Posts Tagged ‘alcoholism’
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.
* How Much Does An Adjunct Actually Make?
* 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?
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
* 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.
* 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.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 16, 2019 at 8:10 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #The Resistance, adjuncts, Afrofuturism, air pollution, Alaska, alcoholism, America, apocalypse, art, automation, Brazil, CFPs, chess, climate barbarism, climate change, climate fascism, corruption, democracy, depression, diets, Donald Trump, English majors, Fantastic Four, film, Fredric Jameson, general election 2020, grief, health insurance, ice sheet collapse, IRS, John Mulaney, liberation, Lord of the Rings, mass extinction, memory, mental health, Mike Pence, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, misogyny, mortality, mourning, movie trailers, MTV, music, neoliberalism, normalcy, obituary, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, post office, recession, robots, science fiction, science fiction studies, sexism, socialism, standup comedy, the 1980s, the 2000s, the Amazon, the archives, The Cars, the Midwest, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, UC Irvine, unions, voting, weird science, wellness
Wednesday Links!
* Marquette now requires permission for on-campus protests. An Open Letter Opposed to Marquette U.’s Anti-Demonstration Policy.
Two aspect of Marquette's new protest policy worth noting:
1) All protests must be approved by the administration and in the designated protest era. This recalls the "free speech zones" of the Trump era. Essentially: denude protest of power by hiding it. pic.twitter.com/zh8aG9ztUm— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) August 28, 2019
* Elsewhere in academics behaving badly: Professors rally behind MIT Media Lab director after Epstein funding scandal.
* The Quantitative Easing of the Humanities.
The dangerous essence of the humanities is loyal criticism of the institutions one serves.
— William Pannapacker (@pannapacker) August 27, 2019
* Most-Expensive 4-Year Private Nonprofit Institutions, 2018-19. Impressive for Harvey Mudd to be so committed to that last three dollars to tick just over $75,000/year.
* College Board Drops Its ‘Adversity Score’ For Each Student After Backlash.
✍ by @tomgauld pic.twitter.com/FQ3EkVW12M
— New Scientist (@newscientist) August 26, 2019
* The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials.
* I just knew it would be something like this.
* This Professor Compared a Columnist to a Bedbug. Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost. A Q&A With the Man Who Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Bret Stephens’s “bedbug” meltdown, explained. Who Gets to Speak Freely? Aaron Bady goes all the way back to 2005 for a good old-fashioned blog post.
Rorschach's journal, August 27, 2019: “Time to do what I long ago promised to do. Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deact
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019
the thing you have to understand is that university administrations absolutely despise faculty and will gleefully seek out any opportunity to hurt them no matter how petty or embarrassing https://t.co/VZ1b9PotBD
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2019
* Speaking of the mystery of free speech: Incoming Harvard Freshman Deported After Visa Revoked.
“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” he wrote. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.”
* Southern California police arrest 3 middle school students for inciting a riot.
* Photos: The Burning Amazon Rainforest. The basic premise of geoengineering is that it will be easier to get the planetary atmospheric and ecological systems to change the way they work than to get the capitalist economy to change the way it works. It is immoral to have climate change in the era of babies. Wildfires and Floods Push Russia to Revise Its Stance on Climate Change. Let’s just spray trillions of tons of snow on Antarctica?
it cost $350 million to make Avengers: Endgame https://t.co/WOdh4fEcxN
— flglmn (@flglmn) August 26, 2019
The US spends $32 million on its wars – per hour. https://t.co/0oetA6fFod
— Amir (@AmirAminiMD) August 26, 2019
That’s what climate change is. https://t.co/ooGMmSbIw7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 24, 2019
* The Affair, climate change, and the new realism.
* Florida Marine vet teacher on leave after telling students he would ‘be the best school shooter.’
* Bigotry and hate are more linked to mass shootings than mental illness, experts say.
* Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S. (A rebuttal.) Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart. Trump Allies Reportedly Set Up Network to Smear Journalists Ahead of Election. He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
* The Entire Plane of the Milky Way Captured in a Single Photo. Keep scrolling, there’s more!
* A reading list on alcoholism.
* School Administration Reminds Female Students Bulletproof Vests Must Cover Midriff.
* Native American Lacrosse Teams Reported Racial Abuse. Then Their League Expelled Them.
* When your kids start beating you in games.
* Where the candidates campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Understands Democracy Better Than Republicans Do.
* When you’re extremely on message.
* Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, a county coroner is forced to confirm. He’s in on it.
* Johnson & Johnson must pay over $572 million for its role in Oklahoma opioid crisis, judge rules.
* Drug prices in 2019 are surging, with hikes at 5 times inflation.
As 1/4 of diabetics ration their insulin to survive, here's how much Pharma execs rake in:
Regeneron: $118M
Merck: $49M
Pfizer: $47M
Johnson & Johnson: $46M
Abbott: $32M
Gilead: $22M
Eli Lilly: $14MPharma's greed is as lethal as the diseases they’re supposed to be treating.
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 23, 2019
* 2 California towns where chickens have free range.
* Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say.
* A growing army of ‘Airbnb’ police gets paid to expose the addresses of homeshare hosts.
* Human-guided burrito bots raise questions about the future of robo-delivery.
* More evidence of YouTube rightwing radicalization. In a study of >79 million YouTube comments, @manoelribeiro et. al. shows that a high % of people who now comment on Alt-Right videos used to comment exclusively on IDW or Alt-lite videos.
* ProPublica found that – despite the TSA saying it is committed to treating all passengers equally and fairly – five per cent of civil rights complaints against the TSA related to the treatment of trans passengers, despite trans people making up less than one per cent of the US population.
* Lots of nerds *think* they like science fiction because of the technology and perditions.
* Marvel Comics Just Retconned the Entire Vietnam War.
* There Are People Who Think The West Invaded Iraq Over a Stargate.
* Mystery Deepens Around Newly Detected Ripples in Space-Time.
* “We are in a mass delusion that it’s all Gary, that he’s the father of role-playing games,” he said. “Humans do not like to admit they’ve been hornswoggled, lied to, cheated, or fooled.”
* We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture. The Campbell Award gets a new name.
* How Do We Colonize the Moon?
* And submitted for your approval: the new culture industry.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 28, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adversity score, Airbnb, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alt-right, Amazon, America, Andrew Luck, Antarctica, apps, artificial intelligence, bedbugs, bigotry, Bolsonaro, Bret Stephens, burritos, California, cannibalism, capitalism, CBP, chickens, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, class struggle, Congress, cosmology, culture industry, Dairy Queen, democracy, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drugs, Dungeons and Dragons, eating meat, education, Electoral College, football, free speech, games, geoengineering, graduate student movements, guns, Harvard, health, Heroes, How the University Works, ice, Iraq, Islamophobia, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, John W. Campbell, journalism, kids today, lacrosse, longevity, look upon my works ye mighty and despair, Lyft, maps, Marquette, Marvel Comics, mass shootings, Milky Way, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT, Monopoly, MS-13, my scholarly empire, Native American issues, neoliberalism, nerds, opioids, optimism, outer space, OxyContin, pardons, parenting, politics, pop culture, prescription drugs, protest, race, racism, radicalization, realism, recession, research, robots, Russia, SAT, science, science fiction, scooters, sex work, Siberia, Sleep Dealer, standardized testing, Stargate, the Amazon, the Constitution, the humanities, the Moon, the university in ruins, Tom Gauld, Uber, unions, Vietnam, visas, voting, white supremacy, wildfires, worst financial crisis since the last one, YouTube, Zeel, zunguzungu
Train Travel Day, Which Means A Whole Trainload of Links
* Two talks down, two to go! My Worlding SF keynote is archived at Facebook Live, but my “Superheroes vs. the Climate” talk got pulled down due to the Funny or Die video I played during my presentation and will need to be edited and reposted. You can also get some coverage from Austrian Public Radio and the Superscience Me podcast (which was there all weekend reporting on the conference). If you’re dying for more Worlding SF content, there’s always the #WorldingSF hashtag on Twitter!
* I was also briefly interviewed for GlacierHub’s latest blogpost tracing the impact of ice sheets in science fiction.
* CFP: Science Fiction and Communism Conference 2019. CFP: Call for Papers: ANGUISH graduate conference at Georgetown University. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on “Artifice.” CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, Mapping the Mythosphere, 23rd-24th May 2019. CFP: The 2019 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, June 7-8, 2019.
* Paradoxa 30 is out, on Latin American Science Fiction.
* Terrific short film inspired by Richard McGuire’s Here.
* Margaret Atwood is officially writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. All is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.
* 2018 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Of course there’s many, many, many more links below the image…
* Lies About the Humanities — and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
* What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers.
* UNC announces exciting plan to return Silent Sam to campus for a mere $5 million up front and $800,000 every year. (Over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments.) They’ve got some other great ideas, too!
* UNC TAs go on strike in protest. More here.
* Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
* Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People’s Mental Health.
* The Insect Apocalypse Is Here. How A Shorter Sea Ice Season Is Changing Life In The Arctic. U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy. The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Here’s How Climate Change Is Already Impacting The US. How Climate Change Is Challenging American Health Care. Climate May Force Millions to Move and U.S. Isn’t Ready, Report Says. America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well. Reindeer in Sweden usually migrate in November. But there’s still no snow. Huge if true. Democrats get on board with Manchin for energy committee post. When the survival of the planet is at stake, calls for moderation and compromise aren’t a mark of adult politics — they’re a threat to civilization. But Mr. Burns and the plot of Snowpiercer have a plan.
* Parable of the Sower was a documentary.
* Imagine a better world: Forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
* Not even Pantone is safe. More geoengineering, coral reef edition.
* 150 Minutes of Hell: Inside the Carr Fire Tornado.
* Meanwhile, Brexit, am I right?
* Welcome to Our Modern Hospital, Where If You Want to Know a Price You Can Go Fuck Yourself.
* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
* How do they do it, every single time?
* Russians! Surprise! Trump was blackmailing everybody.
* When I was closing tabs I found this story about the Moscow Trump Tower project, which was like three unindicted crimes ago already.
* Trump officially ruining books, too.
* Trump Ramped Up Drone Strikes in America’s Shadow Wars. No Bush, No Trump.
* When George H.W. Trump ruined a kid’s life for a five-second TV bit. Why Do Political Journalists Think It’s Their Job to Portray George H.W. Bush as America’s Benign, Saintly Grandpa?
* Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, didn’t need to leave the Durham church where he’s been taking sanctuary for eleven months Friday morning. He knew stepping foot outside the church risked arrest and deportation, but he chose to, in good faith, get a biometric screening to comply with part of his pending asylum petition. At about 8:45 a.m., Oliver-Bruno entered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville, where he was thrown on the ground by ICE officers and arrested, according to Viridiana Martinez of Alerta Migratoria. He was taken outside and placed in a beige van with dark tinted windows.
* Migrants Tear Gassed at US Border. Families are still being separated at the border, months after “zero tolerance” was reversed. This is what the world looks like to kids in the caravan. US nixed FBI checks for teen migrant camp staff. ICE To Release Asylum-Seeker After 2 Years In Detention. Trans woman beaten to death in ICE custody. Making President Trump’s Bed: A Housekeeper Without Papers.
* Holocaust Survivors Recall Exact Day Holocaust Started Right Out Of The Blue.
* Same joke but meanwhile, NJ Democrats.
* What the Cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Got Wrong.
* The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed.
* The New Republican Myth of California Voter Fraud. Meanwhile, in NC-09.
* Coups in WI, MI, NC, and WV. The suffocation of democracy.
* The lame duck session is a deranged, obviously terrible institution.
* Overall, the experiences of Central European countries suggest that when left-leaning parties turn their backs on working people, other parties will willingly step up to channel their frustration.
* 40 million people with diabetes will be left without insulin by 2030, study predicts. Insulin is a cheap and easy to manufacture drug invented 100 years ago, deliberately entered into the public domain by its creators to prevent precisely this situation.
* U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again. Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report shows.
* “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
* Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times.
* Unemployment Is So Low Some People Have 2 or 3 Jobs.
* Sign here to lose everything.
* He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life.
* Generational analysis isn’t great, and yet.
* GM gave out $25b in dividends etc last 5 yrs; its auto biz is now worth just $14b, yet financiers want more. Financialization grinds real industry into the dirt.
* Police chief gets three years for a wide-ranging conspiracy to frame black people for crimes. When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose. How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever. Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* An interview with the managing editor at one of the country’s most widely read prison newspapers.
* I’ve been collecting an archive of attempts to bolster the police state by leveraging people’s sympathies for dogs. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon but it happens over and over.
* Meet the 90s nonwhite character actors.
* You Probably Owe Jennifer’s Body An Apology. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie marketed so catastrophically badly.
* About 137 women killed by someone they knew every day in 2017. More here.
* Rape by deception apparently isn’t illegal in Indiana.
* Neil deGrasse Tyson under investigation after accusations of sexual misconduct.
* The Miami Herald has been diving deep into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
* The Socialist Memelords Radicalizing Instagram.
* @ChuckWendig yo, can you help me out
* Minneapolis becomes the first American urban area to ban single family housing.
* School turns students’ lunch debt over to collection agency.
* Welcome to the Good Place: China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
* What could go wrong? Chinese scientists say they’re creating CRISPR-edited babies.
* Millennials in China Are Using Nudes to Secure Loans.
* In less sensationalistic, Orientalist news, approximately one million Uighurs have been put in concentration camps in China.
* Some deep dives into the Sentinelese, among the most isolated people in the world. A Twitter thread.
* Tumblr’s porn bad reveals who controls what we see online.
* How an army of temps produces NPR.
* A people’s history of He-Man.
* CNN, Palestine, and actually existing media bias.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the politics of digital intimacy.
* N.K. Jemisin: “I’m writing about dragons as a black woman, and it’s fucking political.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson and Anthropology.
* ‘Oumuamua goes into stealth mode in preparation for attack.
* Gods of Fiction: African writers and the fantasy of power. Ainehi Edoro’s Essay on the God Complex of African Writers Sets Off Social Media Reaction.
* Good poets borrow, great poets steal, but not like that.
* Dialectics of Fortnite: Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab. Fortnite as third space.
* Uber is a “bezzle,” doomed to disappoint the suckers who buy into its IPO.
* Millennials are brokest generation. Doing my part!
* In East Germany, a gamer scene emerged just before the fall of communism. Teenagers met at a computer club to swap and play C64 games. The state watched with interest.
* I’ve been rereading the series with my kids at bedtime and this is definitely canon.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 11, 2018 at 7:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with acting, actually existing media bias, Africa, African literature, Ainehi Edoro, alcoholism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, America, animals, Anthropocene, anxiety, apartheid, apocalypse, Baby Boomers, billionaires, blackmail, books, Brexit, Brooklyn, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Christmas, Chuck Wendig, class struggle, climate change, CNN, college basketball, color, comics, communism, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, coral reefs, corruption, coups, CRISPR, debt, delicious French fries, democracy, deportation, depression, diabetes, dogs, domestic violence, Donald Trump, drones, East Germany, ecological humanities, ecology, English departments, English majors, financialization, fire tornados, Fortnite, Friday the 13th, games, Generation X, gentrification, geoengineering, George H. W. Bush, gig economy, glaciers, graduate school, graduate student movements, graduate student strikes, graft, Harry Potter, He-Man, health care, health insurance, Here, Hillary Clinton, history, housing associations, How the University Works, Hubble Telescope, ice, ice sheet collapse, immigration, Indiana, insects, Instagram, insulin, intergenerational struggle, intergenerational warfare, James Bond, Jeffrey Epstein, Jennifer's Body, jigsaw puzzles, Kim Stanley Robinson, lame duck session, Latin America, LEGO, life expectancy, lunch student, manic pixie dream girl, Margaret Atwood, Mark Lamont Hill, mass extinction, medicine, Megan Fox, memes, Michigan, Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, military-industrial complex, millennials, minimum wage, Minneapolis, minority rule, money, Moscow, my particular demographic, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, New Jersey, North Carolina, nostalgia, NPR, obituary, Octavia Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Palestine, palm oil, Parable of the Sower, Paradoxa, parents, pedagogy, photography, plagiarism, podcasts, poetry, poets, points, police brutality, police dogs, police violence, pornography, poverty, Powerball, Prime Directive, prison, race, racism, radicalism, rape, rape by deception, rape culture, refugees, Republicans, rich people, Richard McGuire, Russians, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science fiction, science fiction studies, Silent Sam, social media, socialism, Square One, stunts, stuntwomen, suicide, superbabies, Supreme Court, surveillance, surveillance society, teaching, temp workers, the 1990s, the Arctic, the bezzle, the Confederacy, the Constitution, the courts, the economy, The Handmaid's Tale, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, The Lottery, the Pentagon, the Sentinelese, The Testaments, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, trees, true crime, Tumblr, Uber, Uighurs, UNC, unemployment, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, voter fraud, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, West Virginia, wildfires, Wisconsin, Worlding SF, writing
Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!
* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Children’s Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.
* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.
* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!
* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.
* A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.
* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.
* Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.
* The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
Every mass media outlet talking about the climate report: “If we don’t get serious soon, bad stuff will start to happen.” This is denialism along multiple vectors: very bad stuff is already happening, it will continue to happen regardless of what we do, and we won’t do anything.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
I’ve lost hope that there’s anything to do about climate change except some sort of likely catastrophic geoengineering intervention — but even if we do it and it works we will need massive intervention in the operation of global society to ameliorate the harms already baked in.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
so anyway good morning
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
ps your favs aren’t getting serious about climate change, they’re building private bunkers and training local cops and private mercenaries to liquidate striking workers and refugees
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 8, 2018
* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.
* The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Can’t Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.
* Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.
* The suffocation of democracy.
* The president sure did some crimes.
* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?
* And how will they solve securities fraud?
* KSR: The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.
* The Bosses’ Constitution: How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
* NC’s Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!
* The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.
* A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.
* Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economy—and Voter Turnout.
* Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isn’t when they’ll rebuild — but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.
* Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.
* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.
* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US. ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court.
* Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”
* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.
* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.
* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.
* How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.
* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.
* I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.
* Geological time versus capitalist time.
* The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.
* The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.
* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.
* “The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”
* On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.
* On raising a non-neurotypical child.
* The film’s real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggers—the gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.
* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.
* I’m here only to present the facts.
* The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.
* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.
* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.
* You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96—less than 1 percent—had their debt erased. And it gets worse.
* How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.
* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.
* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.
* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 9, 2018 at 5:39 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abolish the Senate, academic hoaxes, academic jobs, alcohol, alcoholism, aliens, animals, Antarctica, anxiety, apocalypse, Aquaman, art, autism, Banksy, Bernie Sanders, Brett Kavanaugh, cancer, canons, carbs, CFPs, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, comedy, comics, contemporary literature, David Foster Wallace, death, dementia, democracy, denialism, deportation, diabetes, dissent, Donald Trump, Dril, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Elon Musk, epic level, ethnic cleansing, fascism, First Amendment, football, fraud, free speech, freelance writing, games, genius grants, geoengineering, George Mason, gig economy, grievance studies, health insurance, Helen Keller, Hurricane Florence, hurricanes, ice, identity politics, immigration, improv, Infinite Jest, IPCC, Kelly Link, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mad Men, Mars, Marxism, mass extinction, Matthew Weiner, Mike Davis, Moral Mondays, my scholarly empire, neurotypicality, New York 2140, NFL, North Carolina, obesity, Oregon Trail, Orphan Black, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, photography, police violence, politics, prison, prison abolition, Puerto Rico, R. Crumb, Rick and Morty, San Francisco, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, scuba diving, SEC, sex, Sokal hoax, Sorry to Bother You, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords, student debt, Supreme Court, surveillance society, taxes, teaching, television, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the courts, The Good Place, the law, the truth is out there, true crime, Twilight Zone, Twitter, UFOs, unions, United Nations, whales, Wilmington, writing
Friday Morning!
* Trump White House finding a new bottom, day after day after… whoa. Turning Point? They’re not even pretending. The Biggest Political Story in Decades. In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred. Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry. Inside Trump’s anger and impatience. Another inside story. Time to shut everything down. And then on the third day he threatened to blackmail Comey with secret White House tapes. Only the Rock can save us now.
* The primary takeaway of the last 18 months is that no one should ever use email for any reason.
DID YOU KNOW when Trump finally goes down in flames and brings half the country down with him your dad will say it was all Obama’s fault
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 10, 2017
A person who still supports Trump after this week probably can’t be reached. Sorry.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 11, 2017
COMEY (2041)
COMEY, PART TWO (2043)
COMEY: THE COMPLETE SAGA (chronological re-edit for TV, 2044)
COMEY, PART THREE (2057; regrettable)— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 5, 2017
* Huge relief after only 11 million people vote for a fascist.
* Trump’s attacking the Census.
* Journalist arrested for trying to ask HHS Secretary Tom Price a question.
* What if populism is not the problem, but the solution?
* By refusing to negotiate with recently unionized graduate workers, Yale president Peter Salovey has announced in writing that the university will defy US labor law.
* Meanwhile, at the greatest public university in the world: Also included in the itemized spending was a dinner tab worth more than a year of tuition.
[concert]
SINGER: hows everyone doin tonight
CROWD: woo
ME (from the back in a normal speaking voice): it's actually been a tough few months— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) May 9, 2017
* Locked Up for Being Poor. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county. All the money’s gone, nowhere to go.
* Kristen Gillibrand, for and against. All this for someone who already ruled it out!
* Despite the confidence that the backlash to the healthcare bill will benefit Democrats, this doesn’t seem like good politics to be gleefully cheering on something you think is going to literally kill people. Especially, when you’re just singing over the supposed political benefits.
* History Will Remember These 217 House Republicans for Their Inhumanity.
* The Democratic Party Is a Ghost. Losing West Virginia. Priorities in Delaware. The Resistance, but not just as a joke. Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.
* Trumpism is coming from the suburbs. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.
* A study at Demos says voter suppression flipped Wisconsin. Some Words of Caution.
* I’m sure no one could find this objectionable: A top government official overseeing detentions and deportations is heading to a private prison company at the end of the month, according to a source with firsthand knowledge.
* The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.
* Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused.
* How a Utah county silenced Native American voters — and how Navajos are fighting back.
* The Higher-Education Crisis Is a Labor Crisis.
* How Marquette Is Becoming More Diverse.
* Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong.
* This is how SETI plans to find alien life by 2037.
* Chicago Approves Plan To Block Trump’s Name on His Tower With Giant, Flying Pigs.
* A Defense of the Tuvel Open Letter, at the Chronicle. And on the other side.
'In the XKCDification of political protest the demand has been replaced by the in joke, the threat to power by the witty signal to peers'
— Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) April 22, 2017
* How many Death Row prisoners are disabled? All of them.
* The length schools will go to cover up for bullies never ceases to amaze me.
* District: The Game of Gerrymandering for the Whole Family.
* Secret military space shuttle rattles Florida.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.
* HIV life expectancy ‘near normal’ thanks to new drugs.
* Another neurological disease unexpectedly linked to gut bacteria.
* U.S. to Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe, Officials Say.
* Stephen Fry is being investigated for blasphemy. Amazing.
* That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox.
* The Girls’ Soccer Team That Joined a Boys’ League, and Won It.
* Winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.
* Write the book you needed to read when you were a child. Troubled Wisconsin man goes on 50 state killing spree. Guns and Roses tones it down. Our future in space. They fucking killed him. Top ten book rebrands, all-time. I hacked into Mike Pence’s email. Maybe I should give the Yankees another look. A new favorite metaphor. But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
* And I don’t care how pretty or enigmatic it is, nothing will ever make Blade Runner 2049 a good idea.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 12, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, 2020, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, actually existing media bias, aestivation, air travel, airport security, alcohol, alcoholism, aliens, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, bail, Big Brother, Black English, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, blasphemy, books, bullies, Chicago, class struggle, college admissions, Comeygate, comics, conspiracy theories, copyright, cultural preservation, death penalty, death row, Delaware, delicious Girl Scout cookies, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, disability, diversity, email, fair use, fascism, FBI, Fermi paradox, film, Florida, France, freedom of the press, games, general election 2016, general election 2020, Georgetown, gerrymandering, girls' sports, graduate student movements, Guns and Roses, Haiti, health, health care, Hillary Clinton, HIV, How the University Works, ice, immigration, inequality, Ireland, James Comey, Jefferson Davis, Judy Blume, Kristen Gillibrand, laptops, life expectancy, M&Ms, Marquette, medicine, Mike Pence, millennials, mortgage interest deduction, NASA, Native American issues, neurology, New Orleans, New York, Nixon, normalcy, nuclear holocaust, our brains work in interesting ways, outer space, Paul Ryan, pigs, politics, polls, populism, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, racism, real wages, Rebecca Tuvel, Russia, salt, science fiction, segregation, SETI, slavery, slaves, soccer, statues, Stephen Fry, suburbs, the Census, the Confederacy, the courts, the law, the Left, The Rock, Tom Price, trans* issues, true crime, Trump, TSA, Twitter, unions, University of California, Utah, Watergate, Welcome to the Jungle, West Virginia, White House, white people, Wisconsin, writing, xkcd, Yale, Yankee
Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks!
* Once more, with feeling: Should You Go to Graduate School?
* CFP: Not Reading: University of Chicago English Graduate Conference.
* What are Muppets, anyway? Monsters from an evolutionary perspective.
* No.
* The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.
* Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign. More. More.
* Dungeons and Dragons and the class system.
* Bruno Latour: The New Climate.
* Which country shall we bomb today?
* Against “Fearless Girl”: 1, 2, 3. And a counterpoint.
* The Secret at the Heart of A.I.: No one really understands how it works.
* Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense.
* How artificial intelligence learns to be racist.
* The new Star Wars theme park seems like a place my kids will completely love.
* The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners.
* The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban.
* California State University cannot justify administrative growth, manager raises, audit says.
* The coming British bloodbath.
* The fake news long con: The Anne Frank Center.
* Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia.
* “I always have SO MANY QUESTIONS about the economies of post-collapse fictional societies.”
* Every Sci-Fi Star Map. Keep scrolling, we’re not done yet!
* Why the FBI Kept a 1,400-Page File on Einstein.
* American energy use, in one diagram. 410. There hasn’t been a cool month in 628 months. A closer look at how rich countries “outsource” their CO2 emissions to poorer ones. Countries Need to Move to Zero-Carbon Energy Now–Here’s Why.
* Why are doctors giving anti-psychotic drugs to toddlers? Kids Who Use Touchscreen Devices Sleep Less at Night. Let the children play.
* A New Study Confirms What You’ve Long Suspected: Facebook Is Making People Crazy.
* History as a never-ending struggle to delay the Nazi takeover of the world.
* Star Trek: Discovery delayed again, again. Ian McShane says a Deadwood movie script’s made its way to HBO. Every New (and Returning!) Development Thrawn Brings to the Star Wars Universe. ‘Locke and Key’ Pilot From Carlton Cuse Set at Hulu. Can Batman Beyond save the DCEU? And because you demanded it!
* Mystery of why shoelaces come undone unravelled by science.
* What’s the most American movie ever made?
* NASA announces one of Saturn’s moons could support alien life in our solar system. NASA Considers Magnetic Shield to Help Mars Grow Its Atmosphere. Space Leaves Astronauts Partially Blind, and We May Finally Know Why. Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist.
* Recycling is in trouble — and it might be your fault.
* Why United Was Legally Wrong to Deplane David Dao. How Much Money Will David Dao Make From United Airlines?
* Moderate drinking is good for you, if you don’t control for wealth.
* Nintendo doesn’t want you to be happy.
* Jeff VanderMeer amends the apocalypse.
* It might be easier to make a list of who isn’t working for Putin.
* The Landmark Sexual Assault Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.
* There’s just one story and we tell it over and over.
* Editing the Constitution: Wisconsin conservatives are pushing for a constitutional convention. What are their motives? Oh, I bet it’s fine.
* Fifteen Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Film and TV Projects with Black Talent to Get Excited About.
* First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump.
* Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a federal informant?
* Trustees of the Whittier Law School said on Wednesday that it would close down, making it the first fully accredited law school in the country to shut at a time when many law schools are struggling amid steep declines in enrollment and tuition income.
* If you want a vision of the future. The thing is though. The hero’s journey.
* And just in case you haven’t heard: Capitalism is violence.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 24, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Afrofuturism, alcohol, alcoholism, America, amusement parks, Amy Hungerford, animals, Anne Frank, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, Batman Beyond, Big Pharma, books, Borne, Boston marathon, Brexit, Bruno Latour, bureaucracy, California State University, Captain America, catastrophe, CFPs, China Miéville, civilization, class struggle, climate change, collapse, comets, comics, Constitutional Convention, David Dao, David Milch, DC Comics, Deadwood, deportation, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, early modern, ecology, economics, Einstein, energy, English departments, evolution, Expanded Universe, Facebook, fake news, FBI, Fearless Girl, Florida, general election 2016, General Thrawn, Ghostbusters, Google, graduate school, Hail H.Y.D.R.A., HBO, Hero's Journey, Hillary Clinton, humanitarianism, if you want a vision of the future, immigration, iPads, Jeff Vandermeer, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Henson, kids today, kindergarten, labor, Labour, law schools, libraries, Locke and Key, maps, Marvel, mental health, Muppets, NASA, Nazis, neoliberalism, NES Classic, Nintendo, no, now my story can be told, Octavia Butler, Octavia's Brood, outer space, parenting, play, politics, pornography, Putin, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reading, real estate, recycling, retail, revenge, rising sea levels, Sam Spicer, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, sea level rise, sex, Should I go to grad school?, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, superheroes, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Constitution, the courts, the law, there's just one story and we tell it over and over, think of the children, this is fine, Title IX, trees, ugly duckling, United, United Airlines, United Kingdom, Utopia, violence, Wall Street, walls, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, Wisconsin, work, zoos
It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy
* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.
* The part I was born to play.
* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
* The novel in the age of Obama.
* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.
* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.
* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.
* Student evaluations: still bad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.
* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.
* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.
* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.
* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’
* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.
* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.
* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).
* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?
* UBI already exists for the 1%.
* 26, 171.
* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.
* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.
* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.
* The End of the Rural Hospital.
* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.
* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.
* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.
* But this one takes the cake.
* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…
* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.
* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.
* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.
* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?
* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.
* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).
* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.
* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.
* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.
* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.
* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.
* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.
* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.
* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.
* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.
* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.
* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.
* Neanderthals were people too.
* When a Video-Game World Ends.
* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.
* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.
* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”
* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”
* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.
* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.
* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.
* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.
* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.
* Superheroes and the kids today.
* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 24, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #NoDAPL, 2020 Democratic primary, A.J. Daulerio, academia, academic jobs, activism, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Affordable Care Act, alcohol, alcoholism, alt-ac, alternative facts, America, Andrew Cuomo, animal personhood, animal rights, animals, anti-Semitism, antibiotics, apocalypse, Arrested Development, artificial intelligence, asylum, austerity, autism, Barack Obama, bees, Betsy DeVos, Big Data, biometrics, bombs, books, boycotts, boys, Bruce Serling, bullshit, Cambridge, celebrities, centrism, CFPs, Christianity, circuses, citizenship, class struggle, climate change, Colby-Sawyer College, comics, communism, conferences, cows, cruelty, David Foster Wallace, Democrats, Dennis Hastert, depression, Disney, dominionism, Don't mention the war, Donald Trump, drinking, dystopia, ecology, education, Electoral College, emoluments, endangered species, English departments, English majors, EPA, Episode 8, espionage, ethics, fandom, fascism, FBI, film, games, Gawker, Geek Squad, Gene Roddenberry, Germany, Grace Lee Whitney, guns, health care, history, history departments, homelessness, How the University Works, humor, Hunger Games, ice sheet collapse, income inequality, Instagram, Israel, JCC, jokes, Junot Díaz, kids today, LEGO, livestock, MadMaze, Mark Fisher, Mark Hamill, Marquette, metafiction, Milo Yiannopoulous, Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, Minnesota, misogyny, Missouri, MLA, murder, Mystery Science Theater 3000, national parks, NEA, Neanderthals, NEH, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, nipples, North Korea, novels, nuclear war, nuclearity, obituary, Octavia Butler, otters, Palestine, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parenting, passwords, pedagogy, Philip K. Dick, play, politics, pornography, preppers, primates, Prodigy, protest, PTSD, public health, race, racism, rationality, reality TV, refugees, Republicans, reverse development, rhetoric, rich people, Rick and Morty, Ringling Brothers, rural hospitals, Russia, satire, science, science fiction, sea level rise, segregation, sex, sexism, SFRA, shame, Sheriff Clarke, Sherlock, Skittles, Somalia, South Dakota, stand your ground, Star Trek, Star Wars, student evaluations, suburbs, superheroes, survivalism, teaching, tenure, The Joker, The Last Jedi, The Man in the High Castle, the Purge, theodicy, Third Way, time travel, Tolkien, Tom Gauld, true crime, universal basic income, University of Alberta, Utopia, UVM, vaccines, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, wealth, white people, whiteness, William Gibson, women, words, writing, Zootopia, zunguzungu
New Year’s Links!
* A nice endorsement of Octavia E. Butler from Steve Shaviro. Some bonus Shaviro content: his favorite SF of 2016. I think Death’s End was the best SF I read this year too, though I really liked New York 2140 a lot too (technically that’s 2017, I suppose). I’d also single out Invisible Planets and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, both of which had some really good short stories. In comics, I think The Vision was the best new thing I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot I bought this year and didn’t have time to look at yet, though, so maybe check back with me in 2019 and I can tell you what was the best thing from 2016.
* Introducing the David Foster Wallace Society, including a CFP for the inaugural issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.
* Call for Papers: The Poverty of Academia.
* Oh, fuck this terrible year.
* 30 essential tips for succeeding in graduate school.
* The University in the Time of Trump.
* Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme.
* Who’s Afraid of the Student Debt Crisis?
* Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right. Some Michigan and Denver faculty members have received similar emails but from different source.
* The age of humanism is ending.
* The New Year and the Bend of the Arc.
* Marina Abramović and Kim Stanley Robinson perform “The Hard Problem.”
* Osvaldo Oyola reads Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Leia Organa Solo: A Critical Obituary.
* BREAKING: There Is No Such Thing as “White Genocide.” Academic Freedom, Again. Buffalo skulls.
* I don’t think Children of Men was ever actually “overlooked” — and I’m shocked it was considered a flop at a time — but it certainly looks prescient now.
* From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck. Remembering Caravan of Courage, the Ewok Adventure Star Wars Would Rather You’d Forget. Anti-fascism vs. nostalgia: Rogue One. How to See Star Wars For What It Really Is. And a new headcanon regarding the Empire and its chronic design problems.
* Good News! Humans No Longer Caused Climate Change, According to the State of Wisconsin.
* How did A&E let this happen?
* On fighting like Republicans, or, the end of America.
* Scenes from the class struggle in Berkeley. And in Chillicothe, Ohio.
* The seduction of technocratic government—that a best answer will overcome division, whether sown in the nature of man or ineluctable in capitalist society—slides into the seduction in the campaign that algorithms will render rote the task of human persuasion, that canvassers are just cogs for a plan built by machine. And so the error to treat data as holy writ, when it’s both easier and harder than that. Data are fragile; algorithms, especially when they aggregate preferences, fall apart. Always, always, power lurks. The technocrats have to believe in mass politics, believe for real that ordinary people, when they organize, can change their own destinies. Whether that happens depends on the party that gets built, and the forces behind it.
* Four Cabinet nominations that could blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump: New Strategies, New Alliances. Why Donald Trump Might Not Be All That Good for Art. How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler. This all certainly seems on the up-and-up. And today in teaching the controversy: Nuclear diplomacy via Twitter is a bad idea.
* Democrats: Time to Win! Why the Democrats’ 2017 comeback dream is like nothing we’ve seen before.
* The Russia Conundrum: How Can Democrats Avoid Getting Entangled in a Losing Issue?
* House Republicans will ring in the new year with a plan to permanently cripple government.
* The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.
* The UBI already exists for the 1%.
* The arc of history is long, but Google Search will not longer return Holocaust-denying websites at the top of page one.
* Same joke but about not being allowed to ban plastic bags in Michigan anymore.
* The Champions of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started.
* “It was a pleasure to cull.”
* Geoengineering could ruin astronomy.
* Haiti and the Age of Revolution.
* A Utopia for the Deaf in Martha’s Vineyard.
* Why the ‘Ghost Ship’ Was Invisible in Oakland, Until 36 Died.
* Nine charts that show how white women are drinking themselves to death.
* It wasn’t just your imagination: more famous people did die in 2016.
* How long can Twitter go on like this?
* The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think it Is. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn.
* Special ed and the war on education.
* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.
* Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 3, 2017 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2016?, 401Ks, A&E, academia, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, addiction, Alan Moore, alcohol, alcoholism, Alfonso Cuarón, America, Arrival, art, artificial intelligence, astronomy, Aurora, austerity, Batman, Berkeley, Black Panther, blood, books, CFPs, Chicago, Children of Men, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, comics, Congress, copyright, Dan Hassler-Forest, data, David Foster Wallace, DC Comics, deafness, death, Death's End, Democrats, denialism, design, design flaws, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ethics, eviction, extinction, Fahrenheit 451, fan theories, fascism, film, futurity, genocide, geoengineering, grades, grading, graduate school, Haiti, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Harvard, headcanon, hell is other people, Hermione, Hitler, Holocaust, How the University Works, humanism, Infinite Jest, information, Invisible Planets, jobs, John Scalzi, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kindred, KKK, leap seconds, LEGO, libraries, Mark Bould, Martha's Vineyard, mass incarceration, McCarthyism, Michigan, midterm election 2018, misogyny, Modern Masters of Science Fiction, My Little Free Library, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, New York 2140, North Korea, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Oakland, obituary, Octavia Butler, Ohio, over-educated literary theory PhDs, partisan politics, pee, Peter Thiel, plastic, politics, pornography, poverty, Princess Leia, prison, prison-industrial complex, public domain, Putin, race, racism, Republicans, revenge porn, revolution, Rogue One, Russia, science fiction, sign language, smart people, special education, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steve Shaviro, student debt, suburbia, superheroes, Ta-Nehisi Coates, technocracy, technocrats, Ted Chiang, television, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, the buffalo, the Cabinet, the Holocaust, the university in ruins, The Vision, theory, Twitter, ugliness, universal basic income, Utopia, vampires, Wakanda, war on education, Watchmen 2, white genocide, Wisconsin, witchhunts, women
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Three!
(here’s part one and part two)
* The Changing Faces of Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
* I wonder if there is a line connecting nostalgia and the condition of our country. Stranger Things is really, after all, Reassuring Familiar Things, and nostalgia for a thing that never was is, apparently, good product.
* Isn’t it funny how the same investment firm always shows up at the White House?
* A Student Has Created A Gripping And NSFW Photo Series With Trump’s Quotes About Women.
* The very hottest Rogue One take of all: How ‘Rogue One’ Backs Up The Founders’ Approach To Slavery. Scorching.
* When Star Wars Killed a Universe to Save the Galaxy.
* The Politics of Nature in a Time of Political Fear.
* Self-driving cars turn in a way that will kill bicyclists.
* The surveillance state and racism.
* “Clinton Campaign May Have Been Too Smart to Win.” Sure, that’s one way to put it.
* Liberals’ belief in their superior ability to govern has never had the facts on its side. The Weimar Analogy.
* Why Are Detroit Cops Killing So Many Dogs?
* Three state lawmakers call for Sheriff Clarke’s removal or resignation.
* Alcohol-related problems are on the rise among older Americans.
* Cover Design in Dangerous Times: An Interview with Peter Mendelsund.
* Passengers sounds awful. I can’t believe this movie has been getting such good buzz for so long.
* Critical Inquiry‘s special issue on comedy.
* These Utopian City Maps Have Influenced Urban Planners for Over a Century.
* Why is medical training so insane?
* Robert Jensen has spent his career restoring order after mass fatalities: identifying remains, caring for families, and recovering personal effects. Here’s how he became the best at the worst job in the world.
* And after a whole day spent closing 300 tabs, don’t even try to cheer me up.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 20, 2016 at 3:44 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, alcoholism, America, asteroids, authoritarianism, autocracy, bicycles, books, Chana Porter, Cicero, city planning, class struggle, cleaning up, comedy, Critical Inquiry, death, deep state, Detroit, diversity, dogs, Donald Trump, ecology, Electoral College, Expanded Universe, fascism, fear, Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton, Hitler, lorem ipsum, medicine, Milwaukee, mortality, NASA, nature, nostalgia, Octavia Butler, Passengers, petrostates, politics, popular vote, post-truth, racism, rape, rape culture, Rogue One, science fiction, self-driving cars, Sheriff Clarke, slavery, Star Wars, Stranger Things, surveillance society, surveillance state, the Anthropocene, the elderly, The Octavia Project, the Third Reconstruction, typesetting, Utopia, Weimar, Wisconsin
Wednesday Links!
* The Department of English invites candidates holding the rank of Associate or Full Professor to apply for the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature honoring the department’s most celebrated graduate.
* Next week at Marquette: Cuban science fiction authors Yoss and Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo!
* 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium: A Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Inside The Octavia Butler Archives With L.A. Writer Lynell George.
* I am writing to apply for the job–or rather “fellowship”–advertised on your website. As a restless member of the creative class, I agree that secure employment, renewable year-to-year, can be a suffocating hindrance. And besides, you specify “tons of snacks and beverages” as part of your benefit package. As a job-seeker motivated by a combination of desperation and snacks, I am an ideal candidate for this position.
* The report finds that the cost of forgoing tuition revenue from two- and four-year public institutions could run into the billions for some states: $4.96 billion in California, $3.89 billion in Texas and $2.53 billion in Michigan.
* Pence and gaslighting. Kaine’s tactical defeat. A Con Man of Epic Proportions. Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for A Mere Two Decades. The mind-blowing scale of Trump’s billion-dollar loss, in one tweet. Trump Foundation ordered to stop fundraising by N.Y. attorney general’s office. I want to believe! This seems legitimate. If Donald Trump Published an Academic Article. If you want a vision of the future.
yeah, just give it a good whack, it’ll turn back on https://t.co/baDF0VocTR
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 4, 2016
* Bananas possible endings to the election, New Mexico edition.
* The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Visions of the Future.
* All told, however, Xiberras feels Louise could have done better. “We hoped for more followers to take notice of Louise’s behavior,” he says. “There were a few people who sensed the trap—a journalist among others, of course—but in the end, the majority just saw a pretty young girl of her time and not at all a kind of lonely girl, who is actually not at all that happy and with a serious alcohol problem.”
* Here’s a piece we can all get mad about, regardless of our pedagogical inclinations: Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?
* The Luke Cage Syllabus. 15 Essential Luke Cage Stories.
* Teaching the controversy: The Identity of a Famous Person Is News. The outing of Elena Ferrante and the power of naming. Ars longa, vita brevis.
* Yahooooooooooo: Yahoo built email spying software for intelligence agencies, report says.
* Tracing the path of one of the world’s most in-demand minerals from deadly mines in Congo to your phone. More here.
* That’s a hell of an act! What do you call it? The Mets. Relatedly: in search of the Korean bat flip.
* Nostalgia for World Culture: A New History of Esperanto.
* Harvard loses a mere $2 billion from its endowment. My favorite part of these stories is always the comparison to passive management by an index fund.
* More running it like a sandwich: More than ever, college football programs are finding it difficult to draw and retain the young fans who grow up to be lifelong season-ticket holders. In many athletic departments, the reasons can practically be cited as catechism: high-definition televisions, DVRs, diffuse fan bases and higher ticket and parking costs.
lol maybe you shoulda thought of that before you spent all that money on your new stadium https://t.co/zz8WUHyK9j
— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) October 3, 2016
* American University Student Government Launches Campaign in Support of Mandatory Trigger Warnings.
* Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.
* Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today.
* The last days of Robin Williams, as told by his wife Susan Schneider Williams.
* ‘Killer Clowns’: Inside the Terrifying Hoax Sweeping America.
* No one knew then that Springsteen, like Smith, would provide a through-line for his fans as things got worse, shifted in unimaginable ways, shifted again. Springsteen has himself changed with the times, becoming more sensitive to the issues his most-adored music still raises. Born To Rundemonstrates that. The decency at the heart of his memoir is a balm. He’s not only survived a life in rock and roll; he shows how a true believer doesn’t have to get stuck within its illusions, no matter how much they also attract him. After all, to Springsteen, a worthwhile dream isn’t an illusion; it’s a form of work.
* Unusually Murderous Mammals, Typically Murderous Primates: You know, humans.
* One of the most important lessons of Ghosh’s book is that the politics of climate change must not tiptoe around the questions posed by colonial encounters. Issues of climate justice cannot be solved without first addressing questions of equitable distribution of power, historically rooted in imperialism. And therein lies Ghosh’s disagreement with those who find the source of the problem in capitalism itself (Naomi Klein, for example). For him, even if “capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.”
* Wealth of people in their 30s has ‘halved in a decade.’ Probably definitely totally unrelated: Federal student loans facilitate a pernicious profit motive in higher education.
* Patent application for a method of curing kidney stones.
* I think it’s 50/50 at this point that the Purge is a real thing before I’m dead.
* So You Want to Adapt The Tempest.
* No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously. Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene.
* The secret lives of New Jerseyans.
* On our phenomenal (recent) accomplishments in space.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 5, 2016 at 12:46 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 30 Rock, academia, academic jobs, adaptation, administrative blight, alcohol, alcoholism, Alison Bechdel, America, animals, apartheid, baseball, books, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, con artists, Cuba, D.B. Cooper, debates, domestic surveillance, Donald Trump, ecology, Electoral College, Elena Ferrante, endowments, English departments, entropy, Esperanto, feminism, foundations, Frankfurt School, fraud, frenemies, futurity, general election 2016, girls, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, Horkheimer and Adorno, horror, How the University Works, It, James Tiptree Jr., Jet Propulsion Laboratory, justice, Karl Marx, kidney stones, kids today, killer clowns, Korea, language, leftism, Luke Cage, Mad Men, Maine, Marla Maples, Marquette, Marxism, mass incarceration, McMansions, Mike Pence, millennials, NASA, NCAA, New Jersey, New Mexico, nonprofit-industrial complex, NSA, Octavia Butler, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, outer space, patents, politics, primates, race, racism, rhetoric and composition, Robin Williams, run it like a sandwich, scams, science, science fiction, Shirley Jackson, snacks, South Africa, sports, Springsteen, Stephen King, student debt, surveillance society, taxes, teenage sweetheart of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the archives, the Congo, the courts, the law, the Mets, the Purge, the smartest kid on Earth, the suburbs, The Tempest, Tim Kaine, time, trees, trigger warnings, Ursula K. LeGuin, Utopia, Venn diagrams, Walter Benjamin, werewolf bar mitzvah, writing, Yahoo, Yoss
Good Morning, It’s Monday Links
* TNG and the limits of liberalism (and, not incidentally, why I always recommend The Culture novels to Star Trek fans). And one more Trek link I missed yesterday: An oral history of “The Inner Light.”
* Your obligatory 9/11 flashback this year was all about Air Force One. And if you need more there’s always Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man.”
* Sofia Samatar: Risk Is Our Business.
* We are, after all, rigged for gratification, conditioned to want to “feel good.” We seek pleasure, not pain; happiness, not misery; validation, not defeat. Our primary motivators are what I have previously called the “Neuro P5”: pleasure, pride, permanency, power, and profit — however these may be translated across socio-cultural contexts. Whenever technologies that enhance these motivators become available, we are likely to pursue them.
* The layered geologic past of Mars is revealed in stunning detail in new color images returned by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which is currently exploring the “Murray Buttes” region of lower Mount Sharp. The new images arguably rival photos taken in U.S. National Parks.
* “Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion.” The Frankfurt School, forgotten?
* CFP: “Activism and the Academy.”
* Your MLA JIL Minute: Assistant Professor of Science Fiction/Fantasy Studies at Florida Atlantic University.
* Rereading Stephen King’s It on Its 30th Anniversary.
* Rereading The Plot Against America in the Age of Trump.
* How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Built Modern Conservatism.
* Weird temporality in It Follows, by way of The Shining.
* States vs. localities at Slate. Wisconsin vs. Milwaukee is the example in the lede.
* Donald Trump and the Fall of Atlantic City. Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign.
* And just in case you’re wondering: What happens if a presidential candidate dies at the last second?
relaxwhitemaleliberalshereswhyitsactuallygoodnewsthatClintonfaintedtoday.Vox.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 11, 2016
Voting for individuals rather than party-defined slates is an democracy design flaw. Introduces pointless complication into decision-making.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 12, 2016
* Once again: A News21 analysis four years ago of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states found that while some fraud had occurred since 2000, the rate was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million registered voters in that 12-year span. The analysis found 10 cases of voter impersonation — the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls.
* 21st Century Headlines: “Airlines and airports are beginning to crack down on explosive Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones.”
* Rebranding watch: Lab-Grown Meat Doesn’t Want to Be Called Lab-Grown Meat.
* Passing My Disability On to My Children. Facing the possibility of passing on a very different genetic condition — which, as it turned out, I wasn’t a carrier of– I was very much on the other side of this before we had our children.
* Addiction and rehabilitation, a minority report.
* Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?
* Jason Brennan (and, in the comments, Phil Magness) talk at Bleeding Heart Libertarians about their followup paper on adjunctification, “Are Adjuncts Exploited?: Some Grounds for Skepticism.”
* Why Do Americans Find Cuba Sexy — but Not Puerto Rico?
* This Friday at C21: Brian Price on Remakes and Regret.
* From the archives: Some Rules for Teachers.
* And we’ll never see prices this insane again.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 12, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, aaarg, academia, activism, adaptations, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Adorno, Air Force One, air travel, airplanes, alcohol, alcoholism, America, Atlantic City, brands, Bush, capitalism, Captain Picard, Center, class struggle, cognitive science, conservativism, Crazy Eddie, Cuba, democracy, disability, Doctor Who, Donald Trump, drugs, emotion, eugenics, Falling Man, fantasy, Florida Atlantic University, Frankfurt School, general election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Horkheimer and Adorno, horror, How the University Works, Iain M. Banks, It, It Follows, liberalism, Little House on the Prairie, Mars, meat, NASA, obituary, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, outer space, pedagogy, Philip Roth, phones, politics, Puerto Rico, regret, rehabilitation, relativis, remakes, Risk, ruins, Samsung, science fiction, science fiction studies, Sofia Samara, Star Trek, Stephen King, teaching, The Culture, The Inner Light, The Plot Against America, The Shining, TNG, Tom Junod, tourism, voter fraud, Walter Benjamin
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
Overnight totals:
4 injured officers
17 arrests
7 squads damaged, 2 totaled
48 ShotSpotter activations
6 businesses set on fire— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 14, 2016
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
This is fine. pic.twitter.com/uJawEv7mo7
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) August 11, 2016
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then they google to make sure it’s actually THAT pirate party
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 13, 2016
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
English has a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" https://t.co/6Inp9xNJ4n
— AllThingsLinguistic (@AllThingsLing) August 14, 2016
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
CONSPIRACY THEORY:
AUSTRALIA IS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/BJvqgK8USd— anna (@ttylgay) August 10, 2016
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
I saw this yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since pic.twitter.com/S2RVoBswyJ
— sam (@SamSt3bbins) May 16, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, abolish the Senate, abuse, academia, addiction, alcoholism, aliens, American exceptionalism, anagrams, animals, anime, architecture, austerity, Australia, Barack Obama, Bigfoot, body cameras, books, bronze medals, Bryan Fuller, Case Western, CFPs, cheating, Chernobyl, childbirth, chimera, China, China Miéville, Chris Ware, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, Cloud Atlas, cockroaches, comics, CWRU, David Mitchell, DC Comics, deafness, decency, democracy, disease, Disney, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, doping, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Electoral College, English majors, epistemic closure, ethics, faculty meetings, family leave, fantasy, feminism, film, Flint, flooding, FMLA, game theory, games, Gawker, general election 2016, girlhood, God, group writing assignments, groupwork, guns, Harry Potter, Hawaii, Hawaii Sign Language, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, human-animal hybrids, ice, Iceland, immortality, institutes, James Tiptree Jr., Jessica Jones, karate, Kenny Baker, language, lawns, lead, lead poisoning, license plates, linguistics, literature, Lois Lane, long jump, Louisiana, mad science, Making a Murderer, maps, Marquette, Mars, mass extinction, Mayor McCheese, McDonald's, McSweeney's, Mebane, medieval studies, mental health, mental illness, Merrick Garland, MetaFilter, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, Moirai, money, monstrosity, movies, Mr. Burns, muons, music, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, neoliberalism, New York City, Niku, No Man's Sky, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYC, Ocean's Eight, Octavia Butler, Olympics, online harassment, Orion, outer space, Paul McCartney, pedagogy, personality, Peter Thiel, physics, Pirate Party, podcasts, poetry, police, police violence, politeness, politics, polls, pregnancy, prisoner's dilemma, protons, Proxima Centauri, PT Cruisers, public universities, Puerto Rico, pulse drive, R2-D2, race, race-walking, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, Ray Kurzweil, reading, real estate, refrigeration, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, revenge, rickrolling, riots, sabotage, science fiction, Scooby Doo, segregation, self-driving cards, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, shipwrecks, silver medals, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, street signs, suicide, Suicide Squad, superheroes, Supreme Court, surrealism, surveillance society, syllabus, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Beatles, The Last Days of New Paris, The Last Saturday, The Little Mermaid, the Moon, The Night Of, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the Universe, Third Amendment, this is fine, ties, totality, traffic stops, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unions, violence, voting, water, wealth, weather, white privilege, whiteness, wilderness, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, writing
Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday!
* Rob Latham’s anthology of essential historical science fiction criticism has a pre-order page. Here’s a table of contents.
* Elsewhere on Amazon: Star Trek Barbies! Rick & Morty Season Two DVDs (out today)!
* The arrival of annual reports on the job market in various humanities fields this year left many graduate students depressed about their prospects and professors worried about the futures of their disciplines. English and foreign language openings were down 3 percent and 7.6 percent, respectively. History jobs fell 8 percent.
* Those of us working in the humanities must accept that our golden age lasted just one generation, argues Leonard Cassuto, and was not the norm.
no American president would ever activate the Beyoncés, the military would never follow the order https://t.co/Y2nM8e0YUc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2016
* Some smart comparison between Game of Thrones and the Southern Reach trilogy from Phil Maciak.
* Small-Town America Has a Serious Drinking-Water Problem.
* Bible Verses Where “Behold” Has Been Replaced With “Look, Buddy.”
* Teaching Philosophy on Death Row.
* “American conservatives are the forgotten critics of the atomic bombing of Japan.” Even they forgot about it!
* When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff. I have to say, this is getting pretty good.
* Inside Trump University. Maybe Trump Really Does Make Less Than $500k a Year.
* “When ‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ Are Tenure Requirements”: Faculty at Pomona College have set new guidlines—but the students who pushed for the change don’t agree among themselves on their implications.
* John Oliver Steals Rolling Jubilee’s Bad Idea, Doesn’t Give Credit.
If anything they are increasing the value of worthless debt, making the problem worse. https://t.co/Kj4H4Vt2Mc
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 6, 2016
* The Creator of Settlers of Catan Has Some Important Gameplay Advice for You.
* A major Native American site is being looted. Will Obama risk armed confrontation to save it?
* Dialectics of The Little Mermaid.
* Supergirl Is Finally Going to Show Superman as an Actual Character. This only compounds the original mistake; the solution was always to just say Superman is dead or missing and be done with it.
* Seems legit: State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election. But who’s counting.
* And progress certainly has its advantages.
One in three children used to die before they were 5.
Now one in three hundred. Amazing. https://t.co/QHCZ7H4XWq pic.twitter.com/Q4h3VkZSEB— Tom Forth (@thomasforth) June 3, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
June 7, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, alcohol, alcoholism, Amazon, America, architecture, Arizona, Barack Obama, Barbie, Barbies, Beyoncé, child mortality, class struggle, cultural preservation, Dan Harmon, death row, debt, Democratic primary 2016, Disney, Disney princesses, diversity, Donald Trump, DVDs, edited collections, English departments, fraud, Game of Thrones, games, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, graduate student life, GREs, Hillary Clinton, Hiroshima, history, hoaxes, How the University Works, Japan, Jeff Vandermeer, John McCain, John Oliver, lead, lead poisoning, Lindsey Graham, look buddy, medicine, Native American issues, Newt Gingrich, nostalgia, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Occupy, politics, pollution, Pomona College, princesses, prison, progress, rich people, Rick and Morty, Rob Latham, Rolling Jubilee, scams, science fiction, Settlers of Catan, small towns, Southern Reach, Star Trek, Supergirl, superheroes, Superman, teaching philosophy, television, tenure, the bible, the humanities, The Little Mermaid, the university in ruins, toys, Transpacific Partnership, Trump University, water, Wisconsin
Monday Morning Links!
* Coming soon: Adam Kotsko’s long-awaited book on the devil, The Prince of This World. And from Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
* Important White House petition: “Include Adjuncts in Loan Forgiveness Program.”
* But here’s the rub: I am able to afford this faux middle-class life on $40,000 a year because I live around poverty. I didn’t write this, but basically anyone with a job like mine in a city like Milwaukee could have.
* Marquette University John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty announced Monday that they have filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for what the plaintiffs describe as “illegally suspending” McAdams more than a year ago.
* Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.
* Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs.
* Clinton is the second-most disliked general election candidate in modern history. Guess who is #1. Using this approach, the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%, and the probability that Clinton will remain ahead of Trump is 91%.
* Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year.
* “Uber for MBAs Is a Worrying Sign.”
* How Gender Confirmation Surgery Actually Works.
* But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
* Suing? What for? The coffee was too cold. It’s supposed to be cold. Not THAT cold.
* Pop culture moment: we’ve been watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson and have been completely floored by how good it is. Thanks Lili Loofbourow for the rec!
* This month is also the Comedy Bang Bang live tour — with each date appearing on howl.fm the next day — so my pop culture dance card is kind of filled right now.
* I can’t decide if the White House Correspondents Dinner becomes more or less obscene when Obama is so good at it.
* Monkey bars alert: Playground concussions are on the rise. I’m really surprised parental use of cell phones isn’t suggested as a possible aggravating cause.
* Understanding epigenetic. Forgotten lessons of the American Eugenics movement.
* Andrew Sullivan is back, and he says your precious democracy is doomed. Doomed!
Wow, I can't believe Melisandre was able to raise Andrew Sullivan from the dead
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) May 2, 2016
* And tell my kids I’m sorry: Scientists find more reasons that Greenland will melt faster. World on catastrophic path to run out of fresh water. And in case you’ve forgotten.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 2, 2016 at 10:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #Lemonade, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, adjuncts, alcohol, alcoholism, America, American Crime Story, Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Bay View, Beyoncé, Canada, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, coffee, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, concussions, crisis, debt, democracy, digital humanities, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, epigenetics, eugenics, Game of Thrones, gender confirmation surgery, general election 2016, genetics, Greenland, guns, Hillary Clinton, ice sheet collapse, imbeciles, John McAdams, kids today, maps, Marquette, May Day, MBAs, Milwaukee, neoliberalism, outer space, parenting, places to invade next, podcasts, politics, polls, pop culture, Premier League, segregation, soccer, Socrates, Socratic dialogue, Starbucks, student debt, Ted Cruz, television, the courts, the Devil, the law, The Onion, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, theology, toddlers, trans* issues, true crime, tyranny, Uber, water, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner
Wednesday Links
* Marquette English’s medievalist search closes today! Get your applications in!
* Advice for academics: how to write a research statement.
* The digital humanities and the MLA JIL.
* Junot Diaz on academic freedom and Palestine.
* The Plot Against Public Education.
* Grooming Students for A Lifetime of Surveillance.
* Yet another roundup on the death of the faculty.
* Holy picket lines, Batman! Marxism and superheroes, part two: the struggle.
* The right to die: Terminally Ill 29-Year-Old Woman: Why I’m Choosing to Die on My Own Terms.
* Is Rick & Morty the best cartoon since The Simpsons season four? Probably! You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty. Seriously.
* Google Glass and facial recognition.
* American Empire, by the numbers.
* An open access book: Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.
4. The people making the claim eventually die. At that point the claim is acknowledged as having been credible.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014
5. But because the claimants are dead, it is said that nothing can be done. Society shrugs, moves on, because, uhm, black on black crime.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) October 5, 2014
* War is a racket, Prophet Samuel edition.
* Wealth of richest 400 Americans surges to $2.29 trillion.
* The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past. Yet at least since the 1970s, most professional historians – that is, most historians holding doctorates in the field and teaching in universities or colleges – conducted most of their research on timescales of between five and 50 years.
* We’re probably teaching math wrong.
* Daria Morgendorffer’s Reading List.
* Hey, you, get your damn hands off her.
* Venus Green, who was 87 when she was handcuffed, roughed up and injured by police, will receive $95,000 as part of a settlement with Baltimore City. The quote doesn’t even reflect the most bananas part: Woman, 90, locked officer in basement, settles with police.
* Ga. Cops Who Blew Off Toddler’s Face With Grenade Won’t Be Charged.
* Did I do this one already? Infinite Jest, as it was meant to be read.
* Stay informed: Nicolet National Forest is Milwaukee’s “zombie safe zone.”
* National Adjunct Walkout Day Planned.
* The gum you like is going to come back in style.
* And that gum you like is going to come back in style.
* Startups Did Not Get Last Month’s Memo To Stop Burning All Their Money.
* MIT researchers are developing a “second skin” space suit lined with tiny coils that contract when switched on, tightening the garment around the body. The coils (image below) in the “BioSuit” are made from shape-memory alloy that “remembers” its shape when bent and returns to its original form if heated.
* Marvel will finally try to make some money off the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.
* Boston Review on vulture capitalism.
* MetaFilter mega-post on sex work and consent.
* The United States and alcoholism. Some anti-big-data-journalism pushback.
* And now at last we see the violence inherent in the system.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/8LS8TRMkAo
— congress-edits (@congressedits) October 7, 2014
Written by gerrycanavan
October 8, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, adjuncts, alcoholism, America, Back to the Future, Big Data, books, capitalism, cartoons, class struggle, comics, Congress, consent, Dan Harmon, Daria, David Lynch, digital humanities, empire, English, ethics, facial recognition, gay rights, Google Glass, How the University Works, income inequality, Infinite Jest, Israel, Junot Díaz, kids today, LEGO, Marquette, marriage equality, Marvel, Marxism, math, medievalism, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, MLA, outer space, Palestine, pedagogy, police brutality, police state, politics, Prophet Samuel, rape culture, reparations, rich people, Rick and Morty, science fiction, sex work, slavery, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, startups, strikes, surveillance society, Ta-Nehisi Coates, teaching, tenure, that gum you like is going to come back in style, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the long now, the right to die, Twin Peaks, vulture capitalism, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war is a racket, war on education, Wes Anderson, Wikipedia, William Shatner, zombies