Posts Tagged ‘allergies’
Friday Morning Links GUARANTEED* Not to Send You Into a Tailspin of Misery and Despair!
* In effect, more than a third of all cinema tickets bought in North America are for a Disney movie.
* UAA students, staff respond to impending, unprecedented budget cuts.
* ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump. New disclosures about lewd Trump video reveal his mastery of the GOP.
* Really, are the liberals okay?
* A “cheerful white woman” who voted for Trump loses her birth certificate, can’t get a passport, gets stuck in expensive and frightening citizenship limbo. Concludes “I don’t think anyone should be treated like that, period.” Plans to vote for Trump again. What a journey.
* ICE Told Agents ‘Happy Hunting!’ as They Prepped for Raid.
* Mother Whose Toddler Died After Leaving ICE Custody Tells Harrowing Story To Congress.
* On the brink of being homeless in a sanctuary city.
* Immigrants in U.S. Illegally Are Hiding Out, Staying Home From Work Amid Looming ICE Raids. Immigration law firm worker says silent raids in SoCal have already begun.
* When news broke that thousands of current and former Border Patrol agents were members of a secret Facebook group filled with racist, vulgar, and sexist content, Carla Provost, chief of the agency, was quick to respond. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see — and expect — from our agents day in and day out,” Provost said in a statement. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.” About that…
* Cop lies. Cop lies. Cop lies.
* Pleading guilty just to go home.
* Today in the richest country in human history.
* In the time of Stranger Things, this seems like a gimme: Paper Girls Ordered to Series By Amazon Studios.
* And speaking of which: The Real Monsters in Stranger Things Are Adults. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game — hard to think of a classic SFF text where this isn’t the case. Why Stranger Things‘ nostalgia isn’t quite as magical in season 3.
* Indeed, the only thing the domestic outrage over the Iraq War seemed to accomplish has been a massive effort waged by the government and the corporate elite to engineer a public that doesn’t complain and doesn’t care when their government meddles or invades another country.
* Martian time-slip: How Should Space Settlers Keep Track of Time?
* What old age is really like.
* The Once and Future MetaFilter.
* In a dark time, Americans stood up: Thousands of people have taken a Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 to ‘see them aliens.’
* Do you think there’s a meaning of life?
* “Fatal Accident With Metal Straw Highlights a Risk.”
* Conservationists have coined a new term—“The Fifth Season”—for the month or two of wildfires that now descends on much of the West each late summer. Red sun; yellow skies; oddly chill, acrid air. A nightmare inversion of summer. In addition to the Jemisin reference, this is also a running joke on the podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern, where the magical land of Foon has an extra season where the whole world just burst into constant flame for a few months.
* And now I’m anxious about this! Thanks for nothing.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.
* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.
* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.
* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.
* A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.
* United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.
* Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.
* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.
* Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.
* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.
* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.
Monday Morning Links! All of Them! ALL OF THEM
* Of course you had me at Zelda propaganda posters.
* Special issue of Deletion: Punking Science Fiction.
* Editorial: We Should Create a Honors College to Propagandize on Behalf of the People Who Already Control Everything.
* A surprisingly large number of Obama-era ICE and HHS horrors got rediscovered as if they were new to Trump this weekend. This is a case where Trump’s horror truly is as much continuity as break.
* Even despite that continuity, though, we seem to be moving to a new energy state: Taking Children from Their Parents Is A Form of State Terror.
* Fighting spectacle with snores, or why Trump could easily win a second term.
* Is America heading for a new kind of civil war?
* Fascism is back; blame the Internet.
* I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.
* After a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville in 2017, Facebook pushed to re-educate its moderators about hate speech groups in the US, and spell out the distinction from nationalism and separatism, documents obtained by Motherboard show.
* Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Milwaukee PD Misconduct Has Cost the City $22 Million Since 2015.
* When a Nashville man named Matthew Charles was released from prison early in 2016 after a sentence reduction, he’d spent almost half his life behind bars. But in a rare move, a federal court ruled his term was reduced in error and ordered him back behind bars to finish his sentence.
* Man, 79, sentenced to 90 days of house arrest in 5-year-old girl’s rape.
* She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.
* This has created a problem that has not been seen before: voluntary, intentional, migrating, mobile, functional, litter. The bikes and scooters are disruptive to the locations where they are abandoned and, because they are constantly moving, the issues of abandonment and refuse are constantly cycling (sorry) throughout an urban region. Yesterday’s bike or scooter blight might be around today, or it might move for a few days and then return. In short, the bikes and scooters share a civic pattern similar to that of homelessness. Thus, in an unexpected way, the dockless bikes and scooters are also competing with the homeless for pieces of urban space upon which to temporarily rest.
* Mike Meru, a 37-year-old orthodontist, made a big investment in his education. As of Thursday, he owed $1,060,945.42 in student loans.
* Executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further. Also, rich people are going to be needing your blood so they can stay young forever, just FYI.
* Be more like Chipotle, Jerry Brown tells California universities.
* Report Says Rising CO2 Levels Are Ruining Rice. Allergy Explosion Linked to Climate Change.
* For Women of Color, the Child-Welfare System Functions Like the Criminal-Justice System.
* Now that’s what I call ideological state apparatus™.
* A new front in the drug war.
* HUGE IF TRUE: Hollywood isn’t on the side of the resistance.
* Teen Vogue and woke capital.
* Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of ‘bear arms.’ I think a better description here is “not even wrong”; originalism is a rhetorical style, not a claim of fact.
* Sexpat Journalists Are Ruining Asia Coverage.
* A People’s History of Superstar Limo, Disney’s “worst attraction ever.”
* Solo crashes and burns, even underperforming Justice League. I haven’t seen it yet, but it certainly sounds like it had it coming. Relatedly: The Ringer takes a deep dive into the now-decanonized Han Solo prequels from the EU.
* Wakanda fans might be interested in the very odd turn the comics have taken. Relatedly: ‘Black Panther’ meets history, and things get complicated.
* Janelle Monáe for President.
* Conducting a posthumous interview with science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Your People Will Find You: A Podcast with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. And Ayana Jamieson’s authorized biography of Butler has a Patreon.
* Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history.
* Wendy Brown at UC: What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?
* Interesting Twitter thread on emergency and the suspension of the law.
* Half the budget, half the fun: A Star Trek World May Be Coming to Universal Studios.
* Power vs. responsibleness. Politics y’all. Existence is objectively good.
* This is an urgent reminder: Mindflayers are not sympathetic.
* As Kip Manley said, this is the flag of the Anthropocene.
* And I want to believe! US aircraft carrier was stalked for days by a UFO travelling at ‘ballistic missile speed’ which could hover above the sea for six days, leaked Pentagon report reveals.
All Your Weekend Links
* Waywiser Press has two new MP3s of Jaimee reading from her first book, How to Avoid Speaking: “Derrida Eats a Dorito” and “On Beauty.”
* New SF from Cixin Liu: “The Weight of Memories.”
* Duke Lit is hiring. And Georgetown has a cluster hire in African American studies.
* Automatically preordered: Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, New York 2140. China Miéville’s October: A History of the Russian Revolution. The Miéville- and Le-Guin-fronted new edition of More’s Utopia. Box Brown’s graphic history of Tetris.
* I love this Oulipoesque writing game from Steve Shaviro, on writing like a pundit.
- Every sentence must be a cliche.
- There must be no logical or narrative connection among the sentences. Each one must be a complete non sequitur.
* Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom.
* Reevaluating Teaching Evaluations.
* Can grad students unionize? Academia awaits major labor board ruling.
* Univision buys Gawker for $135m, shuts Gawker itself down.
* Conservatively, counting just the biggest chunks of staff time that went into it, the prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared on the article brought in $5,000, give or take. Had we been really in your face with ads, we could have doubled or tripled that figure—but it would have been a pain for you, and still only a drop in the bucket for us.
* Relatedly: Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons. Some immediate effects.
* The new Star Trek distribution model in a global context.
* 15 Technologies That Were Supposed to Change Education Forever.
* Foundation 124 is out, with a special focus on More’s Utopia.
* I feel this now about a lot of things I read: Why Scott Snyder Doesn’t Write Damian Wayne Much.
* Unfortunately, Landis — the director who co-wrote and executive produced Clue — and the studios were completely wrong about there being any box office appeal for a film with three endings. As Lynn explained, “The audience decided they didn’t know which ending to go to, so they didn’t go at all.”
* Meanwhile, from the death of culture.
* It was the deadliest massacre of disabled people since World War II. How do we honor the victims if we don’t even know their names? Remembering the Sagamihara 19.
* Joseph Goebbels’ 105-year-old secretary: ‘No one believes me now, but I knew nothing.’
* Something unexpected I learned recently: the practice of giving presidential candidates classified intelligence briefings began in the 1950s with President Truman, who didn’t want his successors coming into office without knowing crucial information (the way he hadn’t known about the Manhattan Project).
* Donald Trump is assembling gathering the Legion of Doom. (The ubiquitous Twitter joke was calling it “the hospice stage.”) Trumpism: first as tragedy, then as farce. The Presidential Debates Will Almost Definitely Exclude Third Parties. Finding Someone Who Can Imitate Donald Trump. Battleground Texas? The short, unhappy life of the Naked Trump statue. #TrumpExplainsMoviePlots.
* The GOP’s Chances Of Holding The Senate Are Following Trump Downhill.
* A digital exhibit from the Milwaukee Public Library on the history of race and class in Milwaukee. Milwaukee by the numbers.
* Frodo’s trip to Mordor as a Google Map. Via Boing Boing.
* Aetna to pull out of the Obamacare markets, apparently for revenge. EpiPen Price Hike Has Parents of Kids With Allergies Scrambling Ahead of School Year.
* Diagnoses of 9/11-linked cancers have tripled in less than 3 years.
* Why gifted kindergarten is 70 percent white. How schools that obsess about standardized tests ruin them as measures of success.
* “Clickbait”-esque titles work for academic papers too.
* Why aren’t there more women in Congress?
* What crime is the robbing of a neighborhood, compared to policing it?
* These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk. In a panic, they try to pull the plug…
* The Original Plan for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four Sounds Completely Amazing.
In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great…well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.
By coincidence, we watched the actual Trank Fantastic Four tonight and I was utterly shocked to see that there was almost a decent movie lurking in there somewhere.
* Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered.
* The spectacle of mixed gender racing unravels fascistic models of sex/gender difference and sex/gender purity. Every woman runner competes with the lie that men are faster than women. That fiction can only be maintained by ensuring that men and women never run with each other — when men and women run with each other, they scale down each other’s understanding of their differences. The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion. Capturing Semenya.
* The Forgotten Tale of How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village Into a Prison.
* That time NASA accidentally sold a piece of irreplaceable Apollo history for less than $1,000.
* Nothing gold can stay: The Heidelberg Project is coming down.
* Allow me to recommend the Julia Louis-Dreyfus portion of this episode of the Katie Couric Podcast, where she talks Veep, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The Al Franken episode is pretty good too.
* This episode of Criminal, on the founder of The Leaky Cauldron’s experience of being cyber-stalked for eight years, is also a really fascinating listen.
* I’m sad about this, but it’s probably time: Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman Announces End of Long-Running Superhero Comic Invincible.
* Perhaps, once at a summer barbecue, when both were still alive, Maude grabbed Marge’s hand under the table and held tight.
* Meritocracy and system dysfunction. Meritocracy and system dysfunction and free tuition at public colleges.
* One of the biggest crime waves in America isn’t what you think it is: wage theft.
* The race of the police officer doesn’t matter. The race of the mayorimplementing the policy doesn’t matter. What matters is who enjoys a “right to the city” — and who gets thrown up against a wall and patted down.
* New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
* Elsewhere at Jacobin: Jacobin vs. Scientology.
* Scenes From the Terrifying, Already Forgotten JFK Airport Shooting That Wasn’t.
* Stranger Things, Parallel Universes, and the State of String Theory. And an interesting proposition from Chuck Rybak: Is the ubiquity of cell phones driving the nostalgia craze in film and TV?
* Please don’t mess this up: Marvel And Hulu Announce Runaways TV Series.
* Or this one either: Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar return for animated Batman movie.
* What killed The Nightly Show?
* When Nixon almost implemented universal basic income.
* Understanding the Harambe meme. Understanding the bees are dying at an alarming rate meme.
* A list of 150+ SF Writers of Asian Descent.
* Terraforming Mars without Nukes.
* Gins often said that the reason she and Arakawa made art and architecture was to “construct optimism.” Their whole philosophy began there, in the desire to embrace being alive and to shift their focus away from the certainty of death. Gins made the choice to believe that art, and her work, were strong enough to do that. It was her version of faith, and her work made that faith solid, physical. Her life, like all our lives, was often filled with sadness and difficulty. There were periods of depression, anxiety, sick parents, financial problems, her husband’s illness and death. Through it all, she insisted not just on continuing to live, but on living forever. Trying to build a world where fewer people suffered made her own suffering bearable. A year and a half after Arakawa’s death, Gins recalled in a letter to a friend her struggle to move forward. “Despite my shattered state,” she wrote, “in spite of the gaping hole that had been punched into my optimism, I asserted that nothing is of more interest than to be alive.”
* J.K. Rowling announces new Harry Potter short story collections.
* Stop me if you’ve heard this one: In the 136 years scientists have been tracking global temperatures, there has never been a warmer month than this July, according a new NASA report.
* Arctic Cruises for the Wealthy Could Fuel a Climate Change ‘Feedback Loop’.
* RIP John McLaughlin, who I watched with my father every week for a decade. Bye-bye.
* Dune, as it was always meant to be experienced.
* Feet of clay: Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland vs. the unions.
* Exercise we can believe in: Watching horror films burns nearly 200 calories a time.
* And physicists may have discovered a fifth fundamental force of nature. This is the one that gives people superpowers, I know it.
Friday Morning Links!
* CFP: Anticipations: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Radical Visions.
* It’s basically become a standing assignment at the Marquette Tribune to ask me about some weird thing I like once a semester. And while we’re on that subject: a preview of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Hard times at Mizzou. This new enrollment decline — seemingly on top of the demographic dip nationwide — looks like a complete disaster for the troubled campus, which the administration has effortlessly managed to weaponize in pursuit of its own goals. Meanwhile: Melissa Click Breaks Silence, Backs AAUP Inquiry.
* Luxurious College Apartments, Built on Debt.
* The end of tenure in Wisconsin.
* Fukushima: Tokyo was on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, admits former prime minister. Miami’s oceanfront nuclear power plant is leaking.
* What happens if there’s a supervolcano?
* Teaching kids philosophy makes them smarter in math and English.
* Alternate title: Bernie Sanders has no path to a delegate majority. Even so, that Michigan win was pretty great.
* Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias: How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* In stories of classroom sexual harassment, popular teachers are often the perpetrators.
* Dystopia now: United confirms 10-abreast seating on some of its 777s.
* …just another instance of the bipartisan “smell weakness, then mercilessly swarm” routine that everyone has apparently decided is a healthy and beneficial norm for online life.
* At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump. It’s Getting Harder For Donald Trump To Deny That His Top Aide Assaulted A Reporter. Donald Trump Encourages Violence At His Rallies. His Fans Are Listening. Legitimacy and violence. The plan.
* The arc of history is long, but Home Depot might pay up to $0.34 in compensation for each of the 53 million credit cards it leaked.
* “Magic in North America”: The Harry Potter franchise veers too close to home.
* Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income. (via)
* 100% absolutely yes: Janelle Monae Will Co-Star in a Movie About the Women Behind the Space Program.
* Former College Student Wins Lawsuit After Being Told Men Were ‘Turned On’ By Her Pregnancy.
* xkcd: Map of the Repositioned United States.
* As a result, the complaint stated, Choudhry was disciplined with a 10 percent reduction in salary for one year and required to write a letter of apology to Sorrell. Sorrell alleged in the lawsuit that she was told by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele that he had “seriously considered terminating the Dean” but had decided not to because “it would ruin the Dean’s career.” Berkeley’s handling of sexual harassment is a disgrace.
* U.N.C. Football Player Who Ended Up Homeless Had C.T.E.
* Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF.
* How many LEGO would it take to…
* A brief history of allergies.
* google spiderman sounds weird truth
* The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age.
* The making of Cosmic Encounter, the greatest boardgame in the galaxy.
* Sleep is important, apparently. I know I miss it.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Orpheus.
* Y’all ready for a tech crash?
* And the worst part is, now they won’t even let us complain!
* And this is very promising: Huntington’s disease gene dispensable in adult mice.
Closing All My Tabs Before I Flee The Country Links
* The new issue of Extrapolation is out! This one was put together before I was an editor, but it’s still really great stuff.
* CFPs: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2015. Tolkien at the University of Vermont. The Marquette Undergraduate Humanities Conference.
* Dear English Major: A 7-Step Guide to Your Final Semester as an English Major.
* It’s syllabus prep week at universities all across America. Here’s a provocative one from Vanderbilt: PHIL 213: Police Violence and Mass Incarceration.
* #MLA: Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There’s No Easy Fix.
* Solidarity without Affect: The MLA Subconference Enters Its Second Year. Via Freddie deBoer.
* Give me the child at 18 or so, and I will give you the man: Nine Percent of 114th U.S. Congress Are Alumni of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.
* Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory.
* California colleges see surge in efforts to unionize adjunct faculty. Washington University adjunct faculty vote to form a union.
* Is depression a kind of allergic reaction?
* Why we can’t have nice things, 2015 edition: The Senate’s 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than its 54 Republicans.
* Pot Tax Adds $40+ Million To Colorado’s Economy: Crime, Traffic Deaths And Unemployment Are Down.
* The Economics (and Nostalgia) of Dead Malls.
* Great moments in headcanon, Guardians of the Galaxy edition.
* I say teach the controversy: “Creationist: Aliens Will Go to Hell and Not Even Jesus Can Save Them.”
* Actual Supreme Court decisions: To remain silent, one must first speak.
* Dog bites man: 2014 Was The Hottest Year On Record Globally By Far.
* On the 60th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the Los Angeles Review of Books has assembled a group of female authors, artists and performers who, dedicated to examining the faces, bodies and voices of the young girl, consider the significance of Nabokov’s pubescent protagonist as both a literary conceit and an object of patriarchal fetish.
* The process used is ridiculous and would result in termination if used.
* As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set ’em free.
* Here’s a comic strip about children dying of preventable diseases.
* Horrible attack on a satirical magazine in Paris.
* A Colorado NAACP Office Was Bombed Today. A gasoline can near the bomb, apparently intended as a firebomb, failed to ignite.
* People diagnosed with serious mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe depression — die 20 years early, on average, because of a combination of lousy medical care, smoking, lack of exercise, complications of medication, suicide, and accidents. They are the most discriminated-against and neglected group in the U.S., which has become probably the worst place in the developed world to be mentally ill.
* Tangled, Brave, and Frozen All Made the Same Critical Mistake.
* Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* Few things we criminalize because they are ‘harmful’ are anywhere close as harmful as prison.
* How White Liberals Used Civil Rights to Create More Prisons.
* Ferguson Grand Juror Sues Prosecutor To Lift Gag Order.
* “The little girl come to my door,” 71-year-old Larry Wilkins told NBC News. “She told me that her mom and her dad were dead, and she was in a plane crash, and the plane was upside down. She asked if she could stay here.”
* “I’m no longer watching television in which middle-aged men figure out how to be men. I’d rather watch shows about teenaged girls figuring out what it means to be a monster.”
* A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below 25 grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: If you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) “As you move up the class ladder,” says Keltner, “you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”
* Our New Politics of Torture.
* The Cost of US Wars Since 9/11: a mere $1.6 Trillion.
* The CIA has to approve every script for spy drama The Americans.
* Here’s what’s in the new issue of The Journal of Puerile Mathematics.
* Preach! Scientists Agree Work Makes You Wake Up Too Early.
* United States Passes Old Soviet Union For Largest Prison System In History.
* Visibility As Violence On Social Media.
* ‘Bullsh*t jobs’: Guerrilla posters welcome commuters back to work.
* In Preventing Trans Suicides, ‘We Have Such A Long Way To Go.’
* The True Cost of Teach For America’s Impact on Urban Schools.
* I can’t believe I’d never read this before: the original script to Back to the Future is wonderfully bananas, including the “nuke the fridge” scene from Crystal Skull thrown in as a sweetener.
* Peak neoliberalism: eventheliberal Kevin Drum says an AI revolution that will be “pretty brutal for the 90 percent of the population that occupies the middle classes and below” will be a “basically positive” development.
* PS: Drum might have been overestimating the timetable here. In 10 years, your job might not exist.
* The paper makes no claims about in-person classes or very large online courses, but says that the study’s findings provide “the first evidence that increasing class sizes in the online context may not degrade the quality of the class.” And the paper says that “these results could have important policy and financial implications.”
* ‘Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds’ – why are there so few women?
* What To Do When You Discover Your Co-Worker Writes Erotic Hulk Fanfic.
* Anti-terror plan to spy on toddlers ‘is heavy-handed.’ Well, that’s debatable.
* 67 Science Fiction And Fantasy Movies To Watch Out For In 2015.
* The 10 Most Insignificant Wars in History.
* A Nuclear Plant Leaked Oil Into Lake Michigan For Two Months Straight.
* Police say at least 30 people are sleeping permanently in Madrid airport’s terminal 4 but the number goes up in winter.
* In 1997 the Swedish parliament wrote into law a “Vision Zero” plan, promising to eliminate road fatalities and injuries altogether. “We simply do not accept any deaths or injuries on our roads,” says Hans Berg of the national transport agency. Swedes believe—and are now proving—that they can have mobility and safety at the same time.
* Cell Phones Don’t Seem to Cause Brain Cancer.
* We lost our son to football and brain disease. This is our story.
* They Might Be Giants, Again: The Adult Comeback of a Cult Band. Even Dial-a-Song is back.
* Science fiction poetry: “Sci-Fi Violence.”
* Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation in forty hours.
* It’s good to get ahead of things: Should Martians Pay U.S. Taxes?
* “Hold for release till end of the world confirmed.”
* And the winner of the Worst Thing Written in 2015 has been announced. Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you again in 2016.
Weekend Links!
* I liked this brief addendum to my academic job market as “game” piece from the other day.
One thing I might add is that the game metaphor also helps us see the job market as something that could be improved. If we view the market as a system of pure luck, then there’s nothing we can do to fix it. And if we think of it as a meritocracy, then we don’t have any reason to. But if the job market is a game, structured, as Canavan says, by “a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair,” then those in positions of power in the academy (including people on hiring committees) could work to change the rules. In large and small ways they could work to make it a more rational and fair game.
I agree the game framing suggests change is possible in a way that neither merit nor lottery does. I’d hoped I made that point at the end (“make alliances, change the rules, overturn the table”) but perhaps I could have put more emphasis on it.
* I’ve always been really skeptical of Rolling Jubilee, so I’m a sucker for any time Naked Capitalism dumps on it.
So while it is impressive to hear of the large amounts of debt being forgiven, the fact is that the people who are finding their debts erased more than likely won’t care much because they are either no longer under any legal obligation to pay the note and have long since forgotten about it, or never intended to pay the note in the first place, and never would! So these borrowers won’t likely be gushing with praise and thanks, and frankly won’t be helped much if at all by the repurchase of the debt. I suspect that people learning of their debt being purchased and erased were, instead of relieved and grateful, were more perplexed as to why anyone would go to the trouble of clearing up debt that they themselves had forgotten about long ago! By far, the happiest participant in these transactions, are the banks/collection companies who are thrilled to get anything for the loans!
* But the elusive nomads who wander that desert say California was once a paradise.
* Courts do not give justice, because they do not try. They follow a formal procedure, at best.
* Run the university like a business, you know, have such radically lax oversight that one person can steal $700,000.
* When I was talking the other day about the similarities between my childhood plan to become a priest for the free housing and lifetime tenure and my current profession as a secular monk performing textual exegesis at a Catholic school, 1, 2, 3, 4, I guess I didn’t think you’d take it so literally.
* The Pharmacy School Bubble Is About to Burst.
* Cutinella is the third high school football player to die in less than a week.
* On the life of PhDs working outside the US and Europe.
* Capitalism in 2014: “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”
* At least they got to waste all that money first: MOOC fever has broken.
* A gender-neutral pronoun is taking over Sweden.
* Elsewhere in the-Scandinavian-kids-are-all-right: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play.
* Maps Of Modern Cities Drawn In The Style Of J.R.R. Tolkien. No Milwaukee, but he did do Cleveland, Boston, and DC. Many more links below the image; you’re not getting off that easy.
* I can’t figure out if Ascension is let’s-do-BSG-with-a-competent-showrunner or let’s-do-BSG-on-the-cheap. Mad Men in Space, though, so fine.
* Museum of Science Fiction Selects Design for Preview Museum.
* We Still Don’t Know If This Tribe Discovered In The ’70s Was Real.
* An Apple Store employee has written the follow-up to I Am Legend.
* Ideology watch: “Let. Her. Go.” movie supercut.
* America was founded as a white supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Here’s a lawsuit that seems deliberately calibrated to freak everybody out: Black sperm incorrectly delivered to white lesbian couple.
* Talking White: Black people’s disdain for “proper English” and academic achievement is a myth.
* D.C. Attorney May Use FBI Headquarters As Leverage In Statehood Lawsuit.
* People are saying Homeland might be good again, but don’t you believe it. That’s exactly what they want us to think.
* Elsewhere in ideology at its very very purest. Mad Men: Lady Cops.
* BREAKING: Startup Funding Is Given Almost Entirely To Men.
* Just imagine what England might accomplish if it ever gets a second actor.
* Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Controversial, really? Can’t imagine why.
* Freedom’s just another word for a $1200 machine that lets anyone manufacture a gun.
* Human civilization was founded as a human supremacist state. You’ll never believe what happened next.
* Earth crosses the walrus threshold.
* Paid leave watch: Florida cop placed on leave after using taser on 62-year-old woman.
* Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
* Please be advised: Jacobin 15/16 looks especially great.
* Even baseball knows baseball is dull.
* And a UF study suggests peanut allergies could soon be a thing of the past. That’d be pretty great news for a whole lot of people I know.
Linkdump!
Linkdump!
* The headline reads, “Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected.”
* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don’t exist.
* ‘Going Under’: Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.
* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.
* I don’t know if I’m more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.
* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.
* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.
* Blago: owned. More discussion here.
* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance’s latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.
* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.
* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.
(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)
Gerry Canavan 
Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!
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* ICYMI: My new syllabi for the fall! Infinite Jest and Alternate History. There’s also a new version of my “Video Game Culture” class, set for a new eleven-meeting schedule and with a “Capitalism” week added centered on Pokémon Go (what? oh, that thing). Relatedly: Milwaukee County Parks are trying to remove Pokemon Go from Lake Park.
* The NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities can unionize. How letting grad students unionize could change the labor movement and college sports. The NLRB Columbia Decision and the Future of Academic Labor Struggles. The Union Libel: On the Argument against Collective Bargaining in Higher Ed. But elsewhere in academic labor news: Adjuncts in Religious Studies May Be Excluded From Religious College Unions.
* Are PhD Students Irrational? Well, you don’t have to be, but it helps…
* Colleges hire more minority and female professors, but most jobs filled are adjunct, not tenure track, study finds.
* This morning everyone’s fighting about academic freedom and trigger warnings at the University of Chicago.
* I thought I was the only prof who didn’t really care about deadlines. But apparently there are dozens of us!
* That’ll solve it: Replace college instruction with Ken Burns movies.
* A New Academic Year Brings Fresh Anxiety at Illinois’s Public Colleges.
* Poor and Uneducated: The South’s Cycle of Failing Higher Education.
* Actually, I’m teaching these kids way more than they’re teaching me.
* I’ve dreamed about this since I was a kid: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star. Time to teach The Sparrow again…
* Philosophical SF.
* CFP: Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, University of Florida.
* Cuban science-fiction redefines the future in the ruins of a socialist utopia.
* Puppies, Slates, and the Leftover Shape of “Victory.” On that Rabid Puppies thing and my Hugo Award-winning novella Binti.
* It was a long time before anyone realized there was something not the same about her.
* From all indications, the next X-Men movie will hew closer to Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix story than the previous cinematic effort. But any sense of authenticity it achieves will only arouse and prolong the desire for closure of the loss not only of a treasured character who might have lived endlessly in the floating timeline, but also of the very narrative finitude in which this loss could only happen once. Comic Book Melancholia.
* Bingewatching vs. plot.
* A new book series at Rowman and Littlefield explores Remakes, Reboots, and Adaptations.
* Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi.
* Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.
* The real questions: How Long Would It Actually Take to Fall Through the Earth?
* How did an EpiPen get to costing $600? Earned every penny. A Case Study in Health System Dysfunction. But, you know, it’s all better now.
* Amazing study at Duke: Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds.
* The Epidemic Archives Of The Future Will Be Born Digital.
* How One Professor Will Turn Wisconsin’s Higher-Ed Philosophy Into a Seminar.
* Becoming Eleven. Concept Art Reveals Barb’s Original Stranger Things Fate and It Will Depress You. We Will Get ‘Justice for Barb’ in a Second Season of Stranger Things. This Stranger Things fan theory changes the game.
* Arkansas City Accused Of Jailing Poor People For Bouncing Checks As Small As $15. An Arkansas Judge Sent A Cancer Patient To ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Over A Few Bounced Checks.
* And elsewhere: Drug Court Participants Allegedly Forced To Become Police Informers.
* The times of year you’re most likely to get divorced. Keep scrolling! We’re not done yet.
* Are these the best films of the 21st century? I’m not sure I enjoyed or still think about any film on this list more than I enjoyed and think about The Grand Budapest Hotel, though There Will Be Blood, Memento, Caché, and Children of Men might all be close.
* CBS is bound and determined to make sure Star Trek: Discovery bombs.
* Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.
* An Instagram account can index depression.
* After neoliberalism?
* Parenting and moral panic.
* How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains.
* The technical language obscured an arresting truth: Basis, which I had ordered online without a prescription, paying $60 for a month’s supply, was either the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work.
* Nazis were even creeps about their horses.
* Mapping the Stephen King meganarrative.
* Good news for Dr. Strange: Dan Harmon wrote on the reshoots.
* My colleague Jodi Melamed writes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on white Milwaukee’s responsibility.
* The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Translated from the Icelandic.
* Saddest postjournalism story yet: “Vote on the topic for a future Washington Post editorial.”
* Katherine Johnson, the human computer.
* I arrived at my friend’s party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.
* Uber loses a mere 1.2 billion dollars in the first half of 2016. Can there be any doubt they are just a stalking horse for the robots?
* It’s been interesting watching this one circulate virally: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.
* William Shatner Is Sorry Paramount Didn’t Stop Him From Ruining Star Trek V. Apology not accepted.
* Hillary Clinton will likely have a unique chance to remake the federal judiciary. How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America.
* Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State. You don’t say… 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling.
* Does he want a few of mine? Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of His Own Book.
* Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump. Hey, that was my bit!
* Oh, so now the imperial presidency is bad.
* Good news, everyone!
* At least Democrats are currently on track to retake the Senate.
* Scenes from the richest country in the history of the world: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. Raw sewage has been leaking into Baltimore’s harbor for five days, city says. It appears aquatic life — the moss that grows on rocks, the bacteria that live in the water and the bugs that hatch there — are the unexpected victims of Americans’ struggle with drug addiction. Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds.
* No Man’s Sky is like real space exploration: dull, except when it’s sublime.
* A.J. Daulerio, bloodied but unbowed. How Peter Thiel Killed Gawker. Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself. Gawker Was Killed by Gaslight. And if you want a vision of the future: A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker.
* Greenlit for five seasons and a spinoff: The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates from Miami came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars — one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.
* Also greenlighting this one.
* The legacy board games revolution.
* 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks.
* The millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income because of climate change. The children of millennials will lose tens of trillions.
* When Icon fought Superman.
* Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks.
* An Exciting History of Drywall.
* Title IX: still under serious threat.
* And it’s not a competition, but Some Turtles See Red Better Than You Do.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, adaptations, adjunctification, adjuncts, Agustín de Rojas, alcohol, allergies, Alpha Centauri, alternate history, America, Arkansas, artificial intelligence, assisted suicide, austerity, automation, Baltimore, binge watching, Binti, books, cancer, capitalism, CBS, CFPs, children, climate change, Clinton Foundation, college sports, color, Columbia, comics, commentary tracks, content notes, content warnings, crystal meth, Cuba, Curt Schilling, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, DEA, deadlines, debt, Democrats, depression, disability, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, drugs, drywall, Duke, DVDs, dystopia, ecology, EpiPen, euthanasia, extrasolar planets, fantasy, films, first as tragedy then as farce, fountains of youth, futurity, games, Gandalf, Gawker, graduate student movements, Harry Potter, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, horses, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, Ian McKellan, Iceland, Icon, ideology, if you want a vision of the future, Illinois, imperial presidency, Infinite Jest, infrastructure, Instagram, Jean Gray, Jodi Melamed, journamalism, Katherine Johnson, Ken Burns, legacy board games, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, meganarratives, melancholy, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, mortality, my pedagogical empire, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, NLRB, Nnedi Okorafor, No Man's Sky, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, philosophy, places to invade next, plot, Pokémon Go, polls, post journalism, prison, private college, Proxima Centauri, Rabid Puppies, race, racism, ramen, rape, rape culture, rationality, raw sewage, reboots, religious studies, remakes, Republicans, robots, Ron Johnson, Sad Puppies, science, science fiction, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, siblings, slavery, sobriety, space travel, Star Trek, Star Trek V, Star Trek: Discovery, Stephen King, Stranger Things, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, swords, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, the South, the sublime, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, Title IX, transgender issues, trigger warnings, true crime, turtles, Uber, University of Chicago, University of Florida, Utopia, Vox Day, war on drugs, Washington Post, water, Wes Anderson, white people, William Shatner, Wisconsin, writing, X-Men, Yale, Yoss, you and I are gonna live forever