Tuesday Links!

* A new Modern Masters of Science Fiction volume is out: Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones. Check it out!

* The Tiptree Award Motherboard has issued a lengthy statement on why they won’t be renaming the prize.

* Podcast alert! Keywords of Capitalism with John Patrick Leary.

* Natalia Cecire on “cursed” as an aesthetic category.

* It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that could not figure out what to do with its technological inventiveness — its energy, innovation, and abundance — except to squander it in creating new kinds of artificial scarcity: the monumental folly of our age.

* Expert predicts 25% of colleges will “fail” in the next 20 years.

* More honest Latin mottoes for your overrated university.

* Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age.

Adjunct instructors at my university don't get paid until October 31. School started on August 26. Happy Labor Day.

— Mark Doyle (@DrMarkDoyle) September 2, 2019

* Why don’t doctors trust women? Because so much of the research was done only on men.

* Another US visa holder was denied entry over someone else’s messages.

* Trump trails Democrats by a historically large margin. That’s why they call him the Comeback Kid!

* The Senate suddenly looks like it’s up for grabs in 2020.

* The world promised to double its green energy R&D from 2015-2020. Sadly, no sign of this happening (2015 at $16bn, 2018 at $17bn). Still got a few months!

Simply put: Grand Bahama Island is currently enduring one of the most catastrophic 24-hour periods of weather in recorded world history.

The people there are going to need years, if not decades to recover. https://t.co/lCieDg7S4W

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) September 2, 2019

* I realize I have barely stopped complaining for four months, but I honestly think that if anything we should be talking even more about how Marvel’s first two phases gave us one female superhero each, the token woman on each of their two teams (nothing so much as a solo movie, don’t be silly, we had to wait ten years for that), and in the culmination of the Infinity Saga, both of those women were thrown off a cliff.

* “Common Mistakes Guys Make When Approaching Women Who Are Wearing Headphones.”

* “After pressure, PayPal takes down Ku Klux Klan donation account.”

* “Harvard Freshman, Ismail Ajjawi, Admitted Into U.S. After Being Denied Entry.” Imagine how hard this would be if you didn’t have Harvard in your corner!

* America can’t talk about labor, part 89: There are 91,000 professional home aides in New York City. There are 50,000 coal miners in the United States of America.

* Hand surgeons agree: hand surgeons should be paid 4.5 billion dollars per surgery.

* Ron Fellows played cornerback for the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Raiders from 1981–1988. He intercepted 19 passes and scored three touchdowns, including two on interception returns. Now 61 years old and living in Sacramento, Calif., Fellows suffers from Alzheimer’s, and his cognition is gradually declining. What follows is a description of life from the perspective of Debra Fellows, Ron’s wife since 2002, as told to Dom Cosentino. My Husband Is Dying Every Day.

* ROMs and Mappers: Why NES Games Can Be So Different On The Same Hardware.

* Abolish Uber.

* Side hustles of the music industry.

* Follow an exorcist’s advice and you’ll never see a demon in your life.

* With a trusted information source like the Pentagon on the case, fake news doesn’t stand a chance!

* Another new Twitter account to love: reporting the absolute risk increase alongside the relative risk increase of various mundane activities.

RELATIVE RISK INCREASE: 200%

ABSOLUTE RISK INCREASE: 0.6%https://t.co/dv8EVedPit

— RelativelyRisky (@justsaysrisks) July 2, 2019

* “I’m going to die,” Stevens cried later. “Yeah, I know,” Reneau said.

* And I don’t know much, but I do know Wisconsin will break your heart.

The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

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

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

* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

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

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

* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

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

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

How does this school stack up?

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

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

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

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

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

* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

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

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019

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

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

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

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

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

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

* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

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

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019

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

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

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

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

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

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

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

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

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

* In the age of the psychonauts.

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

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

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

* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

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

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

— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019

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

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

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

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

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

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

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

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

But, doctor, I am the Joker

— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019

And the Droney Goes To…

Pentagon Creating New Medal For Drones, Cyberattacks.