Posts Tagged ‘assisted suicide’
Friday Links!

- Great looking one-day symposium: Queer Utopias.
- CFP: Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas – Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps. CFP: Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. CFP: SFRA Panels at ASLE 21. CFP: Migration and Exile in Science Fiction. CFP: Black Feminism on the Edge. CFP: The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature. CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- Kurt Vonnegut: March Madness Edition.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- In this situation, safeguarding the planet requires building a counter-hegemony. What is needed is to resolve the present cacophony of opinion into an eco-political commonsense that can orient a broadly shared project of transformation. Certainly, such a commonsense must cut through the mass of conflicting views and identify exactly what in society must be changed to stop global warming—effectively linking the authoritative findings of climate science to an equally authoritative account of the socio-historical drivers of climate change. To become counter-hegemonic, however, a new commonsense must transcend the ‘merely environmental’. Addressing the full extent of our general crisis, it must connect its ecological diagnosis to other vital concerns—including livelihood insecurity and denial of labour rights; public disinvestment from social reproduction and chronic undervaluation of carework; ethno-racial-imperial oppression and gender and sex domination; dispossession, expulsion and exclusion of migrants; militarization, political authoritarianism and police brutality. These concerns are intertwined with and exacerbated by climate change, to be sure. But the new commonsense must avoid reductive ‘ecologism’. Far from treating global warming as a trump card that overrides everything else, it must trace that threat to underlying societal dynamics that also drive other strands of the present crisis. Only by addressing all major facets of this crisis, ‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’, and by disclosing the connections among them, can we begin to build a counter-hegemonic bloc that backs a common project and possesses the political heft to pursue it effectively.
- If voting worked, they’d make it illegal, and they’re going to.
- I’d like this to stop: Drone comic.
- Undergrad and incarcerated students are learning side-by-side at Marquette. The result is transformative.
- “No one gets fired.” Protest to reinstate 39 eliminated faculty ends up in the street. ‘It’s criminal’ : How Marquette’s languages department is trying to stay afloat amid budget shortfalls and failed support.
- Tenure’s not the problem; administrative bloat is.
- $40 Billion for Colleges. Accreditor Places Wheeling University on Probation. Faculty union at Elon declares victory as university agrees to bargain. Spring Enrollment Keeps Slipping.
- Some Notes on Romulans from Michael Chabon. Shockingly compelling!
- History Channel Launching ‘The Center Seat’ Docuseries All About Star Trek.
- Zoom isn’t carbon-free. The climate costs of staying home.
- The Rules for Race: Dungeons & Dragons in the Suburbs.
- Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos.
- How I (Barely) Survived the Abject Failure of My Much Hyped Debut Novel.
- I Shouldn’t Have to Dehumanize My Son to Get Him Support. Parenting as a Radical Act of Love.
- A Marvelous History of the Vision’s Penis.
- We will never let them cancel Pepe le Pew.
- Curation is not cancellation.
- This is why we can’t have nice things.
- The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.
- Andrew Cuomo Should Resign.
- Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
- “Can you please paint The Artist Formerly Known As Prince having a fight with Prince Harry over who is least known as Prince now. In the background we can see the The Queen, and Queen (the band) also fighting over a similar thing.”
- Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle.
- Unions Are Cool Now.
- The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers.
- ‘There’s a lot of nasty stuff’: the people living with long Covid.
- Life after vaccination.
- “Scientists” should call their publicist, I think someone’s talking out of school: Scientists want to send 6.7M sperm samples to the moon.
- The Invention of murder.
- Inside the incel.
- ‘My body is unserviceable and well past its sell-by date’: the last days of Avril Henry.
- The arc of the moral universe is long, but Texas school scraps assignment that had girls ‘obey any reasonable request of a male’.
- We don’t belong on Mars, we haven’t landed on Earth yet.
- Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
- The New Star Wars Trilogy Wasn’t Worth It.
- Against WandaVision.
- Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters.
- What took so long? FX Orders Pilot Based On Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Novel From Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Courtney Lee-Mitchell & Protozoa. More Butler content! Reviews of her career in the New Yorker and Bookforum.
Tuesday Links!
* Jack Hamilton on “Under Pressure.” When Bowie Met Springsteen. David Bowie’s Radicalism. The International Marxist Group, “In Defense of Bowie.” A Good Looking Mugshot. David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books. David Bowie’s Dark Past. Last Words. The Longreads. Almost Elrond. “Will Brooker is studying David Bowie by trying to live like him for a year.” We Won’t See His Like Again.
* MLA is dead; long live MLA.
* Between 2009 and 2013, public universities reported increasing their annual expenditures on football to more than $1.8 billion — a 21 percent jump in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to Knight Commissiondata reviewed by International Business Times. In that same time period, public universities’ reported debt on their athletic facilities has grown to $7.7 billion — up 44 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars in that time. In all, two thirds of Division I public universities increased their spending on football or athletic facilities in that time period — when average tuition and student fees at public universities have risen more than 40 percent in the last decade. The payoff for all that investment? Nearly three quarters of all Division I football programs now run deficits, which are eventually covered by the rising tuition and student fees.
* Daisy Ridley: The Carrie Fisher Interview.
* Robert Kilpatrick on The Feminine Future : Early Science Fiction by Women Writers.
* Why Wisconsin city’s bid to tap Great Lakes water is a big deal.
* Like Harry, though, I’ve never intended to let that happen. I have no interest in trying to tell other people what to do if they find themselves close to death, but my choice has always been clear: I don’t want to die in pain—or drugged into a stupor by pain meds—all while connected to tubes and respirators in a hospital room. When the end is near, I want to take my own life.
* Meanwhile: This Doctor Wants to Treat Your Crippling Fear of Death With Uncut Ecstasy. Okay, dammit, I’m in.
* Alternatively, maybe the fact that El Chapo—who we can probably assume has someone in his employ who does, in fact, speak English—didn’t exercise his veto is as damning an indictment of such an arrangement (or, more specifically, the product of such an arrangement) as if he had and the magazine acquiesced. The 14 weirdest moments from Sean Penn’s El Chapo interview. Reality truly is a hoax.
* I’ve played the Powerball simulator for 1,092 years and have lost 91% of my money.
* The forgotten way African Americans stayed safe in a racist America.
* Today, of course, anti-beardism is the last acceptable prejudice.
* Texas School Triples Recess Time And Sees Immediate Positive Results In Kids.
* Tax Cuts Don’t Lead to Economic Growth, a New 65-Year Study Finds.
* The Company Behind LA’s Methane Disaster Knew Its Well Was Leaking 24 Years Ago.
* You had me at Hello: Arrested Development Season 5 will echo Making a Murderer and Trump.
* What could possibly go wrong?
* What could possibly go wrong?
* Despite Frigid Winter Temperatures, Students Are Waking Up To Unheated Classrooms. Elsewhere in Baltimore: Women In Baltimore Public Housing Were Forced To Trade Sex For Basic Repairs.
* Whitesboro’s racist town logo up for vote. Good news everyone.
* Breastfeeding is overhyped, oversold, and overrated. The real story: Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise.
* Trinity Cube was created by melting these two forms of glass together into a cube, then installing the cube back into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone as part of the Don’t Follow the Wind project. The artwork will be viewable by the public when the Exclusion Zone opens again, anytime between 3 and 30,000 years from the present.
* Against Serial season two. I think there’s a lot more one could say about what’s seemed to go wrong this time around, but on the level of why the show seems so boring now this is a good start.
* And on the local beat: South Milwaukee man behind homemade fireworks launcher escapes citation.
Sunday Morning Links!
As Marquette’s faculty gathers in the basement of the Bradley Center for commencement, some links…
* I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.
* There’s tons of great stuff in issue 17 of Jacobin, from the Peter Frase editorial on automation to a call to democratize the universe to ruminations on edutopia and the smartphone society.
* Mad Max: Fury Road Is the Feminist Action Flick You’ve Been Waiting For. 3 Brief Points on Mad Max: Fury Road.
* Alastair Reynolds Says What It’ll Take To Colonize Other Planets.
* University of Wisconsin flunks the financial transparency test.
* Juxtaposition watch: Maryland governor vetoes $11 million for schools, approves $30 million for jails.
* The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
* Hillary Clinton personally took money from companies that sought to influence her. The next couple years are going to be a bottomless exercise in humiliation for Democrats.
* People Who Opposed The Iraq War From The Beginning Are The Best Americans.
* History is a nightmare for which I’m trying to hit the snooze: NJ Republican Introduces Resolution Condemning ‘Negative’ AP History Exam.
* City leaders approve plan for National Slave Ship Museum.
* Let the Kids Learn Through Play.
* Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?
* I also won’t accept that Someone Did a Shit So Bad On a British Airways Plane That It Had to Turn Around and Come Back Again.
* When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself. The question was, when?
* If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.
* Jurors In The Boston Bombing Case Had To Agree To Consider The Death Penalty Before Being Selected. This is a very strange requirement of the law that seems to strongly interfere with the “jury of your peers” ideal.
* Deleted scene from Infinite Jest. So bizarre.
* Dibs on the young-adult dystopia: Teenagers who show too much leg face being sent into an “isolation room” for breaching the new uniform code.
* New Zealand Legally Recognises Animals as ‘Sentient’ Beings.
* Schools are failing boys because lessons have become “feminised”, says a leading academic who wants to see outdoor adventure given greater emphasis in the curriculum. That’ll solve it!
* What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
* What Would You Do If You Could Censor Your Past? A Visit to the UK’s Secret Archives.
* The Ecotourism Industry Is Saving Tanzania’s Animals and Threatening Its Indigenous People.
* “On the occasion of David Letterman’s retirement after 33 years of hosting a late-night talk show, Jason Snell presents his take on Letterman’s significance, told with the help of a few friends.”
Last Weekend Before the Semester Links!
leave a comment »
* ICYMI: My new syllabi for the fall! Infinite Jest and Alternate History. There’s also a new version of my “Video Game Culture” class, set for a new eleven-meeting schedule and with a “Capitalism” week added centered on Pokémon Go (what? oh, that thing). Relatedly: Milwaukee County Parks are trying to remove Pokemon Go from Lake Park.
* The NLRB has ruled that graduate students at private universities can unionize. How letting grad students unionize could change the labor movement and college sports. The NLRB Columbia Decision and the Future of Academic Labor Struggles. The Union Libel: On the Argument against Collective Bargaining in Higher Ed. But elsewhere in academic labor news: Adjuncts in Religious Studies May Be Excluded From Religious College Unions.
* Are PhD Students Irrational? Well, you don’t have to be, but it helps…
* Colleges hire more minority and female professors, but most jobs filled are adjunct, not tenure track, study finds.
* This morning everyone’s fighting about academic freedom and trigger warnings at the University of Chicago.
* I thought I was the only prof who didn’t really care about deadlines. But apparently there are dozens of us!
* That’ll solve it: Replace college instruction with Ken Burns movies.
* A New Academic Year Brings Fresh Anxiety at Illinois’s Public Colleges.
* Poor and Uneducated: The South’s Cycle of Failing Higher Education.
* Actually, I’m teaching these kids way more than they’re teaching me.
* I’ve dreamed about this since I was a kid: An Epochal Discovery: A Habitable Planet Orbits Our Neighboring Star. Time to teach The Sparrow again…
* Philosophical SF.
* CFP: Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, University of Florida.
* Cuban science-fiction redefines the future in the ruins of a socialist utopia.
* Puppies, Slates, and the Leftover Shape of “Victory.” On that Rabid Puppies thing and my Hugo Award-winning novella Binti.
* It was a long time before anyone realized there was something not the same about her.
* From all indications, the next X-Men movie will hew closer to Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix story than the previous cinematic effort. But any sense of authenticity it achieves will only arouse and prolong the desire for closure of the loss not only of a treasured character who might have lived endlessly in the floating timeline, but also of the very narrative finitude in which this loss could only happen once. Comic Book Melancholia.
* Bingewatching vs. plot.
* A new book series at Rowman and Littlefield explores Remakes, Reboots, and Adaptations.
* Hot Tomorrow: The Urgency and Beauty of Cli-Fi.
* Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.
* The real questions: How Long Would It Actually Take to Fall Through the Earth?
* How did an EpiPen get to costing $600? Earned every penny. A Case Study in Health System Dysfunction. But, you know, it’s all better now.
* Amazing study at Duke: Virtual Reality and Exoskeleton Help Paraplegics Partially Recover, Study Finds.
* The Epidemic Archives Of The Future Will Be Born Digital.
* How One Professor Will Turn Wisconsin’s Higher-Ed Philosophy Into a Seminar.
* Becoming Eleven. Concept Art Reveals Barb’s Original Stranger Things Fate and It Will Depress You. We Will Get ‘Justice for Barb’ in a Second Season of Stranger Things. This Stranger Things fan theory changes the game.
* Arkansas City Accused Of Jailing Poor People For Bouncing Checks As Small As $15. An Arkansas Judge Sent A Cancer Patient To ‘Debtors’ Prison’ Over A Few Bounced Checks.
* And elsewhere: Drug Court Participants Allegedly Forced To Become Police Informers.
* The times of year you’re most likely to get divorced. Keep scrolling! We’re not done yet.
* Are these the best films of the 21st century? I’m not sure I enjoyed or still think about any film on this list more than I enjoyed and think about The Grand Budapest Hotel, though There Will Be Blood, Memento, Caché, and Children of Men might all be close.
* CBS is bound and determined to make sure Star Trek: Discovery bombs.
* Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.
* An Instagram account can index depression.
* After neoliberalism?
* Parenting and moral panic.
* How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains.
* The technical language obscured an arresting truth: Basis, which I had ordered online without a prescription, paying $60 for a month’s supply, was either the most sophisticated fountain-of-youth scam ever to come to market or the first fountain-of-youth pill ever to work.
* Nazis were even creeps about their horses.
* Mapping the Stephen King meganarrative.
* Good news for Dr. Strange: Dan Harmon wrote on the reshoots.
* My colleague Jodi Melamed writes in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on white Milwaukee’s responsibility.
* The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave Odyssey of Hans Jonathan. Translated from the Icelandic.
* Saddest postjournalism story yet: “Vote on the topic for a future Washington Post editorial.”
* Katherine Johnson, the human computer.
* I arrived at my friend’s party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned.
* Uber loses a mere 1.2 billion dollars in the first half of 2016. Can there be any doubt they are just a stalking horse for the robots?
* It’s been interesting watching this one circulate virally: Giving up alcohol opened my eyes to the infuriating truth about why women drink.
* William Shatner Is Sorry Paramount Didn’t Stop Him From Ruining Star Trek V. Apology not accepted.
* Hillary Clinton will likely have a unique chance to remake the federal judiciary. How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America.
* Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State. You don’t say… 4 experts make the case that the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising was troubling.
* Does he want a few of mine? Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of His Own Book.
* Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump. Hey, that was my bit!
* Oh, so now the imperial presidency is bad.
* Good news, everyone!
* At least Democrats are currently on track to retake the Senate.
* Scenes from the richest country in the history of the world: Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds. Raw sewage has been leaking into Baltimore’s harbor for five days, city says. It appears aquatic life — the moss that grows on rocks, the bacteria that live in the water and the bugs that hatch there — are the unexpected victims of Americans’ struggle with drug addiction. Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds.
* No Man’s Sky is like real space exploration: dull, except when it’s sublime.
* A.J. Daulerio, bloodied but unbowed. How Peter Thiel Killed Gawker. Never Mind Peter Thiel. Gawker Killed Itself. Gawker Was Killed by Gaslight. And if you want a vision of the future: A Startup Is Automating the Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used to Kill Gawker.
* Greenlit for five seasons and a spinoff: The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates from Miami came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars — one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.
* Also greenlighting this one.
* The legacy board games revolution.
* 25 1/2 gimmicky DVD commentary tracks.
* The millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income because of climate change. The children of millennials will lose tens of trillions.
* When Icon fought Superman.
* Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks.
* An Exciting History of Drywall.
* Title IX: still under serious threat.
* And it’s not a competition, but Some Turtles See Red Better Than You Do.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 26, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic labor, adaptations, adjunctification, adjuncts, Agustín de Rojas, alcohol, allergies, Alpha Centauri, alternate history, America, Arkansas, artificial intelligence, assisted suicide, austerity, automation, Baltimore, binge watching, Binti, books, cancer, capitalism, CBS, CFPs, children, climate change, Clinton Foundation, college sports, color, Columbia, comics, commentary tracks, content notes, content warnings, crystal meth, Cuba, Curt Schilling, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, DEA, deadlines, debt, Democrats, depression, disability, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, Dr. Strange, Dr. Strangelove, drugs, drywall, Duke, DVDs, dystopia, ecology, EpiPen, euthanasia, extrasolar planets, fantasy, films, first as tragedy then as farce, fountains of youth, futurity, games, Gandalf, Gawker, graduate student movements, Harry Potter, health care, Hidden Figures, Hillary Clinton, horses, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, Ian McKellan, Iceland, Icon, ideology, if you want a vision of the future, Illinois, imperial presidency, Infinite Jest, infrastructure, Instagram, Jean Gray, Jodi Melamed, journamalism, Katherine Johnson, Ken Burns, legacy board games, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, meganarratives, melancholy, millennials, Milwaukee, misogyny, moral panics, mortality, my pedagogical empire, NASA, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, NLRB, Nnedi Okorafor, No Man's Sky, our brains work in interesting ways, over-educated literary theory PhDs, parenting, pedagogy, Peter Thiel, philosophy, places to invade next, plot, Pokémon Go, polls, post journalism, prison, private college, Proxima Centauri, Rabid Puppies, race, racism, ramen, rape, rape culture, rationality, raw sewage, reboots, religious studies, remakes, Republicans, robots, Ron Johnson, Sad Puppies, science, science fiction, sexism, Should I go to grad school?, siblings, slavery, sobriety, space travel, Star Trek, Star Trek V, Star Trek: Discovery, Stephen King, Stranger Things, suicide, Superman, Supreme Court, swords, syllabi, taxes, teaching, tenure, Texas, the courts, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the law, the Senate, the South, the sublime, the university in ruins, the wisdom of markets, Title IX, transgender issues, trigger warnings, true crime, turtles, Uber, University of Chicago, University of Florida, Utopia, Vox Day, war on drugs, Washington Post, water, Wes Anderson, white people, William Shatner, Wisconsin, writing, X-Men, Yale, Yoss, you and I are gonna live forever