Posts Tagged ‘antibiotics’
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
Just Another Monday Morning Linkpost
* I asked “If you were going to do a NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM lit crit class where the gimmick was that you always returned to a foundational text for application, what would you choose?” and got some really good ideas. Right now, if I do it rather than a multiple-choice or wheel-of-fortune variant, it looks like it’s going to be Frankenstein.
* CFP for SFRA 2019, at Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
* Her Eyes Weren’t Watching God: The Empathetic Secular Vision of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin – Building a World.
* Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in first look at ‘Lord Of The Rings’ author’s biopic. Deadwood Movie Confirmed for Spring 2019 Premiere. And the new Aladdin movie looks worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.
* This week I went on a journey into the madness of The Phantom Podcast, which reviews the Star Wars prequel trilogy as if the series began with Episode 1, and I regret nothing. Scroll all the way down.
* Active-Shooter Drills Are Tragically Misguided: There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying view of childhood.
* Students and Faculty Plan Walkout Over Johns Hopkins’ ICE Contract.
* How to Make Grad School More Humane.
* Should You Allow Laptops in Class? Here’s What the Latest Study Adds to That Debate.
* International Graduate-Student Enrollments and Applications Drop for 2nd Year in a Row.
* WTF Is Going on at Wright State? Seriously. Seriously. Seriously. Seriously.
* “Student Loan Relief or Paid Vacation? These Workers Get a Choice.” Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans.
* Every tweet in this thread is enraging. Every one.
* Julian Glander’s Art Sqool is about Froshmin, a small, round person who is going to an art school run by an artificial intelligence that is going to help Froshmin become a great artist. Or at least some kind of artist. Actually, thinking about it, the weird little robot who evaluates all of your art doesn’t make any promises about ability or skill or fame or recognition as a product of the time that Froshmin spends at Art Sqool. Wait, shit, is this a scam?
* When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation.
* When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)
* How Flight Attendants Grounded Trump’s Shutdown.
* The battle for the future of Stonehenge.
* 250 dead, $91 billion in damages: 2018 was a catastrophic year for U.S. weather; 4th-warmest for globe. A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan. Melting glaciers reveal ancient landscapes, thawing mummies, and long-dead diseases. Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. Global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years. Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’. The end of the Colorado. Polar thinking.
* Latinos, blacks breathe 40 percent more pollution than whites in California, study says.
* Liberal Democrats Formally Call for a ‘Green New Deal,’ Giving Substance to a Rallying Cry. More here.
* Ugh. Gotta preserve this flawless system.
* Please Stop Writing Nancy Pelosi Fan Fiction.
* Tax the Hell Out of the Rich, When They’re Alive and When They’re Dead.
* Meanwhile, it sounds like things going great in Britain.
* Brett Kavanaugh Just Declared War on Roe v. Wade.
* Parable of the Talents watch: Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency.
* “I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book.
* Sesame Workshop has finally given up on Bert and Ernie.
* On the end of The Good Place.
* Patreon planning to completely betray its user base, of course.
* Google is already way down that road. As is everyone else.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York’s establishment Dems to eliminate her district.
* Headlines from the end of the world: “Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate.”
* Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows. 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.
* “Hackers using black-market Israeli ICE-breakers to extort a billionaire who’s replacing his employees with robots, at the behest of a shadowy tabloid/petromonarchy alliance, is actually the cyberpunk future we were promised, and yet.” But for real.
* On Jaws 4. On a legally distinct Harry Potter.
* Young engineer upgraded the LEGO bionic arm he built for himself.
* I’m amazed it’s even legal to sell these paintings in Germany.
* Finland gave people free money. It didn’t help them get jobs — but does that matter?
* The meat industry vs. lab-grown meat.
* An antibiotic-style treatment for cancer? Let’s hope.
#OEBStudies for All Your #OEBStudies Needs
* I’m at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, presenting as part of the Octavia Butler studies conference here. Here’s a great writeup from the organizers, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey. Hashtag #OEBStudies!
* Lumenscent Threads: Knowing Octavia Butler through a Community That Loved Her.
* I also got in a big Twitter to-do with Noah Berlatsky about the Oankali, if you want some extra bonus OEB content.
* Then next week I’m back in California for the Science Fiction Research Association conference at Riverside, giving a talk called “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene” (and doing a bunch of SFRA executive committee stuff too I guess).
* “Rakka,” a nightmarish SF film from Neill Blomkamp, narrated by Sigourney Weaver. Seems almost like proof of concept for the Alien sequel they won’t let him do…
* And why not? Here’s an Irish one.
* The Han Solo prequel film, like every other Star Wars followup Disney has attempted, has encountered problems that have crashed production. This time they’ve fired the directors and brought in Ron Howard to attempt to salvage the project.
* Jon Ossoff’s Georgia special election loss shows Democrats could use a substantive agenda. Nonsense! They’re doing great. Why Jon Ossoff’s loss is bad news for Democrats’ 2018 hopes. Keep hope alive.
* Memo shows what major donors like Goldman Sachs want from the Democratic Party. Class struggle in America doesn’t look exactly like you think.
* Who Is Getting Rich Off the Secret Health-Care Overhaul?
* Senate Health Bill Gives Huge Tax Cuts to Businesses, High-Income Households. G.O.P. Health Plan Is Really a Rollback of Medicaid. A helpful chart of the differences between the Senate and House bills and the status quo. The Senate health bill is a recipe for a death spiral. Wheelchairs and zip ties. The littlest lobbyist: a 6-year-old, whose life depends on ACA, heads to Capitol Hill. There will be deaths.
* Going on Fox News cost me my job, professor claims.
* Don’t Trust a Republican Just Because He Hates Trump.
* Corey Robin on China Miéville’s October.
* The Pittsburgh Fairy Tale: Pittsburgh’s much-touted revival has remade the region for the wealthy while leaving workers and the poor behind.
* Twilight of the CEOs. Uber doesn’t even currently have a CEO, COO, CFO, or CMO, “in addition to other open positions.”
* Ted Chiang was right! Attractive Students Get Higher Grades.
* Probably the only good thing that has ever happened on Twitter.
* Hunting for Antibiotics in the World’s Dirtiest Places.
* The New Free Speech is a right-wing grift, part 29.
* “North Carolina is the only state in U.S. where no doesn’t mean no.”
* “Bill Cosby to Teach Young People How to Avoid Sexual Assault Charges.”
* But it’s not ALL deranged misogyny! N.H. Republicans Accidentally Approved a Bill Allowing Pregnant Women to Commit Murder.
* Looks like the marketing team have had a word.
* This seems fine: Elections officials outgunned in Russia’s cyberwar against America.
* Sega!
It’s Week One of Year Zero and I’m Declaring Total Tab Bankruptcy
* CFP: SFRA 2017. CFP: 14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference. CFP: Toxic Fans. CFP: Whiteness and the American Superhero. CFP: The Gibson Critics Don’t See. Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships. CFP for MLA 2018: Creative Economies of Science Fiction. And also at MLA 18, the science fiction panel I’ll be chairing: Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* This thread on Gene Roddenberry and Grace Lee Whitney makes some flat assertions that are actually just well-supported speculations, but is nonetheless is a shocking and dispiriting revisionist history of Trek that’s well worth considering.
* The part I was born to play.
* Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
* The novel in the age of Obama.
* The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering in a Post-Apocalyptic World.
* Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries.
* From my colleague Rebecca Nowacek: Don’t Retreat. Teach Citizenship.
* Student evaluations: still bad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Alternative.
* I’m not normally one to defend college admin, but: Trade school fires president after he let homeless student stay in library during sub-zero weather.
* Without communism, there’s something missing from dystopian stories.
* Junot Diaz remembers Octavia Butler.
* Legislation in two states seeks to end tenure at public colleges and universities. Missouri Lawmaker Who Wants to Eliminate Tenure Says It’s ‘Un-American.’
* The university as asylum. The university and the class system.
* The Changing English Major. The collapse of history as a discipline. A liberal arts college without English majors? Massive cuts at the University of Alberta.
* MLA Rejects Israel Boycott. MLA by the numbers (from the right).
* When a school hires adjuncts, where does the money go?
* UBI already exists for the 1%.
* 26, 171.
* Shockingly enough, legalizing murder means more murders.
* Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
* Somali refugee in Milwaukee publishes book.
* When the homeless die, it’s up to forensic investigators to find their families.
* The End of the Rural Hospital.
* Secrets of my success: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent.
* The FBI has been using the Geek Squad as all-purpose informants.
* Trump Promised to Resign From His Companies — But There’s No Record He’s Done So. Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue. Mark Hamill, National Treasure. Searching for Time-Travelers on the Eve of the Trump Inauguration. Donald Trump, David Foster Wallace, and the hobbling of shame. A mere 34. It would be crazy not to impeach him. Keep America Great. Oh, you think? The DeVos Democrats. That’ll solve it. Here’s What You Can Do to Beat Trump. Preventing 2017 America from becoming like 1934 Germany: A watchlist. Philip K. Dick vs the Time of Trump. Here’s what Sci-Fi Can Teach Us About Fascism. Stop making sense, or, writing in the age of Trump. The stories coming out of this White House are bananas. Watch this story. And this one! How jokes won the election. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. UPDATE: This is fine.
* But this one takes the cake.
* Meanwhile, the 2020 Dem frontrunner…
* But Jeet Heer thinks we can do even worse.
* Democrats in the Wilderness. Oh, they’ve got this.
* The Electoral College Is Even Worse Than You Think. But it can always be worse.
* What Would Happen in the Minutes and Hours After North Korea Nuked the United States?
* The Obama speeches. A politics that surrenders every level of government to its opposition cannot win the future. It has already lost the present. But this was good.
* Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (But Their Schools Probably Won’t).
* Teachers who drink and drinkers who teach.
* Bumblebee is first bee in continental US to be listed as endangered.
* The Suburbanization of the US Working Class.
* You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke.
* Thousands of Skittles end up on an icy road. But that’s not the surprising part.
* Forced to watch child porn for their job, Microsoft employees developed PTSD, they say. The people behind the AI curtain.
* Ha ha ha, he’s the sheriff of my county, what a character, this is not frightening at all.
* Lessons from Octavia Butler: Surviving Trump.
* I still think every adult who let this get to trial should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice. There’s no hyperbole in that declaration.
* Sherlock‘s bizarrely self-aware problem with women.
* About that biometric password you’re born with and will never be able to change.
* Women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies.
* Most primate species are now threatened with extinction.
* Neanderthals were people too.
* When a Video-Game World Ends.
* Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.
* Twilight of the cruelty factory circus.
* “We Will Miss Antibiotics When They’re Gone.”
* “Genderless Nipples account frustrates Instagram.”
* Disability and as-seen-on-TV.
* Wolf-Sized Otters Prowled the World Six Million Years Ago.
* Not all that long ago, as the editor in chief of Gawker.com, Daulerio was among the most influential and feared figures in media. Now the forty-two-year-old is unemployed, his bank has frozen his life savings of $1,500, and a $1,200-per-month one-bedroom is all he can afford. He’s renting here, he says, to be near the counselors and support network he has come to rely on lately.
* I still believe in Arrested Development Season Five.
* Your blast from the past: Prodigy Online’s MadMaze.
* Superheroes and the kids today.
* And RIP, Mark Fisher. A memorial fund for his wife and son. His piece on depression.
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Sunday Night Links!
* CFP: Afrofuturism in Time and Space.
* I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but the United flight left so amazingly late that it would have actually arrived after my panel (despite planning an ample buffer). I can’t remember the last flight I took that wasn’t at least partially a disaster. How much worse can air travel get? The Reason Air Travel Is Terrible and So Few Airlines Are Profitable. The airlines have maximized profits by making travel as miserable as possible. The Airline Fee to Sit With Your Family. And of course: Waiting in Line for the Illusion of Security.
* I’m 36, and I’ve never felt more “halfway there” than I have since my birthday last November.
* This is mostly anecdata, but all the same Milwaukee really does have the absolute worst drivers in the world.
* What happened to CUNY? The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?
* Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.
* Climate Change: Views from the Humanities.
* Western universities are opening campuses in some odd places where they really don’t need to be.
* Students With Nowhere to Stay: Homelessness on College Campuses.
* “Without provocation or warning, a large swarm of bees descended on both of them as they continued on the trail,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
* We’ve separated the work of medicine and the work of the humanities for too long. After all, the creation of meaning is most important during our inevitable periods of suffering — whether the suffering is a patient’s physical illness or a physician’s emotional anguish.
* Here’s the data: The National Health Interview Survey from 2011–12 found that children between the ages of six and 17 from families under the poverty line were significantly more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medication than any other economic group. The same study found that children on Medicaid were 50 percent more likely to get a prescription than those with private insurance. An analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among kids between the ages of five and 17 between 1998 and 2009 found rates rose twice as fast for working-class and poor kids. A measurable class gap has emerged among children when it comes to mental health. And elsewhere from Malcolm Harris: why the dreaded term ‘millennial’ is actually worth saving.
* We, the undersigned graduate students from the UCSD Literature Department and their allies, are writing to publicly voice our concerns about the building where the Literature program is currently housed. In the past twenty-six years, many members of our departmental community have been diagnosed with cancer, forming an as-yet unexplained cancer cluster centered on the Literature Building.
* Ole Miss Admits Former Assistant Football Coach Helped Falsify ACT Scores.
* America’s atomic vets: ‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us.’
* It’s time to acknowledge the genocide of California’s Indians.
* Who paid for a professional oppo-research team to mock an environmental activist? The answer is secret. One could argue that the campaign isn’t substantially different from that of a corporate lobbyist, but, unlike registered lobbyists, America Rising Squared doesn’t have to file public disclosures or pay taxes, because it purports to be a social-welfare organization.
* For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean “the end of the road” for antibiotics. That New Superbug Was Found in a UTI and That’s Key.
* The Player Kings: On Shakespeare’s Henriad.
* Huge Marvel Comics twist changes Captain America forever*, and you might not like it.
* six months tops
* I get the anger, but I just don’t think Steve will be Hydra long enough to be outraged about. It really might not last past the next issue. Needless to say, on the question of outrage, others disagree. Jacobin weighs in: Captain America Doesn’t Have to Be a Fascist.
* What’s it Like for Peter Parker Growing Up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
* “Unprecedented” discovery of mysterious structures created by Neanderthals.
* Archaeologists discover Aristotle’s 2,400-year-old tomb in Macedonia.
* A ‘Devastating Account’ of Diversity at Yale.
* The Obama Administration Is Using Racist Court Rulings to Deny Citizenship to 55,000 People.
* Hillary Clinton’s email problems just got much worse. More. What the new inspector general report on Hillary Clinton’s emails actually says.
* Hard not to feel like Democrats are really bad at this. Really bad.
* Bernie Might Be Helping, Not Hurting Hillary Right Now.
* The Independent didn’t think this pair of glasses left on the floor of a museum was art.
* Geraldine Largay’s Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail.
* Peter Thiel just gave other billionaires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy. Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker.
* The iron-clad rule of all punditry and freelance social media opinionating: everything that happens must be construed such that it helps Trump.
* How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built.
* 12 Fringe Conspiracy Theories Embraced By A Man Who Might Be The Next President.
* Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise.
* A coup in Brazil, not that anyone seems to care.
* Research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny.
* Teaching Veronica Mars in a season of campus sex crimes.
* The turn to whetted appetites is supposed to be a compliment, but it just goes to show that there is no non-sinister defense for the “American male birthright” as a conceptual category.
* Gay Essentialism in a Eugenic Age.
* “Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania.
* Sad story: Gorilla shot dead after 3-year-old falls into enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo. A lot of people seem to be blaming the parents for neglectful watching, but having any way for a child to gain access to an enclosure is a catastrophic failure of design.
* Elsewhere in animal news: A Dutch Company Is Training ‘Low-Tech’ Eagles to Fight Drones.
* There are a lot of pieces of this argument that I don’t agree with, but this part seems right to me: What its steadfast defenders fail to grasp is that, by promoting the PhD as a sort of generalist’s degree that should be used to do all sorts of things by as many people as possible, they are damning the humanities to continued irrelevance.
* 50 Years of Joan of Arc at Marquette.
* New Evidence Suggests a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature.
* Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: A Mother Jones Symposium.
* Every Single Pinky and the Brain Plan to Take Over the World, Ranked.
* Do you think humans really have feelings, or are they just programmed to act like they do?
* I try to remember the day I stopped believing in the Loch Ness Monster, the day I realized heaven and earth provided more than enough to think about. I cannot, which seems strange. I have never regretted my obsession with the Loch Ness Monster. A strong belief in UFOs, say, is somehow contaminating, so many of its paths leading into the intellectual urinal of conspiracy and cover-up. Belief in the hard-core paranormal is not something one grows out of but something one is reduced to. Accepting the Loch Ness Monster’s existence, on the other hand, did not mean signing on to any particular pathology, except possibly that of optimism. The Loch Ness Monster made the world a little stranger, a little more wonderful.
* Welcome to Disturbia: Why midcentury Americans believed the suburbs were making them sick.
* Reproductive futurity watch: Congress member goes on bizarre anti-LGBTQ rant about sending gay people to space.
* Huge, if true: J.K. Rowling Confirms Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Will Be Sad.
* The Sad State of Game of Thrones’ Direwolves.
* Game of Thrones: This is canon now.
* Winter is going: The Arctic Heat Wave Is Literally Off the Charts Right Now.
* But there’s a Plan B: The Time To Nuke Mars Is Now.
Gerry Canavan 