inside your heart.

* And it took the end of the world, but the Far Side is back. Same joke but Clone High.

if you know where i can buy this nuclear waste warning message live-laugh-love sign, please get at me because i’ve been thinking about it for a month now and will not rest until it is in my home pic.twitter.com/988H0cID64

— jane c. hu (@jane_c_hu) July 1, 2020

 

After a Quiet Month in Which Absolutely Nothing Happened: The Return of Saturday Morning Links!

* In case you missed it: Grad School Vonnegut #5! Harrison Bergeron! It’s also bad! Next week is Bluebeard, and then Sirens of Titan, so we’re back to Good Vonnegut for a bit…

* And once you’re done with that, listen to Octavia’s Parables!

* I also had a review essay in the latest American Literature on some of the new work being done in comics studies: “Comics Grow Up.”

* Someone made a YouTube explainer essay of my Snowpiercer necrocapitalism essay, weirdly sponsored by a luxury watch change…

* It’s been a bit since I’ve recommended anything, so let me give two very quick game recommendations for those with ears to hear: Ori and the Blind Forest is a terrific Metroidvania game for the Nintendo Switch (among other platforms), and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is a terrific DM-less D&D engine for your meatspace tabletop. More recommendations will emerge as circumstances warrant.

* Proposals invited! 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies.

* CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Taco Bell Quarterly. CFP: The Labour of COVID section of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour.

* In light of the mass protests across the United States and around the world, the executive committee of the Science Fiction Research Association asserts unequivocally that Black Lives Matter. IAFA Statement on BLM.

* The kids are all right: Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion.

* An Open Letter to Marquette University. Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not.

* Aware that the gatekeepers will never agree, this admirer of George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Elif Batuman, and Jonathan Franzen who’s been less impressed by, for instance, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Jennifer Egan has come to regard Kim Stanley Robinson as the greatest living American novelist.

* Ten Minutes with Kim Stanley Robinson. Is This A Unique Time for Science? We Ask Sci-fi Writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The Climate Case for a Jobs Guarantee. Imagining American Utopia.

* Penguin Classics Launches Science Fiction Series. Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus. This American Life on Afrofuturism. We Are Living in the Retrofuture. Announcing the 2019 Nebula Awards Winners.

* Academic Publishing: An Odyssey.

* Read it and weep, my friend.

* Minneapolis Had This Coming. The Minneapolis Uprising in Context. America is a tinderbox. When Police View Citizens as Enemies. The Thick Blue Line. Tribute to Breonna Taylor. Scenes from the struggle in Philadelphia. If you’re not getting any fouls, you’re not working hard enough. Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. Just weeks after the shooting, Weirton and the Police Department did something almost unheard-of in America’s long and troubled history of police shootings: They quickly fired one of the officers for his actions in the fatal encounter. From the archives: On Social Sadism. Then: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Protesting in Chile. Now: A Bullet to the Eye Is the Price of Being a Journalist in America. The American Nightmare. Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience. The Black Lives Matter movement could be the vaccine the country needs. The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance. Neoliberal Capitalism Depends on White Supremacy. This is fascism. The liberal attachment to previous movements as peaceful, nonviolent, and respectable obscures the historical efficacy of riots, blockades, and looting as legitimate forms of revolt. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Abolish these police departments. Imagining the nonviolent state. The Supreme Court Broke Police Accountability. Now It Has the Chance to Fix It. Why Was a Grim Report on Police-Involved Deaths Never Released? Policing and the English Language. The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. The president of the Minneapolis City Council says the city’s Police Dept. will be dismantled and replaced with a “transformative new model of public safety.”

it's a nationwide police riot and any journalism which doesn't acknowledge this fact is bullshit https://t.co/PzQd9HUREX

— Atrios (@Atrios) May 31, 2020

The only answer is the one the mayor of Camden, NJ took about 8 years ago: fire them all. Every last police officer, all at once, summarily fired. Replace most of them with social-worker types.

Crime went down. Way down.

Oh yeah—the cops’ union sued to reverse it. They LOST. https://t.co/HbAZIlaqJS

— Brandon Smith (@muckrakery) June 1, 2020

“Calling 911 is a magical incantation of sorts. With the push of a button, anyone can summon the state’s full might and aid to their side within minutes—and many Americans don’t wield that tremendous power wisely.” https://t.co/mk7TSpDHYo

— Matt Ford (@fordm) May 26, 2020

 

Shot, Chaser pic.twitter.com/X6BrQmRTWy

— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) June 16, 2020

The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

— Tweets by Tolstoy (@TweetsbyTolstoy) June 3, 2020

you ever see a church sign writer go supernova pic.twitter.com/AUlgvVKhFg

— Chris Dlugosz (@cubosh) June 17, 2020

* Cop Shows Are Undergoing a Reckoning—With One Big Exception. Amid George Floyd protests, is it time for cop TV shows to be canceled for good? Video Games Have To Reckon With How They Depict The Police.

* Black Bereavement, White Condolences. How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression. #ImagineBlackFreedom.

* Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide. The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It. Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder. Cops Love to Falsely Claim People Have Messed With Their Food. Cops and the Culture War. Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters. Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War. How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism. Something terrible is happening.

* A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, Census Bureau finds amid coronavirus pandemic. The unluckiest generation in U.S. history.

* Sorry Roosevelt — ya cancelled.

* When Will Capitalism End?

* Sometimes the mask slips right off. We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War. The Insecurity Machine. How the Criminal Justice System Preys on the Poor. Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19. An ‘Avalanche of Evictions’ Could Be Bearing Down on America’s Renters. A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies Is Coming. Warning signs of the coming catastrophe. The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August. Another Crash Is Coming. Weird coincidence.

* Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. “A Political Form Built Out of Struggle”: An Interview on the Seattle Occupied Protest. Get In The Zone: A Report From The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone In Seattle. CHOP Residents Are Working Out a New Footprint With the City.

A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today #BlackLivesMatter #CHAZ pic.twitter.com/augbcA6Cqg

— Kyle Kotajarvi (@kylekotajarvi) June 12, 2020

* It’s not obesity. It’s slavery. COVID-19 Deaths by Race and Ethnicity in the US. ‘All the psychoses of US history’: how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead.

Pastor just made the connection that I tried to make yesterday in a meeting.

For Black people, the removal of workplace protections around COVID and police violence all come down to the same racism and the same phrase – “we can’t breathe.”

— Dr. G, but from home (@AmeliaNGibson) May 30, 2020

* Now they tell us: Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic. America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further. The world is putting America in quarantine. The Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection. Neurological and neuropsychiatric complications of COVID-19 in 153 patients. Some things mankind was not meant to know. The Climate Crisis and COVID-19 Are Inseparable. Ah, memories. How the Virus Won. The coronavirus surge is real, and it’s everywhere. A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic.

* Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us. 100% facemask use could crush second, third coronavirus waves. Reopening too soon: Lessons from the deadly second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic. What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19. Who Are We Reopening For? Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell. I miss restaurants. That Office AC System Is Great — at Recirculating Viruses. How the coronavirus spreads in those everyday places we visit. C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices. People Don’t Trust Public-Health Experts Because Public-Health Experts Don’t Trust People. Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus. These 20-Somethings Survived Coronavirus, But Their Symptoms Won’t Go Away. Social Distancing Is Not Enough. Humans are not meant to be alone. The Coronavirus Is On Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed. Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine. We Don’t Even Have a COVID-19 Vaccine, and Yet the Conspiracies Are Here. The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet. The next 100 days.

Nationally, more than 44k new cases were reported today. That's the third straight record day. pic.twitter.com/ahY6WvRLC6

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 26, 2020

* Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic.

* The best COVID-19 response in the world.

* Covid-19 Makes Things Tricky For Haunted Houses.

* Žižek vs. the virus.

* From the no-such-thing-as-good-news files.

* Meanwhile: In Some States This Fall, Masks at Public Colleges Will Be ‘Encouraged’ but Not Required. Text games that simulate the fall semester from the perspective of students and faculty. Large number of LSU football players placed in quarantine. Simulations of classrooms don’t bode well.

* Unions are once again anti-doctrinal. Massive cuts at U Alaska. Colleges say campuses can reopen safely. Students and faculty aren’t convinced. How the Pandemic Will Change Teaching on Campus. Principles for a Post-COVID University. The Existential Threat to Higher Education is Not What You Think. Faculty Are Not Cannon Fodder. University Leaders Are Failing. Zoom and Gloom: Universities in the Age of COVID-19. Welcome to the Socially Distanced Campus. Off campus. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 workers is organizing to reject Rutgers’s austerity response to the pandemic. Disaster capitalism on campus. Extinction Event. The Case for Liberal Arts Education in a Time of Crisis. How to stop the cuts. And just to stick the knife in.

"Student demand" is a pass-through for administrative and business priorities. When students actually demand something admin and business leaders don't like, suddenly a different rationale emerges for why it can't be offered.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) May 28, 2020

Faculty responded to the pandemic with a show of care for their students. Administrations have ineptly co-opted that care, refashioning it as a drama of "flexibility" for just-in-time course delivery plans that inhibit faculty from maintaining appropriate curricular governance.

— Harris Feinsod (@feinsod) June 16, 2020

What would happen if your campus's reopening plan had to be reviewed by IRB as an experiment? Fascinating question from a colleague.

— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) June 12, 2020

For your faculty meeting entertainment, here is College/University Reopening Bingo, with thanks to @JohnPatLeary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism pic.twitter.com/mejVt9c9uR

— Lara Langer Cohen (@LaraLangerCohen) June 22, 2020

* The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.

* What Is College Worth?

* For Colleges, Protests Over Racism May Put Everything On the Line.

* Principal warns NYC parents about potential chaos next school year. U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids. Student Trauma Won’t Just Disappear In the Fall, Counselors Warn. 70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after reopening. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction releases guidelines for reopening schools in the fall. Wisconsin schools should expect coronavirus threat for next 18 months, according to new state guidance. We’re homemakers, stay-at-home parents and paid workers. All at the same time. This Summer Will Scar Young Americans for Life. Pandemic Reveal: Heterosexual Motherhood is a Hostage Situation. The Next Pandemic: Homesickness. Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It.

* John Chisholm is the district attorney for Milwaukee, where homicides were double the normal rate during the first five months of 2020; Chisholm estimates that a quarter of these were related to domestic violence, including an incident on April 30th in which a man with a history of domestic abuse killed five members of his family, four of them teen-agers. Chisholm told me that there’s no set date for when courts will be fully operational again. “The backlog concerns me the most,” he said. “It’s going to stretch our protective services, and we will have more people with unresolved cases still circulating in close proximity to the victims.”

* Bosses in the US Have Far Too Much Power to Lay Off Workers Whenever They Feel Like It. The Coronavirus Is Exposing Wall Street’s Reckless Gamble on Bad Debt. The Looming Bank Collapse.

* The 1918 Flu Pandemic Changed Literature More Than You Think.

* Before the End.

* J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs. The Harry Potter book series helped me realize I’m nonbinary. Now I know that had nothing to do with J.K. Rowling. I’m A Trans Harry Potter Fan, And There Are A Few Things I Want J.K. Rowling To Know. Generation X and Trans Lives.

So, while we're all beating up on JK Rowling, one thing that I feel is pertinent is that the Harry Potter series is actually somewhat misanthropic, quietly endorsing a low-trust society that is very likely to succeed in the longterm. 1/?

— ol johnny websites (@robertjbennett) June 13, 2020

Ok this is the best thread on the @jk_rowling kerfuffle, hands down. And that's even WITHOUT the massive haul of bonus points for the use of the phrase "Holy Cartesian dualism, Batman!" https://t.co/Lrv2da0Ebm

— Stephen Saperstein Frug (@StephenFrug) June 8, 2020

* All the signs were there.

* Meanwhile: Transgender Health Protections Reversed By Trump Administration.

* ‘She just started blooming’: the trans kids helped by a pioneering project.

* Biden’s Disability Policy Plan Is Surprisingly Good.

* Mail-in Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant. House adopts bill to make DC 51st state; Senate GOP opposes. Will he go? And a little bit of old eve-stakes speculation: Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory.

* The Prophecies of Q.

* Facebook researched the affect of its own platform on polarization and found that “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and then largely shelved its study, the WSJ reports.

* The authors found that the 6-hour-forecast errors were smaller for the revised model than for a version of the model without the cloud-microphysics revisions. Hence, instead of being able to discount estimates of high sensitivity, as Rodwell and I had done, their result provides some of the best current evidence that climate sensitivity could indeed be 5 °C or greater. Climate change and redlining. Climate change threatens U.S. mortgage market. Gulp.

New research has found that 92% of the cities that were historically redlined are now warmer than their neighbors. The predominate factor is likely a lack of green space in the redlined neighborhoods to help bring the temperature down. https://t.co/9iIcPnHEId pic.twitter.com/AERKQ31o6B

— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) September 30, 2019

Don’t really understand how everyone doesnt spend much of the day mentally destroyed by the fact that we created hell on earth and doomed our kids to climate dystopia because we as a society refused to make small sacrifices or force our wealthy overlords to be a bit less greedy.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 23, 2020

* Facebook markets their Slack alternative by showing how it can suppress unionization.

* Profiles in Things That Almost Look Like Courage: Mad Dog Denounces Trump.

* How Bill De Blasio Lost New York City.

* U.S. Border Patrol migrant camp from above.

* Turns out if you give people money then they aren’t as poor anymore.

* Disney fans say Splash Mountain, a ride inspired by ‘Song of the South,’ should be re-themed. And Disney agrees!

* The end of the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt.

* The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.

* Rumors of Goonies 2.

* Who Framed Roger Rabbit: An Oral History. Street Fighter: The Movie — What Went Wrong. Queer Empire: On the 40th Anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. How to Miss What Isn’t Gone: Thoughts on Modern Nostalgias While Watching “The Office.”

* Humanity against Cards against Humanity.

* Racism and the porn industry.

* How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural.

* D&D is trying to move away from racial stereotypes. America is going to recognize the common humanity of orc and drow before it does black people.

* Deeply unpleasant Lord of the Rings character combination chart.

* Never ask questions about Animal Crossing lore. Ever.

* “What’s Actually Happening”: Looking for History in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.”

* Comics Are for Everyone: Rethinking Histories of Comics Fandom.

* Warren Ellis Accused of Grooming Young Women for Decades.

* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Black Superheroes & The Tulsa Massacre. ‘Watchmen’ Writer on Trump in Tulsa, Bad Cops, and America’s White Supremacy Problem.

* John Boyega is doing what Star Wars wouldn’t.

* How racist was Flannery O’Connor?

* The Long Battle Over ‘Gone With the Wind.’

* The arc of history is long, but NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag.

* Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years.

* She Gets Calls And Texts Meant For Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird.

* There Is No Writer Quite Like Arundhati Roy.

* I think during the discussions about The Last Jedi I pointed out that the Holdo Maneuver is such a radical reconsideration of how physics works in Star Wars that it will necessarily become a preoccupation of all future entries in the series, and, well: The Inciting Incident of Star Wars‘ High Republic Is a Horrifying Technological Disaster.

* Boots Riley’s ‘Dark, Absurd’ Next Project Will Star Jharrel Jerome as a 13-Foot-Tall Man.

* How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses).

*  I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) by scene.

* Forty years for me but still I’m putting up huge numbers.

* The Case against Mars.

* Recreating the ‘Left Behind’ Books From Memory.

* fMRIs (still) don’t work.

* Hitler’s alligator escapes justice.

* What-Is-Genre Hedgehog sees his shadow, another six years of “What is genre?”

* US states but every state is named like West Virginia.

* When UCB Tried To Pay Workers In Money They Could Only Spend At UCB.

* Civil War ends.

* Scientists say most likely number of contactable alien civilisations is 36. I can call the first six if someone else can take over the phone tree from there.

* “My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem.”

* This is how you get Skynet.

* And 2020, man, I just don’t know.

Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links

* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…

* Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality).

* “Speaking of Chip Delany, yesterday on his Facebook page he posted video of this amazing event with Octavia E. Butler. It was held at the Smithsonian in D.C. on November 19, 2004.”

* Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery.  It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.

Ordinary Americans have reorganized every aspect of how we live and work in about 15 days’ time, shifting everything around to take care of each other in the face of a serious collective threat. We keep doing it. It’s our rulers who are wildly inadequate to the moment, not us.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 2, 2020

* Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?

* Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.

* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.

* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.

* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.

* The One with the Coronavirus.

* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.

* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.

* The sea of blue mats is part of a temporary shelter for the homeless, who will be spaced at least six feet apart.

* Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.

* The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.

* Ain’t that America?

there could be dump trucks ferrying corpses covered in pustulent buboes down fifth avenue and a sizeable number of our compatriots will simultaneous deny it's real, say these people would have died anyways, celebrate it as a good thing, and express relief that it could be worse

— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 30, 2020

* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.

* Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.

* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.

* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.

* Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.

* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.

* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.

* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.

It might seem odd that a person running against Donald Trump refuses to attack him too harshly for his disastrous response to a crisis, but a Democratic ad featuring Reagan helpfully reminds us that Biden is from an entire political generation of losers https://t.co/64gkZAV13N

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 2, 2020

* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.

* Seconded.

* Free Comrade Britney!

* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.

* That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.

* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.

* How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.

* Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.

* America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.

City of Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht also told reporters there could be 40,000 to 50,000 Milwaukee voters at the 10-12 polling sites Tuesday.

That's at least 3,000 to 4,000 voters at each location.

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeck) April 1, 2020

* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!

* Policing and the English language.

* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”

* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.

* Computer, on screen.

* Being Greta Thunberg.

* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’

* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.

* Nailed it.

* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.

* The return of Rick and Morty.

* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.

Friday Links!

* My Octavia Butler book is free all this month from University of Illinois Press. Their new Kim Stanley Robinson book is also very good.

* Africanfuturism Defined.

* J.R.R. Tolkien crowds drive Paris staff to go on strike. Marquette helped make it happen.

* Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist.

* Promissory futures.

* I’ve been deep in edits for SFFTV’s special issue on Blade Runner and its legacy, so of course I had to check out this oral history of its Los Angeles.

* Amy Rose grew up loving Star Trek in a way no one else did… she thought it was real.

* Not all heroes wear pantaloons: Usher Who Keeps Colossal ‘Hamilton’ Bathroom Line Moving Becomes Viral Star.

* My Friend, Mr. Rogers.

* Halloween and Stranger Danger.

Here is my most humorless opinion: The concept of ghosts is an example of how we stigmatize victims of violence as much as perpetrators, and perceive them as a threat to our peaceful lives. The desired outcome is to make them go away, shut up, and let us forget about them again.

— Sandra Newman is objectively frightening (@sannewman) October 31, 2019

Xennials are called Calvinistas now https://t.co/8vhCm4X8vU

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019

 

* Let’s transform the city with scooters! *five seconds later* oh right

* 😬😬😬😬😬.

* Hate crime horror in Milwaukee. Hate in the Trump era.

* We’re really just going to sit around and pretend they’re not going to do this in three states in November 2020, I guess?

Stivers said he thought Bevin’s speech declining to concede to Beshear was “appropriate.” He said believes most of the votes that went to Libertarian John Hicks, who received about 2% of the total vote, would have gone to Bevin and made him the clear winner.

This is sub-“illegal immigrants stole the vote in California” bullshit and there’s no guarantee it won’t work.

* Bernie finds religion on immigration.

* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.

* Having exhausted all other options for profit, a health insurance company tries actually giving people the care they need. How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby.

* “OK Boomer”: not okay?

* OK Adorno.

* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!

* First I’m hearing of it, but it sounds bad: Scientists Declare A Climate Emergency, Warn Of ‘Untold Human Suffering.’

* Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity. Forged in Fire: California’s Lessons for a Green New Deal. California is experiencing an almost existential crisis. Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? What It Means to Evacuate. California Is Burning—Nationalize PG&E. Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest. The world is stuck with decades of new plastic it can’t recycle. How The Affair Turned to Climate Change and Science Fiction in Its Final Season.  Reflections on the Green New Deal. The Oregon Trail for a new — oh no. Lessons in survival.

I am sure you will be surprised to hear that in less than 48 hours a gigantic corporation has superseded Twitter’s PR-grabbing “no political ads” rule because Twitter really likes money https://t.co/rTyNE6xC3X

— August J. Pollak (@AugustJPollak) November 5, 2019

* “Really cheap powerful computing is great,” Goodman said, “but it also allows us to be racist faster and more efficiently than ever before.”

* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.

* Behind the scenes at Disney U.

* Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless. I could have told you that!

* Of course they kept this one behind the paywall: Can You Get Students Interested in the Humanities Again? These Colleges May Have It Figured Out.

* How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color.

* Redlining the humanities.

* The Williams English Boycott.

* Key elements of the campus panic narrative are drawn not just from unrepresentative anecdotes but from stories that are basically fake.

The narrative about totalitarian political correctness on college campuses HAS to be true, because otherwise the greatest political dangers would be coming almost exclusively from the right, and every smart pundit knows that's impossible.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) November 6, 2019

* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.

* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!

* We Don’t Need Longer School Days, We Need a Shorter Work Week.

A lot of people on my timeline like this proposal but my reaction is just pure dread on every level, from the thought of kids trapped at school literally all day to the inevitable revenue-neutral strategies to somehow wring an extra three hours of care out of the existing budgets https://t.co/2Q89HE4iTb

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019

* The culture of policing is deeply sick.

* Privacy experts say a warrant granted in Florida could set a precedent, opening up all consumer DNA sites to law enforcement agencies across the country.

* The only election result I need.

* The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets. The Tyranny of Economists. Liberalism according to The Economist. Neoliberalism? Never Heard of It.

* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?

* ‘It’s Time To Break Up Disney,’ Says Author Of New Book On Monopoly Power In America.

* Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

the liberatory potential of fandom lies in dispensing with any loyalty to the 'original' and the structure of media conglomerates that exploit it for profit. the most visible kind of fandom now is the opposite, astroturfed by disney

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 5, 2019

pitch: THE GOODFELLAS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019

👇 https://t.co/XFFoAOWz1p

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019

* All you people who are telling me this show is good are messing with me, right.

* Terminal whiteness.

* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.

* With a Laser, Researchers Say They Can Hack Alexa, Google Home or Siri. New York Times writer is shocked to see how much a social trust scoring system knows about her. Grand Theft Auto maker hasn’t paid corporation tax in 10 years. I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. In an often barren media landscape, Deadspin was an oasis of editorial independence and irreverence. So its ultra-rich owners killed it. Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up. Uber’s first homicide (that we know of). Screen time might be physically changing kids’ brains.

NTSB docs: Uber's radar detected Elaine Herzberg nearly 6 seconds before she was fatally struck, but “the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians” so it didn't react as if she were a person. https://t.co/M2B38i2Bq2 via @mikelaris

— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) November 6, 2019

* Friends? I’ll give you friends!

* Scenes from the class struggle in America.

* The Company That Branded Your Millennial Life Is Pivoting To Burnout.

* Ady Barkan Is Running Out of Time to Speak: As his ALS intensifies, the prominent single-payer activist is finding new ways to influence the politics of health care.

* My Year of Concussions.

* When the company that made your prosthetic feet won’t repair them.

* Don’t break up without reading this! A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day.

* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.

* McDonald’s apologises for ‘Sundae Bloody Sundae’ promotion.

* RIP, Hollywood Superman.

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a huge unforced error to try to replicate “Let It Go.”

* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.

* If Birds Left Tracks in the Sky, They’d Look Like This.

* I can never resist brutalist ruins.

* Watch how the 11foot8 bridge is being raised by 8 inches.

* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?

* Buckle up, motherpastas, because I’m gonna blow the lid off the tin of lies that is SpaghettiO’s.

* Some things are forbidden for a reason.

* And if we’re still alive then, we’ll be seeing Into the Spider-Verse 2 in April 2020.

Jul 24, 2019; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; A cat disrupts play in the second half between Tigres UANL and the Real Salt Lake during their Leagues Cup game at Rio Tinto Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Swinger-USA TODAY Sports TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – 13095176

Surprise! Thursday Links!

* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.

* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.

* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.

Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”

(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)

* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.

* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.

* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.

* Afrofuturism and solarpunk.

* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.

New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W

— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019

* After Deadspin.

* it’s a real feeling, to watch people you admire – entire crews of them – get fucked again and again by parasitic industries and self-important executives whose pockets are as deep as they themselves are shallow

the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.

* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.

* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.

* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.

By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.

This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019

that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019

“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019

* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.

* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.

* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.

* If Virginia ratifies the ERA next year, it would go back to Congress for what would be an utter shitshow fascinating vote.

* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.

* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.

* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.

* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.

* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.

His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.

“This has ruined our lives,” he said.

* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”

* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.

* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.

Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019

* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.

* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.

* Take the blue pill, and…

Friday Afternoon Links!

* Big story keeps getting bigger. ‘Total panic’ as ‘shell-shocked’ White House struggles to find impeachment footing. Madness at Fox News as Trump Faces Impeachment. As Republicans Face Impeachment Dilemma, Romney is a Lonely Voice of Concern. Impeach Barr too. Innocent Man Calls for Whistleblower to Be Executed. This Guy Truly Has No Idea What He’s Talking About. This Guy Too. Needle already moving. Impeachment Shouldn’t Be the Goal of Impeachment.

* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism.

* Pattern Recognition but real and completely depressing: The Pee Tape Is Real, but It’s Fake.

* Whoever wins, we lose: With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other.

* Wall Street vultures cutting ads for Warren now.

* Into every generation a Slayer is born: The harmless-looking girl… who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars: WWII heroine who joined the Dutch resistance aged 14, dies aged 92.

* For all its flaws, I liked Ad Astra more than a lot of my circle. Abigail Nussbaum gets at a lot of the reason why.

* Gollancz announces a £4,000 prize for sf writing by people of color.

* Grad programs still chronically lying about where their grads end up.

* White Borrowers? Almost Paid Off. Black Borrowers? Still Indebted.

* Greta Thunberg isn’t the only trailblazing young climate leader. Activists from the Amazon to Nigeria share their ideas for battling the climate crisis. Teen girls are leading the climate strikes and helping change the face of environmentalism. Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg. Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men? Greta Thunberg became a climate activist not in spite of her autism, but because of it. For people with Asperger’s, a role model emerges in Greta Thunberg. As an Autistic Femme, I Love Greta Thunberg’s “Resting Autism Face.” US politics is stuck. Can the climate movement shake it loose? I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth.

* Peace in our time: Sony and Marvel Strike a New Deal to Keep Spider-Man in the MCU.

* Will there ever be a cure for chronic pain?

* Cash/Consent: The war on sex work.

* Trees won’t save us either.

* Reunite.

* You’re It, Charlie Brown.

* The creator of the labradoodle says he made ‘Frankenstein’s monster.’

* Spotted on the web: Games and Culture syllabus 2019.

* Trailer for documentary very specifically tailored to my Northern New Jersey roots: Class Action Park.

* Academic freedom under siege.

* That was fast: McDonald’s rolls out meatless Beyond burgers in Canada.

* Quantum Supremacy FAQ.

* There’s a serious blood plasma shortage, please consider donating.

* Wisconsin, you should be ashamed of yourself.

* Marquette program helps students with autism adjust to college life.

* Big mood: Kufungisisa, the local term for depression, is literally translated into “thinking too much”.

* And news of Tom Brady’s omnipotence does throw me for a loop.

Monday Morning Links!

* CFP: Art as Liberation in the Black Fantastic.

* Fredric Jameson donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries.

* Tolkien report: Tolkien’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women’s rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West. I’m fascinated by Lobelia because as far as I can tell she is the one and only character in LOTR to receive the opportunity to repent and then actually do so (rather than immediately betraying the forgivers) — so I certainly take the “misogyny” part (it’s undeniable), but her becoming a reformed philanthropist after the Scouring of the Shire remains interesting (and probably still misogynistic in a different way).

* The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving.

* Factchecking yet another English major takedown.

* A Complete-ish List of Grad Students / Postdocs / Adjuncts / Alt-Acs / Whoevers in SF, Fantasy, and Horror Studies.

* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?

* Truly bizarre list of the top 100 films of the 21st century, almost tailor-made to annoy every single person viewing it.

* Employers have become obsessed with improving the health of their employees. But does it do anyone any good?

* Naomi Klein: ‘We are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism.’ The US and Brazil have agreed to promote private-sector development in the Amazon, during a meeting in Washington on Friday. Our lethal air. Cold war, hot planet. There used to be ice off the north coast of Alaska in the summertime. Now there’s not. How climate change affects mental health. This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event.

“what was called normalcy was a hyperviolent multi-generational ponzi scheme rendered inoperable by accelerating ecological crisis” https://t.co/IPUGLl9ArZ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 14, 2019

* Trump in all things big and small: USPS will leave the Universal Postal Union on October 17, ending 144 yrs of involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail & postal parcels between countries.

* Can’t imagine anyone having any objection to this.

* Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid.

* What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down?

* Shots fired, Milwaukee.

Fantastic Four #1 established a lot of canon, but perhaps none so firmly as Reed Richards' inability to read a room. pic.twitter.com/FvZ0i8XgFp

— (((Jay Edidin))) (@NotLasers) September 15, 2019

* Oh, so there’s my problem.

* Socialism and the Self-Checkout Machine.

* When a woman ran for president in 1872.

* Only one way to get to Robot Heaven. I say let the robots have their turn.

* Shock Survey Says People Want to See Less Trailers Before Movies.

* All power to the union: Nearly 50,000 GM auto workers go on strike for first time since 2007.

* The John Mulaney profile you didn’t know you needed.

* Teenager’s memory resets every two hours after being kicked in the head, meaning she wakes up thinking every day is 11 June.

* Human corpses keep moving for over a year after death, scientist say.

* Veering dangerously close here to someone who did teach me to be weird.

* How not to mourn Toni Morrison.

* And American Pharoah has done more to resist the Trump administration in a single afternoon than the Democrats have done in the last nine months.

Wednesday Night Links!

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

Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019

* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.

* The coming death of just about every rock legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Liberalism can’t defend itself.

* Whose Apollo Program?

* Another world is possible.

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

* The great enrollment crash.

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

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

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

— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019

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

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019

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

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019

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

* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.

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

* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.

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

— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019

* Another free speech exception.

* Inside Liberty University.

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

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

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

— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019

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

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

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

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

* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.

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

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

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

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

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Agribusiness against the Amazon.

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

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

* Today in the wisdom of markets.

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

* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”

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

* And speaking of white fragility.

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

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019

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

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

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

* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.

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

* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.

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

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

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

* Imagine if we had a democracy.

* Trump’s already cancelling elections.

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

* The case for changing the voting age to zero.

* The Fall of the Meritocracy.

* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.

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

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

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

* extremely normal very normal

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

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019

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

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

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

* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.

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

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

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

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

* The struggle to save Day-Glo.

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

* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.

* A history of Tetris randomizers.

* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.

* 44 African Architectural Styles.

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

* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.

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

* A people’s history of labor history.

* They solved the Geedis mystery.

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

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

* Cheese can’t fake the funk.

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

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

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

* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Night Links! Apologies to Anyone Who Actually Tries to Read This Post!

* CFP: “New Worlds of Speculation.” CFP: Star Trek Novel Worlds. CFP: Slowness. CFP: SFRA News associate editors. And in case you missed it: SFFTV is finally looking for book, DVD, and video game reviewers again.

* Speaking of SFRA: The 2020 conference will be held at Indiana University from July 8-11, 2020.

* Tenure-track job: Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program.

* As If: Alternative Histories from Then to Now.

* Syllabus: Philosophy of Middle-Earth. Microsyllabus: Animal Studies.

* Collateral Journal has a special issue on the weird, mostly focused on Vandermeer.

* For my “Jesuits in Space!” syllabus: Why do Catholic priests keep popping up in sci-fi? Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy.

* What South Asian SF can tell us about our world.

* What will Palestine be like in 2048? Writers turn to sci-fi for the answer.

* From Black Panther to Tade Thompson: why Afrofuturism is taking over sci-fi.

* ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing.

* Brexit vs. Roko’s basilisk.

* Let’s talk about peeing in space.

* Utopia for realists: The case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek.

* Another starry-eyed young writer discovers that Columbia School of the Arts is a scam. Still angry after all these years!

* College and the future of work. The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? ‘Dire Financial Straits’: A Portrait of a Desperate University That Made All the Wrong Bets. ‘Better, Not Bigger’: As Private Colleges Hunger for Students, One University Slims Down.

* This historic map of 6 million syllabi reveals how college is changing.

* Chaos theory as career counseling. And on a more down to Earth level: 8 Tips to Improve Your CV.

* How Should Professors Cite Their Transgender Colleagues’ Work Produced Under Past Identities? Academe Is Trying to Figure It Out.

* All Along the Ivory Tower.

* Generous Worlds: Rethinking the Fate of the American University.

Securing a better future almost certainly means working outside established institutional and administrative power channels. That means labor unions and persistent collective action by the people who actually allow the university to function day to day, and by the publics that surround it. Fitzpatrick has little to say about such action, aside from some late, quick references to the recent wave of K–12 teachers strikes. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would entail a fundamental restructuring of schools, running them like truly democratic, far less hierarchical collectives, and that runs counter to their institutional history. Undoing our present system would be a massive undertaking in both material and conceptual terms, and I fail to see how anything less than union action would make it possible. There is reason for hope, though, as unionization is beginning to win victories for adjunct faculty across the United States.

* ‘Everybody Is Panicking’: Thousands of Alaska Students Scramble With Scholarship Money in Jeopardy. Alaska Lawmakers Fail to Avert Sweeping Cuts to the University System. Here’s What Happens Next. Facing unprecedented state cuts, faculty members at one branch of the University of Alaska system assert that another campus should absorb most of the financial pain. Its peers aren’t pleased. Despair, rage.

* UC Berkeley Removed From US News College Rankings For Misreporting Statistics.

* But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate? One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.

* The Alaska village where every cop has been convicted of domestic violence.

* Part two of the great ESPN expose on kids sports: Under the knife: Exposing America’s youth basketball crisis.

* America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. This Year’s Wild, Wet Spring Is Feeding Massive Blobs of Toxic Algae. ‘Toxic Stew’ Stirred Up by Disasters Poses Long-Term Danger, New Findings Show. We Were Already Over 350 ppm When I Was Born. All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe. Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis. Climate change and hurricanes. California’s Wildfires Are 500 Percent Larger Due to Climate Change. Huge swathes of the Arctic on fire, ‘unprecedented’ satellite images show. Beautiful, isn’t it. 3M admits to releasing toxic chemicals into the Tennessee River for over a decade. How Can You Tell When a Glacier Is Dead? Who needs food, anyway? Every movie is a climate change movie. Climate change is making people suicidal. Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis. “I spend my billions on space because we’re destroying Earth.”

imagine being a billionaire and funneling all your stolen money into a fantasy plan to colonize mars like a cartoon villain instead of just like, planting trees

— ghoulia👻 (@c00lia) July 24, 2019

Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 20, 2019

The glacier "Ok" used to be a glacier but lost its status as such in 2014 when it had shrunk too much. This is a brand new memorial shield in its honour. #climatechange pic.twitter.com/0YlIewvDJe

— Olafur Margeirsson (@IcelandicEcon) July 19, 2019

“the face app reveals a desire for a future which will never arrive” -just a friendly Wednesday afternoon text exchange

— Sarah Osment (@sm_osment) July 17, 2019

* To take one step back: the climate already is hotter than ever before in our species’ history. The entire history of human evolution (the development of agriculture, of civilization, of everything we take as familiar facts of our social interactions, our political systems, our cultural inheritance, our biological processes) all developed under climate conditions that no longer pertain. It’s now as if we’ve collectively landed on a different planet, and we need to figure out how many things that we’ve brought with us can survive in this new world, and how many of them will have to be remodeled or remade. Now add on top of that the fact that so far we only have reached 1.1 degrees of warming. We should expect to see at least two (probably three, and maybe four) times as much warming still this century. So our lives will get dramatically different even from where we find them right now. Everything we still take for granted actually will come up for question.

* Cybergothic Acid Communism Now.

* Mr. Rogers and radical theology.

* How America Got to ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Immigration: The Inside Story. Six officials at nonprofit Southwest Key, which runs migrant child shelters, earned more than $1 million in 2017. Trump’s Border Patrol Chief Was In Secret, Racist Facebook Group. Autopsy Offers Jarring New Details About the Death of a 16-Year-Old Guatemalan Boy. A Border Kept Him From His Daughter. He Came Only in Time to Say Goodbye. The Man Killed In An Attack On An ICE Jail Said He Was Fighting “Against The Forces Of Evil.” A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. Migrants Shout “No Shower!” as Pence Tours Overcrowded, Foul-Smelling Detention Center. Video. More video. AOC in impassioned testimony: Children were separated from parents ‘in front of American flags.’ Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children could be detained indefinitely. What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic.’ More. 3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say. On her first day in office Elizabeth Warren pledges to start a commission to investigate “crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.” Immigration Judges Are Railing Against A Plan To Replace Court Interpreters With Videos. Trump Seeking to Effectively Outsource Asylum Seekers to Guatemala. U.S. consulates around the world are “blatantly abusing their discretion” to stop legal immigration, lawyers say. A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks, his lawyer says. Held in a cramped space with 60 men, he’d lost 26 pounds and been denied showers. ICE dragged a man out of his car after breaking the window and threatened to shoot a nearby witness who asked for their warrant. Border agent in Clint accused of harassing mother of 12-year-old migrant who was in custody. Expedited removal to be expanded to apply everywhere within the U.S. (not just 100-mile border zone) and to anyone not in the U.S. more than two years. ‘Never again means close the camps’: Jews protest ICE across the country. More on this one. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s decision to speak out against Holocaust analogies is a moral threat. 70 Catholics arrested in D.C. protest over Trump immigration policies. Bishops back Catholics arrested at Capitol for protesting treatment of immigrant children. Ahead of ICE raids, Miami advocacy groups set up secret shelters for immigrants in fear. ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds. ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all. Autopsy report for a sixteen year old who died in a CBP shelter. Now that’s what I call the Anthropocene™.

https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1149375043182505985

Children were hungry, children were traumatized. They consistently cried and some wept in their interviews with me. One 6 yo girl, detained all alone, could only say "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared" over and over again. She couldn't even say her own name.

— Brandi Buchman (@BBuchman_CNS) July 12, 2019

Forget about history; it’s like we didn’t learn anything from every single Twilight Zone episode.

— (((Goldwasser))) (@PurestRobin) July 16, 2019

* Cops can do anything. Really, anything. St. Louis police union asks officers to post Punisher logo in solidarity with cops under investigation.

* Penguins ignore police, return to sushi shop.

Qualified immunity is so out of control that these cases barely register. But here's another one from the 9th Circuit: Cops got qualified immunity for stealing someone's money because it isn't "clearly established" that cops can't steal your money. https://t.co/YSFqBraiHO

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) July 25, 2019

* Democrats Continue Search For The Smoking Gun They Already Have. On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1: How they got away with it. Nancy Pelosi Has Lost Control.

* It’s funny when people say the Democrats have no spines. You guys, they are a bunch of millionaires whose campaigns are financed by other millionaires. They have spines, it’s just that their job isn’t to stand up to the Republicans, it is to stand up to you.

That two-tweet sequence really is remarkable. "Aha! This demonstrates that the president's entire project has always been about white supremacy! (a beat) I reiterate my call to him to work with me on the kind of immigration policy we can both agree on"

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 14, 2019

my 32-year-old self strongly relates to this pic.twitter.com/AM9py4b7t9

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 25, 2019

Pelosi Concerned Outspoken Progressive Flank Of Party Could Harm Democrats’ Reputation As Ineffectual Cowards https://t.co/bF91vZf4oy pic.twitter.com/Zna5ZvvFZH

— The Onion (@TheOnion) July 25, 2019

 

* The world’s saddest, most pathetic losers.

It's tempting to think "oh man how can they be this stupid," but the truth is Pelosi and Schumer want McConnell to use the debt ceiling against them. They want the excuse to go back to their base and say "sorry, we tried, but those damn Republicans won't let us do anything." https://t.co/BYEqppv2jo

— derek davison (@dwdavison) July 22, 2019

* What Jane Mayer Gets Wrong About Al Franken. Al Franken Really Wants You to Know How Clumsy He Is. Al Franken did the right thing by resigning.

* Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign.

* How 13 Rejected States Would Have Changed The Electoral College.

* How a fractured family may have changed the course of American politics.

somewhere or another William Gibson describes the role of the science fiction writer as predicting what happened two years ago https://t.co/uDuTBck6kg

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 25, 2019

* For those interested in the extreme rightward drift in the GOP, this podcast is a must. It delves into the activities of WA-GOP state representative Matt Shea. If the party will tolerate this guy, it’ll tolerate pretty much anything.

* The future of Trumpism is more erudite — and just as frightening.

* ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms.

* Trump claims the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants. He’s not wrong!

* The end of the Supreme Court.

* If the South didn’t exist, the North would have to invent it. How segregation keeps poor students of color out of whiter, richer nearby districts.

* Teenage pricks.

* The Socialist Network: Inside DSA’s struggle to move into the political mainstream. Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. The Billionaires Are Against Bernie — and the Rest of Us. Why Did Millennials Turn Left?

* 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic. A remote Virginia valley has been flooded by prescription opioids. Louvre Removes Sackler Family Name From Its Walls.

* The Epstein files: Jeffrey Epstein paid $350K to ‘influence’ possible co-conspirators: prosecutors. Jeffrey Epstein’s High Society Contacts. How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women. Jeffrey Epstein found nearly unconscious in NYC jail cell after possible suicide attempt. Jeffrey Epstein Taught at Dalton. His Behavior Was Noticed. How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight.

* In this way, pedophile conspiracies act as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order. This is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate to McMartin to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the dawn of major religions. The demons may take different forms, but the conspiracy is basically the same: Our house is under attack.

* Today in the staggering efficiency of capitalism.

* MLMs are cults that prey on moms, Mormons and the military.

* Twilight of Netflix. Perhaps we won’t miss it.

Netflix’s metrics-driven approach shows up in other ways. For instance, it now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.

* Nothing gold can stay dead.

* Peak America: “Emmett Till memorial in photo of gun-toting Mississippi students will be made bulletproof.”

* Unless it’s this one: a school district refusing donations to double-down on its threat to take people’s children over unpaid lunch debt.

* Look, there’s a lot of Peak America to go around.

* MAGA Bomber’s Lawyers Blame Trump, Sean Hannity for His Radicalization.

* Colorado abuse hotline emails went unchecked for 4 years.

* Turning 26 Is A Potential Death Sentence For People With Type 1 Diabetes In America.

* Trump Administration Moves to End Food Stamps for 3 Million People.

* My Frantic Life as a Cab-Dodging, Tip-Chasing, Food App Deliveryman. DoorDash Is Proof of How Easy It Is to Exploit Workers When Their Boss Is an Algorithm.

* Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings.

* Inside the Wildly Popular Forum Where Landlords Plot to Screw You Over.

* “A high school gave 336 students fake AP exams when the district didn’t have funding to pay for the real ones. Students didn’t find out until real scores were posted online.”

* “Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists.”

* The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires.

* When the Soviet Union Paid Pepsi in Warships.

In 1989, the cash-strapped Soviet Union paid Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate & a destroyer in exchange for $3 bln worth of Pepsi. This caused Pepsi to become the 6th largest military power in the world for a moment, before they sold the fleet for scrap recycling. pic.twitter.com/zlsPLEV7re

— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) July 1, 2019

* Remains of 9,000-year-old Neolithic settlement unearthed outside Jerusalem.

* Using salt circle motor runes to trap car AI.

* Kodak and the cold war.

* Ending period ‘taboo’ gave USA marginal gain at World Cup.

* Meth-gators in Alabama!

* And elsewhere on the gator beat. More gators! More!

giant alligator flick Crawl is bad but actually good bc a) rising sea levels have made its setting broadly relatable & b) it's a competent, unpretentious genre movie, a dying mode that might be extinct in 10 years

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) July 16, 2019

* You say “brain-eating amoeba” like it’s not a big deal!

* Conspiracy corner: House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them.

* Hacking the insulin pump.

* Dystopia now: Instacart Hounds Workers to Take Jobs That Aren’t Worth It.

* How the retweet ruined the Internet.

* Archaeology of the 99%.

* The Millennial nuns.

* Marvel got Natalie Portman to come back! Dr. Strange 2 sounds bonkers! Star Trek: Picard sounds… good? Call no movie woke till you’ve actually seen it. I’m not ready to predict anything about Watchmen either.

* Giving Tawny Newsome both Lower Decks and the official Star Trek podcast is a truly shameless bid for my attention.

It won;t happen but I always thought, what with the Picard series getting press, that a good plot point for a future trek is a split between a defeated but hostile Borg Collective and a newly emergent Borg Cooperative.

— John Leavitt 🌹 (@LeavittAlone) July 21, 2019

* Stranger and stranger: Quentin Tarantino just might go out on a Star Trek movie. I’m now fully convinced it will rule. I haven’t been able to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet (that’s Monday night), but I have been enjoying Quentin Tarantino’s Feature Presentation.

* A Different Handmaid’s Tale: On Joanne Ramos’s “The Farm.”

* How Japanese RPGs Inspired A New Generation Of Fantasy Authors.

* How Inmates Play Tabletop RPGs in Prisons Where Dice Are Contraband.

* Duncan Jones talks Moon, ten years on.

* When the Sims was(n’t) queer.

* Sexism and the car crash dummy.

* Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit.

* There is only one professor of future crime, and that is I, DOCTOR CRIME!

* It’s interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt. More on the return of Malthus.

* Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955.

* “I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications.”

* I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.

* The Ultra-Rich Are Ultra-Conservative.

been saying it for years, and will keep saying it: anomized precarity and a privatized forever war have offered a more fertile breeding ground for fascism – and stronger obstacles to resisting it – than a mass mobilized world war followed by a global depression ever could

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) July 27, 2019

* He did.

* And the good news is: We can’t lose!

Tuesday Afternoon Links!

* SFFTV 12.2 is here, with articles on Afrofuturism, time-travel surveillance cinema, Avatar, and the Anthropocene…

* CFP: Tolkien/Whedon.

* A people’s history of New Coke.

* The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage.

* Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.

* Are we living in a simulated universe? Here’s what scientists say. Scientists are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.

* Ugly academic war ends with unprecedented apology from USC, $50-million settlement.

* The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim. Alaska is having an environmental and political meltdown. Alaskan glaciers melt at fastest pace in centuries. Trump Administration Is Suppressing Science and Public Opinion to Drill the Arctic Refuge. Six shocking climate events that happened around the world this week. Are parts of India becoming too hot for humans? A Ferocious Heat in Delhi. India staring at a water apocalypse. All Mississippi Beaches Close Due To Toxic Algae Bloom. The Internet Is Drowning. Fish die-offs in Wisconsin expected to double by 2050, quadruple by 2100, report says. Breaching a ‘carbon threshold’ could lead to mass extinction. And sure let’s go back to killing all the bees while we’re at it.

my brother just told me captain planet's not real but his enemies are and i felt it in my bones

— i'm tired (@artboypolitico) July 5, 2019

There are more LEGO figures in the world than humans, and they will last longer then any person alive today. #Anthropocene #plastic https://t.co/tJxkkyAqVb

— Simon Lewis (@SimonLLewis) July 8, 2019

 

* Fear of immigration raids looms as plans for ICE ‘family operation’ move forward. FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches. (81% of ‘suspects’ flagged by Met’s police facial recognition technology innocent, independent report says.) Hungry, Scared and Sick: Inside the Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex. ‘It’s a Terrible Existence’: The Crisis of Emergency Dialysis Care for Undocumented Immigrants. ICE deports dozens of Cambodian refugees. Officials expect Trump to try and add citizenship question to the census via executive action this week — an idea officials say was not a serious one as recently as Wednesday. Attorney General Barr tells SC reporters he’s found a legal recourse on Census question. Trump Lied to the Supreme Court, and Four Justices Don’t Care. Whatever’s coming, the career folks couldn’t abide.

[ten thousand years later. earth is a smoking cinder. dead dust and ash coats the world] could we be on the brink of a constitutional crisis https://t.co/wqNuPGfkJb

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 8, 2019

* On the migrant crisis, European governments are failing the first test of climate change.

* The Postcolonial Case for Rethinking Borders.

* Amazon Workers Plan Prime Day Strike at Minnesota Warehouse.

* Democratic candidates’ school integration plans, explained.

* Democrats will never allow the system to be reformed.

* But this time around, I don’t think 2007–8 produced anything. The resulting policies were, if anything, even more neoliberal. But the problem is that neoliberalism has lost its attractiveness and legitimacy, so is now enforced by authoritarian and right-populist means.

* The Millennial Condition: History, Revolution, and Generational Analysis.

* To see how the Koch brothers’ free-market utopia operates, look no further than Corpus Christi.

* I’ve always been cold on Russiagate, but I’ll believe any conspiracy theory you have to sell me about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained. The Mystery Around Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune and How He Made It. How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime. Epstein indictment renews questions about earlier case handled by Trump Cabinet official. When Jeffrey Epstein Joked About Sex Abuse. DA knew Jeffrey Epstein was a dangerous pedophile when arguing for leniency. Flashback to 2003. Inside Epstein’s $56 Million Mansion: Photos of Bill Clinton, Woody Allen and Saudi Crown Prince. Barr won’t recuse, again.

real glass half full feelings about the way the guy who was openly sex trafficking for the ultra-rich and powerful has finally been arrested after decades of just completely getting away with it

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 7, 2019

* So much corruption you can’t even keep it all straight: Investigation Intensifies Into Top Trump Fund-raiser.

* Nancy Pelosi Has Chosen Her War, and It’s With Her Own Party’s Future.

* Haunted by the Reagan era.

* Progressive Boomers Are Making It Impossible For Cities To Fix The Housing Crisis.

* The Bernie-Warren Suicide Pact to Save America.

* Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It. Don’t Count on U.S. Regulators to Make Self-Driving Cars Safe for Pedestrians.

* MSP troopers blow through stop sign, arrest driver that ran into them.

* Most Americans like to think of their country as a meritocracy, a system that rewards hard work and intelligence over privilege. But if you look at how things actually work, @sarahrlnrd argues, it’s clear the U.S. is more of an aristocracy…

* Far from Home saving the MCU from itself.

* MLMs Are A Nightmare For Women And Everyone They Know.

* One woman quits coloring her gray hair and investigates the human and environmental costs of this contentious female beauty standard.

* When Philip K. Dick turned to Christianity.

* Chernobyl and Russiagate.

* Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now.

* Full circe.

* When a car crashed outside of tiny Tonopah, Nevada, volunteer EMS workers raced to the scene in minutes. But ever since Tonopah’s hospital closed, the town is now hours away from the nearest emergency room.

* Another animal intelligence roundup.

* Zoos Called It a ‘Rescue.’ But Are the Elephants Really Better Off? Despite mounting evidence that elephants find captivity torturous, some American zoos still acquire them from Africa — aided by a tall tale about why they needed to leave home.

* Principal Refused to Call the Holocaust a Fact. Five seconds later: Principal Who Tried to Stay ‘Politically Neutral’ About Holocaust Is Removed.

* Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt.

* Damn, that’s dark.

* On average, older adults spend over half their waking hours alone.

* A retired teacher found some seahorses off Long Beach. Then he built a secret world for them.

* The Rise of the Professional Dungeon Master.

* Baseball has a home-run problem.

* Will Impossible Burgers be the norm for Gen Z?

* And if aliens call, what should we do? Scientists want your opinion.

July 3 Links! Accept No Substitutes!

(an addendum)

* CFP for ICFA 2020: Expanding the Archive.

* Forgot to link this yesterday: If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department.

* Cory Doctorow: What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages?

I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exer­cises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.

Fake news is an instrument for measuring trauma, and the epistemological incoherence that trauma creates – the justifiable mistrust of the establishment that has nearly murdered our planet and that insists that making the richest among us much, much richer will benefit everyone, eventually.

* ‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out.

* Medievalism goes to war with itself.

* Milwaukee County absolutely determined to destroy itself.

* In the world’s northernmost town, temperatures have risen by 4C, devastating homes, wildlife and even the cemetery. Will the rest of the planet heed its warning? Welcome to the fastest-heating place on Earth.

* Amazon destruction accelerates 60% to one and a half soccer fields every minute. Bolsonaro is the greatest crisis on the planet right now and everyone has agreed to just let it happen.

* ‘Families belong together’: Hundreds gather in Milwaukee to protest migrant detention centers.

* Watchdog Slams ‘Overcrowding’ At DHS Detention Centers.

* Trump’s Apparent Decision to Drop the Citizenship Question Is the Biggest Legal Defeat of His Presidency.

* Another ICE detainee has died in custody.

* Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.

* ‘Unprecedented in Our History’: One State Is on the Verge of Slashing Higher-Ed Funding, Leaving Public Colleges in a Panic. Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments.

* Will Donald Trump’s Fourth of July Parade Break the Law?

* Must have absolutely broken their hearts: FBI claims it lost file on neo-Nazi website Stormfront ‘after a reasonable search.’

* The Single Most Reliable Recession Indicator of the Past 50 Years Has Officially Started Blaring.

* The madness of factchecking. The hits against Sanders this week are especially incredible even by factchecking’s already low standards.

* Teenager Accused of Rape Deserves Leniency Because He’s From a ‘Good Family,’ Judge Says.

This is completely infuriating. This boy filmed himself raping her, called it rape in a text to friends, and the judge *still* decided it wasn't rape. https://t.co/WlLudz2t85

— Laila Lalami (@LailaLalami) July 3, 2019

It’s an underdiscussed problem in America that some huge percentage of its judges are bug-nuts irrational and irresponsible, just wholly abusing their position to make up rules on the fly.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019

* The Democrats Aren’t a Left-Wing Party — They Just Play One on TV. And a truly evergreen tweet.

The Democratic Party is essentially an elaborate set of psychological defense mechanisms for the American bourgeoisie

— Roger Bellin (@rogerbellin) July 13, 2016

 

At some point people will have to begin acknowledging that the role of Democrats is to keep the rabble from impeding the lucrative and murderous actions of the elite. This self-pleasing pretense that our leaders are forced to do nothing is pathetic.

— Susan of Texas (@SusanofTexas) July 2, 2019

* We had our time. The world belongs to the humanzees now.

* Sympathy for the devil.

* Why did octopuses become smart?

* Couldn’t hurt.

* They say time is the fire in which we burn.

* At least Discovery season three starts filming in two weeks, which means I should be good and disappointed by the end of the year.