Posts Tagged ‘Arrival’
So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links
* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…
* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).
* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!
* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)
* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…
* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.
* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.
* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.
* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!
* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.
* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.
* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.
* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.
* Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.
* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.
* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.
* Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.
What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?
The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.
* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.
* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.
* The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.
* How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.
* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.
* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.
* Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.
* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.
* Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.
* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.
Politics corner!
* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.
* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.
* Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.
* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!
* I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’
* The political theology of Trump.
* Florida. Why is it always Florida?
* The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.
* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.
* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.
* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.
* Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.
* Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.
* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.
* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.
* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.
* Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.
* Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.
* Why are we in the Middle East?
* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.
* Trans rights are human rights.
* Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.
* Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.
* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.
* Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.
* What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.
* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.
* Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.
* A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.
* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.
* How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.
* Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.
* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.
* “Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.
* Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?
* The story of a serial SWATter.
* The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”
* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.
* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.
* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.
* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.
* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.
* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.
* The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.
* A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.
* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?
* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.
* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.
Live from a Hotel Room in Philadelphia – Saturday Links!
* Climate work and despair. It’s a tough problem in the classroom, too. Climate change conflicts somehow with an assumed, mandatory pedagogical optimism; the lack of a solution or even a “hope spot” often leaves the class feeling somehow incomplete.
* Today our president was trolled on Twitter by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vicente Fox.
* Ted Chiang in the New Yorker. Great piece.
Beyond this narrow Wikipedian territory, Chiang is reluctant to venture. Although he is amiable and warm, he is also reticent and does not riff. Over several conversations, I learned, in addition, that he owns four cats, goes to the gym three times a week, and regards a small cylindrical seal made of hematite sometime around 1200 B.C. as one of his most treasured possessions—it was a gift from his sister, a reference to “Tower of Babylon.” He told me that, when he was a child, his family celebrated Christmas but wasn’t religious. When I asked Chiang if he had hobbies, he said no, and then, after a long pause, admitted that he plays video games. He refused to say what he eats for breakfast. Eventually, I sent him an e-mail with twenty-four questions that, I hoped, might elicit more personal details:
Do you have a favorite novel?
There isn’t one that I would want to single out as a favorite. I’m wary of the idea of a favorite anything.You’ve spent many years living near the water. Do you like the sea?
Not particularly. I don’t actually spend much time on the coast; it’s just chance that I happened to move here.What was the last work of art that made you cry?
Don’t know.Do you consider yourself a sensitive person?
Yes.
* Required Reading: 50 of the Best Sci-Fi Comics.
* Conspiracy theories we can believe in: the 19A0s, the suppressed decade between the 1970s and 1980s whose memory has been repressed.
* Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not. This article certainly supports my implicit bias against these sorts of studies.
* Trumpism: The Devil We Know.
* Today in the hopeless search for some Trump upside: the end of the campus sex bureaucracy.
* How could it possibly get worse? Oh.
* From December: UN opens formal discussions on AI-powered autonomous weapons, could ban ‘killer robots.’
* I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems.
* In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.
* A Practical Guide to Teaching Children Basic Math Concepts Using LEGO Bricks.
* And meanwhile, in the other universe…
.
New Year’s Links!
* A nice endorsement of Octavia E. Butler from Steve Shaviro. Some bonus Shaviro content: his favorite SF of 2016. I think Death’s End was the best SF I read this year too, though I really liked New York 2140 a lot too (technically that’s 2017, I suppose). I’d also single out Invisible Planets and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, both of which had some really good short stories. In comics, I think The Vision was the best new thing I’ve seen in years. There’s a lot I bought this year and didn’t have time to look at yet, though, so maybe check back with me in 2019 and I can tell you what was the best thing from 2016.
* Introducing the David Foster Wallace Society, including a CFP for the inaugural issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.
* Call for Papers: The Poverty of Academia.
* Oh, fuck this terrible year.
* 30 essential tips for succeeding in graduate school.
* The University in the Time of Trump.
* Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme.
* Who’s Afraid of the Student Debt Crisis?
* Duke warns professors about emails from someone claiming to be a student, seeking information about their courses — many in fields criticized by some on the right. Some Michigan and Denver faculty members have received similar emails but from different source.
* The age of humanism is ending.
* The New Year and the Bend of the Arc.
* Marina Abramović and Kim Stanley Robinson perform “The Hard Problem.”
* Osvaldo Oyola reads Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.
* Leia Organa Solo: A Critical Obituary.
* BREAKING: There Is No Such Thing as “White Genocide.” Academic Freedom, Again. Buffalo skulls.
* I don’t think Children of Men was ever actually “overlooked” — and I’m shocked it was considered a flop at a time — but it certainly looks prescient now.
* From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck. Remembering Caravan of Courage, the Ewok Adventure Star Wars Would Rather You’d Forget. Anti-fascism vs. nostalgia: Rogue One. How to See Star Wars For What It Really Is. And a new headcanon regarding the Empire and its chronic design problems.
* Good News! Humans No Longer Caused Climate Change, According to the State of Wisconsin.
* How did A&E let this happen?
* On fighting like Republicans, or, the end of America.
* Scenes from the class struggle in Berkeley. And in Chillicothe, Ohio.
* The seduction of technocratic government—that a best answer will overcome division, whether sown in the nature of man or ineluctable in capitalist society—slides into the seduction in the campaign that algorithms will render rote the task of human persuasion, that canvassers are just cogs for a plan built by machine. And so the error to treat data as holy writ, when it’s both easier and harder than that. Data are fragile; algorithms, especially when they aggregate preferences, fall apart. Always, always, power lurks. The technocrats have to believe in mass politics, believe for real that ordinary people, when they organize, can change their own destinies. Whether that happens depends on the party that gets built, and the forces behind it.
* Four Cabinet nominations that could blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Fighting Mass Incarceration Under Trump: New Strategies, New Alliances. Why Donald Trump Might Not Be All That Good for Art. How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler. This all certainly seems on the up-and-up. And today in teaching the controversy: Nuclear diplomacy via Twitter is a bad idea.
* Democrats: Time to Win! Why the Democrats’ 2017 comeback dream is like nothing we’ve seen before.
* The Russia Conundrum: How Can Democrats Avoid Getting Entangled in a Losing Issue?
* House Republicans will ring in the new year with a plan to permanently cripple government.
* The Great Harvard Pee-In of 1973.
* The UBI already exists for the 1%.
* The arc of history is long, but Google Search will not longer return Holocaust-denying websites at the top of page one.
* Same joke but about not being allowed to ban plastic bags in Michigan anymore.
* The Champions of the 401(k) Lament the Revolution They Started.
* “It was a pleasure to cull.”
* Geoengineering could ruin astronomy.
* Haiti and the Age of Revolution.
* A Utopia for the Deaf in Martha’s Vineyard.
* Why the ‘Ghost Ship’ Was Invisible in Oakland, Until 36 Died.
* Nine charts that show how white women are drinking themselves to death.
* It wasn’t just your imagination: more famous people did die in 2016.
* How long can Twitter go on like this?
* The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think it Is. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn.
* Special ed and the war on education.
* Happy Public Domain Day 2017.
* Intricate Star Trek Klingon Warship Using 25,000 LEGO Bricks.
Christmas Hangover Links!
* An excerpt from the conversation between Tim Morton and Jeff VanderMeer from my and Andy Hageman’s issue of Paradoxa is up at LARB. You can read our introduction too! The issue has been printed and will be on its way to subscribers (and available for purchase) soon.
* acting as if nothing terrible has happened
is a failed strategy you yell and this docility
has ruined and crushed us and afraid as I am
I cannot hold your vehemence against you
at this political moment as I watch you dig
your fingers into the rubble you’re sitting on
and you say maybe it’s impossible to believe
in politeness or civilization anymore…
* Ken Liu’s “Paper Menagerie” is the first story to hit the Hugo / Nebula / World Fantasy Award trifecta. Read it!
* The Christmas archives: Home Alone! Die Hard!
* Being a parent really is a second childhood: I’m even terrified of nuclear war again. “A tense new battle over nuclear arms erupts between Donald Trump and his staff.” Tweeting our way to Armageddon.
* How to Be a Guy: What I Learned My First Year Living as a Guy (at Age 34).
* Carrie Fischer is apparently in stable condition, but George Michael is gone.
* Ted Chiang talks adapting Arrival.
* Blade Runner 2 (“Blade Runnest“) and the Koreanization of the future.
* #TheResistance: American Mustache Institute takes a stand against Donald Trump’s anti-facial hair bias. John Bolton Vows Not to Shave Moustache.
* Today’s purge: Donald Trump is demanding the names of federal employees working to curb violent extremism.
* Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary. Trump to dissolve Trump Foundation, having moved on to bigger grifts. And why not dissolve the UN while he’s at it?
* Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel.
* Neo-Nazi March Planned for Whitefish, Montana.
* The GOP Theocracy: Xmas vs Hanukkah Statements. And don’t worry: RNC: The ‘new King’ is not Trump.
* Looking back: The collapse of the Obama coalition. What could explain it? More data that couldn’t possibly explain it. Having presided over the catastrophic collapse of his party and the possible end of American democracy, Obama gives himself high marks. Why Did Planned Parenthood Supporters Vote Trump?
* 2016 wasn’t actually bad, he explained. I’ll give it one point, for this.
* We can end the war on milk in our time.
* Prime Minister Dreamboat can’t wait to Keystone XL again.
*A consummate bullshit artist, Bucky Fuller’s career was built on failure, if not outright fraud. With few of his ideas achieving commercial success, he amounted to nothing more than a hand-waving proponent of outlandish notions. Worse still, he was an aggressive manager of his own profile and patents, an authoritarian technocrat who sought not students but compliant disciples to disseminate his muddled messages. The lynchpin of this view: even the geodesic dome, Fuller’s greatest “success,” rested on a concept borrowed (to be charitable) from an aspiring student sculptor. Buckminster Fuller in the 21st Century.
* John Williams Hasn’t Seen a Single Star Wars Movie.
* Don’t make the joke, don’t make the joke: Sex robots will ‘come a lot sooner than you think’, scientist claims.
* Elsewhere in the rise of the machines.
* A&E Cancels KKK Docuseries Following Criticism. That whole network needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
* BREAKING: All pro sports are bad.
* Actually, my speciality is evil ethics.
* Gasp! Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* They did it: They found the worst Star Wars take.
* The arc of history is long, but it can kick over its own head.
* Meanwhile, in Japan: Can the Emperor abdicate?
* And wherever we are on the political spectrum: let’s give the giant meteor a chance.
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
* The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book
* Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
* The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.
* Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
* We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
* The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
* My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Links
* Some of my own stuff from the weekend: Making America Great Again with Octavia Butler and the formal, official, can’t-take-it-back-now release of Octavia E. Butler in Kindle, hardback, and paperback. CFP: Buffy at 20. Jaimee’s election poem at the New Verse News: “Donald Trump, Kate McKinnon, Leonard Cohen.”
* CFP: Capital at 150. CFP: Marxist Reading Group: Genre and the Crisis of Narrative.
* Jerome Winter on the new space opera.
* Other books I’d rather be reading: In a Galaxy 90 Miles Away: The View from Cuban Science Fiction. No Mind To Lose: On Brainwashing.
* How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It). A Ted Chiang profile in The Guardian.
* A history of Chinese science fiction. An Islam and Sci-Fi Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten. The Trump Meltdown Begins. There is no way to predict where this is heading. (Okay, maybe we can predict a little bit.) How Trump Won. The counties that flipped parties to swing the 2016 election. It probably wasn’t voter suppression (except maybe in Wisconsin). We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions. Yeah, good luck. It Can’t Happen Here in 2016. The Plot Against America in 2016. Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America. Preparing for the Worst: How Conservatives Will Govern in 2017. Trump takes to Twitter to blast ‘hater, loser’ children; vows retribution. Where the Democrats Go From Here. How to Build an Exit Ramp for Trump Supporters. Amazing what a week can do. Blue Feed, Red Feed. Abolish the Electoral College. Post-Election College Grading Rubric. Google Emoluments Truth. The nine liberals you meet in hell.
* He might as well try: Obama Can and Should Put Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.
* Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters. The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem. Clinton Aides Blame Loss on Everything but Themselves. Comey! The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say. Epic. This didn’t have to happen. They Always Wanted Trump: Inside Team Clinton’s year-long struggle to find a strategy against the opponent they were most eager to face. Twilight of the Messageless Candidate. Blame the Clintons. Obama after Obama. Whatever happened: The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble. 2009: The Year the Democratic Party Died. The decimation of the Democratic Party, visualized. Does the Democratic Party Have a Future? Well, have you met the Democrats? The Worst Possible Leader at the Worst Possible Time. These are the key governors’ races the Democrats will blow in 2018. Blueprint for a New Party.
* From the archives: Umberto Eco on Ur-Fascism.
* Historians under Hitler. When Hitler Pivoted. Autocracy: Rules for Survival. What Is The “Alt-Right”? A Guide To The White Nationalist Movement Now Leading Conservative Media. Prepare For Regime Change, Not Policy Change.
* Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else. More from Nate’s Twitter. And from another angle entirely: Things look an awful lot like they would if we decided elections by coin flip.
* So many more examples could be given, but it’s getting late, and one general takeaway from the 2016 Election seems clear: our popular media, from those producing it to those sorting it with editors and algorithms, are not up to the task of informing us and describing reality. This won’t happen, but those people who got Trump sooo consistently wrong from the primaries to Election Day should not have the job of informing us anymore. And if you were surprised last night, you might want to reconsider how you get information.
* The New Inquiry has been all over the Trump Resistance. Waking up in Trump’s America. Lose Your Kin. Against Extinction. Fuck. The Gamble. And the struggle goes on: “Thanksgiving is the festival of white reconciliation.”
* No President. What a proper response to Trump’s fascism demands: a true ideological left.
* Do any laws bind electors to vote along with their state? Not really. But this cuts both ways, and basically ruins any sort of “hack the Electoral College scheme” from the jump too. Meanwhile, let’s hack the Electoral College, because what could possibly go wrong.
* Truly, only the superrich can save us now.
* Beginning to look a lot like Christmasttime: UPS strike. O’Hare strike.
* Rise of the Sanctuary Campus.
* And yet, to my knowledge, no one has explained clearly enough that globalization is over, and that we urgently need to reestablish ourselves on an Earth that has nothing to do with the protective borders of nation-states any more than the infinite horizon of globalization.
* Being Productive in Scholarly Publishing: Advice from Jason Brennan. No one said you’d like it.
* A GoFundMe for SEK’s medical bills. I only wish the prognosis were better.
* The New Intellectuals: Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture?
* Title IX is effectively finished, at least in its current form. More here. “College” as a concept may not be all that far behind.
* On toxifying, rather than repealing, the ACA.
* Trump Will Have Access To Personal Info Of “Dreamers” For Deportation Efforts. This precise possibility, of course, was raised as an objection to Obama’s action at the time.
* Democrats, 2016, preserving the state, and the man of lawlessness.
* After a tweet blaming this all on Bill Clinton, Steve Shaviro provided a time-travel novel to soothe my pain: The X-President.
* The coming Democratic defeat on infrastructure.
* What Women Used Before They Could Use the Law.
* I want things to be different.
* This world is so messed up. Let’s go do something good.
* How to Reverse Engineer Smells.
* The Official November 2016 Guide for Making People Feel Old.
* The 100-Year-Old Man Who Lives in the Future.
* Fact-checking doesn’t ‘backfire,’ new study suggests. Calling people racist might, though.
* Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal.
* What if X-Men were a Gothic novel?
* Calexit.
* The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price.
* Huge, if true: Report finds many graduate students are stressed about finances.
* An Oral History of My So-Called Life.
* The Fate of Reading in a Multimedia Age.
* I think I did this one a few months ago, but at least somebody has a plan: Optimal search path for finding Waldo.
* We asked eighty-six burglars how they broke into homes.
* New research suggests the Earth’s climate could be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than thought, raising the spectre of an ‘apocalyptic side of bad’ temperature rise of more than 7C within a lifetime. With Trump’s election I think any hope of solving this without geoengineering is over, and perhaps all hope period.
* The North Pole is a mere 36 degrees warmer than normal as winter descends. Give it a chance!
* Stephen Hawking says we’ve got about 1,000 years to find a new place to live. So you’re saying we have 999 years before we even need to think about this.
* But it’s not all bad news! Blood from human teens rejuvenates body and brains of old mice.
* And the thrilling conclusion to the thisisfine.jpg trilogy, truly the epic of our times.
Monday Morning Links!
* My superhero identity has finally been scooped.
* Lots of people are sharing this one, on hyperexploited labor in the academy: Truman Capote Award Acceptance Speech. As with most of this sort of adjunct activist some of its conclusions strike me as emotionally rather than factually correct — specifically, it needs to find a way to make tenured and tenure-track faculty the villains of the story, in order to make the death of the university a moral narrative about betrayal rather than a political narrative about the management class’s construction of austerity — but it’s undoubtedly a powerful read.
* I did this one already, but what the hell: Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes.
* Open Access (OA) is the movement to make academic research available without charge, typically via digital networks. Like many cyberlibertarian causes OA is roundly celebrated by advocates from across the political spectrum. Yet like many of those causes, OA’s lack of clear grounding in an identifiable political framework means that it may well not only fail to serve the political goals of some of its supporters, and may in fact work against them. In particular, OA is difficult to reconcile with Marxist accounts of labor, and on its face appears not to advance but to actively mitigate against achievement of Marxist goals for the emancipation of labor. In part this stems from a widespread misunderstanding of Marx’s own attitude toward intellectual work, which to Marx was not categorically different from other forms of labor, though was in danger of becoming so precisely through the denial of the value of the end products of intellectual work. This dynamic is particularly visible in the humanities, where OA advocacy routinely includes disparagement of academic labor, and of the value produced by that labor.
* Bring on the 403(b) lawsuits.
* On being married to an academic.
* It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe: Nobel academy member calls Bob Dylan’s silence ‘arrogant.’
* Eugenics and the academy. Racism and standardized testing. Whiteness and international relations.
* Language Log reads the bookshelf in the linguist’s office set in Arrival (out next month!).
* After years of neglect, public higher education is at a tipping point.
* Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th.
* Springsteen and Catholicism.
* White masculinity as cloning.
* Parenting is weird. If God worked at a pet store, He’d be fired. Part Two. It’s a mystery!!! Wooooooooooh! The Fox and the Hedgehog. Science and technology have reached their limit. Self-destructive beverage selection: a guide. Motivational comics. Has the media gotten worse, or has society? Understanding the presidency. The oldest recorded joke is from Sumeria, circa 1900 B.C. There’s a monster under my bed.
* Tenure Denials Set Off Alarm Bells, and a Book, About Obstacles for Minority Faculty.
* Trump’s Milwaukee Problem. Let’s Talk About the Senate. From Pot To Guns To School Funding: Here’s What’s On The Ballot In Your State. Todd Akin and the “shy” voter. The banality of Trump. The latest polls indicate the possibility of a genuine electoral disaster for the GOP. A short history of white people rigging elections. Having not yet won it back yet, Dems are already getting ready to lose the Senate (again) in 2018. The Democrats are likely to win a majority of House votes, but not a majority of House seats. Again. Today in uncannily accurate metaphors. This all seems perfectly appropriate. Even Dunkin Donuts is suffering. But at least there’s a bright side. On the other hand.
Slavery: Colorado
Yes, you read that right. There is a vote on slavery in 2016. The Colorado state constitution currently bans slavery and “involuntary servitude” … except if it’s used as punishment for a crime. This amendment would get rid of that exception and say that slavery is not okay, ever.
* And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.
* Speaking of endless refrain: Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi is now pierced by bullet holes.
* District Judge John McKeon, who oversees a three-county area of eastern Montana, cited that exception this month when he gave the father a 30-year suspended sentence after his guilty plea to incest and ordered him to spend 60 days in jail over the next six months, giving him credit for the 17 days already served. His sentence requires him to undergo sex offender treatment and includes many other restrictions.
* On Anime Feminist. (via MeFi)
* Today in the Year of Kate McKinnon: ten minutes of her Ghostbusters outtakes.
* Jessica Jones’s Second Season Will Only Feature Female Directors.
* I don’t really think they should do Luke Cage season two — or Jessica Jones for that matter, as Daredevil proved already — but just like I’d love to see a Hellcat series with Jessica Jones as a supporting player I’d love to see Misty Knight guest starring Luke Cage.
* The Case against Black Mirror. I haven’t been able to tune in to the new season yet but the backlash surprises me. This was one of the best shows on TV before! What happened?
* Famous authors and their rejection slips.
* How much for a hotel on AT&TTW? AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion.
* “This is still the greatest NYT correction of all time imo.”
* This is [chokes] great. It’s great if they do this.
* This, on the other hand, is unbelievably awful: Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war. Everyone involved in trying to claw back this money should be ashamed of themselves.
* Gee, you don’t say: U.S. Parents Are Sweating And Hustling To Pay For Child Care.
* I’ve discovered the secret to immortality.
* And there’s a new Grow game out for that mid-2000s nostalgia factor we all crave. Solution here when you’re done messing around…
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
Submitted for Your Approval, Wednesday Links
* CFP with a Monday deadline: Paradoxa 29, “Small Screen Fictions.” And relevant to my current courses: CFP: The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
* Application period now open for 2016-17 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort.
* Tor has an excerpt from Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, which is amazing (and which I’ll be reviewing for The New Inquiry, by and by).
* Just in the nick of time, the United States’ newly minted Solar Forecasting Center was able to convey the true cause of the radar jamming: a rash of powerful solar flares.
* On Pokémon Go and Psychogeography (and Philip K. Dick).
* Submitting (SFF) While Black.
* Trump, Second Amendment people, and stochastic terrorism. Could this actually be rock bottom? Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not two sides of the same coin but libidinally necessary for one another. The horror of Trump manages to create the ultimate liberal fantasy of post-partisanship, consensus and respect for the discourse.
* Remember When Hillary Clinton And Donald Trump Were Maybe Forced To Pose Nude In College?
* Coming soon to a university near you: We’re implementing new general education requirements without having first figured out how we want to deliver it or even what it is we’re trying to deliver, on a model where all the previous examples we can think of have failed.
* The US government will track killings by police for the first time ever.
* Justice Department to Release Blistering Report of Racial Bias by Baltimore Police. Should shock even the most cynical.
* Chicago Police Can’t Explain Why Their Body Cameras Failed At The Moment Of Unarmed Black Teen’s Death. I suppose it will always be a mystery.
* Oneida: The Christian Utopia Where Contraception Was King.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 26: Bootcamp.
* Finally, there’s a good way to play Dungeons & Dragons online.
* An unsettling thing happened at the Olympic diving pool on Tuesday: the water inexplicably turned green, just in time for the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform diving competition.
* Exceptionalism: More and more women are now dying in childbirth, but only in America.
* Nailing it: We’ve Devoured a Year’s Worth of Natural Resources in Just Seven Months.
* DCTVU Watch: This is a bad idea and they shouldn’t do it, though they will.
* Harley Quinn and sexism by committee. All the Ways Suicide Squad Could Have Been Much, Much Better.
* Trailers! Luke Cage! Story of Your Life Arrival! Even an improvised Rick and Morty mini-episode!
* And a friendly reminder to always look on the bright side of life.
Gerry Canavan 