Posts Tagged ‘charter schools’
Monday Night Links!
* CFP: ASAP11, “Ecologies of the Present.”
* A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report: Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people.
* Great Twitter thread on screenwriting from my old friend Tony Tost.
* And a great thread pitching a black Batman story.
* Thieves stole architectural gems from USC in a heist that remained hidden for years.
* Bennett, who a week earlier had been placed on indefinite administrative leave, was now barred from the university, the message said. Sandwiched between those assertions was a sordid allegation: Bennett’s “recent admittance to police of meth use and access to firearms.”
* Vox talks to Malcolm Harris about the kids today.
* When a utility files for bankruptcy.
* Free-market boosters, including Betsy DeVos, promised that a radical expansion of charter schools would fix the stark inequalities in the state’s education system. The results in the classrooms are far more complicated.
* When Democrats actually propose popular progressive policies.
* Crimes against humanity without apology: Finding all migrant children separated from their families may be impossible, feds say. The utter shamelessness of these people.
* Executive time: How Trump’s schedule compares to past presidents.
* Trump wants another fake physical.
* African-American women were written out of the history of the woman suffrage movement. As the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches, it’s time for a new look at the past.
* In one Milwaukee school, on one day, what a difference a small class size made.
* Financial literacy is a kind of formation of its own. Such programs form us to believe that we can make up for one $40,000 decision with forty thousand other decisions that save a single dollar each. In retrospect, it seems fitting that Duke Divinity School required each of us to sit through a brief seminar on financial literacy prior to graduation. The school needed one last moment to shape us as individuals in control of our destiny through wise choices, hard work, and willpower. … Student debt thus exposes a farther-reaching cruelty in a system that treats people, in the end, as autonomous consumers. Until we recognize the deeper problem, we will be hindered from taking collective action to build better lives together. We spend so much time blaming one another and ourselves that we don’t have time to look at bigger, collective solutions like tuition-free higher education or the cancellation of student loan debt. We don’t ask what kind of society we want to see and what kind of collective political action it might take to win it. Our eyes haven’t been trained to see society and its institutions as something we can change. Our imaginations haven’t been formed to desire something better fitted for human flourishing.
* Y: The Last Man TV Adaptation Will Premiere in 2020. As we were chatting about on Twitter, it’s amazing how long this took, so long that they’re probably quite a bit out-of-step with the times now.
* When you’re looking on the bright side.
* Lots of white people having nervous breakdowns lately.
* Billionaires! They’re just like us our parents!
* How long could my murderer pretend to be me online?
* Can you trip so hard you never stop tripping?
* Another truly bananas story from the world of young adult publishing.
* And that’s we in the business call a “win-win.”
Just 363 Shopping Days Till Christmas Links
* Call for Papers: Literature and Extraction. Call for Papers: The Romantic Fantastic.
* A new Black Mirror is dropping tomorrow. From doing some recent workshops with Black Mirror as a focus I think it’s clear that an occasional surprise release is a much better model for them than the binge.
* Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era.
* Sure, when you put it that way it sounds really bad.
* The global economy should isolate Japan by any means necessary until it reverses this decision.
* When Report Cards Go Out on Fridays, Child Abuse Increases on Saturdays, Study Finds.
* This is one version of strategic inefficiency: how some are relieved from doing the work that would slow their progression. And, of course, others then inherit that work. That some people end up being given more administrative work because they are more efficient might seem so obvious that it does not need to be said. The obvious is not always obvious to those who benefit from a system; the obvious always needs to be said. We need to learn from how inefficiency is rewarded and how that rewarding is a mechanism for reproducing hierarchies: it is about who does what; about who is saved from doing what. In academic career terms, efficiency can be understood as a penalty: you are slowed down by what you are asked to pick up.
* How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. A helpful Twitter thread elaborates on just how much of the internet economy is predicated on fraud of one type or another.
* U.S. Grip on the Market for Higher Education Is Slipping.
* The Southwest May Be Deep Into a Climate-Changed Mega-Drought. Discovery of recent Antarctic ice sheet collapse raises fears of a new global flood. Melting Arctic ice is now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the ocean, scientists find. 2018 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history. “The last five years have been the five warmest years in modern human history … The last cooler-than-normal year, based on the 20th century average, was way back in 1976.” Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Risks of ‘domino effect’ of tipping points greater than thought, study says. ‘We are at war’: New York’s rat crisis made worse by climate change. ‘Future-proofing’ is how you say climate change in Texas. 130,000. The Real-Life Effects of Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks: 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation. Democrats remain fundamentally unserious.
* Moving a section of railroad up and inland is not going to be the drastic logistical challenge of the 21st century. It is going to be an ordinary baseline necessity, one minor component in a comprehensive retooling of life and infrastructure. Whole cities will have to move up and in. Rail and transit, water and sewer, power and industry—none of it can stay put on the low ground. Nor, if there’s any hope of getting emissions under control, is the feeble, endangered Amtrak line more than a fraction of the transportation systems the country will need for its survival. The issue isn’t whether we can mobilize to keep rail service running through Wilmington without interruption. It’s whether there’s going to be a Wilmington at all.
* Here are the yoga pants you should buy if you don’t want to poison the groundwater.
* Fifty years since Earthrise.
* Migrant boy dies in U.S. custody; Trump vows shutdown will last until border wall is funded. A 5-Month-Old Girl Has Been Hospitalized With Pneumonia After Being Detained By The Border Patrol. Border Patrol says young girl in custody nearly died after going into cardiac arrest: report. ICE Quietly Drops 200 Asylum Seekers at El Paso Bus Station with No Money or Shelter Right Before Christmas. ICE Is Using Driver’s License Applications to Arrest Immigrants. ICE, CBP Seize Billions In Assets Including Human Remains.
* A College Student Was Told To Remove A “Fuck Nazis” Sign Because It Wasn’t “Inclusive.”
* The fact that there can be no accountability despite “serious” allegations is, in some sense, the common theme of the time. It’s part of a drumbeat that insists: We cannot indict a sitting president; we cannot discipline a sitting justice. If you are untruthful for a long enough period of time, you can find your way into a job where there are no consequences for being untruthful.
* How Mark Burnett Invented Trump.
* The Catholic Church in Illinois withheld the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, the state’s attorney general said. Wild that the Catholic Church would think it could win a morality fight about kids and sex.
* Elon Musk is a ludicrous, transparent fraud, and it just doesn’t matter a bit.
* After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools.
* You can’t argue with facts! Milwaukee named one of the best places to start a business in the US.
* Why did the Times let Alice Walker recommend an anti-Semitic book?
* What if the Constitution is bad?
* Putting your mass shooting on credit.
* What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle. Everything! And they were wrong about unions too!
* A Mysterious Object Twice the Size of Earth is What Caused Uranus’ Lopsided Orbit.
* Julie Rea was convicted of killing her son largely on the testimony of bloodstain-pattern analysts. She was later acquitted and exonerated, joining a growing community of Americans wrongly convicted with bad science.
* The Spider-Verse story that (kind of) inspired Into the Spider-Verse is only $8.99 at Comixology. It’s fun!
* How the ‘Spider-Verse’ Animators Created That Trippy Look.
* Berlin Is a Masterpiece of a Graphic Novel.
* One second from every episode of Mad Men.
* Great session today, doc, thanks.
* The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.
* Childhood poverty has a lasting impact on developing brain, finds study.
* I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.
* Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not).
* For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain. Stay tuned for my darkly erotic sequel to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Closed Some Tabs Today Links
* * The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures.
* Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?
* A couple recent novel recommendations, just because I’ve had a bit more time to read lately, and because it’s been a while: I enjoyed both The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts and The Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee.
* I thought ranking the 5th through 20th Beatles was an especially good episode of Screw It, We’re Just Gonna Talk about the Beatles, too, while I’m in a recommendin’ mood.
* Calling all folks who have a conference paper or short piece they’re not sure what to do with. You’ve got a friend in the SFRA Review!
* Foundation #130 has been published.
* An Alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Judged by You. And a deep dive into the ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize.
* N.K. Jemisin’s first short story collection is coming this fall. And elsewhere on the Afrofuturism beat: Nnedi Okorafor will be writing Shuri.
* Claremont Graduate University closed its philosophy department and laid off the program’s two main tenured professors this summer, just a year after approving a promising master’s degree-only model for the department.
* Understanding the CV vs the cover letter.
* A lost Stanley Kubrick screenplay has apparently been found.
* The secret history of Marxist alien hunters.
* Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work. “Saint Tolkien”: Why This English Don Is on the Path to Sainthood.
* From Peter Frase: On the Politics of Basic Income.
* How Should Children’s Literature Deal with the Holocaust?
* Who Is Brett Kavanaugh? Inside the Right-Wing History of Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee. To Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, Immigrants Have No Rights. Senators, Don’t Pretend You Don’t Know Where Kavanaugh Stands On Roe. Brett Kavanaugh’s Record on the Rule of Law Is Much Worse Than His Defenders Contend. Yes, Normal Republican Elites Are a Threat to Democracy.
* As local newsrooms shrink, college journalists fill in the gaps.
* White House Reviewing Plan to Relax Child Labor Laws.
* Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
* Family Separations Are Still Happening Along The Border, As This Father’s Case Shows.
* I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.
* Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention.
* Immigrant mothers are staging hunger strikes to demand calls with their separated children. Army abandons legal effort to expel immigrant soldier on path to citizenship. The Army as a whole, and every individual soldier involved, should be ashamed of itself for participating in this nonsense. Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families. Sexual Assault Inside ICE Detention: 2 Survivors Tell Their Stories. After an ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Two teens wait in Boston after being separated from their father at the border. The prison-industrial complex, ICE edition. Look who’s profiteering now.
* Most Trump Voters Say MS-13 Is A Threat To The Entire U.S.
* What Does It Mean to Abolish ICE?
* Trump and Putin: what we know is damning. It got worse.
* Meanwhile, House conservatives prep push to impeach Rosenstein.
* The borrowed kettle, war on poverty edition.
* Trump has said 1,340,330 words as president. They’re getting more dishonest, a Star study shows.
* As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
* Records obtained by the Miami Herald suggest that during the tenure of former chief Raimundo Atesiano, the command staff pressured some officers into targeting random black people to clear cases.
* With last charges against J20 protestors dropped, defendants seek accountability for prosecutors.
* Nineteen tenants of 18 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, contend that Kushner Cos. tried to convert the majority of the 338 apartments in the building from rent-stabilized units to luxury condos starting in June 2015. To do so, Kushner’s firm harassed the rent-stabilized tenants with major construction all over the building, the lawsuit charges. The construction at the Austin Nichols House unleashed dangerous toxins into the air and caused a litany of issues, according to the legal filing. Rent-stabilized tenants allege Kushner Cos. harassed them.
* The woman in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence — she says she’s been ‘shamed, insulted, and harassed’ since the story went viral and asks for her privacy. Don’t stalk random strangers for clicks!
* Don’t feed the trolls, and other hideous lies: The mantra about the best way to respond to online abuse has only made it worse.
* E.U. Fines Google $5.1 Billion in Android Antitrust Case.
* The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes.
* Left Politics Can Win All Over the Country.
* In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.
* Something is up with Elon Musk. Keep your eye on it. Really!
* All class: MGM Preemptively Sues Victims of Las Vegas Mass Shooting.
* Handmaid’s Tale season two sounds like a real mess. A roller-coaster season – and its mind-boggling conclusion – have left Hulu’s flagship drama with nowhere to go.
* Mad as a Mars Hare as the first Vietnam War film.
* A new law makes it illegal to vote if you’re a Democrat. But critics say…
* Why Aren’t We Still Talking About Treasure Planet?
* Pushback against immunization laws leaves some California schools vulnerable to outbreaks.
* Autism and the tech industry. The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents).
* Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates.
* Today in the charter school scam.
* Trump is so bad that presidency-ending scandals don’t even get any airtime.
* Could Ancient Humans Have Lived as Long as We Do?
* Wildfires In The U.S. Are Getting Bigger. Orcas of the Pacific Northwest Are Starving and Disappearing. The disturbing reason heat waves can kill people in cooler climates. How Climate Change in Bangladesh Impacts Women and Girls. Global warming could make India literally uninhabitable.
* Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign.
* Stop-and-Frisk Settlement in Milwaukee Lawsuit Is a Wakeup Call for Police Nationwide.
* “Sacha Baron Cohen Tricked Me Into Saying We Should Arm Preschoolers.”
* Why isn’t the liberal media focusing on the one good trip?
* Incompetence all the way down.
* Abortion is immoral, except when it comes to my mistress.
* In Praise of Incivility: The Appropriate Posture in a State of Emergency.
* Nintendo Labo Contest Winners Include A Solar-Powered Accordion And A Teapot Minigame.
* The Most Important Video Game on the Planet: How Fortnite became the Instagram of gaming.
* Disney will control about 40% of the annual box office if it buys Fox.
* Money is literally speech, but ‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules.
* I’m sure there’s a reason you’d set this story in the Victorian period that wasn’t about smuggling in sexist tropes under the sign of historical verisimilitude, but.
* Venmo’s “public by default” transactions reveal drug deals, breakups, more.
* We’ll never know what combination of incentives and forces and genuine beliefs are at play in one person’s shifting positions. And like I said, I welcome the change that is happening today. But I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was sometimes unsettled by it. Particularly when it’s unacknowledged.
* In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light. From the archives.
* Ocasio-Cortez’s Blueprint for a New Politics. More from the New Yorker. Making the right enemies.
* Raising a child in a doomed world.
* The second civil war just got interesting.
* In Town With Little Water, Coca-Cola Is Everywhere. So Is Diabetes.
* An exciting opportunity to read your own kids’ memoir, today.
* Sorry guys, this one is my bad.
* And a plastic straw update: A Reason investigation reveals that the coffee giant’s new cold drink lids use more plastic than the old straw/lid combo. Well done, everyone!
Saturday Night Links!
* CFP: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, Edited Volume.
* CFP: Darkness.
* Never Tell Them Your True Name: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin.
* The Demanding, Essential Work of Samuel Delany: The Atheist in the Attic.
* Games for a Fallen World: On the Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene.
* Why we march: a then and now look at Marquette student’s involvement in protests.
* Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think. Amid wage stagnation, corporate leaders declare the end of annual raises triggered by increased profitability. The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.
* A grim new angle on the intergenerational struggle: Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors.
* Harvard study estimates thousands died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria.
* Living Homeless in California: The University of Hunger.
* The Criminalization of Knowledge.
* A conservative Stanford professor plotted to dig up dirt on a liberal student. Niall Ferguson, amazingly. Niall Ferguson quits Stanford free speech role over leaked emails.
* It’s Not Liberal Arts And Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed.
* Inside the NCAA’s years-long, twisting investigation into Mississippi football.
* Colleges Are No Match for American Poverty.
* Here’s every Star Wars movie, ranked by female screen time. Should Donald Glover Have Played Han Solo? Disney and Star Wars: An Empire in Peril? The growing emptiness of the Star Wars universe. ‘Solo’ gets one thing right: The droids in ‘Star Wars’ are basically slaves.
* Isaac Cates on Infinity War‘s False Conclusions.
* How Tolkien created Middle-earth.
* Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls. White Americans abandoned democracy and embraced authoritarianism when they realized brown people would soon outvote them. TMZ Goes MAGA. Can the Rule of Law Survive Trump?
* Three tweets on impeachment from Corey Robin.
* thread re: how NYT has now basically locked out Congressional Dems from commenting on Trump news.
* Trump’s ‘Forced Separation’ of Migrant Families Is Both Illegal and Immoral. Separated at the border: A mother’s story.
* After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back. Customs stole a US citizen’s life savings when he boarded a domestic flight, now he’s suing to get it back. Southwest wouldn’t let mixed-race family fly until mom “proved” parenthood. This AI Knows Who You Are by the Way You Walk.
* Internal company emails obtained by The Intercept tell a different story. The September emails show that Google’s business development arm expected the military drone artificial intelligence revenue to ramp up from an initial $15 million to an eventual $250 million per year. How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google.
American flag-waving obfuscates these and other abuses of power; reveals the state’s protection and definition of a white, hetero socioeconomic class as the legitimate citizen class at the expense of black, brown, Muslim, trans, disabled, or immigrant lives; and is our traditional response to a sense of foreign impingement on “normal American life” (white suburban families). The message goes: Don’t think about the President’s baseless claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, don’t think about the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and, now, Reality Winner, don’t think about the dependence of all power on a disenfranchised, exploited class. Think instead of the firefighters at ground zero, who were certain that America would endure. Think of ordinary citizens, like those depicted in the “Main Street USA” ad, and their faith in this city on a hill. Think instead, “Make America Great Again!” Don’t ask: Who suffers in this society when the state makes better security and freedom for its populace a goal? Freedom for whom? Who does a Muslim ban serve? Who do police serve? On which caskets do we lay the flag?
* In the richest country in the history of the world: Nine year old raises thousands of dollars at lemonade stand to help pay brother’s medical bills.
* Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself agreeing with David Brooks.
* Bear’s Dairy Queen ice cream treat earns zoo $500 fine.
* Archaeologists uncover remains of man crushed as he fled Pompeii.
* Why Isn’t Asbestos Banned in the US?
* Choose-Your-Own-Security-Disclosure-Adventure.
* Meet the Rising New Housing Movement That Wants to Create Homes for All. Tenant and Squatters’ Rights in Oakland.
* We compared Milwaukee police reports on Sterling Brown’s arrest with the video. They don’t match.
* Jury Leaves $4 to Family of Man Killed by Sheriff’s Deputy, Along With Many Questions.
* LARB reviews Dirty Computer.
* How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language From a Terrible One. How to Build a World.
* Humans will have to leave the Earth and the planet will become just a “residential” zone, according to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I assume the rivers of meat blood come later.
* A weather report from an alternate universe, in which science is real and people aren’t idiots.
* Climate grief in the classroom.
* Banning straws won’t save the oceans.
* Bet this won’t either: Trump Prepares Lifeline for Money-Losing Coal Plants.
* Summah. Don’t kill your wife with work. If these trends continue. Teach the controversy. Dads & grads. When you’re almost forty.
* “Says he had to stage his own murder in order to capture someone, apologises to his wife.”
* How #MeToo Impacts Viewers’ Decisions on What to Watch.
* In 1975, Gary Gygax revealed the Tomb of Horrors module at the first Origins convention, presenting it as a campaign that would specifically challenge overpowered characters who would have to rely on their wits to outsmart incredibly lethal, subtle traps, rather than using their almighty THACOs to fell trash-mobs of orcs or other low-level monsters.
* How 1960s Film Pirates Sold Movies Before the FBI Came Knocking.
* The art of the grift in 21st century Manhattan.
* Shockingly, ‘impossible’ EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all.
* New podcast watch: Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes. The Good Place: The Podcast.
* An oral history of the Muppets.
* A research question I’ve been pondering for awhile: When, exactly, did the idea that the President — and only the President — was in charge of the decision to use nuclear weapons get turned into real policy? Answer seems to be September 1948, with NSC-30.
* We’re not prepared for the genetic revolution that’s coming.
* And you can’t argue with the facts: Wearing glasses may really mean you’re smarter, major study finds.
people and nature
Sunday Links!
* Nintendo Labo looks amazing. I’ve already preordered both kits…
* From the AAUP: A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics.
* Among the first-time nominees for the 1967 prize, writes M.A. Orthofer for Literary Saloon, are “future winners Saul Bellow and Claude Simon, as well as Jorge Amado, Jean Genet, György Lukács — and the (as best I can tell) last surviving nominee, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” Other names on the list include “Auden, Beckett, Ionesco, Kawabata, Mishima, Montale, Moravia, Neruda, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Simenon, and J.R.R.Tolkien.” Also on the list, writes Alison Flood for The Guardian, is “Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year,” 1968.
* The drought-stricken city announced on Thursday that it will begin marking 200 collection points where its 3.7 million residents will be required to queue for a rationed supply of water on “Day Zero” – currently forecast to be April 21. If it happens, Cape Town would become the first major city in the world to shut down entirely the supply of running water in all of its homes.
* Kylo Ren destroying the Millennium Falcon in the trailer is a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
* Break your phone addiction by turning your screen to grayscale.
* The sexual assault backlash is coming. Here’s how to respond.
* 14 on MSU staff got Nassar warnings over 2 decades.
* Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?
* Charter schools can never fail, they can only be failed.
* Too late, Delta tries to put the “comfort animal” genie back in the bottle.
* US border patrol routinely sabotages water left for migrants, report says. Deputy shoots, kills 16-year-old boy during scuffle at courthouse. This Is What a White Supremacist Department of Justice Looks Like.
* Within Reach: The transgender community fights for health care.
* New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy.
* Porn and the bomb, by the numbers.
* It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
* How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s.
* De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness at LARB.
* 9 Times People Were Actually Murdered By Their Clothes.
* What radicalized you? Calvin and Hobbes.
* And a happy, happy birthday to the Dax symbiont, born in 2018.
A Desperate Last-Ditch Mission to Close All My Tabs
* My Hamilton seminar got some nice national press last week, in both print and video flavors. Check it out!
* Call for Papers: Worlding SF! I’m scheduled to give my first conference keynote at this one.
* Electric Athenaeum: Call for Submissions! Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene!
* BookScrolling’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Written by Women. A solid list! Octavia’s Daughters: Meet the New Queens of Spec Fic. Behold, the mega thread you created with over 200 recs of books by POCs.
* I’m confident this will be the most interesting Star Trek movie of all time, whether it’s the best or worst Star Trek movie of all time.
* The Revolutionary Optimism of Iain M. Banks’ Culture Novels. When Obama met Liu Cixin.
* Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork.
* Still trying not to obsess over every twist and turn of the Trump administration, but this is truly something, even by Republican standards. Proposed rule would protect employers who steal workers’ hard-earned tips. The tax cut that ate America. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lets corporations loose to do what they will—and then imposes pain to make the numbers work. ‘Death to Democrats’: How the GOP Tax Bill Whacks Liberal Tenets. 15,000 people a year. Oops. Not even CHIP can survive these people. FBI Pretty On-Brand. The rot goes all the way down. Gaming out the risk of nuclear war with North Korea. Opening the floodgates. The case for normalizing impeachment.
* The Uncounted: Jobs and Graduates. I think colleges have ignored just how much goodwill has been burned up by the rise in college costs. Graduate Students Mobilize ‘to Stop Something That Can Ruin Us.’ Universities are also to blame for the GOP’s ‘grad student tax.’ The fire next time. The case for federal universities. Student debt: something has to give. The odd case of Hillsdale College. Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a chilling vision of things to come.
* Isn’t this just a pitch for S.P.E.C.T.R.E?
* Moody’s Warns Cities to Address Climate Risks or Face Downgrades. The Texas Town That’s Been Without Clean Water for Thirty Years.
* More than 20,000 Children Have Been Homeless Since Hurricane Harvey. We don’t talk at all about Puerto Rico anymore.
* How did we survive the Cold War?
* When we think about the environmental conditions under which young Americans are developing, a lack of trust makes sense as a survival adaptation. A market that doles out success on an increasingly individual basis is not a strong foundation for high levels of social interdependence. With all youth activities centered on the production of human capital, even team sports become sole pursuits. Add this to the intensive risk aversion that characterizes contemporary parenting and the zero-tolerance risk-elimination policies that dominate the schools and the streets, and it’s a wonder Millennials can muster enough trust to walk outside their own doors.
* These Doomsday Preppers Are Starting to Switch From Gold to Bitcoin. The longer BTC persists, the worse the eventual blowout—and the more angry people there are going to be. Angry people who are currently being recruited and radicalized by neo-Nazis. Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa.
* Domestic terror: ICE tracks down immigrant who spoke to media in SW Washington: ‘You are the one from the newspaper.’
* Escalating in Afghanistan, again, without even the pretense of a strategic goal.
* Zoning laws and resistance. It’s too late for Robert Mueller to save us. All of our institutions will abet, not arrest, this disaster.
* How the Republicans broke Congress. Trump and the failure of incrementalism.
* At this, the girl adopted a stern expression. “You’re not supposed to play!” she said, commandingly. She seemed pleased that the game afforded her an opportunity to reprimand her teacher—a chance to express a different facet of her imagination. “You are not supposed to play in preschool,” she said, with conviction. “You are supposed to work.” The girl had absorbed both the explicit and the implicit lessons of the schoolroom in which she spent her days. So far, it seemed, her education was a success. Against Success Academy.
* To the extent that Jackie was aware that what she told Sabrina Erdely was not true, it was destructive and wrong, cruel and stupid. If she really was not in command of reality, that would mitigate her culpability, but it wouldn’t change the nature of what she did. It was violence. And to me, it was a betrayal — or that’s what it felt like. I knew it was irrational to feel that way, but that’s how I felt. I want to condemn it, and I do condemn it, but I also think I can guess what she was saying, or would have said, which can’t be said reasonably. It must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t you fucking dare not look. I’m going to make you look. I’m going to make you know. You’re going to know what we’ve decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to remember.
* A Timeline of Everything We Know Happened After Return of the Jedi, Up to The Last Jedi.
* American Airlines Glitch Could Strand Thousands Of Holiday Flights. Good on the pilots for signing up before anyone told management.
* What’s on the ground in The Jetsons?
* Facebook is studying your self-censorship.
* Solidarity to our brothers in arms.
* And on the pedestal these words appear:
Thursday Night Links!
(Slight format change: with the return to teaching, increased professional responsibilities, and my kids getting older [too fast!] I’m having real trouble keeping up with the level of linkblogging I’ve previously done. I’m not hanging up the blog, quite yet, but it’s definitely going to continue to be more irregular and more tightly focused on stuff I find particularly interesting and/or might someday need for research. Sorry! Please simply take it as read that Trump sucks, everything he does sucks, and everyone who supports him sucks.)
* This week I have a review of John Scalzi’s newest book, The Collapsing Empire, up at LARB: “No, Speed Limit.” Buy it! It’s good!
* For the more academic minded among you I’ve also got a review of Anthony Lioi’s Nerd Ecology up at ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. I tweeted an excerpt from it too not long ago:
* Must have: Monograph by Chris Ware.
* Humanitarian catastrophe in Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are living climate change right now. Here’s how they describe it. He rattled off a list of what he could not find: bottles of water, gas canisters to light stoves, food.
* Isle of Dogs looking like a strong contender for the first Wes Anderson movie I don’t like.
* Harrowing read: Student survives three days in a cave after college spelunking group leaves him behind.
* Revolutionary Possibility: Henry Farrell on China Miéville’s October.
* Farah Mendlesohn is crowdfunding her Robert Heinlein book, which proved too long for its original publisher.
* Great review of the (excellent) Star Trek: Discovery pilot from Aaron Body at LARB. I’m very pleased, and a little shocked, by how good it is! 8 Star Trek Spec Scripts That Never Saw the Light of Day. And yes, of course it is.
* Humanities, universities and sustainability. Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars. And doing my part: Amid Professors’ ‘Doom-and-Gloom Talk,’ Humanities Ph.D. Applications Drop.
* From a public relations perspective, accepting the terms of a right-wing narrative about supposedly illiberal campuses by bending over backwards to subsidize an already well-financed right-wing assault on the university may do more to confirm the erroneous claims of that narrative than to change them. That narrative has become a crucial element in the arsenal of weapons used to attack our democracy. Make no mistake: the groups that attacktransgender people, Muslims, people of color, women, legal immigrants as well as undocumented students, are also those that attack science, and feel no obligation to hold their views to academic standards of evidence or coherence. We, therefore, urge the administration to creatively and courageously confront the way free speech is being deployed against our academic freedom, and—in deciding what can take place on our campus — to prioritize the conditions that enable teaching and research.
* Meanwhile, across campus. How Much Is Your College Football Team Worth?
* The nightmare state of Thomas the Tank Engine.
* Democrats, for all their self-conception as architects of a progressing world, possess no such singular purpose. Their plan, even when they are in office, consists largely of defending the paltry welfare state already in place against the vastly more disciplined forces of reaction. Their ambition — when they have the opportunity to realize one — is just to tweak. Sometimes they tweak for the better. Sometimes they call their tweaking “welfare reform.”
* The Senate’s Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free. Forever and ever amen.
* Wendy Brown on apocalyptic populism.
* War With North Korea Starts to Look Inevitable.
* The Madness of Donald Trump.
* We’re not going to fix American democracy until we can explain why the GOP went crazy.
* The Resegregation of Jefferson County.
* Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge Over Blacks (But Don’t Know It).
* No rights which the white man was bound to respect.
* The latest way tech companies have promoted their questionable self-image as the antithesis of old, evil corporations has been to open their offices not to unions, but to dogs. Capitalism with a Fluffy Face.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* ICE violates own policy by locking up pregnant women, complaint alleges. ICE Is Using Prostitution Diversion Courts to Stalk Immigrants. The American citizens illegally detained by ICE. Immigrant taken by ICE from Austin courthouse was killed in Mexico. Undocumented Parents Arrested at Children’s Hospital While Awaiting Their Infant Son’s Surgery. Two Women Say They Lost Pregnancies In Immigrant Detention Since July. Government policies funneling illegal immigrants into more dangerous crossing areas have contributed to fatalities. A cancer patient desperately needs a stem-cell transplant. But the U.S. won’t grant the donor a visa. ICE attacks sanctuary cities, arrests 450.
* Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees.
* In the richest country in human history.
* By age 3, inequality is clear: Rich kids attend school. Poor kids stay with a grandparent.
* According to a Department of Education report, black students nationally were three times more likely to be suspended than whites in 2012. Suspensions occur most commonly in secondary schools, but black children were more than twice as likely to be suspended from preschool as well.
* When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the patent and trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”
* Today’s don’t-say-climate-change term of art: mega-heat dome. Australia’s record-breaking winter beats average highs by 2C, Climate Council says.
* Although the uncertainty of each prediction in Fig. 4 is considerable, all scenarios for cumulative uptake at the century’s end either exceed or are commensurate with the threshold for catastrophic change.
* One of the clearest signs of climate change in Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey was the rain.
* What would a flood-proof city look like?
* When Bad DNA Tests Lead to False Convictions.
* Notes towards a trans reading of Severus Snape.
* The New York Times reviews N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
* A people’s history of Dunkin Donuts.
* Sci-Fi Roots of the Far Right—From ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ to Newt’s Moon Base to Donald’s Wall.
* It’s officially too late to save Title IX.
* You had me at hello: Each successive video takes on a new video game and goes into incredibly granular detail on the speed-running history associated with it.
* Your time-travel short of the moment: Cradle.
* Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969.
* And finally a reason to start drinking: Arcade games return to Milwaukee bars.
