Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!

• ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”

pic.twitter.com/OsVxEyToqs

— katie kadue (@kukukadoo) December 27, 2022

• 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
• Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
• Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
• “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
• This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.

• It’s still Christmas somewhere.
• Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
• The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
• A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
• China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
• Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
• Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
• Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
• The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
• Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
• Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.

ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want

— Zack Brown (@LuminanceBloom) December 7, 2022

miyazaki of studio ghibli, upon seeing an artificial intelligence presentation- "i strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself". pic.twitter.com/UmOOWvsfjV

— Tofu (@TofuPixel) December 12, 2022

do you ever think people are just going to get sick of half of media being a sports gambling commercial and the other half being influencers selling eating disorder encouragement or is this just how it’s going to be forever

— kate wagner (@mcmansionhell) December 27, 2022

• Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
• Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
• A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
• El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
• The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
• Effective altruism takes an L.
• It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone  from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority. 
• An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
• to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
• Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
• Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
• Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
• The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
• America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
• They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
• Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
• If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
• Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.

Twitter, while bad, was good at doing what it was doing, and now it’s not even good at that

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2022

• Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
• Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
• Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
• Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
• The Dark History of Hysteria.
• Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
• We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
• The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
• Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
• Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
• With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
• If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?

even when reporting on research that finds *conservative policies will kill you* and *liberal policies will save your life,* big news companies can't resist the both-sides-are-the-same framing pic.twitter.com/wNjDQ9DxP5

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) December 21, 2022

• The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
• So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
• I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
• LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
• Testing LEGO Investments.
• Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
• Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
• Film History According to Tarantino.
• The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
• Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
• It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
• I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Star Wars is the tragic, multigenerational story of how all the smart and competent characters who were good at their jobs and had the vision necessary to both defeat the Empire and to establish a strong and lasting New Republic died immediately before the events of A New Hope

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) December 23, 2022

• A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
• Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
• A Century of Serious Difficulty.
• Is It Art?
• So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
• MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
• I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
• Fitting.
• And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!

Thanksgiving Links!

* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday

* I’m giving the last “Tolkien Tuesdays” talk at the Haggerty on next Tuesday, November 28, on Tolkien and pop culture.

* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.

* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.

* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.

* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!

UNEVEN FUTURES coming in just about a month! https://t.co/tLJAceecmY pic.twitter.com/YnXvO87kRS

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 18, 2022

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.

* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.

* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.

* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.

* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.

* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.

* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…

* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.

* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.

* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.

* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.

* ‘A World Cup Built on Modern Slavery’: Stadium Workers Blow the Whistle on Qatar’s ‘Coverup’ of Migrant Deaths and Suffering.

* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

* Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

* ‘I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to be there’: Milwaukee student’s poetry takes her to the White House.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.

* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.

* what is the crime for which the turkey was sentenced to death & the sentence nullified by the US President? & what guarantee do we have that the turkey won’t be executed anyway, as soon as the cameras are gone.

* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.

* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

* Yes, but: the comic.

* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.

Elon Musk destroying Twitter for all of us who weren’t strong enough to delete our accounts on our own is basically a shot-for-shot remake of Gollum stealing the Ring from Frodo and falling into Mt. Doom

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2022

not my white ass walking into Wakanda Forever two minutes into the movie with arms full of snacks

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 14, 2022

English departments ruining the lives and earning potential of even the most successful among us https://t.co/eHEzTlmXVY

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 29, 2022

me planning my games class syllabus pic.twitter.com/PP2JRhP2Hl

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2022

it’s-a me pic.twitter.com/SLEYdQizpd

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 29, 2022

If they decanonize Old Indy I'm going to lose ithttps://t.co/kYui0lwNvp pic.twitter.com/JWSjwb5pM0

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 18, 2022

Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

• A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
• I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
• A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
• Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
• CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
• The CoFutures Prizes.
• Building a New Framework of Values for the University.

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

• Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
• Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
• How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
• Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
• From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
• Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
• Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
• Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
• Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
• Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
• The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
• Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
• Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
• Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
• The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.

That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2021

Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY

— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022

another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI

— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
• To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
• ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.

I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022

• What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
• U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.

I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 30, 2022

look I don’t think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022

• All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
• Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
• Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
• Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler’s old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel

— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022

• Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
• The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
• Legally defining Peter Parker.
• Marvel adjective chart.

this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022

The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of “fantasy,” “adventure,” “frontier,” and “tomorrow,” with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you’ll find anywhere.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022

science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 20, 2022

• Art Is Not Therapy.
• The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
• Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
• The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
• A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
• Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
• Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.

🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.

For one: more sequels & comic book movies.

In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu

— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022

• Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
• At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
• This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
• Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
• Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
• If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
• Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
• Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
• Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
• The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
• The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
• Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
• Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…

good morning
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F

— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022

oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 27, 2022

• “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
• Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
• Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
• Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
• What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
• Equal population mapper.
• The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
• Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
• Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”

This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022

The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2022

the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD

— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022

• A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
• The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
• War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
• When Chess Gets Weird.
• Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
• America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
• From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
• The United States of Abandoned Places.
• A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
• An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
• An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
• The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
• Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
• Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
• New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
• The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
• In a Parallel Universe, Another You.

I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.

It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022

pic.twitter.com/V0tmZsNfrA

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022

We're a modest company with modest goals:
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god

— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014

• How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
• Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
• We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
• By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
• Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
• Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
• Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
• The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
• Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
• An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
• As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
• As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
• Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
• Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
• Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
• Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
• The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
• ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
• The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
• More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
• Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
• Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
• Anthropocene Gothic.
• Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
• Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
• Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
• It can always get worse.
• They say time is the fire in which we burn.
• How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
• And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.

if you don’t oppose nuclear war when you’re 25, you have no heart. if you’re not in favor of nuclear war by the time you’re 35, you have no head

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2022

This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022

The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels

— ᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟ (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022

from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022

Monday Morning Links!

• The latest Grad School Achebe not-so-mini-episode is up! This one is about two of Achebe’s short stories, “Marriage Is A Private Affair” and “Dead Man’s Path.” It was one of our best conversations yet, on some of the slightest literary territory we’ve yet staked out…
• More good podcast news: the Ranged Touch Homestuck podcast is a reality.
• ICYMI: I’ll be doing a lecture and seminar series as a virtual scholar-in-residence @TheRosenbach this fall on four of Octavia Butler’s novels. Here are the details! We’re reading Kindred, Wild Seed, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower…
• CFP: LGBTQIA+ Fantastika Graphics: A Digital Symposium November 20th, 2021.
• An assistant professor position in transgender studies at UC Davis.
• The results of Marquette AAUP’s financial analysis of the university is also out: Independent Analysis Reveals That Marquette University Finances Are Solid — Faculty Demand Greater Role in Financial Decisions and an End to Layoffs.
• A long-delayed interview with me for the Schmitt Fellowship “Leadership” project is up now with lengthy disclaimer indicating that I speak for no one but myself (which is true!).
• Cornell helpfully announces its intention to violate the ADA.

This is straight-up illegal and somebody in the office of the general counsel at Cornell should know it. https://t.co/M0D1PIWzmq

— Michael Bérubé (@MichaelBerube1) August 13, 2021

• Why Mass Effect is some of the best sci-fi ever made.
• Blood, gore and a healthy dose of catharsis: why horror can be good for us. The H Word: Post-Human Horror.
• John Carpenter Interview: “I’m not the biggest fan of talking about my films – but let’s do it.”
• Inside the Nichelle Nichols conservativorship battle.
• ‘Welcome To Cleveland’ rooftop still baffling Milwaukee passengers decades later.
• ‘Mind blowing’: Grizzly bear DNA maps onto Indigenous language families.
• Unnerving gender hypothetical corner.

this is *wild,* the sort of thing i would make up as an "unnerving gender hypothetical" that turns out to have once been routine medical practice: putting cis girls on hrt to keep them from getting "too tall"
https://t.co/Mn2f5uYKBC

— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@perdricof) August 14, 2021

• Milwaukee took a big hit in the new census numbers. The question is whether they’re accurate.
• ‘Be Paranoid’: Professors Who Teach About Race Approach the Fall With Anxiety.
• Higher Ed Has a Credibility Problem.
• July was world’s hottest month ever recorded, US scientists confirm. It’s now or never. “How long can a fish hold its breath?”
• Andrew Cuomo: A Life. Time’s Up to re-evaluate conflict-of-interest policy in wake of Cuomo scandal.
• Why California is beating Florida and Texas on the Delta variant (so far). Inside America’s Covid-reporting breakdown. In the West, a Connection Between Covid and Wildfires. Delta Variant Raises Questions as Campuses Start Semester. Hey, Is Delta Bad for Kids? Yes and no. Why Parents Shouldn’t Hunker Down and Wait for a “Return to Normal”. COVID School Year Three. Covid Vaccines for Kids Can’t Wait.

Each day the question is how can this possibly get worse. Worster. Worstest. And it does.
New records set daily, cases >25,000, hospitalizations >16,000, 31.9% test positivity, increasing deaths pic.twitter.com/V70wrA0x9z

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) August 14, 2021

• I Can’t Stop Thinking About the First Chapter of This Climate Change Novel: A conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson about The Ministry for the Future and this summer’s extreme heat.
• How a Board Game About Birds Became a Surprise Blockbuster.
• And ladies and gentleman: the Graveyard of Empires.

Thursday Night Links!

• The local AAUP’s fundraiser for an independent audit at Marquette funded so quickly I barely even had a chance to promote it.
• Meanwhile, Marquette in the news! Demographic Realism and the Crisis of Higher Education.
• The attack on the humanities, especially at less selective universities, is a violation of some of the basic premises of undergraduate education, argue Mary Beth Norton and James Grossman.
• The Academic Concept Conservative Lawmakers Love to Hate.
• As Colleges Strive for a Return to Normal, Students With Disabilities Say, ‘No Thanks.’
• Why Doomsday Hasn’t Happened. Most colleges averted financial disaster. But the pandemic will still have a lasting impact.
• Alison Clark Efford describes the value of setting aside time in each class with her graduate students to discuss the humanities, careers and the good life.
• Look who’s being deprofessionalized now? Phylicia Rashad named dean at Howard University.
• Faculty Moral Distress about Pandemic Teaching.

this is a great blog post that also clarified for me why as a grad student I've always experienced teaching as something physically and emotionally draining: I have never been provided the material tools and space to do the job as well as I ethically feel obligated to https://t.co/vwwkpNU9ua

— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) May 11, 2021

reverse tenure, administrators aren’t allowed to leave unless faculty and staff agree they did a good job https://t.co/Nlyi5wMgN3

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021

some personal news: I’m leaving academia https://t.co/XGWSpnbCGG

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021

• Journal of Posthumanism has launched. CFP for issue two!
• Failed state watch: Target to Halt Pokémon Card Sales ‘Out of an Abundance of Caution.’

Drastic as the decision may seem, particularly given that Pokémon cards aren’t the only things people wait in line for hours to buy, it comes days following a fight in a Brookfield, Wisconsin Target’s parking lot in which four people attacked a man, who then pulled his legally-owned gun on his assailants, prompting them to flee before later being arrested by the police. Target’s decision also comes just weeks after the company implemented new policies to curtail people camping out overnight at their stores. Beyond telling people not to line up like this, an alleged note to employees asked them to consider calling the police in order to force people to disperse.

• Elsewhere in my failed state: Wauwatosa PD’s high value target internal investigation.
• You and me both, kid. Bunny, the dog that can “talk,” starts asking existential questions.
• These days, he argues, most of Israel’s leadership falls into what he terms the “annexation” camp or the “control” camp. Israel’s Violence Shows Why Now Is the Time for BDS. The end of the green line.
• This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy.
• Breaking. NBC News confirms: The CDC will announce that Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID no longer need to wear masks or physically distance, indoors or outdoors in almost all circumstances. Elsewhere on the COVID beat: a hilarious troll.
• A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?

The pandemic is the pinnacle of social media content because petty differences of manners and judgment became not just “political” but a Matter of Life and Death — at the precise moment no one was allowed to do anything *but* sit in their house and doomscroll.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 12, 2021

• The Real Reason Behind the Misinformation Epidemic in Online Moms’ Groups.
• A GOP Civil War? Don’t Bet On It.
• Joe Manchin’s surprisingly bold proposal to fix America’s voting rights problem. Reminds me a certain other Joe…

reminds me of when Joe Lieberman tried to scuttle Obamacare by cynically proposing a Medicare buy-in and then had to walk it back after the weekend after everyone agreed https://t.co/TcU0OuRrRv

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2021

• Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet. Only if it turns out after a few years that it’s made up of ground-up animals and after a few more years of transactions will take up all the biomass of Planet Earth!
• The Intelligent Forest.
• 2050 Is Closer Than 1990.
• How the computer broke the human body.
• Once more for safety, the Problem of Susan.
• Untitled Earth Sim 64.
• Who Should John Mulaney Be Now?
• Dark Souls in the dark night of the soul.
• Cory Doctorow mega-thread on The Ministry for the Future.
• All of man’s dreams turn to ash: The Jenga sublime.
• The only CEO I trust.
• Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021

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

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

— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021

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

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

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

pic.twitter.com/sOZCUB70tn

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021

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

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

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021

this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ

— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021

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

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

— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Just Some Normal Friday Night Links on a Perfectly Normal Friday Night

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2020

• Discharges, Demographics and Discipline: Marquette is eyeing deep faculty cuts. An undergraduate says she was targeted for discipline because she questioned the administration.
• Corporate Consultants Set Their Targets on American Universities.
• What a Biden Win Would Mean for Higher Education.
• The College Degree Is Dividing America.
• Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting.’ Trump’s campaign and family boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count. Study Considers a Link Between QAnon and Polling Errors. QAnon Is Winning. The president has told allies he’ll never concede. How Fox News Saved America. Well, it was nice while it lasted.
• 2020 is 2010 redux. The permanent GOP apartheid.
• Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races. Okay but after that it’s socialism, right
• Florida voters backed a $15 minimum wage. So did Joe Biden—and he lost the state. There are important lessons here for the party. What If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
• Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy. What It’s Like for a Voting Rights Activist to Finally See Georgia in Play. The Canavan Plan for Georgia Supremacy.
• If Republicans win the GA specials, the Dem Senate *minority* will represent 20 million more people than the GOP majority. If Dems win, the Senate will be 50-50, and Dems will represent 41 million more people.
• The Cretaceous, US election maps, and you.
• It’s not you, Nate. It’s us. (And maybe a little you.)
• Like so many political prodigies before her, @AOC is about to destroy her career by gripping the last third rail in American life.
• How Conservatism Failed Its Women.
• ‘It’s Just a Slaughter’: Montana Goes From Purple to Deep Red.
• Two Louisville high schoolers just took down the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police. Let that sink in.
• From the archives: The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans.
• The unemployment crisis hiding in plain sight. Help is not on the way.
• Marquette professor settles 144-year controversy on invention of the telephone.
• Mysterious Radio Signal Is Coming from Inside Our Own Galaxy, Scientists Announce.
• Not joking: Is this eligible for every Oscar?
• Great, more work.
• And scientists discover bizarre hell planet where it rains rocks and oceans are made of lava. It’s called Election Night 2020 am I right

pic.twitter.com/0eXnaIVYkF

— Daigle (@Daigle) October 31, 2020

Thursday Morning Links!

* Hey, this is finally out! Imagining Apocalypse Now with Mark Soderstrom & Gerry Canavan.

* And the BBC has re-released its Afterwords: Octavia E. Butler series, but it’s still not available to listen to in the US.

* Presenting The Ancillary Review of Books.

* CFP: Journal of Science Fiction Special Issue on Middle Eastern Science Fiction.

* Come Unstuck in Time with Ryan North & “Slaughterhouse Five.” Everything about the new Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel is beautiful, and nothing hurt.

* Wildfires Bring New Devastation Across the West. 500,000 people in Oregon forced to flee wildfires. 7 People Die in West Coast Wildfires. California blaze caused by firework at gender-reveal party. Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse. Nothing to see here, folks. I Need You to Care That Our Country Is on Fire. Think 2020′s disasters are wild? Experts see worse in future. Nature sends us a wake-up call. When the Sky Is Orange. It’s Ecosocialism or Barbarism. The coming climate migration.

To paraphrase a saying, this isn't California's worst year in the last hundred, it's California's best year in the next thousand https://t.co/InQ6Pl3BJp

— Ethan Hein (@ethanhein) September 10, 2020

Welcome to the fragile era. Overoptimized, neglected, or intentionally damaged systems will break with more regularity. Next up, watch as interlinked systems fail in a cascade rather than alone.

— joshua schachter (@joshu) September 7, 2020

When I was a child in Los Angeles any temperature above 90 F was front page news. Today my home town part of LA is 114 deg., and every place east of the Santa Monica Mtns is triple-digit, most above 110.
Few people have AC.
SoCAL is burning up🔥, literally & figuratively. https://t.co/bCvGJFctjX

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 6, 2020

1/ Once you accept that climate change is *already* making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this:

With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot.

And that’s just the beginning.

— ProPublica (@propublica) September 16, 2020

* Torrential rain triggers widespread flooding in D.C. area, inundating roads, stranding motorists. Floods Washed Away More Than 25% of Nigeria’s Rice Harvest. Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says. Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse. How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. 10 Years Ago, World Leaders Set Biodiversity Goals. They Haven’t Met a Single One.

One person cleaning up trash at a park for 410 straight days only for a giant wildfire to wipe out the whole thing is the perfect metaphor for individual versus corporate responsibility for climate change. https://t.co/zU96RzBCM5

— Louis Keene (@thislouis) September 8, 2020

you are significantly closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire

— get your flu shot (@zoenone0none) September 15, 2020

* The end of the university. House of cards: can the American university be saved? The Necroliberal University. Strike at Michigan. “We are striking as an act of community care.” What a strike is for. Graduate employees reach deal with University of Michigan to end strike. As Colleges Open During a Pandemic, Student Life Remains Closed. How Colleges Became the New Covid Hot Spots. Tracking Covid at U.S. Colleges and Universities. Marquette University orders all students at Schroeder Hall to quarantine for 2 weeks. Some students heading home, after Marquette University enforces Schroeder Hall quarantine. Some Marquette students are leaving campus after being ordered to quarantine, while those stuck in their rooms wonder: ‘Is this hell?’ Marquette students scramble to quarantine, grad workers union blames university. Marquette University leaders draft checklist to prepare for possible online transition. No Wifi, No AC: Inside the Chaos of 1,400 COVID Cases at One College. Twenty-three Greek houses at Michigan State University were ordered by the county to quarantine for two weeks. Notre Dame and Michigan State Shifting Online as Campus Outbreaks Grow. UA official says ‘nothing wrong’ with school’s COVID-19 measures. UW students describe chaos as COVID-19 raged through residence halls, leading to lockdown. College Football Player Dies at 20. Shaming and blaming students can make it worse, experts say. Nice work if you can get it. What if Everyone on Campus Understood the Money? Class Of COVID-19: The Horrifying Sadness Of Sending My Kids To College During A Pandemic. Low-income students are dropping out of college this fall in alarming numbers.

It's all college towns. Every admin needs to lose their job. Catastrophic negligence that everyone watched them commit knowing what it was. https://t.co/OX9GTPnVfu

— Kevin 'cancel rent' Modestino (@kevin_modestino) September 6, 2020

I truly believe that the way universities are breaking their covenant with students during this pandemic will not be forgotten for a generation. What a way to blow a couple hundred years of trust. https://t.co/HeN8y78bbP

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) September 5, 2020

so administrators brought students back to campus against all the critics and all the evidence, and now that everything the critics said would happen has happened, it's too dangerous to undo https://t.co/Er0aVZcfBV pic.twitter.com/9EeVTXTlzg

— reclaim UC (@reclaimuc) September 5, 2020

* Blackademic Lives Matter: An Interview with Lavelle Porter.

* The Rules of the Game: How the U.S. News rankings helped reshape one state’s public colleges.

* What could go wrong in formalizing relationships between a multi-billion dollar industry where fortunes change hands in seconds, and a multi-billion dollar enterprise where the actual workers are paid nothing and could lose their entire futures in a single play

* America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral. The Pandemic Is an Intuition Nightmare. The Pandemic Is a ‘Mental Health Crisis’ for Parents. The Crushing Reality of Zoom School. US daily death toll from COVID-19 shoots back up over 1,000. New Cases Have Reached Record Levels in the Midwest. What Young, Healthy People Have to Fear from COVID-19. How the Coronavirus Attacks the Brain. Obesity and the coronavirus. Maine wedding ‘superspreader’ event is now linked to seven deaths. None of those people attended. Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Is Now Linked to More Than 250,000 Coronavirus Cases. Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. A Dentist Sees More Cracked Teeth. What’s Going On? Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year.

* The stock market is now so decoupled from the real economy that no one can see the economy is in absolute freefall. A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future. Two kids, no support system and $167 in unemployment benefits: One single mom’s plight in the age of Covid-19. 1 in 5 American workers has filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March. Half of out-of-work Americans were unable to cover basic expenses in August. The Unemployed States of America. Why the real unemployment rate is likely over 11%. 52% of young adults in the US are living with their parents. That’s the highest share since the Great Depression. Billionaires won corona. ‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.

robber-barons of the ashes https://t.co/9eU3XHXuej

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020

* Baltimore schools estimate only 65% of students are logging on every day. Children with disabilities are falling behind in school. School in the Time of Coronavirus.

* Darko Suvin: Thoughts within the Coronising siege: a work in progress.

* Some real Ministry of Truth shit at DOJ and HHS.

* ‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. Exclusive: Georgia doctor who forcibly sterilized detained women has been identified.

* Cancel culture strikes again: National U Holds Off on Name Change to Honor Donor Investigated for Child Porn.

* The pandemic and UBI.

* Benford’s Law and COVID-19 reporting.

* Sometimes you just know.

* As a delusion, “transgender Black Marxists are seeking the overthrow of the United States” is almost charmingly retro. How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy. QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. QAnon Incited Her to Kidnap Her Son and Then Hid Her From the Law. No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia. Trump lands likely endorsement. What If Trump Loses and Won’t Leave? Barr Tells Prosecutors to Consider Charging Violent Protesters With Sedition. Bill Barr Pushes ‘Wild’ and ‘Fanciful’ Felonious Postman Hypothetical. Don’t miss what Kayleigh McEnany just said about election night. I don’t think they should have told Trump about the heat ray.

* The Whitelash Next Time.

* What happened in Georgia was a crime. Rick Perry’s Ukrainian Dream. Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say. Another story that would have been a major scandal a few years ago and is now just seen as perfectly ordinary politics.

https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1305894015062216705

TRUMP: i am declaring marshall law

DEMOCRATS: it's 👏 spelled 👏 martial 👏

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) September 14, 2020

* What’s the big deal? He’s not like he’s gonna lose Michigan.

"Just vote." pic.twitter.com/He6b8IPvpD

— Michael (@OmanReagan) September 3, 2020

* “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread.

* Man obsessed with drinking the blood of the young to stay healthy turns out to have some questionable political beliefs.

* The Senate is bad, yes, but we could always make it worse.

* At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

* New York’s homeless students.

* Why Screen Time Can Actually Be Good for Your Kids.

* 12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class.

* Dozens of Black former franchisees sue McDonald’s over alleged discrimination.

* Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice. White House directs federal agencies to cancel race-related training sessions it calls ‘un-American propaganda.’

* Parents vs the childless! Whoever wins, the bosses win a whole lot more!

* Serial killer at Ft. Hood? It’s up over 23 deaths. What on Earth is happening there?

* The OAS Accusation of Electoral Fraud Against Evo Morales Is Bullshit — And Now We Have the Data to Prove It.

* When does a model own her own image?

* Dune as anti-white-savior narrative.

* Civil War generals as Muppets: a definitive thread.

Teaching a writing class for under-10s:
Me: So, everyone, what does a story NEED?
Small boy: A character!
Small boy 2: A setting!
Small girl, a gleam in her eyes, in a near-whisper: REVENGE.

— Jackson Pearce is trying to stay off this site (@JacksonPearce) September 16, 2020

someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a zelda game where ganon can actually be defeated https://t.co/YylhihH9gS it was me sorry https://t.co/G9Ww2abZ8O

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 8, 2020

* “Safety driver” as “moral crumple zone.”

* Imagine the absolute blessing of waking up one morning to find that someone who treated you this way was trending on Twitter.

* J.K. Rowling’s new book imagines a fantasy world where she is right about trans people.

* David Graeber, 1961–2020. A Jewish Goodbye to David Graeber. Remembering My Friend, David Graeber. That Was David Graeber.

* capitalism.jpg

* Semenya loses at Swiss supreme court over testosterone rules.

* John Cage musical work changes chord for first time in seven years.

* Movies were great. I’m sad about movies.

* For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip? In his new book, How To Be Depressed, the renowned journalist and critic George Scialabba observes that “[t]he pain of a severe clinical depression is the worst thing in the world.” This, it turns out, is both pretty much all you can ever say about the topic and a door opening onto the vast field of what we might call depression humanism.

Seinfeld: let's see if people wanna watch misanthropes consistently fail and learn nothing

It's Always Sunny: what if that AND they have cartoonish personality disorders?

Second Reality TV Boom: What if all that AND it's all REAL

Twitter: What if all that AND it's YOU

— Ben Kling 🦚 (@benkling) January 9, 2019

* We stan.

* Time Travel as White Privilege.

* Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds.

* The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network.

* Are aliens hiding in plain sight?

* Eugenics, sperm donation, and the law.

* Rules & Roberts.

* Of course you had me at a Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Switch game.

* And I volunteer.

Friday Links!

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

* Africanfuturism Defined.

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

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

* Promissory futures.

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

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

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

* My Friend, Mr. Rogers.

* Halloween and Stranger Danger.

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019

 

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

* 😬😬😬😬😬.

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

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

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

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

* Bernie finds religion on immigration.

* The metapolitics of Medicare-for-all.

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

* “OK Boomer”: not okay?

* OK Adorno.

* Lean in, white supremacist ladies!

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

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

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

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

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

* Stanford still trying to murder Stanford University Press.

* Behind the scenes at Disney U.

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

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

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

* Redlining the humanities.

* The Williams English Boycott.

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

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

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) November 6, 2019

* Just the pettiest shit. It’s incredible.

* Clinton! Bloomberg! All your favorites!

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2019

* The culture of policing is deeply sick.

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

* The only election result I need.

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

* Could it be that Amazon … is bad?

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

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

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

— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 5, 2019

pitch: THE GOODFELLAS CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019

👇 https://t.co/XFFoAOWz1p

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2019

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

* Terminal whiteness.

* Funny, I have the exact opposite problem.

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

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

— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) November 6, 2019

* Friends? I’ll give you friends!

* Scenes from the class struggle in America.

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

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

* My Year of Concussions.

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

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

* When child abuse is a personal branding strategy.

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

* RIP, Hollywood Superman.

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

* Animals and sports! Now I like sports.

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

* I can never resist brutalist ruins.

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

* Hey Satan. Burying some fossils again?

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

* Some things are forbidden for a reason.

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

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

Friday Links!

* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.

* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.

* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?

* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.

So far this year, the MLA job lists shows 518 jobs total, at all levels, in all languages. That amount would have to more than triple to reach the total, 1871, for the *worst* year on this chart, 2015-16, the last for which the MLA has released data. pic.twitter.com/wv9Jw2VzP9

— Gerard Holmes (@ihaventreadit) October 9, 2019

* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.

* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.

* The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…

STOCKHOLM —The Swedish Academy announced Wednesday that the 2027 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the anonymous writer known as Q “for genre defying work that transcends traditional literary media platforms and questions the nature of our reality.”

— Jacob Brogan (@Jacob_Brogan) October 10, 2019

* Next year, Greta!

* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.

* Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.

* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!

Two of the president’s fixers arrested at the airport while trying to flee the country seems like it ought to be a bigger story

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2019

* Joe Biden’s Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to Acknowledge That.

* Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.

* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?

* How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.

* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.

The idea that Bush has the relationship to young people today that Reagan had when I was coming up, and that I’m now the old person trying to explain to people that he was Actually Bad, is very upsetting to me.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

Yes, the Iraq War is the headline, but Bush and his administration poisoned this country in almost every conceivable way, from cynically demogauging gay marriage to creating ICE, DHS, and a national surveillance state. Hell, he was whipping votes for Kavanuagh just last year.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

it really is an amazing edit https://t.co/4VPKCHtkKM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

[Hitler is on The Tonight Show]

LENO: Let me start with question number one…

[audience laughter]

LENO: What the hell were you thinking?

[audience loses it]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.

* The Making of the American Gulag.

* 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.

* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.

* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.

Me, when anyone blames PG&E for the situation: ah, you rube, let me explain climate change. You see, hot air flows off the high desert…

Me, whenever anyone blames it on climate change: wake up, you idiot, let me blow your mind about PG&E's deferred maintenance

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 9, 2019

so far it’s a tweet pic.twitter.com/8nTvJsPLxC

— Laura Fisher (@termitetree) October 10, 2019

* Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.

* Today in the nightmare society.

* How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.

* Beware the climate pragmatists.

Capitalism collapses every 10 or 15 years and has essentially summoned a climate meteor to wipe out all life on earth, and people are literally staring at the abyss of human extinction like "its the only system that works."

— Jeremiah Red🌹 (@_Floodlight) October 10, 2019

* Google’s core business is misinforming people, but sometimes they do it on a pro bono basis.

* A lost decade and $200,000: one dad’s crusade to save his daughters from addiction.

* Understanding the professional-managerial class.

* A reporter went undercover as a Facebook moderator and was trained not to delete certain racist memes and images of child abuse.

* Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, presents the actual history of one of those possible branches. It traces the development of the idea of the Fourth Reich—a resurgent, Nazi-like regime based in apocalyptic visions and quasi-religious ethnonationalism. Though the Fourth Reich never actually took power in Germany or elsewhere, Rosenfeld shows how the idea itself has been influential. His account helps us to understand why the Fourth Reich never came to fruition—and what we can do to make sure it remains a counterfactual.

* From the archives: Tribal Map of America Shows Whose Land You’re Actually Living On.

* Research finds uranium in Navajo women, babies.

* Study: a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a mini-nuclear winter.

* Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

Fairly certain that crude oil is a genuine eldritch horror.

• lied in wait in the Earth's crust for literally millions of years
• made from the dead bodies of creatures nobody in recorded history has ever seen alive
• almost immediately granted us advanced technology

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

• naturally occurring, yet has a scent incomparable to any other natural substance
• pitch black liquid
• kills anything it touches
• using it to make anything kills everything it DOESN'T touch, but very slowly
• inexplicably addictive to the money-poisoned

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

• Is the cause of the mass extinction event we're currently experiencing, and that 95% of people are completely unaware of or outright deny.

— ☁️ Peryton's Shadow 👤 (@YseultCeirw) October 9, 2019

* A tale of two Arthurs. Why We Shouldn’t Fear Joker.

* The Real Threat of ‘Joker’ Is Hiding in Plain Sight: What the film wants to say — about mental illness or class divisions in society — is not as interesting as what it accidentally says about whiteness.

* Rewatching Taxi Driver in the Age of Joker.

* So I do know what it’s like to be a bat.

Turns out bats talk and 60% of what they say is arguments, including a whole category of calls for “males making unwanted mating advances” and another for when “a bat argues with another bat sitting too close.“ https://t.co/DasX9Oo3Ah

— Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) October 8, 2019

Monday Night Links!

* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.

* Boomers, man.

* This photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive.

These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019

* We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.

* Police have taken pre-emptive action against environmental protesters who are planning to cause disruption in Westminster.

* I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.

* I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.

* Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?

* Big tech is a black box.

* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.

The belief that there will be some miraculous awakening by the 40 or so % (including elected GOP officials) who support Trump and they will suddenly or eventually realize his crimes are worthy of impeachment is similar in its total disconnect from reality to climate denial

— karl taro greenfeld (@karltaro) October 6, 2019

* Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.

* Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful.

* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.

* Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.

* How the Prison Economy Works.

* Sacramento Amazon Workers Are Protesting after Woman Was Allegedly Fired for Spending Extra Hour with Dying Mother-in-Law.

* Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’

* Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.

* America is a failed state.

* For real though.

* Finally, some good news.

i'm becoming of the opinion that late capitalism's insistence on skeletal staffing has made it more fragile and vulnerable to a general strike

— L'Shanah Dovahkiin (@CelticAnarchy) October 7, 2019

* I like this.

"I think all interesting movies are puzzles or dreams." – @david_rees, breaking our brains pic.twitter.com/fMcnv5mqO3

— Blank Check Podcast (@blankcheckpod) October 1, 2019

* 24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.

* Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.

* This tweet got inside my fucking head.

thinking about how recent games in which "small mario" appears (eg, 3D World) imply this is some sort of fallen or injured condition with post-mushroom "super mario" being the norm, contrasted to the original 2D games' presentation of small mario as his natural state. disturbing.

— michael lutz from the amityville horror (@WarrenIsDead) October 7, 2019

* In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.

* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.

* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.

* Ours is a fallen world.

* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!

Monday Night Links!

* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.

* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.

* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.

* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.

Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV

— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019

* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.

* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.

* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.

* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?

* The university in ruins in Buffalo.

* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.

Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019

* “University of Wisconsin Madison, which announced last year it would open joint research campus with Foxconn in 2020, is well behind its original promise.”

* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.

* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.

* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.

* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.

* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.

* Long-hidden documents reveal the University of Texas’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil rights era.

* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.

* Don’t teach, strike!

* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.

* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?

* Academia’s Holy Warriors: How a network of Catholic intellectuals is making the case against liberalism.

* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.

* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.

* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.

* 80 Years Ago, a Football Powerhouse Ditched the Sport as a ‘Crass’ Distraction. Why Haven’t More Colleges Followed Suit?

* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.

* #NotMyAriel.

* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.

* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.

* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.

* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.

* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.

* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.

* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.

2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ

— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019

Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019

* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.

* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.

* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.

* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?

* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.

* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.

* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.

* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?

* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.

sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019

Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER

— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019

What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."

— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019

 

* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.

* Simpsons did it.

"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019

* “How did the Army exceed its recruiting goals this year? It was the student loan crisis, not the wars, service leaders say.”

* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.

* The Electoral College Really Does Give Republicans a Massive Advantage in Close Elections, a New Paper Finds.

* The Case Against the Popular Vote.

* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.

* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.

* I think people are severely underestimating the likelihood that Hunter Biden was involved in Bad Stuff in either Ukraine, or China, or both.

found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7

— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019

* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.

* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.

* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.

* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.

* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.

* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.

* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.

* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.

* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.

* But Milwaukee’s 30-year voucher experiment has not yielded results that are clearly better than the public schools.

* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.

* This game should be illegal.

* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.

* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.

* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.

* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.

* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.

* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.

* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.

* Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There’s a Clown Egg Registry in London, England.

Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC

— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019

* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?

Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.

In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.

* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.

* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.

* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.

* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.

* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.

* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.

* How pencils are made.

* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.

* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.

* How we invest in our cities is broken.

* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.

* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.

* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.

* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.

* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.

* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.

* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.

* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.

* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.

* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.

* An Alzheimer’s vaccine?

* How an online gag about storming the military base became a real-life drama involving a rural town, the government, and frequent evocations of the Fyre Festival.

* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.

* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.

* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.

Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79

— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019

* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.

* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?

* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.

Wednesday Night Links!

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

Is Margaret Atwood handmaids sequel going to be

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 4, 2019

* Maybe the aliens are already tired of us.

* The coming death of just about every rock legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Liberalism can’t defend itself.

* Whose Apollo Program?

* Another world is possible.

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

* The great enrollment crash.

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

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

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

— Dave Mazella (@DaveMazella) September 7, 2019

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

— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) September 7, 2019

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

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) September 7, 2019

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

* Another trip inside Cheating, Inc.

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

* Hard not to think we’ve grown obsolete.

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

— Zito (@_Zeets) September 3, 2019

* Another free speech exception.

* Inside Liberty University.

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

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

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

— Karl Steel (@KarlSteel) September 9, 2019

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

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

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

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

* Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt.

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

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

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

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

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 6, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Agribusiness against the Amazon.

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

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

* Today in the wisdom of markets.

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

* When the State Enforces “Straight Pride.”

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

* And speaking of white fragility.

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

— Jason Read (@Unemployedneg) September 8, 2019

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

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

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

* Care Work Is the Next Feminist Frontier.

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

* The Center for American Progress Is a Disgrace.

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

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

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

* Imagine if we had a democracy.

* Trump’s already cancelling elections.

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

* The case for changing the voting age to zero.

* The Fall of the Meritocracy.

* Yes, GamerGate Was a Misogynist Hate Campaign.

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

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

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

* extremely normal very normal

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

— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDNews) September 4, 2019

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

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

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

* Republicans Republicaning, part 7998.

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

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

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

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

* The struggle to save Day-Glo.

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

* The original Civilization, running inside an Excel spreadsheet.

* A history of Tetris randomizers.

* How we became nostalgic for Minecraft.

* 44 African Architectural Styles.

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

* Harry Potter Fandom in an Illiberal Democracy.

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

* A people’s history of labor history.

* They solved the Geedis mystery.

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

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

* Cheese can’t fake the funk.

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

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

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

* The art of the Anthropocene: @LegoLostatSea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!

* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.

* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

* 64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.

* In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.

* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.

This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.

How does this school stack up?

The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.

* Inside the African essay factories that churn out university coursework for 115,000 cheating British students every year.

* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

The book posits an Iron Law of Meritocracy, in which meritocratic systems will collapse in on themselves because eventually inequality of outcomes grow so vast, it's impossible to provide equality of opportunity. What you then get is something like aristocracy and oligarchy.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019

* Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.

* Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.

* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.

* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”

the idea that Omega Point aliens will someday be able to resurrect me on the basis of my public writing is 89% of the reason I’m still on Twitter https://t.co/l348wObaXp

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

to be perfectly honest I have a little bit of a Roko’s Basilisk fear that I’ve *already* been resurrected on the basis of my social media posts in some techno-gnostic simulation scenario and that’s why absolutely everything is garbage

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

* Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.

* Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.

* It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.

* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.

* Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.

* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

* Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.

* 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.

* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

Basically our – very neoliberal – plan for everything these days is to dump the consequences for contradictions we refuse to resolve on the most vulnerable, the over-stretched, and the future itself, and monetize every miserable step of it all the way down.

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019

* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.

* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.

* North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

* How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.

* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.

* Meanwhile, a Maryland teen has been labeled a child pornographer for sharing a video of her own sex act.

* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.

* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).

* In the age of the psychonauts.

* “It’s time to talk about James Mattis’s involvement with the Theranos scandal. He’s selling a book, not saving the country from Trump.”

* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”

* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.

* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.

Okay, folks. Here's a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart. pic.twitter.com/fuqglnUEE6

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019

* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!

* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

* Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.

* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…

* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

But, doctor, I am the Joker

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019

Sunday Links!

* Been waiting for this one for a while: Chris Ware talks Rusty Brown.

* Boots Riley has a key read on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that has been left out of nearly every review or thinkpiece I’ve seen. Here’s one thinkpiece that does take it up.

Re Once Upon A Time In Hollywood:

The Manson Family were overt White Supremacists who tried to start a race war w the goal of killing Black folks.

They werent "hippies" spouting left critiques of media. They were rightwingers.

This fact flips Tarantino's allegory on its head.

— Boots Riley (@BootsRiley) August 24, 2019

* Elsewhere on the Tarantino beat: Box Office Milestone: ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Crosses $200M Globally, one of only two non-franchise films to earn that much this year.

* What Satellite Imagery Tells Us About the Amazon Rain Forest Fires. The Amazon Cannot Be Recovered Once It’s Gone. Why Are We Even Responding to John Delaney? The Democrats are climate deniers.

The liberal order doesn’t even have a way to say “now, now, Mr. Bolsonaro, that’s not nice” when the future is at stake.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2019

no it was the rich people who did it https://t.co/ICNi1SOlgb

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2019

* Summer on the swollen Great Lakes.

This. Climate reporting should be a major beat with serious devotion of resources. It takes connecting many particular human experiences to global transformation to make change. https://t.co/J2sd5dyKr8

— erica robles-anderson (@fstflofscholars) August 25, 2019

* The Bone Thief died. :( David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier.

* The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren.

* We got him! I’d like to see Ole Donny Trump wriggle out of THIS jam!

* Northern Ireland is already spiralling out of control but no one is paying attention.

* When Your Rapist Demands Custody.

* Gamergate will always be with us.

* Aaron Bady on Ready or Not.

Such an ending would imply that the ludicrous caricatures we imagine into existence to justify our preposterous wars with each other are, actually, just the pretexts we want and need to justify violence. In other words, it would skewer movies like The Hunt, and the ideological fantasies that divide the country into red and blue caricatures. If The Hunt seems to take a side — endorsing, by all indications, the worldview of its “deplorable” protagonists — Ready or Notnearly ends by suggesting that the stories we might tell ourselves to normalize violence are nonsense.

Instead, as it turns out…

* An update on a bizarre story: Ugandan mothers want justice for their children who died in care of an unlicensed American health worker.

* When You Can’t Afford School Lunch, the Toll Is More Than Just Physical.

* The New American Homeless.

* “The difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.”

* Insulin Prices Killed Josh Wilkerson. Now His Mother Is Taking On Big Pharma.

* Negative interest rates are coming and they are downright terrifying.

* Hellen Keller was a revolutionary socialist who wanted to abolish capitalism lol

* Suffering makes better art.

JUST SAYIN pic.twitter.com/kIjUTnrHlF

— I am the utterance of my name (@filamena) August 24, 2019

* Fairy stories have always been radical.

* The legality of owning a kangaroo in the United States. Kudos to Wisconsin for keeping freedom alive.

* And, finally, the story that never needed to be told is here!