Posts Tagged ‘austerity’
Ceremonial End of the Semester Tab Purge and Semi-Annual Apology for Being So Busy
this one hits a bit too close to home https://t.co/qhnjuEB5CQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 24, 2021
Between my research, service obligations, Zoom teaching, the kids’ virtual schooling, and getting a new puppy, I’ve been just incredibly busy. Another man might say: hey, this is the perfect opportunity to let the blog you’ve been updating continuously since 2004 die! But I am no ordinary man...
First, just a few things I’ve been doing:
- I spoke with Sherryl Vint and Kim Stanley Robinson at UCR on the subject of “Science Fiction and Climate Crisis.” It was a fun talk!
- I spoke with Nisi Shawl, Irenosen Okojie and Shahidha Bari about Octavia Butler on the BBC, which was an amazing experience.
- I also spoke with Nisi about Fledgling at the Rosenbach Library, but I don’t think the video from that one has gone up yet.
- We did an interview for the Library of America site, too!
- I had some very silly thoughts about WandaVision and late style at ArtReview.
- I was on the Novel Dialogue podcast with Kameron Hurley: “Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny.”
- My “Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots” article from Extrapolation 58.2-3 is free to read right now at Liverpool University Press.
- I don’t think I linked to this yet, but a preprint of my article “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene” is up at American Literature.
- I was even on another Random Trek, talking (ugh) TNG’s “Masks.”
- And I’ve agreed to be Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the English department next year, so about that whole “incredibly busy” thing…
“I was planning on having a drink with you in Miami, but things got weird.” – Hunter S. Thompson to Kurt Vonnegut in June 1973
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2021
“…but things got weird” is now officially my go-to excuse whenever I don’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do.
And a carefully curated, deliberately and self-consciously incomplete list of some things I’ve been reading this spring:
Word of the Day: ARIGATA-MEIWAKU (Japanese) – a favour someone does for you against your wishes, which will inevitably end in disaster, but for which you must thank them anyway.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) April 22, 2021
- SFRA Review 51.2 is out!
- Announcing the 2020 Nebula Awards Finalists.
- Truly one of the best SF short stories I’ve read in years: MMAcevedo.
- Call for Proposals for Trans/Inter/Cross: A Symposium on The Fantastic Between Genres, Media, and Cultures; The International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
- CFP: Alternatives to the Anthropocene.
- What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins? Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad. The Right Created Boot Camps for Destroying Democracy and Voting Rights. The (literal) right to crash cars into people. Trump and the Trapped Country. Great Griefs: Notes on the US Election.
- The war on critical race theory.
- The faces of higher education’s historic layoffs. U of A opens bargaining with proposal that staff pay back money already earned. Successful Conclusion for Oregon Tech Strike. “This Agreement Protects Jobs”: Four Unions at Rutgers University Reach Historic Deal to End Layoffs. UVM faculty vote to ratify a 4-year agreement: “The strength of our union prevented the admin. from imposing deep, lasting cuts to base salary & benefits that they proposed, and our pressure helped tip the balance toward the restoration of staff pay that had been cut.” AAUP Survey Spells Bad News for Faculty Wages Amid Pandemic. Monmouth College Faculty Call for President’s Removal. The Era of Artificial Scarcity: Administrators have rushed to embrace austerity measures. The faculty should call their bluff. Colleges Are Using COVID as a Pretext to Make Draconian Cuts to the Humanities. The New Politics of Higher Education. The Future of Tenure. Tenure’s Broken Promise. Organize or Perish.
- The strange case of the ‘$100m deli’ and the universities that own a slice. The Crushing Contradictions of the American University. The faces of student debt. The long fight to cancel student loans. The other side of debt: American universities are buried under a mountain of debt.
- Adjunct Hell: The rise of a new kind of campus novel.
- Course Evaluations: All Cost, No Benefit.
- Ground operations.
- Reflections on the Market.
I'm sure young people getting told "don't go into this industry it's a sinking ship" from literally every industry is a sign of a healthy society.
— Eva ''Bisexual Lighting Girlfriend'' (@ayyy_vuh) March 10, 2021
— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 28, 2021
- Dark academia.
- How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University.
- The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty.
- The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.
- Labor board withdraws rule to quash graduate students’ right to organize as employees.
- Firsting in Research.
- A Student Stole My Academic Work, Copied My Tattoos and Gave Talks Pretending To Be Me.
- “A full-time undergraduate student who attended UC for the four years from 2016 through 2019 paid more than $5,000 to subsidize deficits in the UC Athletic Department.”
- Reagan broke everything.
- The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Hard. The Colleges That Serve Them Are Hurting, Too.
- Imagining a New Deal for Higher Education.
- Book Review: Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving In and Beyond the Classroom by Katina L. Rogers.
- All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets.
- A billionaire-funded website with ties to the far right is trying to “cancel” university professors. 40% of professors featured in Campus Reform articles in 2020 were subsequently threatened with harm, including physical violence or death. The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges.
- University administrator and faculty pay in the new Gilded Age.
- The Post-Covid Future of Distance Learning is Now.
- ‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. Americans Are Already Deciding Where to Move Based on Climate Change. Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ may be melting faster than was thought. Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’. Study predicts the oceans will start emitting ozone-depleting CFCs. Historians rethink the Green Revolution. Climate journalism enters the solutions era. The race to net zero. Death to America’s manicured lawns. Climate dystopia in Northern California. The end of water.
- Search and destroy: How to take action against the climate crisis. When Does the Fightback Begin?
- Every day a new sadness.
- Humans Have Destroyed 97% Of Earth’s Ecosystems.
- How Contemporary Novelists Are Confronting Climate Collapse in Fiction. Part Two.
- Climate Refugees in the Greenhouse World: Archiving Global Warming with Octavia E. Butler.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on Cities as a Climate Survival Mechanism.
- Jeff VanderMeer’s Climate Fiction Reading List.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) March 12, 2021
this radicalized me pic.twitter.com/ln8NRYL9cJ
— shenanigans (@shenpilled) March 26, 2021
if you want a vision of the future pic.twitter.com/VfxX2JpDfM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2021
- How Capitalism Is Driving Covid Disaster in the Global South. GDP Didn’t Save Countries From COVID-19. How the West Lost COVID. Vaccine Nationalism Is Putting the World at Risk. Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn’t rule it out. Nightmare scenario in India. ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe. Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- Why Do We Forget Pandemics?
- Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus.
- We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals.
- Miracles and wonders: Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial.
- The Airline Safety Revolution.
- Easily the most dystopian thing I’ve read in ten years.
- Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to Cost $465M for Just One Season. Merry and Pippin Are Going Podcasting. Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. Part II. Marquette University Is Looking for Oral Histories From J.R.R. Tolkien Fans. Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years.
- Eugenics from Morlock to Shoggoth: The Origins of Cosmic Racism. Antiracist Cosmic Horror. Them as degradation porn.
- It Began as an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker.
- No script, no cast, no problem: The Next Star Trek Movie Has a Stardate in 2023.
- A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics.
- Much-feared asteroid Apophis won’t hit Earth for at least 100 years, NASA says. The Asteroid Impact Simulation Has Ended in Disaster.
- Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast.
- The Muppets’ secret weapon doesn’t work in the Disney era.
- The Fermi Paradox is a sci-fi strategy game about avoiding extinction.
- Dolphin Intelligence and Humanity’s Future.
- The Quest for a Floating Utopia.
- How much money does a writer need?
- Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980.
- The Novel in the Age of Contemporaneity.
- Shaviro v. the NFT. As NFT Sells for $69M, Artists Question Environmental Impact of Blockchain. Bitcoin Mining Could Use More Energy Than All of Italy by 2024.
- The Woke Meritocracy. The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions. The Case for More Cancelling. A plea for anti-anti-wokeness.
- It’s Not Cancel Culture — It’s A Platform Failure. Twitter is a MMORPG.
My working theory is that we're seeing a generational turnover in centrist politics, and the new American "center" is reconstituting itself around an opposition to what it describes as expressions of political irrationality: "cancel culture," qanon, and "foreign influence."
— ktb (@kevinbaker) March 23, 2021
- Your Success Probably Didn’t Come from Merit Alone.
- So you want to acknowledge the land?
- Decolonize Oregon Trail.
- Breakout tabletop RPG by Native designers imagines an uncolonized North America.
- Who Cares? Before Covid-19, American women were already in crisis.
- Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
- How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good. Financialization Created Chicago Public Schools’ Fiscal Crisis.
- There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth.
- Huge, if true: Chipotle Is a Criminal Enterprise Built on Exploitation.
https://t.co/x0t0aFWEDZ pic.twitter.com/fhEfAlAUMC
— Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard (@enkiv2) March 12, 2021
- We should celebrate trans kids, not crack down on them.
- How Star Wars‘ Biggest Fan Wiki Found Itself in a Fight Over Trans Identity.
- Whatever happened to the Star Wars expanded universe? And a flashback to the Timothy Zahn books, while you’re at it…
- America Ruined My Name for Me. What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America.
- A Q&A with the Man Who Keeps Uploading My Feet to Wikifeet.
- What If Everything We Know About Gymnastics Is Wrong?
- Why Is Perimenopause Still Such a Mystery?
- 30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what became of them.
- The Jesuits pledge $100M to “atone” for slavery.
- The Stealth Sticker Campaign to Expose New York’s History of Slavery.
- I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
- How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life.
- Why Disability Studies Scholars Are Protesting a Prominent Textbook.
- “I’m an agent of the 28th Amendment, the abolition of the 2nd.” “Retriever” by Stephen Kearse.
- ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic.
- Sci-Fi Writer or Prophet? The Hyperreal Life of Chen Qiufan.
- Two from Ted Chiang: “The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals” and “Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter.”
- Women Who Fly: Nona Hendryx and Afrofuturist Histories.
- Sertãopunk.
- The Game of Critique: a review of Pat Jagoda’s Experimental Games. Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation.
- Lucocomics: Play and Interactivity in Comics, Games, and You Are Deadpool (2018).
- Chess World Champion Plays ‘Bongcloud Attack’ Meme Opening in Tournament.
- The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki.
- The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes.
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space. Two Good Humans: The Friendship Between Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut.
- The best game I’ve played since Hades is apparently getting some unexpected DLC.
- Top 20 Irishisms.
- Point: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms. Counterpoint: We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide.
- 5 Unexpectedly Awesome Domestic Cities to Fuel Your Wanderlust. Why Is Everyone Surprised by How Cool Milwaukee Is? Out-of-state corporate landlords are gobbling up Milwaukee homes to rent out, and it’s changing the fabric of some neighborhoods. Colectivo Could Soon Become the Largest Unionized Coffee Chain in the U.S. And if you want a vision of Wisconsin’s future.
it’s weird to be from a post-industrial Midwestern city and idk kind of walk around until adulthood implicitly thinking that being half abandoned and crumbling was a general property of cities
— bean (@christapeterso) March 12, 2021

Written by gerrycanavan
May 11, 2021 at 1:41 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet, Look at what I put on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic job market, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Adorno, Afrofuturism, airplanes, Alan Moore, Amazon, America, animal studies, animals, apocalypse, arigata-meiwaku, artificial intelligence, austerity, Brazil, cancel culture, capitalism, Carl Sagan, CFPs, Chen Qiufan, chess, Chronicles of Pyrdain, civilization, climate change, college sports, conferences, course evaluations, COVID-19, Deadpool, democracy, digital immortality, disability, Disney, dissertations, dolphin intelligence, Donald Trump, ecology, Edward Said, existentialism, fascism, Fermi paradox, financialization, Fledgling, futurity, games, glitches, graduate student movements, graduate student unions, gymnastics, Hawaii, Hayao Miyazaki, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, ice sheet collapse, ICFA, indigeneity, indigenous issues, Irenosen Okojie, Jeff Vandermeer, Jesuits, Kameron Hurley, Karate Kid, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, land acknowledgment, late style, LEGOs, Lord of the Rings, Lovecraft, malaria, McCarthyism, meritocracy, millennials, Milwaukee, mRNA, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Nebula Award, neofeudalism, NFTs, Nisi Shawl, novels, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, orcs, pandemic, perimenopause, podcasts, pollution, race, racism, Random Trek, reparations, Republicans, research, rich people, Romania, Ronald Reagan, RPGs, Russia, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, sea level rise, Sertãopunk, SFRA, Sherryl Vint, slavery, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, student debt, Ted Chiang, tenure, the Antarctic, the Anthropocene, the humanities, The Muppets, The Outer Wilds, TNG, Tolkien, trans* issues, true crime, Twitter, UCR, unions, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, voting, WandaVision, water, wealth, white supremacy, Wikifeet, wildfires, Wisconsin, wokeness, words, writing
It’s Been a Minute: Links!

- There’s a new episode of SFRA Review!
- I did this, on The Fifth Season, about a month ago. It was super fun! This just came out, and I was co-editor on it. It’s enormous!
- Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues. A little inside baseball perhaps, but for people in my very tiny sliver of my very strange industry it’s a fascinating situation.
- Call for Proposals: 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Conference. 2020 Visions: Imagining (Post-) COVID Worlds. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. Call for Applications: the MA Program at Marquette English.

- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies special issue: Science Fiction, Disability, Disability Studies.
- Kim Stanley Robinson Is One of Our Greatest Ever Socialist Novelists. The most important book I’ve read this year. Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures. Odd Couples, Carbon Coins, and Narrative Scopes: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. Slowing Climate Change With Sewage Treatment for the Skies. Everyday geoengineering: five climate change innovations from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. Kim Stanley Robinson dares to imagine winning the climate fight. Kim Stanley Robinson Bears Witness to Our Climate Futures. Kim Stanley Robinson Imagines a Future Where We Don’t All Die. The Science Fiction of Right Now. It’s Not Science Fiction. Cory Doctorow Weighs In. All Things Ministry for the Future.
- How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves.
- How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism.
- Sci-fi master explores the rights (and wrongs) of AI.
- A Star Wars writer claims Disney isn’t paying royalties — but the issues are tricky.
- Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021.
- Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait.
- The Proletarian Fantastic.
- Literary Scholars Weigh in on Black Panther in Special Issue of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
- Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. The Arctic is refusing to refreeze this winter. That’s… worrying. Another deadly consequence of climate change: The spread of dangerous diseases.
- Generation C.
- National challenges in higher education echo through a debate over Marquette’s future. Discharges, Demographics and Discipline. Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty and staff “sickened” by proposed budget cuts. The College of Saint Rose, University of Evansville and Marquette University are seeing massive academic cuts. Officials point to ongoing demographic trends. Faculty grieve and fight back. Open Letters Take Aim at Marquette Budget Cuts. Jesuit College Workers Unite. Many Schools, One Story — Workers and Students Launch Petition Fighting Back Against Austerity. Deep Cuts at Catholic Colleges Draw Backlash. Shock Doctrine: Higher Education Version. Transformation Can’t Be Measured in Money: A Reflection for Marquette’s Upper Administration. As end of semester draws near, anxiety regarding layoffs persists. Marquette AAUP Submits Resolution to Academic Senate Calling for Suspension of Budget Cut Process. The latest at WPR, Wisconsin Examiner, and Urban Milwaukee.
Read the whole thread, but this part in particular is infuriating. They’ve been talking about a $45 million budget hole since the summer. Now the hole is only $30 million — so we suddenly need a new $12 million operating margin to make sure the firings stay at the same level! https://t.co/CuOLmQ9AIn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 7, 2020
Watching this letter from my STEM colleagues go viral has been beautiful. Solidarity is beautiful. https://t.co/NsufAqY3FB
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 3, 2020
- ‘A Tremendous Amount of Fear’: Will Major Cuts Threaten Research Universities’ Work? Hit by Covid-19, Colleges Do the Unthinkable and Cut Tenure. Covid-19 Caused International Enrollments to Plummet This Fall. They Were Already Dropping. The Problem with Higher Education (& What We’re Doing about It). Dismantling the Master’s House: Afrofuturism may be the engine for revising the antiracist university and bolstering far more equitable systems, Jonathan Garcia, Issac M. Carter and Zachary S. Ritter argue.
- Guilford College hits pause on sweeping proposed campus changes. Officials say 20/30 Plan at GW is likely ‘obsolete’ following pandemic. In Reversal, USF Will Keep Some Undergrad Education Programs. Not-So-Fait Accompli.
Cumulative job losses at America's universities and colleges since the pandemic's start surpassed more than half a million in October, according to preliminary numbers from BLS. pic.twitter.com/19CgR9coiY
— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77) December 7, 2020
The number of jobs advertised in English Lit (on the Academic Jobs Wiki) is at an all time low: less than half of what it was this time last November. Like last year, the only subfield not plummeting is Ethnic Studies.
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 23, 2020
(Note: # for 2020 only counts ads posted as of 11/23/2020.) pic.twitter.com/wEmErcAS6E
- The Outrage Peddlers Are Here to Stay — and higher education is learning to live with that.
- Judge Orders Rutgers to Turn Over Athletics Financial Documents.
- Reform, defund, abolish MUPD: students and professor weigh in.
- A Black Professor’s Colleague Called the Cops on Him. What the School Did Next Made It Much Worse. Scholars pledge not to speak at University of Mississippi until it reinstates a colleague who publicly questioned why his chair rejected a grant, allegedly for political reasons.
- ‘Words Matter’: Marquette’s English course reimagined to focus on diversity and racial justice.
- The Demographic Cliff: 5 Findings From New Projections of High-School Graduates.
- Purdue Made It Through the Fall. Does That Mean Mitch Daniels Was Right?
- Fascinating situation in Baltimore County involving student voting rights on the Board of Education. Make the whole Board half students and half teachers, I say…
- When Schools Closed, Americans Turned to Their Usual Backup Plan: Mothers.
- And that, in the end, is why I have trouble trusting NuTrek. It has some good ideas, but when push comes to shove it will always opt for shallow storytelling that confuses fanservice for substance, over saying something new and different with its character, setting, and franchise. Picard—and we—deserve better.
- Fandom and the Future of Trek.
- In 1986, two lovebirds busted out of a coed prison in a hijacked helicopter. They’ve been trying to escape ever since.
- If you all haven’t been privy to the Cookie Monster Mural drama this weekend in Peoria, you’re missing out.
- Four dudes showing up in the cloak of night to rip the monolith out of the ground and destroy it for the sake of leave no trace principles is honestly the kind of chaotic energy I’m here for.
- implication here is that in the DC universe there was a need for a constitutional amendment to allow people to testify by their superhero codenames before the civil war
Someone in my Norwegian class didn't know the word for cowboys so called them 'American horse pirates' and I've been laughing about it for about an hour.
— so cactus so owl (@socactussoowl) November 16, 2020
- Best Comics of 2020. Best Games of 2020.
- Joe Biden should do everything at once.
- Biden and the Dems Should Have Buried Trumpism. But They Provided No Alternative.
- In the Time of Monsters.
- The Election That Broke the Republican Party.
- How To Avoid Another Trump.
- Joe Biden Won. Here’s What Higher Ed Can Expect.
- For people asking why Dems are so gloomy, here’s the baseline scenario for the next eight years of American government. It’s a nightmare.

- How Romance Novelists Are Mobilizing Voters in Solidarity With Stacey Abrams.
- What’s the matter with Millennials? The asset economy.
- It’s Not That Complicated. Cancelling Student Debt Is Good.
- Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer. California could allow mass evictions to begin during the worst Covid surge yet. ‘We’re already too late’: Unemployment lifeline to lapse even with an aid deal. Inheritance, not work, has become the main route to middle-class home ownership.
- 80 percent of those who died of Covid-19 in Texas county jails were never convicted of a crime.
- Providing police with military gear does not reduce crime or protect officers: Studies.
- We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.
- The Moral Core of Socialism Is Our Responsibility to Each Other.
my favorite part of the Superman mythos is when Krypton’s scientific and political elite all agreed with Jor-El that the planet was doomed but still you can’t fix it because a 250-year-old piece of paper says white people from Space Wyoming gets 100x more votes
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 28, 2020
- A Syllabus for Antifascist Cinema.
- Could you stay sane on Mars? Real-life mission simulator put six people to the test in “Red Heaven.”
- The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future.
- Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob.
- Pretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left.
- Do No Harm: The complex ethics of portraying suicide.
- We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time. When can I get a COVID-19 vaccine?
- And don’t worry, I’m still extremely depressed: Almost all sides in this debate seem to miss that no matter the angle of approach—political economy, law, movements, ideology, aesthetics, culture—fascism is an ordinary state of affairs for modern capitalist societies: as latent possibility, as “preventive counter-revolution,” or as the exception that is always the rule. It’s baked in the cake and certainly as American as apple pie. Fascism and liberalism are not antinomies; they too can toggle back and forth. Capital, for the moment, seems content with either option. Left-Wing Hypomania: Against the power of positive thinking.
goddamn he solved it https://t.co/RFoXmQlmy2
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2020 at 3:24 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, AAUP, academic freedom, academic jobs, administrative blight, Amazon, America, artificial intelligence, austerity, Baltimore, Black Panther, Bolsonaro, books, CFPs, cinema, class struggle, climate change, college sports, comics, Cookie Monster, COVID-10, cyberpunk, Democrats, demographic cliff, disability, Disney, ecology, elections, fantasy, fascism, futurity, games, general election 2020, George Washington University, Georgia, Guilford College, Harlan Ellison, How the University Works, ice sheet collapse, intergenerational warfare, Jesuits, Joe Biden, Kim Stanley Robinson, literature, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Mars, millennials, Mitch Daniels, moms, MUPD, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Octavia Butler, pandemic, podcasts, police, politics, publishing, Purdue, race, racism, Republicans, roleplaying games, Rutgers, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, SFRA Review, shared governance, socialism, Stacey Abrams, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, stimulus checks, student debt, syllabi, Ted Chiang, tenure, Texas, the Amazon, the Arctic, the economy, The Fifth Season, The Last Dangerous Visions, the Left, The Ministry for the Future, the university in ruins, Tolkien, true crime, UVM, vaccines, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing
Saturday Night Links!
super normal system that allows the next 100,000 years of ecosystem sustainability for human life to be based on the date that a single elderly judge passes away
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 19, 2020
"hypocrisy isn’t the word…it applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to, not parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true."
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) September 21, 2020
Trump as the guy in the zombie movie who tries to pretend he didn’t get bit is an unexpected but fitting end for the character https://t.co/eYC38BgCOI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 3, 2020
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
Wisconsin is hurtling toward becoming the new epicenter for coronavirus in America.
— Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) September 23, 2020
It’s also the only state where the Legislature has control over the statewide covid response.
Since gaining that control 133 days ago, the Republicans running the Legislature have done NOTHING. pic.twitter.com/d9GXzH94Is
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
You can complain all you want about McConnell’s hypocrisy, shady strongarm tactics, etc, but the core issue that the Senate is a fundamentally illegitimate institution that enshrines white minority rule and nothing can fix it short of a new Constitution.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 19, 2020
That almost every election rule or norm we have is the poisoned fruit of a program of mass disenfranchisement of women, nonwhite people, and the poor that dates back to the founding is also extremely good https://t.co/zsOGE28JYi
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020
A few years ago I predicted that we were living in a historical simulation about the collapse of the American republic and I have to say I sort of nailed it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 24, 2020
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
[30 years into the future]
— tef e. birbs (@tef_ebooks) October 1, 2020
me: you know netflix used to send films by post
my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge
me: productivity
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2020 at 8:42 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2020, AAUP, adjunctification, adjuncts, adminsitrative blight, admissions, America, apocalypse, Are we living in a simulation?, austerity, autism, Black Lives Matter, Catholicism, CFPs, China, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, comics, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brin, decolonize everything, deep time, democracy, demographic cliff, depression, Donald Trump, ecology, endowments, English departments, enrollments, epidemic, extinction, futurity, games, general election 2020, general strike, genocide, Germany, gig economy, Harry Potter, How the University Works, Hunter S. Thompson, hypocrisy, ICFA, incels, J.K. Rowling, Joe Biden, Jordan Peele, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor, leftism, literature, Madison, Marquette, MCU, Milwaukee, Mitch McConnell, monuments, Nixon, Notre Dame, pandemic, political compass, politics, poverty, protest, QAnon, race, racism, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, schools, science fiction, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, SFRA, space junk, Star Trek, statement of teaching philosophy, stimulus package, suburbs, Super Mario, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching philosophy, the courts, the economy, the law, Uighurs, unions, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, voting, Walter Benjamin, WandaVision, Watchmen, Wisconsin, work, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, writing, zombies
Sunday Morning Links!
* Released yesterday: Grad School Vonnegut #11, Cat’s Cradle with Patrick Iber! We had some minor but annoying audio problems with this one, so the editing took a bit longer than usual — so please enjoy, and look forward to, well…
As @zunguzungu’s enthusiasm for the podcast wanes, the randomizer heroically gives us… JAILBIRD followed by DEADEYE DICK. 😢 #RIP
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 16, 2020
* Registration for the “Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions” conference is now open. Call for Papers: Journal of Posthumanism. And ICYMI: SFFTV’s Call for Reviewers.
* Polygraph has a new issue! Marxism and Climate Change.
* USPS changes blamed for deliveries of thousands of dead chicks: ‘We’ve never had a problem like this before.’ ‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks. Washington Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines. How a viral photo of USPS collection boxes became a lesson in misinformation. The barn door will now be closed.
* Starting to regret my vote for Trump: In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him.’ Senate committee made criminal referral of Trump Jr., Bannon, Kushner, two others to federal prosecutors. Inside the chaotic, desperate, last-minute Trump 2020 reboot. What happens if when Donald Trump fights the election results? We Shouldn’t Have to Remind People George W. Bush Was a Terrible President.
I think the fundamental thing Democrats don’t understand about Trump is that he isn’t an aberration and isn’t even really the final Big Bad — he is a stress test for a corrupt system that collapsed into completely lawless authoritarianism the first time someone tried it.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2020
* The K-Shaped Recovery. Coronavirus stimulus: Loss of extra $600 unemployment benefits leads to 44% drop in spending. Economists foresee an unemployment “tsunami” coming. The COVID economy means millions of Americans are at risk of food insecurity. Nearly 30 million Americans told the Census Bureau they didn’t have enough to eat last week. Evictions are expected to skyrocket as pandemic protections come to an end.
* New York lays off hundreds of EMTs amidst historic budget crisis.
* Joe Biden’s Campaign Is Making It Very Clear: They Will Push Austerity in the White House. Biden to ABC’s Robin Roberts: ‘I don’t want to defund’ the police, but Trump does. Joe Biden: An Old Man Trying to Lead a Young Country. Prepare yourself for the Biden century.
There are three types of Democratic presidential candidates: I’m the Messiah (Obama); stay the course (HRC, Gore); I’m a Republican (Bill Clinton). Biden is the rare stay-the-course Messiah who is also a Republican.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 21, 2020
* Wisconsin lacks ideal coronavirus testing capacity for reopening of college campuses, schools, top health official says. Trending the wrong way. Wisconsin unemployment rate drops, still double last year. ‘The system is not built for problems:’ Attorneys point to Gov. Walker reforms amid unemployment delays. Wisconsin Is a Microcosm of America’s Democratic Decline.
* But it’s not all bad news! Sculpture Milwaukee 2020 works now on display. A Brief History of Frozen Custard, Wisconsin’s Favorite Dessert.
* University Staff Are Worried Their Recorded Lectures Will Be Used Against Them. The Neoliberal University Is Failing on Coronavirus. How Covid-19 United the Higher-Ed Work Force. Company that builds and maintains student housing sent letters to public universities in at least two states in May as they weighed in-person fall classes, reminding them of hundreds of millions of debt. Deserted College Dorms Sow Trouble for $14 Billion in Muni Bonds. Records from before reopening show experts warned UNC of COVID-19 outbreaks. UNC fiasco reveals truth about reopening colleges. Early Movers to Online Don’t Regret Decision. Will Shame Make Students Stop Socializing? News from the Daily Tarheel. Don’t make us write obituaries. Blaming students at Syracuse, UNC, NC State. University of Michigan professors have ‘no confidence’ in administration’s plan to contain coronavirus. Michigan State, Notre Dame Back Off From Fall Reopening Plans. Detroit Teachers Authorize ‘Safety’ Strike Over School Reopening Fears. ‘I just can’t do this’: UI student who tested positive for COVID-19 recounts school response. Alabama goes from 1% positivity to as high as 29% in one week. NYU students use TikTok to expose the school’s bleak quarantine meal plan. Inside the Slow-Moving Disaster of Students Returning to College Campuses. ‘They put us all in danger.’ Georgia State QB Mikele Colasurdo diagnosed with heart condition linked to COVID-19. Marquette in-person class decision detrimental to non-tenure faculty, TAs. Marquette University’s reopening plan draws backlash. Faculty, Students Protest at MU President’s House. “Christian Colleges Ask: Would God Want Us to Reopen?” The New College Drop-Off. Remote learning: a poem. True shamelessness. This is everyone’s fault but mine.
As I keep saying: the administrators who made the decision to reopen put students, faculty, staff, and everyone connected to these people at risk of death. They should resign or be fired, and the board of governors dissolved. #CovidCampusOutbreak https://t.co/TBxkqUPvIk
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) August 22, 2020
And if the only way you can enforce compliance with your plan is by draconian punitive measures against the community you're ostensibly trying to serve, well, that's not good, either. https://t.co/DGKDLePKVs
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) August 21, 2020
Wellness check: My students are hurting following UNC’s experiment in pandemic f2f learning. As of 8/20, 6% have COVID. 31% have a known exposure. 83% are being forced to find a new housing situation. 78% report elevated stress & anxiety. I’m so sorry they are living this. pic.twitter.com/DvUWbUb9TN
— Angela Stuesse (@astuesse) August 21, 2020
every academic i know: *is unprecedentedly burnt out and anxiety-ridden*
universities: good morning fam 🤪 we trust you’ve been productive 🤓 and relaxed 🧘♀️ this summer ☀️ we’re pumped 💯 to get you back on campus 🏛 don’t forget to write your will 📃🙌
— Annabel LaBrecque (@labrcq) August 18, 2020
A bit lost in the great student enrollment debate of fall 2020 is the fact that their loans come due in sixth months if they disenroll.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 22, 2020
Negligent college administrators, who live in the towns where they make six-figure salaries and who don’t need to go into classrooms or even onto campus at all, are inflicting massive harm on the parents and students who placed trust in them. https://t.co/QkE0vfdtOk
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 19, 2020
spotted on facebook, a poem by elise hu pic.twitter.com/4BA7hjBuXV
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 20, 2020
* Study suggests ‘horrifying’ rise in domestic violence during pandemic. Long-Haulers Are Redefining COVID-19.
* Evidence grows that children may play a larger role in transmission than previously believed.
* 9 reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021.
* Are You Overpraising Your Child?
* America’s Terrible Internet Is Making Quarantine Worse. Blow up plans for the school year and get creative, you fools. Understatement of the year: Working parents face tough decisions as schools reopen. Scientists warn it may be years before students can return to school without masks, social distancing.
* The Lesson Americans Never Learn.
* What Happens If the 2020 Census Fails?
* “Fears about Peak Oil are gone. Now we plan for Peak Demand.”
* Millennial Futures Are Bleak. Incarceration Is to Blame.
* Looking for Solace and Solidarity in a Broken-Hearted World.
* Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.
* California is burning, again. The state is suffering from a severe lack of firefighters due to the COVID-19 depleting the ranks of prisoners who normally do the work for $3/day (and then are barred from being firefighters after release). Severe inhumanity.
Bleak shit in California pic.twitter.com/yXnpRvNrSE
— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) August 20, 2020
And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
“We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
“The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.” https://t.co/n9AFiltXDx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 23, 2020
* The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down.
* The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime.
* TOS FTW. ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life.
* The Evolution of Ransomware.
* This week’s thing we’re supposed to bicker about on Twitter is just absurd. I’m still not over last week’s thing.
* There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship.
* A new theory of historical fantasy from N.K. Jemisin.
* The QAnon Century. A Primer. How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon. Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America. The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump.
* How UFO culture took over America.
* Never a good thing to star in your own dystopian fiction.
* Twilight of DC Comics. But they’re bringing Milestone back!
* (Behold?) The Vision’s Penis: The Presence of Absence in Mutant Romance Tales.
* What about the bad job offers?
* ‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson on Fresh Air.
* ‘The mystery is over’: Researchers say they know what happened to ‘Lost Colony.’
* I could listen to anything on eight cellos, it turns out.
* The latest in my recurring series of grad school advice tweets.
* J. G. Ballard’s book for children were not a success.
* And I believe America’s best days are still in front of it.
I had A LOT of requests for this one! X-Men: The Animated Series pic.twitter.com/D1W5TAAs0I
— Samara Ginsberg (@samaracello) August 18, 2020
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2020 at 9:55 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, academia, academic jobs, algorithms, America, Andrew Cuomo, apocalypse, art, austerity, birds, Bombadil, books, Bush, California, Cat's Cradle, cello, CFPs, class struggle, climate change, comics, conspiracy theory, Cord Jefferson, coronavirus, COVID-19, custard, DC Comics, Democrats, domestic violence, Donald Trump, dystopia, epidemic, evictions, friendship, games, general election 2020, ghouls, grad school, Grad School Vonnegut, historical fantasy, How the University Works, incarceration, Internet, J.G. Ballard, Joe Biden, K-shaped recovery, kids today, long-haulers, Lord of the Rings, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, medicine, Milestone Comics, millennials, Milwaukee, Miri, MLA, mutants, my media empire, my scholarly empire, N.K. Jemisin, neoliberalism, New York, nursing homes, oil, pandemic, parenting, Peak Demand, Peak Oil, pedagogy, podcasts, politics, Polygraph, posthumanism, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, QAnon, race, racism, ransomware, remote learning, Republicans, Roanoke, rule of law, school, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Second Great Depression?, Should I go to grad school?, social media, solace, solidarity, Star Trek, the Census, the courts, the economy, the law, The Sheep Look Up, The Vision, Tolkien, TOS, true crime, Twitter, UFOs, unemployment, Untitled Goose Game, USPS, Utopia, vaccines, Vonnegut, Watchmen, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, X-Men, X-Men: The Animated Series
Thursday Links!
* 15 scenarios for the fall semester. The COVID Caveat. Why We’re Exhausted By Zoom. Better Late Than Zoom. Here’s a thread of all the statements I’ve seen from colleges about what they’re planning for the pandemic’d fall semester. How College Leaders Are Planning for the Fall. Fullerton goes online. A message from President Daniels regarding fall semester: ‘If They Die, They Die.’ Universities are expecting 230,000 fewer students – that’s serious financial pain. Coronavirus pushes colleges and universities to the brink. New report on adjuncts says many make less than $3,500 per course and live in poverty. More College Students May Need Remedial Help This Fall. Can They Get It Online? Admin 101: Our Shift to Remote Fund Raising. For Would-Be Academics, Now Is the Time to Get Serious About Plan B. If you want my advice. And some rare good news: Vermont State Colleges Chancellor Withdraws Plan To Close Three Campuses.
part of my grand unified theory of why colleges are run so terribly is that their leaders are pathetically desperate to signal to the other members of the multi-multi-millionaire class that they are still in the club https://t.co/NNi7IPwo4Y
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020
If it *were* true that Harvard, an institution with both nearly infinite resources and a nearly infinite ability to generate new resources in an emergency, can’t weather an economic downturn without drastic cuts, that would be a massive scandal of truly epic mismanagement!
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 22, 2020
* The NCAA saved money in case of a canceled March Madness. Then it spent it. This is a wild story that gets at the heart of the NCAA: they built a rainy-day slush fund out of fear of the workers they refuse to pay, then dissolved it out of fear that the slush fund might someday find its way into the hands of the workers anyway…
* The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act recognizes that the nonprofit humanities sector is an essential component of America’s economic and civic life. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has received supplemental funding to provide emergency relief to institutions and organizations working in the humanities that have been affected by the coronavirus.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet.
* After the election, Wisconsin reports largest jump in coronavirus cases in at least two weeks. Medical College of Wisconsin model shows hospitals would fill in a month if all social distancing ended May 26. Always an angle. ‘Open the Economy’ Is the New ‘White Lives Matter.’ When working towards the führer goes wrong. Fortress Wisconsin. Republicans ask Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn extension of ‘safer at home’ order; Court could rule to block Wisconsin’s ‘Safer at Home’ order as early as April 30. Milwaukee Common Council votes to mail absentee ballot applications to city’s registered voters.
* Power Up: President Trump wants to return to ‘normal.’ That will be harder than he thinks, say scientists, doctors and Americans. Ex-FDA chief says U.S. not likely to have broad-based coronavirus testing until September. Barr Threatens Legal Action Against States Over Lockdowns. Singapore Seemed to Have Coronavirus Under Control, Until Cases Doubled.
* Very cool: A doctor says he was removed from his federal post after pressing for rigorous vetting of treatments embraced by Trump. CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating. A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity helped spread the coronavirus. Fox News falls out of love with hydroxychloroquine. Why WHO Failed. The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. We Need a New Social Contract for the Coronavirus. We Are Living in a Failed State.
seem to be hitting another instance of that limit where when you simply report what Republicans are doing people won’t accept it’s true because it’s so outrageous and reprehensible https://t.co/Og0fOiUyXH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 19, 2020
* During wartime, both financial and material capital is demolished: infrastructures, factories, bridges, ports, stations, airports, buildings. But once the war is over a period of reconstruction begins, and it is this reconstruction that triggers an economic rebound. However, the current epidemic looks more like a neutrino bomb, which kills humans and leaves buildings, roads and factories intact (if empty). So, when the epidemic is over, there will be nothing to rebuild—and no consequent recovery.
absolutely, also in the short term it is an excuse for not doing anything right now to prevent job losses or support people who've lost their jobs https://t.co/FtEnx9m6ep
— flglmn (@flglmn) April 20, 2020
They are not trying to reopen the economy to save it. They know it can't be saved. They want to reopen the economy to save capitalism, because if this government was forced to distribute resources in a way that ensured our survival, they know we would never go back.
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) April 23, 2020
* Poll: 43 percent of Americans have lost jobs or wages due to coronavirus outbreak. Second- and third-wave layoffs coming from COVID-19.
* Americans too scared to go to work risk losing unemployment aid, experts say.
* White House, GOP face heat after hotel and restaurant chains helped run small business program dry. The astroturf begins. Opening up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.
* The media is already pushing austerity so hard I finally think Biden might actually win.
* Coronavirus Is Hammering the News Industry. Here’s How to Save It. Twilight of the Subway. Now there’s a silver lining.
* By A 10-to-1 Margin, Americans Support Orders To Stay At Home. Something Big Is Getting Lost In The Debate Over Stay-At-Home Orders. Social distancing as act of love. And whether that can last.
Social distancing without social (communal, preferably) support is hugely miserable for people and unsustainable. /2
— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020
The way social distancing has been done in the US has put the entirety of the burden for managing the epidemic on the people who have the least resources. /5
— Jasper Bernes (@outsidadgitator) April 22, 2020
* Facing the Coronavirus in Queens. Whiteness, Visuality and the Virus.
* 28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis. In New York’s largest hospital system, 88 percent of coronavirus patients on ventilators didn’t make it. A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients. “Human challenge trials,” where healthy volunteers would be exposed to Covid-19, explained. The vaccine realism no one wants.
* Disney may stay closed until 2021.
* And why not: Trump Plans to Suspend Immigration to U.S.
* Let’s see what else is in the news: Wildlife Collapse From Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner. After the Flood: Chicago and Climate Change.
* Stay woke, liberals! You have to vote for Joe Biden no matter what Meghan McCain says. By the way, has anyone actually seen the Democrats? Seems like the stuff going on is the sort of thing they might have something to say about…
This is a real ad 100% cannot make this up pic.twitter.com/eBrvJCVXdK
— Wimstom (@KhakiJorts) April 22, 2020
* Trump’s support for right-wing protests just got more ugly and dangerous.
* Don’t put words in my mouth!
* Grandmother Paradox: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler by Nisi Shawl.
* Five Things COVID-19 has taught me about life by Nnedi Okorafor.
* Shaviro reads the Interdependency trilogy.
* The comics industry is in danger. Who can save it?
* Another think piece for my fall Watchmen class, which currently has a waitlist so long I could run a second section: Nothing Ever Ends.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 23, 2020 at 11:12 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, America, apocalypse, austerity, bigamy, capitalism, class struggle, climate change, college admissions, college basketball, comics, coronavirus, COVID-19, CSU Fullerton, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, ecology, fascism, general election 2020, graduate student nightmares, How the University Works, immigration, Interdependency trilogy, Joe Biden, John Scalzi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kindred, Las Vegas, love, March Madness, medicine, memoir, models, money printer go brrrr, NCAA, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia E. Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, Porcupine Racetrack, Purdue, race, racism, recovery, Republicans, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Second Great Depression?, silver linings, social distancing, Steve Shaviro, the courts, the economy, the law, The State, the university in ruins, time travel, trolley problems, unemployment, unions, vaccines, Vermont, Watchmen, White Foods, whiteness, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, worst financial crisis since World War II, Zoom
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
Thursday Night Links!
* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.
* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.
* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?
* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.
* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.
* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.
* Here come the esports majors.
* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.
* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.
* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.
* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.
* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.
* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene™!
* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?
* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.
* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.
McConnell added that it would require 67 votes to change Senate rules to prevent a trial from taking place – so the rule change won’t happen. But he can move to dismiss after the trial begins. “How long I’m on it is another matter,” he said of a trial
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2019
The Senate voting along party lines to refuse to hold the trial at all — which is what they would have to do for this to work — is probably the best case scenario for the Democrats short of conviction (which is a fantasy). https://t.co/n3yJ5bXcut
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 28, 2019
* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.
Mitch McConnell's wife is Secretary of Transportation.
Mitt Romney's niece is RNC Chair.
Antonin Scalia's son is up for Secretary of Labor.
etc. https://t.co/TS5ut3ydEb— Jonathan Dresner (@jondresner) September 29, 2019
This looks like a meeting of the human villains from every Muppets movie. pic.twitter.com/IO64xvFmia
— Devin Field (@thatdevinfield) October 2, 2019
Every worry people have about the way mass media leads people to eliminationist and genocidal thought is present in every form of rightwing media, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News. The foundation is laid.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2019
* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.
* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.
* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.
* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”
* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.
* How they teach slavery, then and now.
Here is a page from "Our Virginia: Past and Present" by Joy Masoff (2010). Notice the reference to free blacks expressing loyalty to the Confederacy and of course the black Confederate claim:
"Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks…" pic.twitter.com/outkKpaIS7
— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) October 1, 2019
* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.
* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.
* I suppose this is canon (again).
* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.
* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.
* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.
* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?
* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?
* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.
* Absolutely psychotic nation.
* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.
* get you a man who can do all three
get you a man who can do all three pic.twitter.com/yYOLHQPZNn
— Dickie Greenleaf (@ohgoddickie) September 28, 2019
* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.
* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.
* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!
* This one is a real america.jpg too.
* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.
* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.
* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 3, 2019 at 5:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, active shooter drills, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, aliens, Amber Guyger, America, apocalypse, Asimov, austerity, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bojack Horseman, breakfast cereals, Bret Stephens, broken windows theory, Buffy, Buffy studies, canon, carbon, CBP, CFPs, childhood, class struggle, climate change, college sports, Columbia, comics, death, deportation, discovery, Disney, Donald Trump, Ecohorror, ecology, Edward Snowden, eliminationism, Elizabeth Warren, emergency, Encyclopedia Galactica, English departments, Enron, equality, esports, Estonia, failure, Fermi paradox, film, Foundation, Fox News, free college, futurity, games, Garrett Hardin, gay rights, geography fan fiction, Google, growth, guns, HBO, His Dark Materials, homelessness, horror, How the University Works, ice, ICFA, immigration, impeachment, imperialism, John Kelly, kids today, KKK, labor, lacrosse, leakers, lesbian separatism, Mara Jade, Marquette, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, media, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, mortality, NCAA, nepotism, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, Philip Pullman, philosophy, plantations, poetry, police-industrial complex, politics, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, proceduralism, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rich kids, scams, school shootings, science fiction, science fiction studies, selfies, Sesame Street, slavery, Sony, Spider-Man, sports, Sports Illustrated, Star Trek, Star Wars, Supreme Court, Tarantino, teaching, television, the Anthropocene, the economy, the Gothic, The Muppets, the Pyrocene, the Senate, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, therapy, they say time is the fire in which we burn, Title IX, Tom Holland, tragedy of the commons, trans* issues, transphobia, Twitter, vaping, violence, violences, Virginia, WeWork, whistleblowers, white supremacy, work, X-Men
Saturday Morning Links!
* SFRA 329 is out! And it includes my candidacy for the SFRA presidency.
* Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings ‘cannot use much of Tolkien’s plot. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Isn’t Allowed to Make These Changes to Canon. The Tolkien estate can veto pretty much anything in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings.
* “The Lord of the Rings” as Lodestone: On Dome Karukoski’s “Tolkien.”
* The New School has cleared a professor of charges of racial discrimination for quoting literary icon James Baldwin during a classroom discussion. The university reversed course late Wednesday after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education intervened on behalf of professor Laurie Sheck’s academic freedom rights.
* Academic job watch: Histories of Slavery, Emancipation, and the Afterlives of Slavery.
* Critically Acclaimed Horror Film of the 2010s, or Your PhD Program?
* When your field is their hobby.
I’ve been talking about this with respect to science fiction studies too for a long time. Widely seen as a field with no history, that anyone can just invent ex nihilo whenever they randomly get interested in it. https://t.co/58glEA9CFv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 9, 2019
* The Legacy of Toni Morrison.
* The inhumanity of academic freedom.
* Inside the Sudden, Brutal Death of Pacific Standard.
* America’s Most Socialist Generation Is Also Its Most Misanthropic.
* The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is the Best Place on the Internet.
* Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.
* No shit, video games are political. They’re conservative.
* One giant leap for Indian cinema: how Bollywood embraced sci-fi.
* The one almost-good thing Truman did with the bomb.
* The Arrogance of the Anthropocene.
Until we prove ourselves capable of an Anthropocene worthy of the name, perhaps we should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene. You wouldn’t stand next to a T. rex being vaporized 66 million years ago and be tempted to announce to the dawning of the hour-long Asteroidocene. You would at least wait for the dust to settle before declaring the dawn of the age of mammals.
* Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Here are America’s fastest warming places.
* Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.
Well sure we could stop burning the world, but then how would we create Jobs, the things we all hate that make us want to die
— Christopher M (@mammothfactory) August 11, 2019
A big reason conspiracy theories are so believable is that most of them start from the fundamental idea that there’s a lawless class of sociopaths running our society, which is demonstrably true
— Erik Hane (@erikhane) August 10, 2019
* U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act. Alaska’s hottest month portends transformation into ‘unfrozen state.’ These are the places in the world that have no water access. In the future, only the rich will be able to escape the unbearable heat from climate change. In Iraq, it’s already happening. The North Atlantic ocean current, which warms northern Europe, may be slowing. Plastic trash discovered in ‘pristine’ Arctic snow. How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades. Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns. How to understand the new IPCC report. Hurricane Maria’s legacy: how the rise of nationalism creates climate victims. Eco-socialism or eco-fascism. ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year.
Climate TBD.https://t.co/XsNHwwr4ar pic.twitter.com/mWzfqIlbe2
— Rosemary Mosco (@RosemaryMosco) August 12, 2019
* Onward to Greenland! How much would it cost?
* Coal miners in KY have stopped a train carrying the coal they mined until they get paid $5 mill in backpay owed to them. Dept of Labor backs them up using a provision that can halt movement of goods for which workers haven’t been paid. In Teen Vogue.
* Eating meat will be considered unthinkable to many 50 years from now.
* A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. A guard was at the wheel. Moments after the truck incident, several other prison guards approached the protesters and pepper-sprayed them. The Business of Cruelty. Trump nominates advocate of ‘ethnonationalism’ for judgeship. “I need my dad.”
* The World That Made the El Paso Mass Shooter.
* First Graders Picked Up Gun Intended to Protect Ohio School.
* It’s not the “newspaper of record.” It’s a rag for the East Coast rich.
* Alaska’s governor and officials of the University of Alaska system announced an agreement Tuesdaythat will blunt — but not avert — a budget crisis that had in recent weeks become a national symbol of the defunding of public higher education.
* From the nice work if you can get it file: Presidential Tenures Are Getting Shorter. Why Are the Payouts So Large?
* If the Tuition Doesn’t Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will.
* The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis. At This Rate, It Will Take 100 Years to Pay Off America’s Student Debt. More Private Colleges Are Cutting Tuition, but Don’t Expect to Pay Less.
* Jane Austen’s income: insights from the Bank of England archives.
* The National Popular Vote interstate compact is a doomed strategy that is just never going to work.
* That’ll solve it: Biden allies float scaling back events to limit gaffes. You don’t have to do this, Joe.
* The sad fact is that this sort of thing will always make blanket debt forgiveness impossible. It doesn’t matter if it’s good policy or it makes sense — there’s too much bitterness and moralism and regret to help those who need help.
* Epstein corner! Jeffrey Epstein Conspiracies and the Mysterious Deaths of the Rich and Ruined. Jeffrey Epstein’s death and America’s jail suicide problem. American flags on Jeffrey Epstein’s private islands lowered to half-staff. Epstein’s Broken Hyoid Bone Doesn’t Tell Us Much. Jeffrey Epstein’s Death Was On 4Chan Before Officials Announced It — And Authorities Had To Look Into It. Epstein’s Death Has a Simpler Explanation. Why are so many people dying in US prisons and jails? Thirty-Two Short Stories About Death in Prison. Epstein’s scientist “friends” should have known better than to associate with a crackpot transhumanist. The Real Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Has Unfolded In Front of an Indifferent Public For Decades. Just read the whole MetaFilter thread for every twist and turn.
Excitement aside I think the facts really do point to a prison system so monstrously incompetent and corrupt it couldn’t keep Epstein alive even when they knew everyone was watching. https://t.co/p4I7Y8otl3
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 12, 2019
People want to see this as a conspiracy but imo the real story here is just that our criminal justice system destroys people's mental health and the mitigants against that damage are laughable. https://t.co/v0yAgmGcUM
— 🇧🇧🇹🇹🇺🇸👨👩👧👦🐕🌉 (@eparillon) August 14, 2019
* Even fixing Wisconsin’s Foxconn deal won’t fix it, says state-requested report.
* How YouTube Radicalized Brazil.
* Understanding the escape room.
* A heck of an act, what do you call it? The Hunt’s cancellation and Hollywood’s history of self-censorship, explained.
* The Uber delusion (forever and ever amen). Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities. And some bonus delusion: Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away. That’s Probably A Good Thing.
* Loot Crate goes bust owing $20 million to customers.
* Boundaries of Taste: Perfection, performance, and the allure of the kids’ menu.
* Bond markets are sending one big global recession warning. Danish bank offers mortgages with negative 0.5% interest rates—here’s why that’s not necessarily a good thing.
* Insurance Companies Are Paying Cops To Investigate Their Own Customers.
* Won’t you be my neighbor? An anti-hate pop culture syllabus.
* Towards a Cruelty-Free Syllabus.
* Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos.
* Elsinore smartly imagines Hamlet with Ophelia as the hero.
* It’s true: The House of X series is doing some pretty interesting things with the X-Men.
* Plunging Into the 1970s’ Altered States of Awareness.
* Newly discovered organ may be lurking under your skin.
* N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database.
* Judge Calls NYPD’s Handling Of Precarious Civil Forfeiture Database ‘Insane.’
* Students with a $20 lunch debt won’t get a school lunch, N.J. district proposes.
* A California school district agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after an investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.
* This is so maddening: Drinking bleach will not cure cancer or autism, FDA warns.
* A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill—rats.
* Why Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad.
* “Amazon’s Rekognition software can now spot fear.”
* Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees.
* Hands-free phone ban for drivers ‘should be considered.’
* Will Wisconsin Let Milwaukee Save Itself?
* Major breach found in biometrics system used by banks, UK police and defence firms.
* Miracles and wonders: Ebola is now curable.
* Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists.
This is a hilarious idea for a history of Batman from his initial publication onward. "Year by year, what movie was it that the ten-year old Bruce Wayne likely saw?" https://t.co/gEl3QLYtqU
— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 9, 2019
* Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why.
* ‘Dicey Dungeons’ Will Help You Understand the Best New Genre in Games.
* Nearly half of you are utterly inscrutable to me.
* Google. Don’t let the Gen Xers run the world. Know your Flat Earths. Neophilosophy.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 17, 2019 at 9:50 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Adam Duritz, administration blight, Alaska, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, Art Spiegelman, austerity, autism, Avengers, Batman, Bernie Sanders, biometrics, biopics, black holes, Bollywood, Brazil, business majors, California, canon, Captain America, CBP, Charlie Brown, cities, civil asset forfeiture, class struggle, climate change, coal, college majors, conspiracy theory, Cops, cosmology, Counting Crows, cruelty, debt forgiveness, democracy, deportation, DNA, driving, drugs, dungeons, eating meat, Ebola, ecofascism, El Paso, elections, Elizabeth Warren, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Endangered Species Act, Endgame, escape rooms, ethnonationalism, Europe, facial recognition, fandom, fascism, Flat Earth, food, Foxconn, fraud, futurity, games, Generation X, good grief, Google, graduate student nightmares, Greenland, Gulf Stream, guns, Hamlet, Harry Truman, hate, Hiroshima, horror, House of X, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, Hurricane Maria, hurricanes, ice, insurance companies, IPCC, James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Jaws, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, kids' menu, Loot Crate, Lord of the Rings, lunch debt, Lyft, maps, Marvel, mass shootings, Maus, Mid-Pleistocene Thermal Maximum, Milwaukee, miracles and wonders, misanthropy, misogyny, my scholarly empire, Nagasaki, National Popular Vote Compact, neoliberalism, New Jersey, New School, New York Times, nice work if you can get it, nuclearity, NYPD, Ophelia, organs, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Pacific Standard, Peanuts, pedagogy, philosophy, phones, physics, politics, prison-industrial complex, prisons, private colleges, race, racial slurs, racism, radicalization, rats, recession, Red Skull, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, segregation, self-driving cars, sexism, SFRA, smart houses, socialism, Star Trek, strikes, student debt, surveillance society, syllabi, teaching, Thanos, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the economy, The Hunt, the rent is too damn high, Tolkien, Toni Morrison, true crime, tuition, Twitter, Uber, underwear, University of Alaska, war on education, white supremacy, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, X-Men, YouTube
Monday Morning Links!
* Now this I’d watch.
* Extrapolation 60.2 is up, with articles on Wonder Woman and feminism, rape culture and fantasy, the various versions of The Three-Body Problem, and a symposium on the state of science fiction studies for the journal’s 60th anniversary. My contribution turned out to be a little bit of a rant.
* MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3.2: Disability Studies Special Issue.
* That time of year again: 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market.
* Relax, English Majors. You’re Still Plenty Employable!
* Should You Go into Debt for an MFA? The crucial contribution is Kelly Link’s nightmare thread about the debt load some people have coming out of more predatory programs.
* Marine Todd wept: A long-term study run by a Republican finds no evidence professors are discriminating against their conservative students.
* How the Wealthy and Well Connected Have Learned to Game the Admissions Process.
* Warning That Their ‘House Is on Fire,’ Alaska President Urges Regents to Act Quickly on Budget Crisis. But there’s always money in the banana stand.
Some of y’all act like these are your only options pic.twitter.com/BGWxb7a9OK
— ZУЯT (@tonalplexus) July 30, 2019
* The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point. Greenland’s Melting: Heat Waves Are Changing the Landscape Before Their Eyes. The terrible truth of climate change. How an accelerated warming cycle in Alaska’s Bering Sea is creating ecological havoc. Arctic Ice Is Crashing, and That’s Bad News For Everyone. Charred forests not growing back as expected in Pacific Northwest, researchers say. Burn. Build. Repeat: Why Our Wildfire Policy Is So Deadly. Chevron spills 800,000 gallons of oil and water in Kern County canyon. Lost Cities and Climate Change. Stopping Climate Change Will Never Be “Good Business.” Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award for Removing Microplastics From Oceans. 1/11th of the Pentagon’s annual budget, not counting the separate Overseas Contingency Operations fund. We could fund the transition to green energy with 10-30% of the world’s fossil fuel subsidy. Environmental activist murders double in 15 years. Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment. Back to Paradise. And the Times is ready to face the serious challenges of our time.
* There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of disruption innovation entrepreneurism progress.
* On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
The world is finite, precious, and free. The question for any economic order is how it preserves the finite, honors the precious, & shares the free. Eco-socialism & other commonwealth ideas seek to shift sharply from the present in all three dimensions. https://t.co/l8MgVWq80c
— Jedediah Purdy (@JedediahSPurdy) July 31, 2019
you, an intellectual: we can’t afford a better society
me, a plebe: DoD spends $15mil/yr trying to kill brown tree snakes it accidentally released on Guam; they’re currently aerially bombing the island with dead mice stuffed with Tylenol, which is toxic to snakes
— Mass for Shut-ins (podcast) (@gin_and_tacos) July 31, 2019
I grew up thinking social and technological progress was leading us towards utopia and am going to spend the rest of my life living through the collapse of civilization. 2 stars.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 4, 2019
* Trump’s Racism Is a National Emergency. Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us. They’re still stealing kids. An American Middle Schooler, Orphaned by Deportation. Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon. Editorial: Why No Borders? Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected. And from the archives: Larry Niven Tells DHS to Spread Organ Harvesting Rumors.
Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/AXAyT0Hy1D
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 30, 2019
* About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley. “A flaming Lyft vehicle is somehow a fitting symbol for investors’ worst fears about ride-hailing. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. are asking investors to trust that they will someday stop figuratively setting on fire hundreds of millions of dollars or more a quarter.”
* Somewhat relatedly—and this is the important part—Elon Musk has also said all Teslas will be fully capable of self-driving and can serve as robotaxis by next year. So if that’s true, why human-driven cars for the CES tunnel in 2021?
* Another way to describe these efforts is what the U.S. security establishment has long referred to as “pushing out the border.” It’s not a project that’s new to the Trump administration, and it’s not one that’s unique to the United States, as journalist Todd Miller expounds in his latest book, “Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.”
* A panel of federal judges dismissed Wisconsin’s high-profile redistricting lawsuit on Tuesday after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week determined claims against partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. They might award the GOP court fees! Why let Democrats in Wisconsin vote at all?
* Phone farms and late capitalism.
* Can young white men be saved? Cloudflare severs ties with 8chan in the wake of shootings: site has become “a cesspool of hate.” Video games don’t cause violent crime; research indicates that, if anything, it’s the opposite.
wild to think we're just going to have periodic white supremacist mass shootings for the rest of our lives and our political system is seemingly unable or unwilling to stop it
— Mark (@haircut_hippie) August 3, 2019
* Andrew Yang 2020: The world is fucked, you’re on your own, take some money, head to higher ground.
in this regard, Yang’s “higher ground” remark at the Dem debates is prescient for the kind of rhetoric we’re going to hear more and more of. don’t mitigate or reverse; accept and protect your own, inevitably along lines of race, class, gender, ability, and so forth
— Jeffrey Moro (@jeffreymoro) August 2, 2019
(increasingly of the opinion that ONLY the right is truly preparing for climate change (by building walls, camps, and xenophobic nationalism) and that the right's position on "border security" (no border, no country) is more coherent than the Dems "kinder gentler status quo")
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) August 3, 2019
* Marianne Williamson isn’t funny. She’s scary. Get your house in order Vox.
* Pete Buttigieg had the most important answer at the Democratic debate.
Democrats please put your differences aside and come together in recognition of the fact that if you nominate Biden you are gonna get fucking massacred and deserve it.
— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) August 1, 2019
* Wow, not a good look, Ronald Reagan.
* Meet the people working to kick Chicago out of Illinois.
* Americans aren’t as terrible as their leaders.
* Wild ride: “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA.” Doesn’t he know you only get what you give?
I forced a bot to watch 1,000 hours of Law & Order: SVU then forced it to write an episode of Law & Order: SVU of its own… https://t.co/4d8TgSFdxu
— Dr. Bluman* (@drbluman) July 31, 2019
* a day late / a buck short / I’m writing / the report
* Quentin Tarantino curated a 4-hour playlist of songs from his own movies, just for you.
* Aaron Bady endorses The Boys.
Which is to say: if you think superhero shows are essentially superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters, the show interestingly posits that in a world where superheroes are real, they'd be superfluous profit-making distractions from what really matters.
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) July 31, 2019
* In search of lost time: nostalgia gaming.
* Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.
* American novelists as Simpsons screens, an occasional thread.
2. Ernest Hemingway pic.twitter.com/RkFupjUiOA
— Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon) July 30, 2019
* Charles Manson was a Republican.
* Shuen’s flagrant disregard for consent was motivated not by malice but by greed. He was taking advantage of peculiarities in OHIP’s billing system, which encourage all sorts of chicanery that, while not always illegal, can tempt doctors into bending the rules.
* Should Board Gamers Play the Roles of Racists, Slavers and Nazis?
* Online, the many horrified reactions to the clip only crystallized how younger Americans appear to feel about yelling in general—namely, that it’s no longer a signifier of dominance, power, or authority but, instead, a mortifying and old-fashioned display of toxic masculinity. What was once associated with a degree of toughness or vigor, and perhaps suggested some hard-earned power—a boss might yell, or a military general—is now considered aggressive and domineering, an odious side effect of hubris and privilege. People who lose control and start screaming are received only with consternation and embarrassment. It is simply not something a serious person should do.
* 8chan Is a Normal Part of Mass Shootings Now. The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror. Unwritten: On Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine.
Social media tends to lend itself more towards a politics of isolation and generalized antagonism. Social media lends itself to stochastic terrorism because its entire model of influencing is stochastic, processing tendencies through algorithms that intensify and cultivate existing sentiments, pushing them to something only social media can satisfy. The stochastic nature of social media works with the inchoate nature of contemporary anger, racism, and misogyny always threatening to tip the latter over into the violent actions the punctuate daily life. As Seymour writes, “Fascist terror is ‘stochastic’ because fascism is still fractal: the armed shitstorm, a material possibility of the medium ever bit as much as the meatspace troll, has yet to materialize. But these are early days for the networked fascism of the twenty-first century.”
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.
* How do the Handmaids reach Ontario?
OK, we hear you complaining that we’re just overanalyzing stuff that isn’t meant to be taken too literally. But does all this just feed into common American preconceptions that Canada is really just an extension of the United States with a few tweaks? And, from an environmental history perspective, does the show undermine how integral the water border is between the two countries?
* They’re doing something weird with the X-Men again.
* If anything, this ADA suit from Domino’s is even more egregious than UC Berkeley’s.
* The Autistic Self Advocacy Network has ended its partnership with Sesame Street.
* Shock of shocks: Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with doctor prescriptions and good insurance.
* The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain.
* A four-hour Netflix cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
* Bookmarked for the fall: An annotated “Frankenstein” brings lessons for today.
* And I must say again that we in the Gerry community do not find this amusing: It’s here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on toUglyGerry.com and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn’t matter.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 5, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 8chan, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, ADA, Africa, Alaska, aliens, America, Andrew Yang, animals, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, autism, bears, Berkeley, books, Calvin and Hobbes, cancer, capitalism, CBP, Charles Manson, Chicago, climate change, collapse, debt, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, deserts, dinosaurs, disability, Domino's, ecofascism, ecology, El Paso, Elon Musk, English majors, Extrapolation, fascism, fonts, Frankenstein, fraud, games, gaming, gerrymandering, grading, Greenland, Guam, guns, health insurance, history, How the University Works, ice, ice sheet collapse, Illinois, immigration, indigenous peoples, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Biden, kids today, Larry Niven, literature, Marianne Williams, Marine Todd, mass shootings, Mexico, MFAs, military-industrial complex, Museum of Science Fiction, my scholarly empire, Native Americans, neoliberalism, Netflix, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, open borders, parenting, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, phone farms, progress, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, rich people, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction studies, self-driving cars, Simpsons, slavery, social media, socialism, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Tesla, the Amazon, The Boys, The Fast and The Furious, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rock, the truth is out there, toxic masculinity, true crime, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Utopia, video games, Walter Benjamin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wealth, white men, whiteness, wildfires, Wisconsin, Wisconsin veto, writing, X-Men
July 3 Links! Accept No Substitutes!
* CFP for ICFA 2020: Expanding the Archive.
* Forgot to link this yesterday: If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department.
* Cory Doctorow: What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages?
I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exercises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of chaos and terror, where you can’t trust the food on your plate, the roof over your head, or the school your child attends.
* ‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ’90s Speak Out.
* Medievalism goes to war with itself.
* Milwaukee County absolutely determined to destroy itself.
* In the world’s northernmost town, temperatures have risen by 4C, devastating homes, wildlife and even the cemetery. Will the rest of the planet heed its warning? Welcome to the fastest-heating place on Earth.
* Amazon destruction accelerates 60% to one and a half soccer fields every minute. Bolsonaro is the greatest crisis on the planet right now and everyone has agreed to just let it happen.
* ‘Families belong together’: Hundreds gather in Milwaukee to protest migrant detention centers.
* Watchdog Slams ‘Overcrowding’ At DHS Detention Centers.
* Another ICE detainee has died in custody.
* Whatever the merits of her criticism, when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.
* ‘Unprecedented in Our History’: One State Is on the Verge of Slashing Higher-Ed Funding, Leaving Public Colleges in a Panic. Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments.
* Will Donald Trump’s Fourth of July Parade Break the Law?
* Must have absolutely broken their hearts: FBI claims it lost file on neo-Nazi website Stormfront ‘after a reasonable search.’
* The Single Most Reliable Recession Indicator of the Past 50 Years Has Officially Started Blaring.
* The madness of factchecking. The hits against Sanders this week are especially incredible even by factchecking’s already low standards.
* Teenager Accused of Rape Deserves Leniency Because He’s From a ‘Good Family,’ Judge Says.
This is completely infuriating. This boy filmed himself raping her, called it rape in a text to friends, and the judge *still* decided it wasn't rape. https://t.co/WlLudz2t85
— Laila Lalami (@LailaLalami) July 3, 2019
It’s an underdiscussed problem in America that some huge percentage of its judges are bug-nuts irrational and irresponsible, just wholly abusing their position to make up rules on the fly.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 3, 2019
* The Democrats Aren’t a Left-Wing Party — They Just Play One on TV. And a truly evergreen tweet.
The Democratic Party is essentially an elaborate set of psychological defense mechanisms for the American bourgeoisie
— Roger Bellin (@rogerbellin) July 13, 2016
At some point people will have to begin acknowledging that the role of Democrats is to keep the rabble from impeding the lucrative and murderous actions of the elite. This self-pleasing pretense that our leaders are forced to do nothing is pathetic.
— Susan of Texas (@SusanofTexas) July 2, 2019
* We had our time. The world belongs to the humanzees now.
* Why did octopuses become smart?
* They say time is the fire in which we burn.
* At least Discovery season three starts filming in two weeks, which means I should be good and disappointed by the end of the year.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 3, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, Alaska, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, austerity, Bernie Sanders, Bolsonaro, Brazil, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, citizenship, civility, class struggle, climate change, cognitive biases, concentration camps, Cory Doctorow, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, directing, Donald Trump, ecology, factchecks, fake news, fascism, FBI, film, Fourth of July, Hell, Hollywood, humanzees, ice, ICFA, immigration, kids today, manners, masturbation, medieval studies, medievalism, millennials, Milwaukee, Nazis, neoliberalism, octopuses, our brains don't work, parks, politics, post-truth, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, recession, resistance, Satan, science fiction, science fiction studies, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormfront, Sympathy for the Devil, the courts, the cruelty of hope, the Democrats, the law, the rainforest, the university in ruins, they say time is the fire in which we burn, trauma, truth, University of Alaska, vaccination, white supremacy, worst financial crisis since the last one
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
We hear about liberal students & faculty. But oversight boards (trustees, regents) tend to be far more conservative & more inclined to treat the university as a business. Sometimes they are politically appointed, sometimes not, but rarely a diverse bunch. Here is #utulsa's pic.twitter.com/e6pxEXU1lO
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 14, 2019
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
It is truly amazing that we are only able to discuss how the country wound up run by a sunsetting racist authoritarian as long as there’s never any indication that a Democrat ever made a single mistake
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
In the last 24 hours we've seen a distinction emerge between candidates who believe their path to the presidency lies in accommodation to GOP rhetoric and those whose strategy is to run straight at the beast swinging a sword.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 13, 2019
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
(1) seen by (2) many (3) as apparently (4) increasing (5) the use of tactics (6) usually employed.
That's SIX caveats standing in the way of "Trump is an autocratic president." Six. https://t.co/QWmF785rKW
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 14, 2019
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
Eight seasons of buildup was worth it just for this moment! pic.twitter.com/3uEonceVVs
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) April 15, 2019
big weekend for our most popular incest-themed fantasy franchises
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 15, 2019
game of zzzzzz am I right
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
Wow Star Wars is having the best media day in history nothing could possibly go wrong, let's go check Twitter and. . . . pic.twitter.com/jwbu1r9MSy
— Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) April 12, 2019
Personally, I can't wait for
X: God Emperor Skywalker
XI: Heretics of Skywalker
XII: Chapterhouse Skywalker— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 14, 2019
(2) But the reintroduction of Palpatine and claim that it was always the plan to bring him back for IX makes me think there’s a decent chance they are going to throw a curveball and have Kylo *always* have been good after all, acting dark to get close enough to Palps to kill him.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(2 cont) This has been speculated since TFA came out and there’s def stuff in the films that can support it (“I will finish what you started,” the Han death scene, but also the Rashomon stuff around the destruction of Luke’s academy in TLJ). The best chance left for a true twist.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(and so on)
Of course the other problem is that episode nine has to be the end of something literally no person on the planet believes will ever be allowed to end.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 12, 2019
Disney will accomplish what George Lucas himself attempted but could not achieve: running STAR WARS into the ground and forcing fans to give up on it
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) April 13, 2019
what a doofus, it's episode ix https://t.co/q4yA3GQuID
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
April 15, 2019 at 11:03 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Airbnb, American Studies, anti-beardism, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antidepressants, apocalypse, austerity, authoritarianism, bargaining, beards, Beto O' Rourke, black holes, bodegas, books, Born in the USA, boycotts, Brown, CBP, CFPs, cities, class struggle, climate change, college sports, college textbooks, colonialism, comics, commitment to a bit, dark side of the digital, Democrats, deportation, disruption, Donald Trump, Duluth, Dunbar number, Dune, empire, endings, energy, Episode 9, fascism, Fox News, fraternities, Game of Thrones, games, George Lucas, Georgetown, germs, Google, Google Books, graduate student movements, graphic narrative, How the University Works, human extinction, ice, Ilhan Omar, immigration, incest, invented languages, IQ, Kylo Ren, Latin America, Mark Fisher, Marquette, Mars, martial rape, misogyny, Nancy Pelosi, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York Post, obituary, oil, outer space, Paradoxa, pedagogy, Pepsi, Philip K. Dick, plastic bags, plot twists, politics, pornography, post-antibiotic bacteria, psychopharmacology, Quidditch, racism, rape, rape culture, reparations, science fiction, scooters, sexism, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, sports, Springsteen, standup comedy, Star Wars, stochastic terrorism, superbugs, surveillance society, teaching, tenure, the courts, the law, The Owl in Daylight, The Rise of Skywalker, the university in ruins, trolls, trustees, Uber, unions, University of Tulsa, VALIS, VAPs, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, YouTube
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn’t mean “like now, but 2C warmer”.
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 28, 2018
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Spartacus (1960)
Plot holeIn the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 2018, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air travel, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, anarchy, ancient aliens, apocalypse, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, asteroids, astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, austerity, Bayeux Tapestry, Beach Boys, Bernie Sanders, Bigfoot, Bird, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, books, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Buffy, bullshit, California, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, cars, Case Western, cats, centrism, CFPs, Charles Stross, child abuse, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, communism, conspiracy theories, corruption, crisis, cyberpunk, David Foster Wallace, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, design, disability, Disney, diversity, doctors, Donald Trump, driving, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, EPA, Episode 9, ethics, Europe, evangelical Christianity, Facebook, fact-checking, fake news, Far Side, film, Flight of the Conchords, Flint, fossils, four-day work week, fracking, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, ghosts, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Greece, Groupon, Guantánamo, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, happiness, happy endings, Heaven, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, inflation, infrastructure, James Gunn, Japan, Jesuits, Joss Whedon, journamalism, justice, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kokomo, labor, leftism, libertarianism, Locke and Key, Lyft, machine learning, maps, mass transportation, McDonald's, Medicare, medicine, memes, Michigan, misogyny, Mizzou, Moby-Dick, moderation, Monopoly, moral panic, mortgage, motherhood, Mr. Rogers, MSNBC, music, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, New York, New York Daily News, New Zealand, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, oil companies, optical illusions, Orwell, our brains don't work, outer space, paleontology, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passports, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, philanthropy, philosophy, plastic, Plymouth State, politics, Portugal, postfeminism, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, QAnon, race, race culture, racism, rape, recycling, rich people, Roe v. Wade, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, Scandinavia, science fiction, scooters, security state, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, Shazam, Sheriff Clarke, Shuri, slave revolts, slaves, soccer, socialism, Sorry to Bother You, spiders, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, surveillance society, survivalism, Sweden, Swiss army knives, Talking Heads, teaching, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Devil, the discourse, the economy, The Hobbit, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, the stock market, Tolkien, Topher Grace, trans* issues, trillionaires, trolls, Tronc, Uber, USC, Utopia, Venezuela, victimization, voting, vulture capitalism, water, white supremacy, wildfires, wiretapping, women, work, Worldcon, writing
Monday Morning Links! All of Them! ALL OF THEM
* Of course you had me at Zelda propaganda posters.
* Special issue of Deletion: Punking Science Fiction.
* Editorial: We Should Create a Honors College to Propagandize on Behalf of the People Who Already Control Everything.
* A surprisingly large number of Obama-era ICE and HHS horrors got rediscovered as if they were new to Trump this weekend. This is a case where Trump’s horror truly is as much continuity as break.
My grandfather prosecuted Dachau war criminals. Later he wrote a book called “After Fifteen Years.” Its premise was that Nazism can happen anywhere, once good people start believing lies while not believing that those who are different from them are human beings.
— Robert Draper (@DraperRobert) May 26, 2018
I think “abolish ICE” is the moderate position and “arrest ICE’s leaders and put them on trial” is the progressive position, but that’s me.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 10, 2018
by the time the 2020 primary arrives (like next month) the squishy centrist position should be "not ALL ICE employees should serve life sentences"
— Atrios (@Atrios) May 27, 2018
* Even despite that continuity, though, we seem to be moving to a new energy state: Taking Children from Their Parents Is A Form of State Terror.
“My son was crying as I put him in the seat. I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was cry, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.” pic.twitter.com/2EmdndFIKo
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 25, 2018
Man. I reread the Parable books recently. First time I read them, I thought Butler was going too hard on the predation of children. But she was right in this, too. We are a nation that devours children screaming, then blames them for making too much noise in their pain.
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) May 25, 2018
* Fighting spectacle with snores, or why Trump could easily win a second term.
* Is America heading for a new kind of civil war?
extremely healthy society that has absolutely nothing to worry about pic.twitter.com/VOyqESV6To
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2018
* Fascism is back; blame the Internet.
* I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.
* After a white supremacist killed a protester in Charlottesville in 2017, Facebook pushed to re-educate its moderators about hate speech groups in the US, and spell out the distinction from nationalism and separatism, documents obtained by Motherboard show.
* Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Milwaukee PD Misconduct Has Cost the City $22 Million Since 2015.
* When a Nashville man named Matthew Charles was released from prison early in 2016 after a sentence reduction, he’d spent almost half his life behind bars. But in a rare move, a federal court ruled his term was reduced in error and ordered him back behind bars to finish his sentence.
* Man, 79, sentenced to 90 days of house arrest in 5-year-old girl’s rape.
* She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.
* This has created a problem that has not been seen before: voluntary, intentional, migrating, mobile, functional, litter. The bikes and scooters are disruptive to the locations where they are abandoned and, because they are constantly moving, the issues of abandonment and refuse are constantly cycling (sorry) throughout an urban region. Yesterday’s bike or scooter blight might be around today, or it might move for a few days and then return. In short, the bikes and scooters share a civic pattern similar to that of homelessness. Thus, in an unexpected way, the dockless bikes and scooters are also competing with the homeless for pieces of urban space upon which to temporarily rest.
* Mike Meru, a 37-year-old orthodontist, made a big investment in his education. As of Thursday, he owed $1,060,945.42 in student loans.
* Executives of big U.S. companies suggest that the days of most people getting a pay raise are over, and that they also plan to reduce their work forces further. Also, rich people are going to be needing your blood so they can stay young forever, just FYI.
* Be more like Chipotle, Jerry Brown tells California universities.
* Report Says Rising CO2 Levels Are Ruining Rice. Allergy Explosion Linked to Climate Change.
* For Women of Color, the Child-Welfare System Functions Like the Criminal-Justice System.
* Now that’s what I call ideological state apparatus™.
* A new front in the drug war.
* HUGE IF TRUE: Hollywood isn’t on the side of the resistance.
* Teen Vogue and woke capital.
* Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of ‘bear arms.’ I think a better description here is “not even wrong”; originalism is a rhetorical style, not a claim of fact.
* Sexpat Journalists Are Ruining Asia Coverage.
* A People’s History of Superstar Limo, Disney’s “worst attraction ever.”
* Solo crashes and burns, even underperforming Justice League. I haven’t seen it yet, but it certainly sounds like it had it coming. Relatedly: The Ringer takes a deep dive into the now-decanonized Han Solo prequels from the EU.
The Force Awakens: Female lead, $247M opening weekend
Rogue One: Female lead, $155M opening weekend
The Last Jedi: Female lead, $220M opening weekend
Solo: Male lead, $83M opening weekend (3-day)Thus, the obvious conclusion:
LEIA: A Star Wars Story, December 2020 pic.twitter.com/QJdjW1nZva
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 27, 2018
* Wakanda fans might be interested in the very odd turn the comics have taken. Relatedly: ‘Black Panther’ meets history, and things get complicated.
* Janelle Monáe for President.
* Conducting a posthumous interview with science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Your People Will Find You: A Podcast with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. And Ayana Jamieson’s authorized biography of Butler has a Patreon.
* Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history.
With the passing of Alan Bean, eight of the twelve humans who have walked on the moon are dead. The youngest survivor, Charles Duke, is 82.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 26, 2018
* Wendy Brown at UC: What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?
* Interesting Twitter thread on emergency and the suspension of the law.
* Half the budget, half the fun: A Star Trek World May Be Coming to Universal Studios.
* Power vs. responsibleness. Politics y’all. Existence is objectively good.
* This is an urgent reminder: Mindflayers are not sympathetic.
* As Kip Manley said, this is the flag of the Anthropocene.
Earth's average temperature since 1850 — the most beautiful representation of a terrifying trend I've ever seen.
Image by the inimitable @ed_hawkins
Raw data and other visualizations: https://t.co/WZLJXRjvv6 pic.twitter.com/vuUPvASbsv— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) May 25, 2018
* And I want to believe! US aircraft carrier was stalked for days by a UFO travelling at ‘ballistic missile speed’ which could hover above the sea for six days, leaked Pentagon report reveals.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 28, 2018 at 8:15 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, #TheResistance, academia, Afrofuturism, allergies, America, Antonin Scalia, apocalypse, Asia, austerity, Ayana Jamieson, Barack Obama, Black Panther, canon, carbon, children, Chipotle, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, comics, cyberpunk, dark side of the digital, deportation, Disney, Donald Trump, drug war, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, emergency, existence, Expanded Universe, Facebook, family businesses, fascism, Fermi problem, games, general election 2020, genocide, gentrification, guns, Han Solo, Hollywood, homelessness, hotels, How the University Works, Hōshi, I want to believe, ice, ideological state apparatuses, immigration, Ireland, Janelle Monae, Japan, Jordan Peterson, journalism, Justice League, liberalism, Marvel, Milwaukee, mindflayers, misogyny, Morgan Freeman, Nashville, Nazism, Neal Stephenson, Nintendo, Octavia Butler, originalism, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, parents, police, police brutality, police violence, politics, pollution, Princess Leia, prison, prison-industrial complex, propaganda, race, racism, rape, rape culture, real wages, Rice, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saudi Arabia, science fiction, Second Amendment, sexism, sexpats, Silicon Valley, Solo, special issues, stagflation, Star Trek, Star Wars, state terror, student debt, student loans, Supreme Court, teaching, Teen Vogue, the Anthropocene, the courts, the Internet, the law, the Moon, the suspension of the law, the truth is out there, theme parks, time travel, trash, true crime, UFOs, UNC, victory, voting, Wakanda, war on education, Wisconsin, woke capitalism, women, Would you believe they put a man on the Moon?, Yemen, Zelda
Sunday Morning Links!
* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!
* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.
The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.
* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?
* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.
* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”
* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.
* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.
* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.
* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.
* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.
* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.
* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.
* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?
And it’d be fun to see Gandalf arriving as a young wizard and getting into scrapes, maybe a story or two set in other campaigns during the War of the Ring. But we saw the main story already, there isn’t a ton of narrative space for another epic.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 17, 2018
* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.
I guess I've lived long enough to see sexist stereotypes of women go from "desperate to trap commitment-phobic men into marriage" to "shallow sluts who need enforced monogamy."
— Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar) May 19, 2018
* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.
* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.
* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.
* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”
Cmon put him in the game pic.twitter.com/ggrPZgRQKM
— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) May 20, 2018
* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.
why don't young people trust the institutions and processes that have exclusively brutalized them every waking moment of their lived reality? opinions differ
— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) May 19, 2018
TFW the country with more guns and people in prison than any other nation in the planet, and that's been at war on "terror" for two decades, builds schools that look like prisons and still is terrorized by kids on rampages with infantry rifles
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 18, 2018
* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.
* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.
* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 20, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Afrofuturism, Amazon, America, Aragorn, Arrested Development, austerity, Avengers, Bitcoin, books, bullying, Chewbacca, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, corruption, coups, Deadpool, Deadpool 2, Death's End, depression, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Donkey Kong, ecology, failed states, foley work, Frank R. Paul, Full House, games, Gamora, Google, Greensboro, Greensboro Massacre, Guardians of the Galaxy, guns, hate, health care, Infinity War, Janelle Monae, Jordan Peterson, kids today, KKK, longevity, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, mass shootings, MCU, Michigan State, misogyny, Nebula Awards, Nintendo, Ozymandias, Play-Doh, politics, pornography, privacy, race, racism, rape, rape culture, schools, science fiction, sex, sexism, smells, Star Trek, surveillance society, the 1990s, The Handmaid's Tale, TNG, Tolkien, trademarks, Voyager, words
Holy Thursday Links!
* William Strampel, Nassar’s former boss at MSU, charged with criminal sexual conduct. MSU Spent Half A Million Dollars Monitoring Nassar Victims’ And Journalists’ Social Media Accounts. Every single member of the upper administration at MSU must resign.
According to MLive, investigators in February found dozens of photos of nude women as well as pornographic videos and a video of Nassar with a young patient on a computer in Strampel’s office.
* Sexuality, childhood, and spanking as sexual assault.
* UW-Stevens Point may reconsider proposed humanities cuts after student protests.
* A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that congressional races are so heavily rigged in favor of Republicans that the United States can barely be described as a democratic republic. The upshot of their analysis is that, to win a bare majority of the seats in the U.S. House, Democrats “would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points.”
* Who Foots Most of the Bill for Public Colleges? In 28 States, It’s Students.
* “Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive.”
* This is a strike to save higher education.
* Oklahoma teachers say they’re going on strike next week.
* Fred Walker’s Career May Not Be Over. But His Presidency Is.
* I heard you like obstruction so I got you some obstruction in your obstruction.
* ‘Deeply weird and enjoyable’: Ursula K Le Guin’s electronica album.
* Here’s how Popular Science covered ‘Star Trek’ in 1967.
* Civilization Player Gets Space Race Victory In 90 AD.
* A Scheme to End the World’s Worst Acid Trip.
* Race, Gender, and Disability in Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time.
* Stormy Daniels Directed a Cyberpunk Porn Thriller That Predicted Our Current Dystopia.
* The Vikings got a billion dollar stadium, and tax payers paid half of that cost. And now…
* Something Happened on Television.
* A California sheriff is posting inmate release dates to help ICE capture undocumented immigrants. ICE gained access to Santa Clara County inmates, breaching sanctuary policies.
* Whatever the potential merits of the arguments might be, it’s tortuous, to say the least, to read anguished warnings about “fake news” from someone who was in the West Wing during the heyday of Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, fictitious attempts to buy refined uranium from Niger, and completely nonexistent alliance with Al-Qaeda; to hear about the threats posed by presidential incompetence from a former staffer of the same White House that so brazenly let New Orleans drown; to be lectured on the perils of executive belligerence and polarizing rhetoric from the man credited with coining the phrase “Axis of Evil”; or to be subjected to sermons about kleptocracy and calls to decency, honor, and the rule of law from someone whose former political boss spent eight years oozing nationalist machismo to champion torture, extrajudicial detention, and aggressive war and who possibly became president in 2000 because his brother just so happened to be the governor of Florida.
* The Newest Frontier in American Jurisprudence Is Trump’s Twitter Feed.
* Hey, Wired — leave those kids alone.
* It shows just how far a man of means will go to get something he can’t buy: the right to carry a concealed firearm anywhere in America.
* Seems pricy, but I’ll allow it.
* Advertising will destroy the auto industry next.
* Scientists say they’ve discovered a new human organ. Behold the interstitium!
* Well, when you put it that way.
* Bulgaria Alleges Julia Kristeva was State Security Agent.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 29, 2018 at 8:58 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with A Wrinkle in Time, academia, adaptation, administrative blight, advertising, Alpha Centauri, Amazon, America, austerity, baseball, Black Panther, bodies, Bond, Bulgaria, Bush, California, Catholicism, children, China Miéville, civilization, class struggle, climate change, cyberpunk, David From, Deep Space 9, deportation, depression, disability, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, ecology, espionage, Fermi paradox, football, games, gerrymandering, guns, gymnastics, happiness, Hell, How the University Works, I feel personally attacked, ice, immigration, Iraq, James Bond, Jesus Christ, Julia Kristeva, kids today, Larry Nassar, middle school, Minneapolis, Minnesota, MSU, music, my scholarly empire, neoliberalism, NFL, obstruction of justice, ocean acidification, Oklahoma, our brains don't work, pardons, parenting, politics, porn, prison-industrial complex, race, rape, rape culture, religion, Robert Mueller, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, self-driving cars, sex, sexuality, Space Race Victory, spanking, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Stormy Daniels, strikes, student debt, television, The City and the City, the House, the interstitium, The Three-Body Problem, tuition, Twitter, unions, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vikings, Wisconsin