Posts Tagged ‘animals’
Wednesday Morning Links!
* Coming soon! Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. I have a short piece in this one ruminating on Rogue One and the problems of multiple authorship in contemporary franchise production.
* Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never.
* The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
* Not half-light, not dimness, not relative dark: total, pitch darkness. Darkness so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, or even be sure whether your eyes are open or closed. Lost within an ancient cave, the man and woman started off separate and alone, confronting mind-bending isolation that played tricks on their senses and produced ever-more-disorienting hallucinations. Fumbling and crawling, never sure which next step might break their necks or worse, they navigated through an alien environment marked by vermin, severe cold, tight confines, sudden drops, yawning pits, and sharp rocks. Eventually, they found each other deep below the earth, then painstakingly made their way to the surface. And the entire time, circling silently about them in the darkness, intimately near yet incredibly far away, has been a crew of producers and camera operators documenting their every move.
After the trial, Weirich spoke to the local news media. ‘‘It’s a great verdict,’’ she said. Noura was sentenced to a prison term of 20 years and nine months. Weirich’s victory helped start her political career. In January 2011, she was appointed district attorney in Shelby County, after the elected district attorney left to join the administration of Gov. Bill Haslam. Weirich, a Republican, became the first woman to hold that post. She then won election in 2012 and 2014 with 65 percent of the vote, running on a law-and-order message against weak opponents. A friend said her husband, who is also a lawyer, began talking about moving the family into the Governor’s Mansion one day.
* Universities and colleges struggle to stem big drops in enrollment.
* A soccer star from Gaithersburg won a college scholarship. But ICE plans to deport him.
* 18 Texas sheriffs sign up to join forces with federal immigration officers.
* All U.S. Catholics are called to oppose mass deportations under Trump. Here’s why.
* ‘The moment when it really started to feel insane’: An oral history of the Scaramucci era.
* Coast Guard ‘will not break faith’ with transgender members, leader says.
* The chaos, legislative fumbling, and legal jeopardy should not obscure the ways that the administration is remaking federal policy in consequential ways. Evergreen headlines: The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy.
* Trump helping his son draft a misleading statement could be witness tampering.
* Always, always: unreal that it’s still this high.
* America’s former envoy to Afghanistan says the war can’t be won. Is there even a strategic goal at this point?
* The plate tectonics of Middle-Earth.
* White Capital, Black Labor. We don’t need a TV show about the Confederacy winning. In many ways, it did.
* With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals.
Tuesday Morning Links!
* CFP: Disasters, Apocalypses, and Catastrophes: PCA/ACA 2018.
* When Universities Swallow Cities.
* UC Davis’ Katehi will teach one course per quarter, conduct research in $318,000 position. Ah, so the standard rate.
* The Last Days of New Paris is China Miéville’s novella about a surrealist Paris magically overlapping with our realist Paris. At the back of the book, Miéville offers endnote citations of the surrealist art that inspired his writing. I corralled all the art in this post.
* Liking What You See will be an AMC series. Interesting!
* This Is the Way the College ‘Bubble’ Ends.
* I don’t like this: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for Hundreds of Applicants. If Admissions guesses wrong it seems to me the college should have to bear the burden of solving the problem.
* Border Agency Set to Jumpstart Trump’s Wall in a Texas Wildlife Refuge.
* The Fifty Year Ache: The Milwaukee Housing Marches.
* We seem to be entering a terrifying new moment of Trumpism. This October, Trump Will Try to Start a War with Iran. A Few Reasons to Impeach the President, Just From Today. How the Trump Administration Broke the State Department. You think? The Presidency in Exile. Kleptocracy. Here comes the pivot.
* RNC PR BS — no more! Inside the end of the Priebus era.
* This guy is on-brand. Aaaaaaand he’s gone. It’s gone to be a record.
* A good day for bad guys getting what’s coming to them.
* Has Jeff Flake really, truly had enough? I bet it’s bluster, and perhaps defensive, but we’ll see…
* All these “ha ha loser POTUS” pre-mortems forget that Trump hasn’t faced a crisis not of his own making yet.
* I thought this Russia subplot was over.
* No exit.
* Immigrant mother of three with no criminal record to be deported.
* Trump’s travel ban keeps orphan kids from US foster families.
* Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.
* The Academic “Success Sequence” – Get Lucky at Birth, Mostly.
* Left with Rage: What Happens When Trump Is Gone.
* Democrats Will Do Anything To Win…Except Change. Democrats Can Abandon the Center — Because the Center Doesn’t Exist. Guys, they’ve got this.
* Dogs probably domesticated us, not the other way around.
* And I say 137 years is too good for ’em!
* Oh, so that’s what happened.
* Why millennials cheat less than their parents.
* Of course you had me at pop culture detritus illustrated as abandoned, overgrown ruins.
* Close roads so children can play in the street like their parents did, say public health experts.
* The Ultimate Playlist Of Banned Wedding Songs.
* A brief history of speedrunning.
* All these worlds are yours, except…
* And I have just one piece of advice for you.
July the 5th Be With You Links
* I have spent the entirety of my academic career so far watching the intensified hollowing-out of my profession. The destruction is not limited to those friends and grad-school colleagues whose “job hunt” turned up nothing—or turned up academic jobs which make the same demands as the tenure track without the same job security. The harm can be counted, too, in the numberless person-hours every academic I know has spent tailoring job application materials, drafting custom syllabuses, and performing all the other rituals of applicant abjection. If you care about the work scholars do, the atmosphere is demoralizing. It is, to be sure, worse in worse jobs: when I was a part-time adjunct, I found the isolation particularly depressing, and I liked my “individualized” health insurance plan even less. But even in a good job with outstanding colleagues and students all around, something eats away at the ordinary routines of my academic life: all the day-to-day work of simply doing the job (teaching the students, carrying on the research, going to the meetings, the meetings, the meetings) takes on more than a tinge of denial, something for the few of us who have good academic jobs to do while we wait for the last curtain to fall on professional scholarship. Nor is it encouraging to witness the parade of more active forms of denial: bad-faith solutions, illusory comforts, and intellectualized excuses for selfishness. But mostly I regret the good work that could have been done by all of us in a better, more just system.
* Mills College Lays Off Five Tenured Professors.
* Prerequisites: “You will need to have seen Star Wars (episode four: A New Hope) and read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.” The syllabi of Junot Díaz.
* Space is the Place: A Crash Course in the Sounds of Afrofuturism.
* A call for applications: Foundation is looking for a book review editor.
* * The “mass graves” story I linked yesterday was fake. Thanks to a longtime reader for the tip. I wonder what the point of making this up was; the best I could come up with was that it was for research about how news spreads on the left and on the right.
* 25 at 50. The 25th amendment is a fantasy.
* Not our Independence Day. Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the US Constitution.Capitalism and Slavery.
* This woman’s name appears on the Declaration of Independence. So why don’t we know her story?
* CTRL-F “rape” CTRL-F “slave” CTRL-F “Hemings”
* Speaking of which: Sally Hemings’s slave quarters have been discovered at Monticello. And from the archives: The Monster of Monticello.
* Dear TNI Contributors, Our August issue theme is PATRIOTS.
* Seize the Hamptons. Probably should take a look at seizing the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, too.
* In sum, here’s what they found: If you’re going to die via an asteroid, it will be the wind and shockwave that gets you.
* Why Roman concrete still stands strong while modern version decays.
* Mother charged with child endangerment for leaving her ten-year-old in the LEGO store unattended.
* ‘Beta Males’ Want To Kill Women Because They Can’t Get Laid.
* The Democrats Are Eisenhower Republicans. Even that seems too kind a description for Rahm Emanuel.
* What does opposition do that resistance doesn’t? It offers a positive agenda for a better social contract, embedded in institutional transformations. Like, for example, everything that Dems don’t ever propose: real universal healthcare, public media, public higher education, debt relief, real safety nets, and so on. A social contract — whole and full and true.
* But don’t worry folks; we’ve got this.
It’s called Win the Future, and Pincus is even courting potential WTF candidates like the frontman of ’90s rock band Third Eye Blind.
* This Is Why Antarctic Sea Ice Crashed This Year.
* U.S. judge finds that Aetna deceived the public about its reasons for quitting Obamacare.
* Never forget: America didn’t die, they murdered it.
* New justices usually take years to find their footing at the Supreme Court. For Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who joined the court in April, a couple of months seem to have sufficed. His early opinions were remarkably self-assured. He tangled with his new colleagues, lectured them on the role of the institution he had just joined, and made broad jurisprudential pronouncements in minor cases.
* UK cops routinely raided police databases to satisfy personal interest or make money on the side.
* Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) Check your privilege, NYT. You don’t speak for me.
* A stressed, sleep-deprived couple accidentally invented the modern alien abduction phenomenon.
* Always money in the banana stand: Congressional panel puts plans for a US Space Corps in 2018 defense budget.
* Journalism in America in 2017.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
It had been crossing so long it could not remember. As it stopped in the middle to look back, a car sped by, spinning it around. Disoriented, the chicken realized it could no longer tell which way it was going. It stands there still.
* Nice work if you can get it: Controversial U of T professor making nearly $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.
* When basic common sense seems radical: Civilians shouldn’t have to de-escalate police.
* Forget the blood of teens. This pill promises to extend life for a nickel a pop. Forget the blood of teens? Screw you, Wired, you don’t speak for me either!
* And a few Fourth of July links from my Tumblr: Check out Captain Woke. What have you done to keep liberty alive? Untitled (Questions). Don’t Tread on Me. Brain expansion meme. Spang!
Infinite Sunday Infinite Reading
* From last week, a rare “actual content” post: White Male Critic Asks Why If Wonder Woman Is Really So Great Why Didn’t She Prevent the Holocaust.
* Princess Buttercup Became the Warrior General Who Trained Wonder Woman, All Dreams Are Now Viable. The Strange, Complicated, Feminist History of Wonder Woman’s Origin Story. Who mourns for the space kangaroos? I’m Pretty Sure Steve Trevor Lied About His Dick Size in Wonder Woman. Classic DC.
* Black Panther next! Everything We Learned From the Black Panther Teaser Trailer.
* Why you should go to the Octavia Butler sci-fi conference at the Huntington. I’ll be there!
* Bob Dylan Delivers His Nobel Prize Lecture, Just in Time.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Evergreen.
* Evergreen headlines: Humanities Majors Drop.
* Eight reasons why universities can’t be the primary site of left organizing.
* UWSP student asks court to force poetry professor to give her an A.
* The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History.
* Fifty years of One Hundred Years of Solitude. No Magic, No Metaphor.
* Corbynmania! How Labour Did It. Why Corbyn Won. Theresa May’s desperation could undo peace in Northern Ireland.
* Excerpts from James Comey’s Opening Statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee or from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? The Comey testimony was riveting reality TV. I asked 6 legal experts if Trump obstructed justice. Here’s what they told me. Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren’t Going to Impeach Him. How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money into His Business. Trump’s DOJ says Trump can still get paid. Our A.I. President. A Noun, a Verb, and Vladimir Putin. All this and Trumpcare isn’t even dead. What Will Happen to Us? Four Cartoonists on A Life Without the Affordable Care Act.
* Reporter Covering Inauguration Protests Now Faces 75 Years in Prison.
* I think we may have had the Russians all wrong.
* Noam Chomsky explains the twentieth century.
* What if Your Cellphone Data Can Reveal Whether You Have Alzheimer’s?
* What’s really warming the world?
* Twilight of the comics direct market.
* Before I go: A mother’s hopeful words about life in its waning moments.
* The toddler survived with some scar tissue—but not everyone who gets Powassan, POW for short, is so lucky. With no treatment available, half of all people who contract the virus suffer permanent brain damage; 10 percent die. And while POW is nowhere near as prevalent as that other tick-borne summer scourge—Lyme—it is starting to show up more often.
* People tend to avoid sick people, even if they don’t consciously now that they are sick, according to a new study published in PNAS.
* The addicts next door. Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever. In one year, drug overdoses killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War did. The last words of a ‘heroin junkie’: There seems to be no escape.
* Not only will this happen in your lifetime — this tweet has accelerated the process.
* Shock finding: Tax evasion is shockingly prevalent among the very rich.
* On Aug. 15, 1977 at 10:16 p.m. ET Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected a curious signal from deep space. Nearly 40 years later, we finally know what caused it and, sadly, it’s not aliens.
* Donald/Donald. Don’t stop till you find the panda. How to succeed. Now my story can be told. Should we be concerned about that? What’s the problem with Florida? Can I interest you in a war on non-transport accidents? If you want a vision of the future. The state is that human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Zoos.
* In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground. Gut-wrenching.
* How Bostonians Defeated the Olympics.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* Peanuts and the Civil Rights Movement.
* ‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book.’
* For the first time ever, a video game has qualified for an Academy Award.
* When David Fincher nearly directed a Star Wars sequel trilogy.
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man…
* How Wookieepedia Tackles the Insanely Difficult Task of Chronicling the Entire Star Wars Universe.
* This week in the richest society in human history.
* At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard.
* I’ve always known this is how it will end for me.
* Everett Hamner will be recapping Orphan Black season five for LARB.
* Some economies just can’t be disrupted. Grilled cheese for instance.
* So is — Mary Poppins? Fine, I guess.
* C. L. R. James in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism.
* Al Franken was a great guest on Marc Maron, if you missed it. Crazy to say it, I think he might actually run for president. Then again, why not him?
West’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is, and will always remain, the single most important screen incarnation of the character, for better or worse: For better because it was the most surprising, at times confounding, interpretation of the Caped Crusader, feather-light and hilarious precisely because of the character’s seeming lack of self-awareness; for worse, in the eyes of some fans, because it encouraged millions of people who had never picked up a Batman comic, or any comic, to be amused by the sight of adults dressing up in wild outfits and pretending to punch each other in the face. Every subsequent, high-profile reinvention of Batman, whether in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Tim Burton’s alternately perverse and sincere Batman and Batman Returns, Christopher Nolan’s operatic trilogy, and Zack Snyder’s funereal Batman vs. Superman, is, first and foremost, a reaction against the Adam West–driven Batman series.
* And the bad news never stops: Sleeping In Is Deadly, Popular People Live Longer, Adolescence Lasts Forever, and So Does High School.
Thursday Links!
* Two days before she died, Nina Riggs made a request: Don’t be afraid to read my book.
* Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio.
* Indeed, this kind of repression is perhaps more sinister because it ropes you into participating in your own silencing. You become the policeman in your own head. When considering whether to attend a demonstration, the powerful internal suggestion is that, even if you do everything “right”—even if you are being peaceful but just happen to be in the same vicinity as someone who isn’t—you could get caught up in a costly legal battle and face serious fines, even jail time. Your entire life could be turned upside down. You might be left alone. But it’s impossible to know—and the only way to be sure is to stay home. You still have the “freedom” to choose, but fully exercising that freedom amounts to playing Russian roulette with an entity all too eager to take that freedom away if you get caught standing near a smashed window. So, really, how much freedom do you have?
* The government is spying on journalists to find leakers.
* Not exactly happily, I found this AAUP unpacking of procedural issues in the recent John McAdams decision pretty persuasive.
* An oral history of “The Inner Light.” The second-best discussion of “The Inner Light” you’ll see this year!
* Monopoly vs. the Nazis: How British intelligence used board games to thwart the Germans.
* How Jalada Is a “Revolution Uniting African Literature.”
* Five current and former U.S. officials said they are aware of classified intelligence suggesting there was some sort of private encounter between Trump and his aides and the Russian envoy, despite a heated denial from Sessions, who has already come under fire for failing to disclose two separate contacts with Kislyak. Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting. Here’s why the feds are looking at Jared Kushner. More. Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation. They’re also looking into Trump’s personal attorney.
* Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules.
* “He now lives within himself, which is a dangerous place for Donald Trump to be,” says someone who speaks with the President. “I see him emotionally withdrawing. He’s gained weight. He doesn’t have anybody whom he trusts.” This is the most relatable Trump has ever been.
* Rise and shine, campers, ’cause it’s coooooold out there today.
* Don’t put ground wasp nest on your vagina to tighten muscles, warns gynecologist.
* California Single Payer Is a No-Brainer.
* If you want a vision of every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.
* SMBC roundup! We discovered a new form of ethical animal consumption. The older you are, the more people you have to deal with, so the number of lies to tends to go up quadratically. The anti-status-quo society. But a strange thing happened. Quantum hypocrisy. Marine biology. Ontology and the barbecue. Neoliberal magic. No funeral. You too.
* Confidence. Never corner a teacher. Flirting and coquettery. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should. Or, Twitter.
* The visit is intended to focus attention on the estimated more than 230 military veterans deported from the U.S. and on the need for a more rigorous process to ensure legal residents recruited with promises of citizenship are naturalized.
* Man Faces Deportation After Failing to Pay Fare on Minneapolis Light Rail.
* “Fearless Girl” is rapidly becoming an entire syllabus in the theory of art.
* More Than One-Third of Teen Girls Have Experienced Depression, Study Finds. When you have numbers like this you have to conclude that the problem isn’t the girls.
* In The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente gives comics’ dead women their voices back. Buy it here!
* Suffering Sappho! The Tortured History of Female Superheroes.
* If only there were an appropriate Marx quote for this.
* On taking candy from a baby.
* A vaccine for denialism? I’m skeptical.
* Buffalo launches nation’s first opiate intervention court.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* 1 in every 4 children robbed of their childhoods.
* “Uncle Julius just thought he was doing what he was supposed to do over there.”
* The patent and copyright systems are clear examples of how the distribution of income is determined by the rules put in place as opposed to the intrinsic structure of the “free market.” There is nothing about the laws of the economy that says the government has to grant these monopolies, and it certainly was not a natural process through which their length and scope came to be extended in the last four decades.
* So you were buddies with a Nazi.
* The law, in its majestic equality.
* And a smart think piece from the archives: Rickrolling is sexist, racist and often transphobic in context. More relevant now than ever…
Sunday’d Reading!
* Presenting the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
* On graduate labor and the Yale commencement protest.
* A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.
* Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared! Jared!
* So old I can remember when Eric and Donald Jr. were going to run the business and not have a political role. (January.)
* Cool, thanks for looking into it.
* Google’s AI Is Now Creating Its Own AI.
* The Republicans Broke American Politics, and Media Elites Are Blind to It. A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is.
* The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. It’s too late, of course, the cultists will believe in it for all time.
* Horrific hate crime in Portland. Seems to be part of a disturbing trend.
* New Orleans principal loses job after wearing Nazi-associated rings in video. Glowing 2015 profile.
* Meanwhile, in Arizona. In New Jersey.
* New Jersey not doing great in my newsfeed today generally. Though this was good.
* U.S. Airstrike Killed Over 100 Civilians in Mosul, Pentagon Says. The U.S. Is Helping Allies Hide Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria.
* ‘Mostly Toddlers’ Among 31 Drowned.
* A spectre is haunting Goldman Sachs.
* Trump going to the mattresses.
* How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative.
* Democrats doing much better, still can’t win a damn thing. The only answer is to keep offering them nothing and telling them they’re stupid, until they finally come around. Wake up, liberals: There will be no 2018 “blue wave,” no Democratic majority and no impeachment. Donald Trump Is A Big Reason The GOP Kept The Montana House Seat.
* Remember how terrible the AHCA is?
* Sheriff Clarke and some totally appropriate, not at all batshit insane behavior.
* A GoFundMe Campaign Is Not Health Insurance.
* A 31-year-old undocumented Honduran bicyclist, Marcos Antonio Huete, was hit by a car in Key West, Florida, on his way to work. The policeman’s camera shows him inquiring about the victim’s immigration status before offering medical assistance. He was later detained by the Border Patrol.
* “We want you to think Luke is bad” is an awfully large part of Last Jedi hype. I have to think that means they won’t actually do it…
* Title IX Policy shift at the University of Oregon: Faculty members at the University of Oregon will no longer be required to notify campus authorities when students confide in them that they’ve been sexually assaulted or harassed but say they don’t want the information reported.
* Wealth, I realized, is the adult version of magic: an incredibly powerful but ultimately arbitrary resource that transfers primarily through inheritance. It has some logic to it— but also enough randomness that those without can hope for a spontaneous windfall in the form of an improbably lucrative investment or a secret inheritance.
* Unexpected and interesting: Joss Whedon isn’t just finishing Justice League; he’s been working on it for a while.
* Truly, ours is the darkest timeline.
* A chance meeting with Mr. Rogers.
* If you’d bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010, you’d be worth $35M.
* Uber: a cheap scam all the way down.
* Original draft of Revenge of the Sith actually treated Padme as an interesting character.
* Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties.
* These birds have the right idea.
* This one cuts me. When you’re in your thirties. Call CPS. #TheResistance.
* Everything was connected, and I was fucked.
* Can someone please explain the physics of Casper?
* And N6946-BH1 is all of us right now.
I’ve Closed Every Tab I Had Open and I’m Not Sorry Links
* There are no links now. There is only the Orb.
* CFP: In Frankenstein’s Wake.
* Queer Artist Transforms Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ Into Opera.
* Great literature, by the numbers. The Bachelor/ette, by the numbers.
* But if you read Spencer’s three-pronged narrative as Sam Wilson’s story, it looks very different. It becomes the story of an impeccably qualified black hero whose time in the spotlight is abruptly cut off by the return of an old white man who once had his position and of a public so thirsty for the moral certainty of the Greatest Generation that it can’t see the nightmarish perversion of it that’s right in front of them until it’s too late.
* LARB on the unionization struggle at Yale. A Case for Reparations at the University of Chicago. Crisis at Mizzou. Two sets of universities, two countries, two futures.
* The engine of irrationality inside the rationalists. Why the “Conceptual Penis” Hoax is Just a Big Cock Up. Some Work Is Hard.
* The Ethos of the Overinvolved Parent: Colleges are adjusting to increasing contact with adults who are more ingrained in their children’s lives than ever.
* A brief history of Esperanto.
* Science fiction’s new golden age in China.
* Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it influences it.
* The Secret History of William Gibson’s Never-Filmed Aliens Sequel.
* Feds use anti-terror tool to hunt the undocumented. Arrests of Undocumented Immigrants Without Criminal Records Spikes 150%.
* Felony charges against inauguration protesters represent ‘historic crossroads.’ The airport lawyers who fought Trump’s Muslim ban are facing a Justice Dept. crackdown.
* Horror in Manchester. Terror in Kansas.
* The Death of the Suburban Office Park and the Rise of the Suburban Poor.
* Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Centre.
* Sheriff Clarke leaving Milwaukee County for position with Department of Homeland Security. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s departure will be good for department and Milwaukee County. Plainly, indisputably unfit. But not so fast!
* Downward spiral: Special Prosecutor? Independent Counsel? Special Counsel? What’s the Difference? Meet Bob Mueller. A forgotten lesson of Watergate: conservatives may rally around Trump. Did Trump Commit a Crime in Sharing Intelligence With Moscow? Trump Gave Russians Secrets News Orgs Are Being Asked To Withhold. Trump’s disclosure endangered spy placed inside ISIS by Israel, officials say. Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign. Notes made by FBI Director Comey say Trump pressured him to end Flynn probe. Trump straight-up told the Russians he fired Comey to obstruct justice and it just. doesn’t. matter. ‘He Looks More and More Like a Complete Moron.’ Even while I was just trying to put this post together more bombshells dropped: Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case. And this one! Flynn stopped military plan Turkey opposed – after being paid as its agent. And this one! It sure seems like Michael Flynn lied to federal investigators about his Russia ties. Shot. Chaser. Donald Trump has committed the exact offense that forced Richard Nixon to resign. Have Trump’s Problems Hit a Breaking Point? Articles of Impeachment for Donald J. Trump. “Don’t See How Trump Isn’t Completely F*cked.” Presidential impeachments are about politics, not law. This is the exact situation impeachment was meant for. Let’s hurry up. Nate Silver runs the numbers. When Will Republicans Dump Trump? Oh honey. But why not him?
* Understanding the self-pardon.
* This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This seems fine. This one really does seem fine. This seems fine. This is definitely not fine.
* Here at the end of all norms.
* Trump Team Stands by Budget’s $2 Trillion Math Error.
* Any Half-Decent Hacker Could Break Into Mar-a-Lago.
* Can the Anti-Trump Resistance Take the Philadelphia DA Office?
* SNL and the profiteers. Trump and the Hall of Presidents.
* MSNBC replaying its Bush-era history note for note.
* I think maybe I want to trade with the Netherlands.
* At least we can still laugh.
* Star Trek: Discovery is definitely bad. This single photo proves it! Honestly, though, I thought that aside from the strong leads the new trailer looks cheap and bad, with terrible-looking secondary characters and a narrative I have very little interest in. I was very glad when The Incomparable explained to me that none of this had anything to do with the actual plot of the show.
* If The Last Jedi Really Has the Biggest Reveal in Star Wars History, What Could It Be? I’m hoping the poster is wrong, rather than (the only possibility) they’re making Luke bad.
* The Secret History of Dragonlance.
* Jordan Peele’s Next Project Is a Terrifying Lovecraftian Story About Race in 1950s America.
* Today in making fascism fun: 1Password’s new Travel Mode.
* Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts. The end of the penguins. Miles of ice collapsing into the sea. Scientists say the pace of sea level rise has nearly tripled since 1990. The Greening of Antarctica.
* Millennials and their damned avocados.
* Don’t Like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats.
* It wasn’t just petty infighting that tanked Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the lack of any coherent program for the country. But don’t worry! There’s a plan.
* Laura Kipniss is apparently being sued for Unwanted Advances. The book seemed to be absolutely begging for a lawsuit; if the publisher wasn’t absolutely scrupulous it was extremely negligent.
* Maybe let’s not gene-sequence human intelligence.
* Can capitalism survive the rise of the machines?
* Statement of Teaching Philosophy. And on the pedestal these words appear. The circle of life. One fear. So you want to write a book. Why work so hard.
* Listen to what science teaches us, people!
* And the circus is (finally) closed.
