Oops, Forgot a Title Links

* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they’ve run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.

* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was “produce more adjuncts,” but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.

* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.

Idea though that T/TT benefit from this move is still almost certainly wrong. Money is flowing to admin/graft/waste. https://t.co/nh76QWAYqP

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) June 21, 2015

* University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.

* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.

* On working dads.

* #charlestonsyllabus

* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.

* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.

* The flag might actually come down.

* For every “justifiable” gun homicide, there are 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and two accidental gun deaths.

* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.

* The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why.

* CCC, call your PR office.

* The brutal truth is that most of American political history is an experiment in seeing what will happen if national political elites agree not to offend white supremacist Southern white men.

* “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton.”

According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.

Surge!

* But set Obama’s impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They’re certainly finding every possible way to blow it.

* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.

* For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.

* The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.

* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.

* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.

* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.

* What happens when the sea swallows a country?

* It’s just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.

* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.

* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.

* Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple’s App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell’s revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don’t simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.

* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.

* ‘Star Trek’ Fan Invited to Pitch ‘Star Trek Uncharted’ TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.

* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From ‘Breaking Bad’ Will Appear in a Future Episode of ‘Better Call Saul.’

Weekend Links

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

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

* Mark Bould on African Science Fiction 101.

* The Moral Hazard of Big Data.

* Racism, monuments, and historical memory.

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

* The Crusades: Teach the controversy!

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

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

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

* 12 Tech Fads in Higher Ed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* How Science Fiction Will Help Us Go to Mars.

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

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

* Ableism, neurotypicality, and the vaccine debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* DC Comics will rebrand, again. More details.

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

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

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

* We Are Watching Brian Williams’ Entire Career Implode.

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

Sunday Links!

* With the newborn and the consequent sleep deprivation I’ve been in sort of a weird place mentally, but if you find yourself in a similar state of consciousness I can recommend Andy Weir’s The Martian, April Richardson’s Go Bayside! podcast, and Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men as just the thing. I’ve also been going through the Comedy Bang! Bang! DVD Season 1 and 2 extras, which are truly prodigious — essentially a few bonus weeks of the podcast hidden as episode commentaries.  The Martian will be a movie in 2016 and I suspect it’ll be a good one.

* Marquette team heads to RoboCup — the World Cup for robots.

* Kacy Catanzaro winning American Ninja Warrior is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.

* For years, Ukrainian science fiction writers have been producing novels about a Russian takeover of Ukraine.

* The Sawyer Seminar at UCR: “Alternative Futurisms,” which will launch in September 2015, will bring together African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American scholars, artists and writers to examine the colonial roots and legacies of science fiction and the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.

* Cli-Fi watch: Mother Jones reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.

* Superpower as disability: Fantastic Four could be either really great or really, really awful.

* …a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?

* Black Internationalism as a Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy.

* Today in police brutality: Man Dies After Being Put In Choke-Hold By NYPD.

* Federal Judge Blasts ATF For Luring Man With No Criminal Record Into Trafficking Cocaine.

* The United States Sentencing Commission just voted to let 46,290 federal prisoners apply to get out of prison sooner.

* The tanks, which serve as the heart of the assault force, received an order to open fire at anything that moved.  “Self-genocide” is not a thing. Unanimous consent. What if Iron Dome is a bluff?

* Twenty-five years ago today, a plane went down in Sioux City. Nobody was expected to survive. Somehow, 184 people did.

* Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. 

* “People need to understand,” he says, “that there’s tons of money in nonprofits, first of all. Second, nonprofits can kind of become containers for for-profit organizations . . . and a lot of that is tax money going into rich people’s pockets.” Pushed into the marketplace, higher education managers pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the UK’s few globally respected sectors.

* Hollywood Will Not Stop Being Ludicrously Sexist Even If It Means the Entire Film Industry Is Destroyed.

* Terminator: An Oral History.

* Dystopia is here.

* Yes. We. Ugh.

* Presenting Cthulhubucks.

* Results from a study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science suggest that 5- and 6-year-old kids from religious backgrounds judge fact from fiction differently than those with non-religious upbringings.

* And is it possible that man was not meant to ingest infinite quantities of mozzarella sticks? Of course, Andy Daly was there first.